This research investigates whether academic integrity can be strengthened through a holistic educative approach that combines compulsory modules on academic integrity, pedagogy that challenges punitive approaches, and an embedded curriculum. We present quantitative and qualitative data from surveys and interview responses from students to investigate their experiences and perceptions of our approach. Qualitative data suggest students appreciate the educative approach and that it fosters agency in students. Most participants – even those who indicated they had been part of an academic (...) integrity breach process and students who knew someone who had been involved in the process – expressed that the process itself led to a greater understanding of academic integrity generally and students felt they could address the issue for themselves and benefit into the future. Responses indicated students wanted to have a voice in the academic integrity process. This research indicates that a holistic educative approach promotes students’ agency in relation to their academic work and frames academic integrity as a positive and desirable aspect of students’ developing academic identities. (shrink)

One of the earliest issues in cognitive ethology concerned the meaning of animal signals. In the 1970s and 1980s this debate was most active with respect to the question of whether animal alarm calls convey information about the emotional states of animals or whether they “refer” directly to predators in the environment (Seyfarth, Cheney, & Marler 1980; see Radick 2007 for a historical account), but other areas, such as vocalizations about food and social contact, were also widely discussed. In the (...) 1990s, ethologists largely came to a consensus that such calls were “functionally referential” (Evans & Marler 1995) even if they did not satisfy all the semantic requirements imposed by philosophers of language. More recently, though, it has been argued that ethologists should eschew the concept of reference and return to a focus on the affective aspects of animal communication (Rendall & Owren 2002). We propose to take a new look at this debate in the light of recent developments in the philosophy of language under the heading of “Neo-Expressivism” (Bar-On 2004). This view provides two different senses.. (shrink)

The ability to reflect on practice is a fundamental component of effective medical practice. In a sector increasingly focused on professionalism and patient-centred care, Developing Reflective Practice is a timely publication providing practical guidance on how to acquire the reflective skills necessary to become a successful clinician. This new title draws from a wide range of theoretical and practical multidisciplinary perspectives to assist students, practitioners and educators in embedding reflection in everyday activities. It also offers structures and ideas for more (...) purposeful and meaningful formal reflections and professional development. Developing Reflective Practice: Focuses on the developing practitioner and their lifelong learning and the development of professional identity through reflection Provides practical how-to information for students, practitioners and educators, including realistic case examples and practice-based hints and tips Examines and explains the theoretical and conceptual approaches to reflective practice, including its models and frameworks"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Programmed cell death (PCD) in unicellular organisms is in some instances an altruistic trait. When the beneficiaries are clones or close kin, kin selection theory may be used to explain the evolution of the trait, and when the trait evolves in groups of distantly related individuals, group or multilevel selection theory is invoked. In mixed microbial communities, the benefits are also available to unrelated taxa. But the evolutionary ecology of PCD in communities is poorly understood. Few hypotheses have been offered (...) concerning the community role of PCD despite its far-reaching effects. The hypothesis we consider here is that PCD is a black queen. The Black Queen Hypothesis (BQH) outlines how public goods arising from a leaky function are exploited by other taxa in the community. Black Queen (BQ) traits are essential for community survival, but only some members bear the cost of possessing them, while others lose the trait In addition, BQ traits have been defined in terms of adaptive gene loss, and it is unknown whether this has occurred for PCD. Our conclusion is that PCD fulfils the two most important criteria of a BQ (leakiness and costliness), but that more empirical data are needed for assessing the remaining two criteria. In addition, we hold that for viewing PCD as a BQ, the original BQH needs to include social traits. Thus, despite some empirical and conceptual shortcomings, the BQH provides a helpful avenue for investigating PCD in microbial communities. (shrink)

The philosophy of chemistry has emerged in recent years as a new and autonomous field within the Anglo-American philosophical tradition. With the development of this new discipline, Eric Scerri and Grant Fisher's "Essays in the Philosophy of Chemistry" is a timely and definitive guide to all current thought in this field. This edited volume will serve to map out the distinctive features of the field and its connections to the philosophies of the natural sciences and general philosophy of science (...) more broadly. It will be a reference for students and professional alike. Both the philosophy of chemistry and philosophies of scientific practice alike reflect the splitting of analytical and continental scholastic traditions, and some philosophers are turning for inspiration from the familiar resources of analytical philosophy to influences from the continental tradition and pragmatism. While philosophy of chemistry is practiced very much within the familiar analytical tradition, it is also capable of trail-blazing new philosophical approaches. In such a way, the seemingly disparate disciplines such as the "hard sciences" and philosophy become much more linked. (shrink)

The philosophy of chemistry has emerged in recent years as a new and autonomous field within the Anglo-American philosophical tradition. With the development of this new discipline, Eric Scerri and Grant Fisher's "Essays in Philosophy of Chemistry" is a timely and definitive guide to all current thought in this field. One of the themes of this collection is how philosophy of chemistry can make a contributions to problems of philosophy more generally, such as how chemistry and quantum chemistry contribute (...) to the philosophy of the mind. (shrink)

For the successful achievement of evidence-based practice, clinicians, managers and purchasers need evidence on whether a particular intervention works and ways to judge the appropriateness of the outcome criteria and measures used. Guidance is needed on what outcome measure to use, especially within routine clinical care settings. Beginning with a re-clarification of the difference between a health status and an outcome measure, the paper presents an evaluative checklist for use by clinical audit and research staff to review outcome measures for (...) use in routine care settings. Central features include the user-centredness of the measure, its psychometric properties, feasibility of use and utility. The applicability of the checklist is illustrated for outcome measurement in diabetes and stroke care. A modified form of the checklist is proposed for use by the busy clinician as an aid to the critical review of research papers within the context of evidence-based practice and to aid health care practitioners' choice of which outcome measure(s) to use within routine clinical care. (shrink)

