This important new book by one of the world's leading political theorists boldly questions the moral justification for organizing our world as a territorial states-system and proposes major changes to states' sovereign powers.

This paper argues that the function of moral education in the biomedical context should be exactly the same as in a general, philosophical framework: it should not provide ready-to-use kits of moral principles; rather, it must show the history, epistemology and conceptual structure of moral theories that would enable those who have to make decisions to be as informed and as responsible as possible. If this complexity cannot be attained, an incomplete product—i.e. bioethics or bioethical principles—should not be seen as (...) a viable substitute. This theoretical position is subsequently illustrated by a case study involving research ethics committees. It is argued that within these committees, that are carefully formed multidisciplinary bodies, what makes competent decision-making possible is not a bioethical theory, nor even a sound philosophical ethics, but the dynamics of the discussion of a number of experts coming from different disciplines. This multidisciplinary expertise is necessary and sufficient to undertake the challenges of complex decisions in the biomedical context. (shrink)

The concept of “enhypostaton” was introduced into theological discourse during the sixth-century Christological debates with the aim of justifying the unitary subjectivity of Christ by reclassifying Christ’s human nature as ontically non-independent. The coinage of the term is commonly ascribed to Leontius of Byzantium. Its conceptual content has been recognized by contemporary scholarship as relevant to the core issues of Christology, as well as possessing significance for such philosophical questions as individuation and the nature of individual entityhood. Even so, despite (...) its role in the formation of classical Christological thought, the notion of “enhypostaton” is often regarded as obscure and not clearly defined. This paper aims to shed some light on the meaning of Leontius’ conception of it, in respect of its specifically philosophical import. (shrink)

De nos jours, les avocats et les juristes chinois sont très friands d'Internet. Pourtant, leur utilisation de la Toile n'a pas encore été l'objet de recherches. Cet article veut apporter un regard nouveau sur le lien entre avocats, internautes et société civile chinoise. Les juristes ont trouvé en Internet, en particulier sur les blogs, un lieu d'information et d'échange où ils peuvent se dédier aux sujets qui les intéressent . Les multiples démarches qu'ils ont initiées au sein du Réseau ont (...) abouti à une mobilisation des moyens numériques, permettant de mieux communiquer et informer sur le système légal et judiciaire chinois. Leur utilisation d'Internet a-t-elle catalysé l'initiative personnelle des utilisateurs et mobilisé l'opinion publique ? Cet article s'attache à démontrer comment par le biais d'Internet les avocats ont pu être des acteurs du développement de la société civile et participer ainsi à l'émergence d'une « communauté de critères » relevant du droit.Nowadays, lawyers and jurists Chinese are very fond of the Internet. However, their use of the Internet has not yet been investigated. This article will provide a new perspective on the relationship between lawyers, surfers and Chinese civil society. Lawyers found in the Internet, especially on blogs, a place to exchange information and where they can devote themselves to topics that interest them . Multiple steps they have initiated within the network led to a mobilization digital means to better communicate and inform the Chinese legal and judicial system. Internet use did catalyzed users personal initiative and mobilized public opinion? This article aims to demonstrate how through Internet lawyers have been involved in development of civil society and thus contribute to the emergence of a "community standards" under the law. (shrink)

This article describes a survey among Finnish business students to find answers to the following questions: How do business students define a well-run company? What are their attitudes on the responsibilities of business in society? Do the attitudes of women students differ from those of men? What is the influence of business education on these attitudes? Our sample comprised 217 students pursuing a master's degree in business studies at two Finnish universities. The results show that, as a whole, students valued (...) the stakeholder model of the company more than the shareholder model. However, attitudes differed according to gender: women students were more in favor of the stakeholder model and placed more weight on corporate ethical, environmental, and societal responsibilities than their men counterparts - both at the beginning and at the end of their studies. Thus, no gender socialization effect of business school education could be observed in this sense. Business school education was found to shape women and men students' attitudes in two ways. Firstly, valuation of the shareholder model increased and, secondly, the importance of equal-opportunity employment decreased in the course of education. This raises the question whether the educational context is creating an undesirable tendency among future business professionals. The results further suggest that the sociocultural context can make a difference in how corporate social responsibility is perceived. The article also discusses possible ways to influence the attitudes of business students. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Saying and the Said Subjectivity as Sensibility Ethics of Difference or an Ethics of Truths? Reading Levinas with Badiou: Impossibly Demanding? An Impossibly Demanding Education Notes.

