Under conditions of physiological stress, officers are sometimes required to make split-second life-or-death decisions, where deficits in performance can have tragic outcomes, including serious injury or death and strained police–community relations. The current study assessed the performance of 122 active-duty police officers during a realistic lethal force scenario to examine whether performance was affected by the officer’s level of operational skills training, years of police service, and stress reactivity. Results demonstrated that the scenario produced elevated heart rates, as well as (...) perceptual and cognitive distortions, such as tunnel vision, commensurate with those observed in naturalistic use of force encounters. The average performance rating from the scenario was 59%, with 27% of participants making at least one lethal force error. Elevated stress reactivity was a predictor of poorer performance and increased lethal force errors. Level of training and years of police service had differential and complex effects on both performance and lethal force errors. Our results illustrate the need to critically reflect on police training practices and continue to make evidence-based improvements to training. The findings also highlight that while training may significantly improve outcomes, flawless performance is likely not probable, given the limits of human performance under stress. Implications for the objective reasonableness standard, which is used to assess the appropriateness of force in courts of law, are discussed. (shrink)

Insights play a role in every field that can be called knowledge, but are of particular interest to the philosophy of religion and special divine action. Although these acts of understanding cannot be generated at will, a second person can vastly accelerate understanding by a first person. In this paper, I argue that this catalysis of insight is best attained in a situation of ‘second- person relatedness’, involving epistemic humility and shared awareness of shared focus. I also argue that this (...) approach provides an appropriate interpretation of Aquinas’s account of God’s gift of understanding. On this basis, it is specifically the context of second-person relatedness to God, as ‘I’ to ‘you’, that is expected to have the most far-reaching impact on understanding of the world. I illustrate the conclusions by means of the story of The Snow Queen, by Hans Christian Andersen, drawing also some practical implications for insights in daily life. (shrink)

The Enron debacle, the demise of Arthur Andersen, questionable practices at Tyco, Qwest, WorldCom, and a seemingly endless list of others have pushed public regard for business and business leaders to new lows. The need for smart leaders with vision and integrity has never been greater. Things need to change-- and it will not be easy. We can take a first step toward producing better business leaders by changing some of our own ideas about what it means to "win." (...) Noel M. Tichy and Andrew R. McGill have brought together a stellar group of contributors from a variety of perspectives-- including General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt, former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, and renowned management gurus Robert Quinn and C. K. Prahalad, among others-- to offer insights that will help build better leaders, communities, and organizations. They show how to present a "Teachable Point of View" about business ethics that will help all leaders within an organization: Internalize core values Build a values-based culture across the organization Become engaged to teach the same values lessons to their staff Take action and raise the ethical bar Successful business leaders must be able to articulate their own unique Teachable Point of View on business ethics and drive it through their organization to ensure that everyone knows the ethical line and is neither shy nor silent if others risk crossing it. (shrink)

In this extraordinary introduction to the study of the philosophy of technology, Andrew Feenberg argues that techonological design is central to the social and political structure of modern societies. Environmentalism, information technology, and medical advances testify to technology's crucial importance. In his lucid and engaging style, Feenberg shows that technology is the medium of daily life. Every major technical changes reverberates at countless levels: economic, political, and cultural. If we continue to see the social and technical domains as being (...) seperate, then we are essentially denying an integral part of our existence, and our place in a democratic society. Questioning Tecchnology convinces us that it is vital that we learn more about technology the better to live with it and to manage it. (shrink)

In Being and Worth Andrew Collier argues that beings both in the natural and human worlds have worth in themselves, whether we recognize it or not. He builds on recent work in critical realism to provide a reassessment of Spinoza's philosophy of mind and ethics. Conclusions are developed with particular reference to environmental ethics.