George Grant’s bleak assessment of the prospects of technological civilization owed a lot to his reading of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Ellul. However, Grant understood technological development within the context of liberal theory and capitalist practice. Grant explained why liberalism is the doctrine most appropriate to the development of productive forces, or the most complete exploitation of natural and human resources. Unlike most North American conservatives, Grant was not a friend of capitalism but of civil servants (...) who restrain capitalist accumulation in the name of the common good or national community. Grant was what Gad Horowitz called a Red Tory and offered a unique perspective of how American technique has closed us off from love and contemplation, leaving us with the one-dimensional problem-solving mentality of the social engineer. (shrink)

Many philosophers who support a four-dimensionalist metaphysics of things also conceive of experience as a state of a mind having temporal extension or existing as a momentary feature of the dimension of time. This essay shows that such a strict four-dimensionalism — suggested in works by D. M. Armstrong, Mark Heller, and David Lewis — cannot be correct, since it cannot allow for the passing of time that is essential to awareness. The argument demonstrates that the positing of any temporal (...) process at all must compromise the strict four-dimensionalist view of the temporality of experience. This is not to say that the traditional endurantist view is left wholeheartedly endorsed. As I point out, this traditional view makes several questionable claims of its own that must be carefully scrutinized. Still, the criticism of the strict four-dimensionalist ontology indicates a direction to be followed in developing a successful metaphysics of experience. (shrink)

Experiential evidence shows that pain is associated with common meanings. These include a meaning of threat or danger, which is experienced as immediately distressing or unpleasant; cognitive meanings, which are focused on the long-term consequences of having chronic pain; and existential meanings such as hopelessness, which are more about the person with chronic pain than the pain itself. This interdisciplinary book - the second in the three-volume Meanings of Pain series edited by Dr Simon van Rysewyk - aims to better (...) understand pain by describing experiences of pain and the meanings these experiences hold for the people living through them. The lived experiences of pain described here involve various types of chronic pain, including spinal pain, labour pain, rheumatic pain, diabetic peripheral neuropathic pain, fibromyalgia, complex regional pain syndrome, endometriosis-associated pain, and cancer-related pain. Two chapters provide narrative descriptions of pain, recounted and interpreted by people with pain. Language is important to understanding the meaning of pain since it is the primary tool human beings use to manipulate meaning. As discussed in the book, linguistic meaning may hold clues to understanding some pain-related experiences, including the stigmatisation of people with pain, the dynamics of patient-clinician communication, and other issues, such as relationships between pain, public policy and the law, and attempts to develop a taxonomy of pain that is meaningful for patients. Clinical implications are described in each chapter. This book is intended for people with pain, their family members or caregivers, clinicians, researchers, advocates, and policy makers. (shrink)

This book's thirty essays explore philosophically the nature and morality of sexual perversion, cybersex, masturbation, homosexuality, contraception, same-sex marriage, promiscuity, pedophilia, date rape, sexual objectification, teacher-student relationships, pornography, and prostitution. Authors include Martha Nussbaum, Thomas Nagel, Alan Goldman, John Finnis, Sallie Tisdale, Robin West, Alan Wertheimer, John Corvino, Cheshire Calhoun, Jerome Neu, and Alan Soble, among others. A valuable resource for sex researchers as well as undergraduate courses in the philosophy of sex.

Locked-in syndrome (LIS) is a severe neurological condition that typically leaves a patient unable to move, talk and, in many cases, initiate communication. Brain Computer Interfaces (or BCIs) promise to enable individuals with conditions like LIS to re-engage with their physical and social worlds. In this paper we will use extended mind theory to offer a way of seeing the potential of BCIs when attached to, or implanted in, individuals with LIS. In particular, we will contend that functionally integrated BCIs (...) extend the minds of individuals with LIS beyond their bodies, allowing them greater autonomy than they can typically hope for in living with their condition. This raises important philosophical questions about the implications of BCI technology, particularly the potential to change selves, and ethical questions about whether society has a responsibility to aid these individuals in re-engaging with their physical and social worlds. It also raises some important questions about when these interventions should be offered to individuals with LIS and respecting the rights of these individuals to refuse intervention. By aiding willing individuals in re-engaging with their physical and social worlds, BCIs open up avenues of opportunity taken for granted by able individuals and introduce new ways in which these individuals can be harmed. These latter considerations serve to highlight our emergent social responsibilities to those individuals who will be suitable for, and receive, BCIs. (shrink)

In this essay I explore the relationship of sport to art. I do not intend to argue that sport is one of the arts. I will rather argue that sport and art have a commonality, in that both are alienated philosophy. This is to propose – in an argument that has its roots in Hegel's aesthetics – that sport and art may both be interpreted as a way of reflecting upon metaphysical and normative issues, albeit in media that are alien (...) to philosophy's conceptual language. The medium of art is the manipulation of sensuous materials, such as stone, paint, or sound. The medium of sport is the pursuit of a physical challenge, at which the athlete may fail. I will develop this argument by borrowing from the philosophy of art of Arthur C. Danto. In particular, I will suggest that a parallel to his concept of ‘artworld’ can be seen in a ‘sportworld’. As the artworld is an ‘atmosphere of theory’ and a ‘knowledge of history’ through which an event is interpreted and thereby constituted as art, so a sportworld is the atmosphere of theory through which an event is constituted as sport. I will argue that much of the existing discussion of the relationship between sport and art is grounded in an ill-conceived aesthetics. In order to be appreciated and appropriately interpreted, sport must be understood within a modernist aesthetics and hermeneutics. As such, the core issue of an aesthetics of sport is not that of beauty, but rather of the meaning of the sport, and what I shall call the capacity of sport to ‘speak as a world’ – to bring to consciousness through play the taken-for-granted cultural conditions through which our social lives are constituted, and within which metaphysical and normative problems are articulated. I will propose that the hermeneutics of music provides a useful model for the interpretation of sport. (shrink)