This article evaluates the theory of boundary legitimacy put forward in A John Simmons’s recent book Boundaries of Authority. I believe Simmons is correct to hold that questions about the legitimac...

This commentary argues that the question of metalanguage is a key issue in emotion research. Izard (2010) ignores this issue (and all the earlier literature relating to it, including the debate in Emotion Review, 2009, 1[1]), and thus falls into the old traps of circularity, obscurity, and ethnocentrism. This commentary rejects Izard’s claim that “emotion” defies definition, and it offers a viable definition of “emotion” formulated in simple and universal human concepts, using the English version of the universal conceptual lingua (...) franca called Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM). Once again, this commentary draws attention to the centrality of the question of language in emotion research. (shrink)

Gender-inclusive language, such as the Swedish pronoun hen, may aid in breaking a binary notion of gender and avoid sexism. The present study followed the implementation of a gender-inclusive third-person pronoun singular in Swedish in two surveys with representative samples in 2015 and in 2018. The surveys comprised measures of attitudes toward, and use of, hen as well as possible predictors such as area of residence, age, preferred pronoun, political orientation, and interest in gender issues. Results showed that attitudes toward (...) hen became more positive and that use of hen increased between 2015 and 2018. About half of the population used hen in their communication in 2018, which is a 14-percentage-point increase from 2015. Younger age, she or hen as preferred pronoun, political left-wing orientation, and interest in gender issues predicted a more positive attitude and a more frequent use. Furthermore, the positive change between 2015 and 2018 was larger among younger people, indicating that hen will remain in the Swedish language. The present research is unique in that it follows a gender-fair language initiative during its implementation in representative samples, thereby providing insights for social movements aiming for gender-fair language. We also discuss the theoretical implications of a gender-inclusive pronoun in comparison with past studies on gender-fair language. (shrink)

Computational explanations focus on information processing required in specific cognitive capacities, such as perception, reasoning or decision-making. These explanations specify the nature of the information processing task, what information needs to be represented, and why it should be operated on in a particular manner. In this article, the focus is on three questions concerning the nature of computational explanations: What type of explanations they are, in what sense computational explanations are explanatory and to what extent they involve a special, “independent” (...) or “autonomous” level of explanation. In this paper, we defend the view computational explanations are genuine explanations, which track non-causal/formal dependencies. Specifically, we argue that they do not provide mere sketches for explanation, in contrast to what for example Piccinini and Craver :283–311, 2011) suggest. This view of computational explanations implies some degree of “autonomy” for the computational level. However, as we will demonstrate that does not make this view “computationally chauvinistic” in a way that Piccinini or Kaplan :339–373, 2011) have charged it to be. (shrink)

This study on Kant’s moral anthropology examines the conditions for achieving moral action, and strives to expand our understanding of Kantian moral philosophy. According to Kant, building moral character is not limited to developing rational capacities but also includes developing emotional capacities, and responsibly managing and deliberately cultivating emotional dispositions. / -/- Award: Förderpreis der Freiburger Kant-Stiftung und der Kant-Gesellschaft 2016 / -/- Anna Wehofsits’ Studie zu Kants moralischer Anthropologie untersucht die Realisierungsbedingungen moralischen Handelns. Die historische Rekonstruktion und systematische (...) Diskussion dieser Bedingungen zielt auf ein erweitertes Verständnis der Kantischen Ethik: Moralische Charakterbildung nach Kant ist nicht auf die Entwicklung rationaler Fähigkeiten beschränkt, sondern schließt die Entwicklung emotionaler Fähigkeiten ein, den verantwortlichen Umgang mit emotionalen Dispositionen und ihre gezielte Kultivierung. -/- . (shrink)