Why we get the world wrong -- Intuitive theories of the physical world -- Matter : what is the world made of? How do those components interact? -- Energy : what makes something hot? What makes something loud? -- Gravity : what makes something heavy? What makes something fall? -- Motion : what makes objects move? What paths do moving objects take? -- Cosmos : what is the shape of our world? What is its place in the cosmos? -- Earth (...) : why do continents drift? Why do climates change? -- Intuitive theories of the biological world -- Life : what makes us alive? What causes us to die? -- Growth : why do we grow bigger? Why do we grow older? -- Inheritance : why do we resemble our parents? Where did we get our traits? -- Illness : what makes us ill? How does illness spread? -- Adaptation : why are there so many lifeforms? How do they change over time? -- Ancestry : where do species come from? How are they related? -- How to get the world right. (shrink)

In the Infamous Opening Sections from Part IX of Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche celebrates a strident kind of elitism and countenances, in however attenuated a form, the institution of slavery. “Every enhancement of the type ‘man,’” he writes, “has so far been the work of an aristocratic society—and it will be so again and again—a society that believes in the long ladder of an order of rank and difference in worth [Werthverschiedenheit] between man and man, and that needs slavery (...) [Sklaverei] in some sense or other” (257). In the section that follows, Nietzsche describes a “good and healthy aristocracy” as “accept[ing] with a good conscience the sacrifice of untold human beings who, for its sake [um ihretwillen] .. (shrink)

I reply to recent criticisms by Uygar Abaci and Peter Yong, among others, of my reading of Kant's pre-Critical of God's existence, and of its fate in the Critical period. Along the way I discuss some implications of this debate for our understanding of Kant's modal metaphysics and modal epistemology generally.

This article reconsiders the reciprocity objection to unconditional basic income based on the idea that reciprocity is not only a duty but a limiting condition on other duties. If the objection wer...

In his article, “What should ChatGPT mean for bioethics?” I. Glenn Cohen explores the bioethical implications of Open AI’s chatbot ChatGPT and the use of similar Large Language Models (LLMs) (Cohen...

Few ideas have excited greater interest among theologians in recent decades than the idea of 'participation'. In thinking about creation, it is the notion that everything comes from, and depends upon, God, inviting the language of sharing, or of an exemplar and its images; in thinking about redemption, it points to the restoration of that image, and is expressed in the language of communion with God and with the redeemed community. In this volume, Andrew Davison considers these themes in (...) unprecedented breadth, investigating the fundamental character of participation as it can be applied to a wide range of theological topics. Exploring what it means to know, to love, to do good, and to live together well, he shows how these ideas animate a particular understanding of human life and how we relate to the world around us. His book offers the most comprehensive survey of participation to date, contributing to detailed discussions of these themes among academic theologians. (shrink)

The epistemic regress problem is about the possibility of having beliefs that are based on evidence. The problem of the criterion is about the possibility of having beliefs that are based on general standards for distinguishing what is true from what is false. These problems are similar. Each is constituted by a set of propositions about epistemically valuable relational properties—being supported by evidence and being authorized by a criterion of truth—that are individually plausible but jointly inconsistent, a paradox. The propositions (...) that constitute one problem have the same forms as the propositions that constitute the other. In particular, each problem turns on the claim that a belief can have a valuable relational property only by means of an endless regress and that this requirement cannot be satisfied. Finally, since evidence and criteria are kinds of reasons, each problem is about the possibility of having beliefs that are based on reasons. (shrink)

Recollection is sometimes automatic in that details of a prior encounter with an item come to mind although those details are irrelevant to a current task. For example, when asked about the size of the type in which an item was earlier presented, one might automatically recollect the location in which it was presented. We used the process dissociation procedure to show that such noncriterial recollection can function as familiarity—its effects were independent of intended recollection.

This paper investigates how ethics is incorporated in the qualification process for prospective professional accountants across Australia and New Zealand. It does so by examining the structure of these qualification processes and by analysing the learning objectives and summarised content for ethics courses that prospective accountants take either at university or through the post-degree programs provided by CPA Australia and Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand. We do this to understand how the ‘sandwich’ approach to teaching ethics :77–92, 1993) is (...) implemented. This approach advocates a standalone ethics course, followed by ethical cases that are integrated across accounting courses, and subsequently a capstone course that combines ethics and professionalism. We test the extent to which this approach is adopted and examine how its application relates to the components of moral behaviour. The results provide three significant contributions. The first is that the ‘sandwich’ approach is not in place for most prospective accountants as only a minority of programs include a mandatory course with a substantial ethics component, and this is more likely in undergraduate rather than postgraduate programs. The second contribution is that although moral sensitivity and moral judgement are widely considered, little attention is given to issues of moral motivation and moral character. We suggest that change is unlikely without explicit ethical education requirements from the professional accounting bodies. The paper also makes a final contribution by proposing a more nuanced typology characterising the degree to which ethics is incorporated in particular courses. (shrink)

As a result of increased interest in global health, more and more medical students and trainees from the.