This volume examines an often taken for granted concept-that of the concept itself. How do we picture what concepts are, what they do, how they arise in the course of everyday life? Challenging conventional approaches that treat concepts as mere tools at our disposal for analysis, or as straightforwardly equivalent to signs to be deciphered, the anthropologists and philosophers in this volume turn instead to the ways concepts are already intrinsically embedded in our forms of life and how they constitute (...) the very substrate of our existence as humans who lead lives in language. Attending to our ordinary lives with concepts requires not an ascent from the rough ground of reality into the skies of theory, but rather acceptance of the fact that thinking is congenital to living with and through concepts. The volume offers a critical and timely intervention into both contemporary philosophy and anthropological theory by unsettling the distinction between thought and reality that continues to be too often assumed and showing how the supposed need to grasp reality may be replaced by an acknowledgement that we are in its grip. Contributors: Jocelyn Benoist, Andrew Brandel, Michael Cordey, Veena Das, Rasmus Dyring and Thomas Schwarz Wentzer, Michael D. Jackson, Michael Lambek, Sandra Laugier, Marco Motta, Michael J. Puett, and Lotte Buch Segal. (shrink)

Human communities teem with a variety of social norms. In order to change unjust and harmful social norms, it is crucial to identify the psychological processes that give rise to them. Most researchers take it for granted that social norms are uniquely human. By contrast, we approach this matter from a comparative perspective, leveraging recent research on animal social behaviour. While there is currently only suggestive evidence for norms in nonhuman communities, we argue that human social norms are likely produced (...) by a wide range of mechanisms, many of which we share with nonhuman animals. Approaching this variability from a comparative perspective can help norm researchers expand and reframe the range of hypotheses they test when attempting to understand the causes of socially normative behaviours in humans. First, we diagnose some of the theoretical obstacles to developing a comparative science of social norms, and offer a few basic constructs and distinctions to help norm researchers overcome these obstacles. Then we develop a six-dimensional model of the psychological and social factors that contribute to variability in both human and potential nonhuman norms. -/- This article is part of the theme issue ‘Social norm change: drivers and consequences’. (shrink)

The notion of the 'philosophy of x', which has recently tended to become part of many subjects, from music to management, tends to obscure a range of important issues. The idea behind it seems to be that, by designating one's reflections on a subject as the ‘philosophy’ of whatever it is one is reflecting about, one achieves some kind of higher insight. Such an approach arguably grants too much to a subject whose main manifestation is actually endless disagreement on fundamental (...) issues. In the light of this less flattering view of philosophy I want to suggest that we may sometimes achieve more by thinking of some of our practices, particularly in the aesthetic domain, as manifestations of what philosophy might become, rather than just thinking of those practices as objects of philosophical analysis. (shrink)

“Thank you Andrew and Ann Goldman for the persistence that it took to achieve the portraits in Facing North. It is a historic document for Ely, Minnesota that has worldwide interest as a snapshot of a unique northern community. You so accurately captured my friends and neighbors and I will always cherish this book.” —Will Steger “My work as a photojournalist has involved assignments about people and faraway cultures as often as about raw nature. Alas, I always felt there (...) were more stories per square foot in Ely as anywhere else I have been. Look into these Ely faces Goldman has captured with his razor-sharp lens and read the stories in their eyes.” —Jim Brandenburg, from the Foreword Perched on the edge of the northern woods at the gateway to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, Ely, Minnesota, holds special meaning for hundreds of thousands of visitors each year. But what is it like for the people who live there year-round? Ann and Andrew Goldman offer a revealing portrayal of the unique people who call Ely home. Featuring more than one hundred portraits as well as vivid essays, Facing North tells the story of life in this Northwoods community: its breathtaking beauty, surprisingly diverse character, and complex history. A thriving destination area, Ely is a changing community, yet its traditions remain vibrant and strong. From resort owners and fishermen to canoe makers and artists, Facing North is an evocative tribute to the enduring nature of Ely and its people. This project is made possible in part by a grant from the Donald G. Gardner Humanities Trust. Andrew Goldman is a freelance commercial photographer. His clients include ESPN and Playboy Enterprises, and his photographs have appeared on more than forty magazine covers. Ann Goldman is a freelance writer and presenter whose professional background is in museum and nonprofit management. They live in Boulder, Colorado, with their two sons. The work of award-winning nature photographer Jim Brandenburg has been featured in National Geographic magazine since 1978. His many books include Chased by the Light and Looking for the Summer. He lives near Ely, Minnesota, where his work can be seen at Brandenburg Gallery. (shrink)

This paper attempts to square libertarian principles with the reality of formal education by asking how far we should and can allow people to do as they wish in educational settings. The major focus is on children in schools, as the concept ‘childhood’ ipso facto implies restrictions on doing as one wishes, and schools as institutions entail inevitable constraints. Children by definition tend to enjoy stronger protection rights but weaker liberty rights than adults. A local preferential calculus is developed as (...) a guide for teachers, suggesting wishes should be granted where feasible and at least welfare neutral. In the case of teachers, employers set the parameters for the feasibility criterion but should also ensure at least welfare neutrality, while students in adult and higher education should be responsible for the feasibility and welfare outcomes of their own choices. (shrink)

It typically taken for granted that agents can be morally responsible for such things as, for example, the death of the victim and the capture of the murderer in the sense that one may be blameworthy or praiseworthy for such things. The primary task of a theory of moral responsibility, it is thought, is to specify the appropriate relationship one must stand to such things in order to be morally responsible for them. I argue that this common approach is problematic (...) because it attempts to explain the way in which an agent can be morally responsible for something that is external to her, the agent. Since, I argue, everything that matters for moral responsibility is internal to the agent, the accounts that emerge from this approach are committed to a particular form of moral luck. Instead, we should reject this form of moral luck, and with it, the possibility of moral responsibility for objects external to the agent. We are, I argue, morally responsible only for our inner willings. Thus, a form of internalism about moral responsibility is defended. (shrink)