The purpose of our article is to present a qualitative empirical study from the ethical viewpoint. It aims at the theoretical conceptualization concerning the managers' decision-making of personnel dismissals in downsizing organizations. First we present and seek to motivate our research task. The importance of real business ethical issues as a starting point of business ethics research is emphasized. Second the main normative ethical theories and ethical decision-making models are presented. These form the loose framework for describing and interpreting research (...) interviews. After this the empirical findings are set forth. This part suggests that the managers explain the dismissals from different decision-making roles emphasizing different ethical orientation. The roles are called a rational and an independent manager, a marionette and an emotional individual. Our study suggests that the role of empathy in morality reveals an interesting and a necessary research topic for business ethics research. (shrink)

Fetal surgery has been practised for some decades now. However, it remains a highly complex area, both medically and ethically. This paper shows how the routine use of ultrasound has been a catalyst for fetal surgery, in creating new needs and new incentives for intervention. Some of the needs met by fetal surgery are those of parents and clinicians who experience stress while waiting for the birth of a fetus with known anomalies. The paper suggests that the role of technology (...) and visualisation techniques in creating and meeting such new needs is ethically problematic. It then addresses the idea that fetal surgery should be restricted to interventions that are life-saving for the fetus, arguing that this restriction is unduly paternalistic. Fetal surgery poses challenges for an autonomy-based system of ethics. However, it is risky to circumvent these challenges by restricting the choices open to pregnant women, even when these choices appear excessively altruistic. (shrink)

While John Tomasi's Free Market Fairness is ambitious, provocative, and does much to reinvigorate debate about economic justice, his argument for market democracy is not compelling. I discuss two objections. First, I offer doubts about whether “thick” economic freedom is a condition of democratic legitimacy. While Tomasi raises the intriguing possibility that liberal commitments may justify a somewhat more expansive list of economic rights than traditionally recognized, he fails to give a well-worked-out account of these rights. Instead, he argues for (...) unfettered economic liberty without adequately connecting it to citizens' self-authorship, or showing how it could feasibly be protected alongside other basic liberties. Second, I argue that a concern for citizens' agency and economic self-authorship should lead us to endorse a social-democratic regime, not a market-democratic one. Market democracy leaves out or heavily revises key aspects of justice as fairness as developed by Rawls, including fair equality of opportunity and the fair value of the political liberties. Moreover, while Tomasi claims that social democracy rests on a perfectionist prioritizing of citizens' status over their agency, I argue that social democracy is best defended on agency-based grounds. (shrink)

Psychiatry today is mainly practised within a curative framework. However, many mental disorders are persistent and negatively affect quality of life as well as life expectancy. This tension between treatment goals and the actual illness trajectory has evoked a growing academic interest in ‘palliative psychiatry’, namely the application of a palliative care approach in patients with severe persistent mental illness. Recently, Trachsel et al presented a working definition of palliative psychiatry. This first official attempt to capture the concept is based (...) on WHO’s widely accepted definition of palliative care but modified and limited to include only severe persistent psychiatric illness. While this is a welcome step in the discussion on palliative care approaches in psychiatry, it also opens up for new questions. One of the most evident is whether psychiatry actually needs its own definition of palliative care or, put differently, whether there is something about mental disorders that differs so radically from other medical conditions that it calls for a separate definition. We acknowledge the need to discuss the goals of psychiatric care in patients with severe persistent psychiatric illness. However, we question whether a separate definition of palliative care exclusive to psychiatry is the right way to go. In this paper, we discuss why. (shrink)

Authors of chapters: J. Blanc, D. Blitman, F. Couturier, P. Fasula, R. Lamarche-Perrin, D. Ross, R. Sandoz, S. Troubé .