Epistemic injustice has rapidly become a powerful tool for analysis of otherwise hidden social harms. Yet empirical research into how resistance to knowing and understanding can be generated and replicated in social programmes is limited. We have identified a range of subtle and not-so-subtle inflections of epistemic injustice as they play out in an intervention for people with chronic depression in receipt of disability benefits. This article describes the different ‘species’ of epistemic injustice observed and reveals how these are unintentionally (...) produced at frontline, management, commissioning and policy levels. Most notably, there remains a privileging of clinical knowledge over other forms of knowledge, producing a ‘pathocentric epistemic complex’. This, combined with the failure of different agencies with competing ideologies to adequately understand each other, and a vicious policy context, added to the injustices already faced by people with mental health issues, generating multiple harms. This has important implications for a range of integrated care and welfare interventions – not least by drawing attention to their unintended potential for replicating epistemic injustice as an institutionalised complex. Careful evaluation and design of such programmes, applying the philosophical and epistemic resources illustrated here, can help mitigate this outcome. Further, by raising awareness of epistemic injustice among programme participants, we can generate epistemic structures that secure programme integrity locally, and promote better policy. (shrink)

Volume 14, Issue 1, February 2020, Page 1-3.

Why did Bernhard Riemann, arguably the most original mathematician of his generation, spend the last year of life investigating the mechanism of hearing? Fighting tuberculosis and the hostility of eminent scientists such as Hermann Helmholtz, he appeared to forsake mathematics to prosecute a case close to his heart. Only sketchy pages from his last paper remain, but here we assemble some significant clues and triangulate from them to build a broad picture of what he might have been driving at. Our (...) interpretation is that Riemann was a committed idealist and from this philosophical standpoint saw that the scientific enterprise was lame without the “poetry of hypothesis”. He believed that human thought was fundamentally the dynamics of “mind-masses” and that the human mind interpenetrated, and became part of, the microscopic physical domain of the cochlea. Therefore, a full description of hearing must necessarily include the perceptual dimensions of what he saw as a single manifold. The manifold contains all the psychophysical aspects of hearing, including the logarithmic transformations that arise from Fechner’s law, faithfully preserving all the subtle perceptual qualities of sound. For Riemann, hearing was a unitary physical and mental event, and parallels with modern ideas about consciousness and quantum biology are made. A unifying quantum mechanical model for an atom of consciousness—drawing on Riemann’s mind-masses and the similar “psychons” proposed by Eccles—is put forward. (shrink)

Yarkoni recommends that psychology researchers should take care to align their statistical models to the verbal theories they are studying and testing. This principle applies not just to qualitative theories in psychology but also to more quantitative sciences: there, too, mismatch between open-ended theories and specific statistical models have led to confusion.

An easy-to-use A-Z guide to a body of work that spans philosophy, sociology, politics, law and cultural theory, this is an essential reference guide to one of the most important social theorists of the last century.

In The Song of the Earth, Jonathan Bate promotes ‘ecopoesis’, contrasting it with ‘ecopolitical’ poetry (and by implication, other forms of writing and expression). Like others recently, including Simon James and Michael Bonnett, he appropriates the notion of ‘dwelling’ from Heidegger to add force to this distinction. Bate's argument is effectively that we have more chance of protecting the environment if we engage in ecopoetic activity, involving a sense of immediate response to nature, than if we do not. This has (...) obvious educational implications. If Bate, James and Bonnett are correct, then the educational pursuit of (eco)poetic sensibility will, of itself, contribute to education for a sustainable future by grounding human experience in nature; if their assertions are insupportable, and (eco)poetic sensibility does not afford privileged access to a state of nature, then the assumption cannot be made that the development of such sensibility will contribute to education for sustainability. I shall critique Bate's argument from a pragmatic perspective. (shrink)