This article traces John Rawls’s debt to Frank Knight’s critique of the ‘just deserts’ rationale for laissez-faire in order to defend justice as fairness against some prominent contemporary criticisms, but also to argue that desert can find a place within a Rawlsian theory of justice when desert is grounded in reciprocity. The first lesson Rawls took from Knight was that inheritance of talent and wealth are on a moral par. Knight highlighted the inconsistency of objecting to the inheritance of wealth (...) while taking for granted the legitimacy of unequal reward based on differential productive capacity. Rawls agreed that there was an inconsistency, but claimed that it should be resolved by rejecting both kinds of inequality, except to the extent they benefitted the worst off. The second lesson Rawls learned from Knight was that the size of one’s marginal product depends on supply and demand, which depend on institutional decisions that cannot themselves be made on the basis of the principle of rewarding marginal productivity. The article claims that this argument about background justice overstates its conclusion, because the dependence of contribution on institutional setup is not total. Proposals for an unconditional basic income may therefore have a strike against them, as far as a reciprocity-based conception of desert is concerned. If we follow Knight’s analysis of the competitive system, however, so too does the alternative of leaving determination of income up to the market. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:CREATOR AND CAUSALITY: A CRITIQUE OF PRE-CRITICAL OBJECTIONS ANDREW BEARDS University of Oalgary Calgary, Alberta IN SOME QUARTERS arguments ias to the existence or non-existence of God are still regarded as intellectually respectaible. Indeed, interest in such arguments is not restricted to those with a strictly philosophical or theological training. Every so often one may observe some specialist from the physical sciences taking an interest in the philosophical (...) discussion of cosmological issues. Such has been the case with the recent contributions of the physicist Paul Davies.1 However, such contributions are likely to invite from the philosopher the response that the generalized notions which the scientist attempts to transpose from the particular field of his scientific interest are the very notions which feature in the current debates on the philosophy and methodology of the sciences. Such debates bring into question the status of these scientific notions and therefore render any putative generalized or even metaphysical application of them problematic. Discussions of natural theology, then, often appear to be conducted in a manner which tends to take too much for granted with regard to the terms employed. The notion of causality, central to such,argumentation, is a case in point. Often enough a simple ":billiard hall" image of causal interaction seems to he all that one is required to keep before the mind in order to follow the lines of argument involved, he they ~or or aiga.inst the postulation of a First Cause. Thus, in the often referred to r:adio.debate on the existence of God between 1 Paul Davies, God and the New Physics (New York: T'ouchstone Books, 1984). 573 574 ANDREW BEARDS Bertrand Russell and Fl1ederick Copleston, Russell simply averred that he did not feel compelled to accept that a causal chain extended heyond the ·World to some First Cause. For, indeed, if one imagines a line of billiard halls transmitting momentum one to the other, there is nothing unintelligible about picturing a first!billiard hall initiating the process apparently unaided. Hume has surely taught us that much. If one is to heed the present debates raging in that arena known as the philosophy of science (by which term one can understand epistemology, metaphysics and virtually ·any other topic tr:aditiona1ly designated philosophical), then one can.be forgi¥en for asking how the question as to the existence of God could he raised in an intelligiible manner. For if one is to agree with Richa1d J. Bernstein's assertion that contemporary philosophy manifests, in the ma.in, 1a rebellious attitude to the "father figure,, of the methodical Descartes,2 then one can be equally well impressed by the fact that this " rebellious spirit" is no Jess informed iby a respect for the Kantian attempt to descry the parameters of valid human knowing. And was it not the Kantian achievement to have dispelled the oibfuscation of metaphysics, thereby eliminating the grounds which were helieved to have substantiated a rational affirmation of the existence of God? The term 'Pre-Critical ' in the title of this essay is, therefore, intended as an e¥ocation of the Kantian demand for a critical v;alidation of the terms employed in philosophical argumentation. However, I shall attempt to advance the thesis that the Kantian enterprise does not, in fact, result in a happy resolution of the problems which it sets for itself. This is, of course, a thesis which could 'be proposed f.rom a number of divergent philosophical standpoints. It is my intention to argue here, however, that the work of the philosopher Bernard Lonergan provides,a more satisfactory method for the carrying through of the critical endeavour to validate epistemologi2 Richard J, Bernstein, Beyond Objectwism and.Relatwism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), p. 18. CREATOR AND CAUSALITY 575 cally the philosophical,statements we propose. I believe it is the merit of Lonergan's work to have developed positions on the hasis of an explication of the exigences operative in criticism itself, such that any criticism of this explication will he rbut an example of an incoherent criticism,attempting to invalidate its own procedures.3 In what follows I shall attempt to develop the above-mentioned argument to the effect... (shrink)

The term “social world” is increasingly familiar in philosophy and political theory. Rawls uses it quite often, especially in his later works. But there has been little explicit discussion of the term and the idea of social worlds. My aim in this paper is to show that political philosophers, Rawlsian or not, should think seriously about social worlds and the roles these things play and ought to play in their work. The idea of social worlds can help political philosophers think (...) about what they do in new and fruitful ways and enrich debates about the roles, aims, and methodology of political philosophy. I begin by analyzing Rawls’s uses of “social world.” I then propose a broadly Rawlsian conception of social worlds as logically possible closed networks of social relations between agents. Next, I put this conception to work, arguing that the idea of navigating the landscape of social worlds can help us better understand the four apparently disparate roles of political philosophy that Rawls presents. Moving beyond Rawls interpretation, I use the idea of social worlds to develop an analogy and distinction between world-oriented and principle-oriented approaches to political philosophy. While principle-oriented approaches grant centrality and importance to engagement with principles of justice, legitimacy, or other political concepts, world-oriented approaches grant centrality and importance to engagement with social worlds. I propose two examples of world-oriented approaches, political philosophy as navigation and political philosophy as world-building, and argue that they are viable and worthy of further consideration. (shrink)

This roundtable discussion is based on an online symposium – The Promise of Photography: Scale, Measure and Proportion in a Conflicted Visual Milieu – which took place on 17 September 2021. Since its inception, photography has promised to set things to scale, to grant them measure and proportion, a series of promises that have also entailed moments of irrationality or conflict that persist in and continue to shape the era of global networked digital imaging technologies. The symposium started out (...) from the diagnosis that, whilst photography continues to promise an ordered, proportionate and measured world in which things can be set to their proper scale, it also acts in many ways as an agent of dismeasure, disproportion and the unscalable. In light of this, the roundtable discussion presented here examines a range of different meanings that scale, measure and proportion have accrued in the photographic context and sets out to explore conceptual frameworks and research methodologies through which the current situation might be understood. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Bioshock and the Art of RaptureGrant TavinorI am Andrew Ryan, and I am here to ask you a question. Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? "No!" says the man in Washington, "It belongs to the poor." "No!" says the man in the Vatican, "It belongs to God." "No!" says the man in Moscow, "It belongs to everyone." I rejected these answers; instead, I (...) chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose Rapture! A city where the artist would not fear the censor; where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality; where the great would not be constrained by the small! And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city as well.Andrew Ryan, opening BioshockIBioshock is the Masterpiece of recent gaming. Genre-wise the game is a first person-shooter survival-horror game—already a complicated mix of gaming forms—and Bioshock is excellent in these gaming terms: playing the game is a consistently engaging, challenging, and tense experience. The narrative of the game, set in Rapture, a dystopian city beneath the sea, fits perfectly with this interactive gaming form. The premise of Bioshock is a parody of Ayn Rand's objectivist novel Atlas Shrugged. Led by the magnate Andrew Ryan, the industrialists, artists, and scientists have retreated from the world and built Rapture through sheer force of will. But when the player enters the city at the beginning of the game, it is evident that nature is pushing back, and that the sea is slowly but surely retaking Rapture, while its citizens have become corrupted by the arts and sciences the city was built upon: as genetically manipulated "splicers" they now creep through Rapture's darkened halls bemoaning their lost humanity. Andrew Ryan "chose the impossible," [End Page 91] and inevitably his hubris is being repaid by the recalcitrance of human nature and the impermanence of human achievement. Much of the immense fun of Bioshock derives from the irony of an objectivist utopia running amok.The immediate visual impact of Bioshock, depending on its employment of cutting-edge high definition 3D computer graphics, is striking. The aesthetic qualities of the water, in particular, have drawn wide praise. The world of Rapture is also presented through an engaging and excellent style. To depict this decaying world, Bioshock draws on the architectural motifs and cultural themes of 1930s and 1940s America. Portrayals of decaying art deco facades, faded Hollywood socialites, and echoes of Hearst, Hughes, and Citizen Kane, are combined with period music and philosophical and literary references to produce a coherent artistic statement.Two features of Bioshock bear out its unique artfulness as a game. First is the role in the game-world of the Little Sisters: cute little girls that pose a game obstacle with which the player must decide how to deal. In Bioshock, the task of harvesting the game-world resources needed to survive is given a moral dimension in that the resources can be extracted only from the Little Sisters by killing them, and so a key part of the gameplay rests on an emotionally provocative moral choice. The second artful aspect of the game that warrants special attention is a narrative twist partway through the game where it becomes evident that player's principle sympathetic source of information in the game-world is a dissemblance. Bioshock has an interactive twist on an untrustworthy narrator, which clouds and complicates the decisions the player has made in Rapture. Rather than an actor, the player-character is a pawn in someone else's game. At the forefront of both of these aspects of Bioshock are considerations of freewill and morality.To really appreciate the art of Bioshock we need to understand its nature as a game, and moreover, to treat the gaming nature seriously and with sympathy. Bioshock is a videogame, and it is also clearly art; but it is not as if the game is art despite its being a videogame and that the art is a mere gloss or veneer. Rather, Bioshock's nature as a game allows it to be art of a distinctive kind. Treating videogames as a kind... (shrink)

I argue that the Causal Closure Argument (CCA) and the Explanatory Exclusion Argument (EEA) fail to show that mental causes must either be reduced/ identical to physical causes or that mental causes are epiphenomenal. I begin by granting the soundness of CCA and EEA and go on to argue that they only rule out irreducible mental efficient causes/explanations. A proponent of irreducible mental causation can, therefore, grant the soundness of CCA and EEA, provided she holds mental causation/explanation to be (...) teleological. I go on to argue that, in light of these two objections, such an account of mental causation is possible. I conclude by giving a cursory sketch of how such a picture of mental causation as non-reductive teleological causation would work. The upshot being that this general approach to mental causation, as non-reductive and non-epiphenomenal, cannot be undermined by the CCA and EEA. (shrink)

Property undoubtedly has a central place in arrangements surrounding social life, a place so central that some writers have claimed that it is impossible to imagine anything which could be called a society without some property institution. A moment's thought suggests that property is a key element of an economic system, a major concern of the legal system, and a focus of political dispute. But the long‐standing recognition of the importance of property was often coupled with taking many aspects of (...) it for granted, particularly with respect to the possible justification of private property. The development of a specialized literature has occurred in the last forty years, to the extent that Becker has suggested that aspects of the theory of property cannot be developed any further. (An excellent essay by Dan‐Cohen, 2001 shows that Becker's comment may have been premature. Dan‐Cohen explores the relationship between ownership and the boundaries of the self.) This is not, of course, to say that nothing valuable or important had been said about property in the history of political and social thought: nothing could be further from the truth. But much of the political theory of property has been embedded in works with more comprehensive ambitions in political philosophy: Locke's Two Treatises of Government and Hegel's Philosophy of Right are obvious examples. The coherence of such theories of property is clearly dependent – to an extent which may be disputed – on the wider philosophical framework in which they are embedded. Again, the relevance of such theories to contemporary normative analysis depends – again, to a disputable degree – on the compatibility of the economic and political institutions envisaged by their authors with plausible contemporary applicability. (shrink)