What is the function of Cartesian virtue within the motivational and cognitive economy of the soul? In this paper I show that Cartesian virtue is a higher-order motivational disposition. Central to the interpretation I defend is Descartes’s view that the will can govern an individual’s attention. An exercise of this capacity, I argue, is a higher-order operation. Because Cartesian virtue is a resolution to focus attention on what reason deems worthy of consideration, it should therefore be understood as a higher-order (...) disposition. To lay the groundwork for this interpretation, I examine Descartes’s theory of motivation. An examination of the sources of Cartesian motivation yields two important points for my reading: (1) that the will is not completely unconstrained in its operations and (2) that there are three sources of motivation: intellectual clarity, the will, and the passions. I show that virtue strengthens the will’s natural disposition toward intellectual clarity, thereby enabling the will to withstand the occasionally harmful sway of the passions. By strengthening the will’s disposition toward clarity, virtue at the same time safeguards the will’s freedom, enables an individual to will what seems best, and, as a result, ensures the individual’s happiness. It carries this out, I contend, insofar as it is a higher-order motivational disposition, a disposition exercised by the person of generosity. (shrink)

America's supposed moral decline from an imagined golden age, and the threat of divine punishment for the sin of straying from the path of righteousness, have been consistent themes in its political and religious rhetoric. In Prodigal Nation, Andrew Murphy investigates the jeremiad's historical roots and probes the ways in which it continues to illuminate themes and tensions in American social and political life.

An understanding of what we mean by the present is one of the key issues in literature, philosophy, and culture today, but also one of the most neglected and misunderstood. _Present Hope_ develops a fascinating philosophical understanding of the present, approaching this question via discussions of the nature of historical time, the philosophy of history, memory, and the role of tragedy. Andrew Benjamin shows how we misleadingly view the present as simply a product of chronological time, ignoring the role (...) of history and memory. Accordingly, discussion of what is meant by the present disappears from philosophical concern. To draw attention to this absence, Andrew Benjamin introduces the notion of hope and asks what this concept can tell us about the present. At the heart of the outstanding work is an emphasis on the relation between hope and the Jewish tradition. Through discussions of philosophical responses to the Holocaust, the work of Walter Benjamin, Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum, and the poetry of Paul Celan, _Present Hope_ shows how we must look beyond the purely philosophical horizon to understand the present we live in. (shrink)

In this paper I examine the most common objection to strict product liability: that it is unfair to manufacturers. Critics have maintained that it is unfair because it allows manufacturers to be held liable even when they have not been negligent, and are not morally blameworthy or at fault. In response to this objection, I argue 1) that there are in fact cases in which it is at least somewhat unfair to manufacturers to impose compensation requirements upon them in accordance (...) with the strict product liability doctrine, but 2) that there is also a class of cases in which it is fair to manufacturers to hold them responsible for compensating injured product users, as strict product liability requires, even though they have not been negligent and are not morally blameworthy or at fault. My analysis of the fairness issue provides a basis for some concluding remarks about the defensibility of the strict product liability doctrine. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper integrates some Buddhist moral values, attitudes and self‐cultivation techniques into a discussion of the ethics of cognitive enhancement technologies – in particular, pharmaceutical enhancements. Many Buddhists utilize meditation techniques that are both integral to their practice and are believed to enhance the cognitive and affective states of experienced practitioners. Additionally, Mahāyāna Buddhism's teaching on skillful means permits a liberal use of methods or techniques in Buddhist practice that yield insight into our selfnature or aid in alleviating or eliminating (...) dukha . These features of many, if not most, Buddhist traditions will inform much of the Buddhist assessment of pharmaceutical enhancements offered in this paper. Some Buddhist concerns about the effects and context of the use of pharmaceutical enhancements will be canvassed in the discussion. Also, the author will consider Buddhist views of the possible harms that may befall human and nonhuman research subjects, interference with a recipient's karma, the artificiality of pharmaceutical enhancements, and the possible motivations or intentions of healthy individuals pursuing pharmacological enhancement. Perhaps surprisingly, none of these concerns will adequately ground a reflective Buddhist opposition to the further development and continued use of pharmaceutical enhancements, either in principle or in practice. The author argues that Buddhists, from at least certain traditions – particularly Mahāyāna Buddhist traditions – should advocate the development or use of pharmaceutical enhancements if a consequence of their use is further insight into our self‐nature or the reduction or alleviation of dukha. (shrink)