Canadians have relatively few binding national myths, but one of the most pervasive and enduring is the conviction that the country is doomed. In 1965 George Grant passionately defended Canadian identity by asking fundamental questions about the meaning and future of Canada’s political existence. In Lament for a Nation he argued that Canada – immense and underpopulated, defined in part by the border, history, and culture it shares with the United States, and torn by conflicting loyalties to Britain, Quebec, (...) and America – had ceased to exist as a sovereign state. Lament for a Nation became the seminal work in Canadian political thought and Grant became known as the father of Canadian nationalism. This edition includes a major introduction by Andrew Potter that explores Grant’s arguments in the context of changes in ethnic diversity, free trade, globalization, post-modernism, and 9/11. Potter discusses the shifting uses of the terms “liberal” and “conservative” and closes with a look at the current state of Canadian nationalism. (shrink)

Why do we grant religious exemptions? Many distinguished scholars and judges have been drawn to the idea that conscience is entitled to special protection, because a person in its grip cannot obey the law without betraying his deepest, most identity-defining commitments. The weakness of this justification is shown by philosopher Harry Frankfurt's account of what he calls “volitional necessity,” which clarifies the structure of the argument that invocations of conscience imply. Frankfurt shows that a person can be bound in (...) this way by allegiances that there is no reason to respect; volitional necessity can arise from anything at all that a person cares about. Conscience is thus a poor basis for claims upon other people. Accommodation must rather depend on some idea of the value of religion. (shrink)

Progress in emergency and critical care requires that clinical research be performed on patients who are incapable of granting consent for research participation. Analyses of the ethics of such research have left some questions incompletely answered. Why should we be permitted to expose vulnerable patients to research risks without their consent? In particular, how do we justify research interventions that have no potential benefit for participants (nontherapeutic interventions)? This article presents a moral justification for nontherapeutic interventions in emergency research. By (...) relying on a framework for assessing research risks, and by drawing on the example of pediatric research, this justification is founded in how institutional review boards, and society in general, analyze risk. Our justification for emergency research also suggests additional protections for emergency research participants, including a stringent threshold for research risk, that still permit important research to proceed. (shrink)

Daniel Bell’s The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism lies at the intersection of the three main theoretical currents of sociological thought, those of Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim and Max Weber. His ‘three realms’ methodology moves away from deterministic accounts that subordinate the political and cultural to the economic realm. By granting each realm an autonomy and principles of their own, Bell locates the contradictions of capitalism in the friction between them. With constant innovation, individual expressiveness and libertarian social values becoming forces (...) in-and-of-themselves, prevailing social structures and the roles within them are left looking increasingly incoherent, illegitimate and meaningless. Likewise, the shift from Protestant asceticism to modernist hedonism creates a sharp tension between the demand for a disciplined and responsible workforce and the demand for economic growth through unrestrained and instantly gratifying consumerism. The result is a complex of crisis scenarios which were manifest with the end of the post-war boom. However, as other commentators have pointed out, Bell’s prophetic theses often seem to fail under the light of subsequent history. (shrink)

Much of the appeal of deliberative democracy lies in its emancipatory promise to give otherwise disadvantaged groups a voice, and to grant them influence through reasoned argument. However, the precise mechanisms for delivery of this promise remain obscure. After reviewing Habermas's formulation of deliberation, the article draws on recent theories of argumentation to provide a more detailed account of such mechanisms. The article identifies the key emancipatory mechanism as explicitness in language. It outlines the primary modalities of this mechanism: (...) expressing differences of opinion, mobilising a shared standard of inference, and recognising and excluding fallacious appeals to irrelevant factors such as force or authority. It describes how these modalities are enhanced at a secondary, reflexive level that recognises the partiality and defeasibility of particular argumentative exchanges. Such qualifications, it is argued, support a model of deliberation across discourses that allows a clearer appreciation of its potential and limits. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Living into Community: Cultivating Practices That Sustain Us by Christine D. PohlAndrew WattsLiving into Community: Cultivating Practices That Sustain Us CHRISTINE D. POHL Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012. 176 pp. $15.00With Living into Community: Cultivating Practices That Sustain Us, Christine Pohl provides a useful and accessible companion to her first book, Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Practice (Eerdmans, 1999). Concerned that “church and culture have not (...) provided the skills or virtues for us to be part of the very communities we long for and try to create” (4), she again challenges the identity of the Christian community. She likewise draws again upon the rich contributions of John Calvin and John Wesley as well as Catholic social movements such as L’Arche as she examines three core practices that engender hospitality: gratitude, promise-keeping, and truth-telling.This book grew out of a grant to participate in the Lilly Endowment project, “Sustaining Pastoral Excellence.” In partnership with her church, Pohl gathered a group of pastors, leaders of intentional communities, and seminary professors to think about gratitude, promise-keeping, truth-telling, and hospitality. The group met for three days twice a year, sharing and reflecting on examples of these practices in their ministries. Pohl provides the practical and theological fruit of their conversations, hoping this work will be used by leaders and members to strengthen their communities. She lays out three sections of three chapters each addressing gratitude, promise-keeping, and truth-telling. Each chapter works from the previous one, examining the practices from historical, biblical, theological, and philosophical perspectives. The last section on hospitality integrates the previous ones rather than simply reworking her previous published material. The book is strengthened by Pohl’s ability to connect together various scholarly and pastoral threads—an ability aided by the practical wisdom of a good working group—to offer helpful practical insights.For example, in the first chapter on gratitude, “Grateful Hearts,” she examines the theological attitudes of gratitude, generosity, and debt contrasted with entitlement and dissatisfaction, or grumbling—ever-present cultural complications for “good” and “holy” communities. In the second section, “Promise-Keeping,” she works through different kinds of promises in order to initiate [End Page 245] the hard work of communal reflection. There, rather than resting in the beautiful but abstract insights of thinkers such as Margaret Farley and Hannah Arendt, she distinguishes contractual and covenantal promises from one another and describes their consequences.Throughout the first two sections, qualities of contemporary culture—individualism, freedom, autonomy, mobility, distrust of institutions—affect and deform the practices of gratitude and promise-keeping essential to healthy and faithful communities. This attention to contemporary culture produces vital insight for the section on promise-keeping: while most Christian organizations appear to operate with covenantal expectations, “we actually work with a hybrid of covenantal and contractual obligations” (78). This “contemporary confusion” can lead to betrayal and loss and impede the mediation of fierce disagreements.Although Pohl provides helpful biblical narrative to support her analysis of each practice, she does not provide an adequate analysis of contemporary culture. One suspects that for Pohl—much like H. Richard Niebuhr—culture exists as a construct external to the well-formed community. It appears responsible for many of the attitudes deforming the essential practices she examines. Yet this suspicion is never fully confirmed, in part because she addresses sin as a present deforming power.Perhaps the most eloquent analysis in the book is found in its discussion of truth-telling. Rather than concede to Augustine’s (theological) or Immanuel Kant’s (rational) prohibition against lying, Pohl turns to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s invocation of the concrete situation to analyze the practice of truth-telling. Only a community that places truthfulness within the context of covenantal relationships can deal redemptively with deception and wrongdoing. Several of her examples help the reader understand the uniqueness of this practice for healthy communities. [End Page 246]Andrew WattsBelmont UniversityCopyright © 2014 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Philosophers of action tend to take for granted the concept of basic actions – actions that are done at will, or directly – as opposed to others that are performed in other ways. This concept does foundational work in action theory; many theorists, especially causalists, take part of their task to be showing that normal, complex actions necessarily stem from basic ones somehow. The case for the concept of basic actions is driven by a family of observations and a cluster (...) of closely related anti-infinite regress arguments. I review this case in the work of Arthur Danto, Donald Davidson, and Jennifer Hornsby – three of the most important developers of the concept – and find it lacking. I conclude by sketching the possibility of non-foundationalist action theory. (shrink)

Philosophical writing on the welfare state has taken a defensive turn in recent years, largely in response to two related phenomena: the re-emergence of pro-market ideologies in the larger political culture and the imperiled condition of real world welfare states in a global economy in which national governments have diminishing capacities for shaping the social and economic lives of their citizens. But thanks in part to the tireless advocacy of Philippe Van Parijs, an even more radically redistributive form of public (...) provision than the welfare state has come onto the intellectual agenda—and the political agenda too, at least in Belgium and the Netherlands. Van Parijs proposes that all citizens be accorded an unconditional “basic income grant” as large as is compatible with the need to generate as much wealth as possible for redistribution. By now, this idea has many defenders. It also boasts a genealogy extending back to such writers as Tom Paine, François Huet, Edward Bellamy and G. D. H. Cole. But Van Parijs has become its best-known and most adept philosophical proponent, and this book represents his most sustained effort to date to investigate its normative foundations. (shrink)

In the debate over the existence of composite objects, it is sometimes suggested that perceptual evidence justifies belief in composite objects. But it is almost never suggested that we are perceptually justified in believing in composite objects on the basis of the fact that the phenomenology of our perceptual experiences enables us to discriminate between situations where there are composite objects and situations where there are merely simples arranged composite object-wise. But while the thought that the phenomenology of our perceptual (...) experiences cannot enable us to discriminate between situations where there are composite objects and situations where there are merely simples arranged composite object-wise is commonly taken for granted, it requires some defence, both in light of its importance in shaping the debate and in light of its recently coming under attack by a prominent philosopher of perception. In this paper, I offer such a defence. (shrink)

It is commonly taken for granted that Thomas Aquinas employed Aristotelian principles in his philosophical system to promote a “program” of Christianizing the Stagyrite. However, the question of why Thomas used Aristotle on a particular point can help uncover the goals of his scholastic project. The case of divine illumination theory is especially enlightening in this regard. From the zenith of Augustinian illumination epistemology as expressed in Bonaventure to its disappearance in Scotus, the influence of Aristotle’s notion of active intellect (...) can be clearly traced throughout the thirteenth century. Thomas is especially important in this chronology, because he “internalizes” Bonaventure’s illumination theory and encapsulates it in man’s innate power of abstraction. In determining his motivation for doing so, this study explores the connection between epistemology and volition in both Bonaventure and Thomas, and postulates that Thomas adopted Aristotelian principles to safeguard a doctrine of free will in his volition theory. (shrink)

The 2010 Quinnipiac cheerleading case raises interesting questions about the nature of both cheerleading and sport, as well as about the moral character of each. In this paper we explore some of those questions, and argue that no form of college cheerleading currently in existence deserves, from a moral point of view, to be recognized as a sport for Title IX purposes. To reach that conclusion, we evaluate cheerleading using a quasi-legal argument based on the NCAA’s definition of sport and (...) conclude that cheerleading fails to qualify as a legitimate sport. A philosophical argument leads to the same conclusion, primarily because of the essential entertainment-aspect of cheerleading. We then examine a consequentialist moral case for making cheerleading an intercollegiate sport and argue that the balance of moral reasons is against doing so. Finally, we look at cheerleading’s newest offspring – Acrobatics and Tumbling, and STUNT – and express our moral reservations about their current claims to be worthy of Title IX recognition. While we would not claim that any single one of our arguments is decisive, we are convinced that the cumulative weight of the arguments against granting intercollegiate sport status to any of the forms of cheerleading or its derivatives is, at present, irresistible. (shrink)

To avoid reification of prime matter, or the indeterminate, yet determinable, substrate underlying all change, many readers of Aristotle have identified this per se unknowable “stuff” with its functional identity, i.e., as a conceptual placeholder of the sum of formal potencies abstracted from concrete particulars.Despite the appeal of this reduction, a case will be made in reference to Siger of Brabant’s Metaphysics for the irreducibility of prime matter. This entails granting an extra-formal reality to prime matter beyond its functional role (...) as a correlate passively receiving forms imparted by an agent without contributing anything of this own. (shrink)

This paper outlines briefly care as a formal construct of a highly regulatory approach to being looked after in the setting of foster care. It then moves on to consider care and its expression within the interdependencies and everyday moral ?workings out? between people in caring relationships. These relationships are informed partly by exterior regulation, but also emerge predominantly from care as a social process and daily human activity in which the self exists through and with others. Drawing from an (...) in-depth qualitative study of 10 foster families supported by local authorities or independent agencies in Wales, the paper examines the meaning of care in what is often a nebulous mix of paid and unpaid fostering. The moral texture of the foster family is revealed in regard to three areas of everyday domestic life that are often taken for granted and rarely researched: the symbolism of food, issues of the body, and aspects of touch. The paper concludes with a brief reprise of foster care as relational, constitutive and contextual in contrast with care as a professional and regulatory discipline. (shrink)

This work was supported, in part, by a Stem Cell Network grant to Françoise Baylis and Jason Scott Robert and a CIHR grant to Françoise Baylis. We sincerely thank Alan Fine, Rich Campbell, Cynthia Cohen, and Tim Krahn for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. Thanks are also owed to Tim Krahn for his research assistance. An earlier version of this paper was presented to the Department of Bioethics and the Novel Tech Ethics research team. (...) We thank the participants at each of these meetings for their helpful comments. (shrink)

Neoliberal assaults upon public education have been grounded upon the supposition that schools are failing to prepare students to respond to local and global economic needs and realities. The result has left the relational between pupils and teachers as a taken-for-granted practice. Lived experiences often can show and capture the unexpressed in taken for granted moments. This discussion presents teaching as relational moments, shared between beginning teachers and pupils. We employ a phenomenological sensitivity as we unravel the anecdotal evidence to (...) bring into language a “lived through” dimension of human relations. As teacher educators, we ask: what is experienced when relationality is the focus for beginning teachers? The importance of this question is due to the prevalence of neoliberal forces that now guide, and to large extent, control what it means to teach in schools across Canada. In an effort to understand this emerging view of teaching, we explore what four preservice teachers from Nova Scotia experienced in becoming teachers, as they completed their final Field Experience in Bergen, Norway. We share these anecdotal representations to help teachers see how the relational informs identity in becoming a teacher and allows teacher educators to deconstruct the “taken-for-granted-ness” of teaching stuck in the rational-technical model. (shrink)

David Cooper has argued that any acceptable theory of metaphor should account for ‘indeterminacy’: the sense that many metaphors admit of multiple acceptable interpretations, none of which can be uniquely demonstrated to be correct. He further argues that the ‘speaker's meaning’ model of metaphorical content cannot meet this constraint and, thus, should be rejected. In this paper I argue that Cooper's characterization of the proposed constraint is imprecise as stated and give my own characterization of the problem. There is a (...) general tension between the authority granted to first-person ascriptions of intentions and facts concerning the phenomenology of metaphor production, given that it seems to misrepresent the latter to ascribe to the speaker special access to a cognitive content, which their metaphorical utterance then expresses. I argue that one way of resolving this tension is by following Crispin Wright in viewing facts about intention as essentially response dependent. (shrink)

Richard Price, Welsh dissenting minister, actuary, and moral philosopher, is best remembered for A Review of the Principal Questions in Morals, a masterpiece of eighteenth-century British ethical theory that anticipated some twentieth-century theses, such as the naturalistic fallacy. Price is also famous for his joining the American cause in the pamphlet literature that flourished during the American revolution. His pamphlet Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, published in London in February 1776, is credited with influencing events that led to (...) the Declaration of Independence and, among other things, induced the Continental Congress in 1778 to grant him American citizenship on condition that he come here to accept it. One of the editors of the present volume, W. Bernard Peach, has already advanced Price's case for a more prominent niche in history with the publication of selections from the pamphlets, which he introduced by means of an insightful interpretative essay. Peach's earlier volume is Richard Price and the Ethical Foundations of the American Revolution. (shrink)

As users of computer networks have become more active in producing their own electronic records, in the form of transcripts of onlinediscussions, ethicists have attempted to interpret this new situation interms of earlier models of personal data protection. But thistransference results in unprecedented problems for researchers. Thispaper examines some of the central dichotomies and paradoxes in thedebate on research ethics online in the context of the concrete study ofa virtual community that we carried out. We argue that alienation, notprivacy, is (...) the actual core of the ethical problems of virtual communityresearch. While practically everybody is allowed and often welcome tojoin online communities (which undermines the claim to privacy), mostparticipants would agree that members and visitors are not authorized touse, or `harvest,'' or sell the product of the group communication. To dothat, they would be expected to ask for permission preferably before thecontent has been produced, thus granting participants'' right to controltheir own product. This `non-alienation principle'' should be the basisof emergent social conventions in cyberspace. It would apply toresearchers as to anyone else. With certain types of research, wesuggest, cyberspace provides unique opportunities for empoweringsubjects by involving them as contributors in the research project. (shrink)

This paper traces the development of corporate citizenship as a way of framing business and society relations, and critically examines the content of contemporary understandings of the term. These conventional views of corporate citizenship are argued to contribute little or nothing to existing notions of corporate social responsibility and corporate philanthropy. The paper then proposes a new direction, which particularly exposes the element of "citizenship". Being a political concept, citizenship can only be reasonably understood from that theoretical angle. This suggests (...) that citizenship consists of a bundle of rights conventionally granted and protected by governments of states. However, the more that governmental power and sovereignty have come under threat, the more that relevant political functions have gradually shifted towards the corporate sphere – and it is at this point where "corporate" involvement into "citizenship" becomes an issue. Consequently, "corporate citizens" are substantially more than fellow members of the same community who cosily rub shoulders with other fellow citizens while bravely respecting those other citizens'' rights and living up to their own responsibility as corporations – as the conventional rhetoric wants us to believe. Behind this relatively innocuous mask then, the true face of corporate citizenship suggests that the corporate role in contemporary citizenship is far more profound, and ultimately in need of urgent reappraisal. (shrink)