In this paper, we develop a theoretical framework for understanding women leaders in working life. Our starting point is in statistics and earlier women-in-management literature, which show that women leaders represent a minority of the managerial population. We assume such underlying mechanisms causing discriminatory practices towards women leaders to exist which have become naturalized and invisible. Our concern is that everyone irrespective of gender should have a fair chance in career progression. This is both a moral and also an economic (...) challenge. The framework we develop in this paper is an alternative approach to studying women leaders compared to traditional women-in-management literature. It aims at revealing the "natural and taken-for-granted" cultural mechanisms behind discriminatory practices. Our framework is based on a critical discursive approach, which draws on ideas of how women''s leadership becomes symbolically represented and constructed in discursive practices. These symbolic constructions, which are mediated through language, often have an ideological loading which positions women leaders and builds their identities in ways that can help to legitimize unequal relations between the genders. However, our framework emphasizes the possibility of multiple discourses and a dynamic view of culture. The cultural constructions of women leaders are, thus, open to change. (shrink)

Empathy is commonly regarded as an essential attribute for doctors and there is a conviction that empathy must be taught to medical students. Yet it is not clear exactly what empathy is, from a philosophical or sociological point of view, or whether it can be taught. The meaning, role and relevance of empathy in medical education have tended to be unquestioningly assumed; there is a need to examine and contextualise these assumptions. This paper opens up that debate, arguing that ‘empathy’, (...) as it is commonly understood, is neither necessary nor sufficient to guarantee good medical or ethical practice. (shrink)

Unlike the question of whether self-deception can be understood on the model of other-deception, the relationship between the two phenomena at the level of practice is hardly ever explored. Other-deception can support self-deception and vice versa. Self-deception often affects not only the beliefs and behavior of the self-deceiving person but also the beliefs and behavior of others who may become accomplices of self-deception. As I will show, however, it is difficult to describe this supportive relationship between self-deception and the deception (...) of others without conceptual contradiction. While “deflationary” approaches offer a convincing way to avoid the so-called paradoxes of self-deception, they do not resolve the conceptual tensions that arise here. I conclude by outlining a solution. (shrink)

Perceivers generally show a poor ability to detect changes, a condition referred to as “Change Blindness” . They are, in addition, “blind to their own blindness”. A common explanation of this “Change Blindness Blindness” is that it derives from an inadequate, “photographical” folk-theory about perception. This explanation, however, does not account for intra-individual variations of CBB across trials. Our study aims to explore an alternative theory, according to which participants base their self-evaluations on two activity-dependent cues, namely search time and (...) perceived success in prior trials. These cues were found to influence self-evaluation in two orthogonal ways: success-feedback influenced self-evaluation in a global, contextual way, presumably by recalibrating the norm of adequacy for the task. Search time influenced it in a local way, predicting the success of a given trial from its duration. (shrink)

Federal policies on human subjects research have undergone a progressive transformation. In the early decades of the twentieth century, federal policies largely relied on the discretion of investigators to decide when and how to conduct research. This approach gradually gave way to policies that augmented investigator discretion with externally imposed protections. We may now be entering an era of even more stringent external protections. Whether the new policies effectively absolve investigators of personal responsibility for conducting ethical research, and whether it (...) is wise to do so, remains to be seen. (shrink)

In this paper, I will explore ideas advanced by Bradshaw, Pence and others who have written on compassion in healthcare. I will attempt to see how and whether their assumptions about compassion can be justified, and explore the role compassion should play in a modern healthcare system. I will justify scepticism at the idea of attempting to incentivise compassion through metrics. The Francis Report raises important questions concerning the nature of a healthcare system that harms rather than helps patients. If (...) something is failing in modern healthcare, those in charge should naturally seek to remedy it. I will investigate whether this is due to the disappearance of compassion, and if so, what is it that is emerging to fill its place. I will consider whether we need to rehabilitate or enforce compassion in the system, or to acknowledge that our modern healthcare systems are incompatible with compassion and how we can make the best of what remains. (shrink)

If lay theories associate moral intuitions with deeply held values, people should feel uncomfortable relying on deliberative thinking when judging violations of personal taboos. In two preliminary studies, participants with siblings of the opposite sex were particularly troubled when evaluating a sibling incest scenario under instructions to think slowly and rationally, or when the scenario was presented in a hard-to-read font forcing them to employ deliberative processing. This suggests that we may be intuitive intuitionists, and opens the door for investigations (...) of people’s preferred modes of moral judgment. (shrink)

We are today agents of a peculiar reality, the global network or the system for automated information production. Our condition in the global network is that of agents of the real, since we all contribute to the coproduction of this ever-evolving process. Nevertheless, I will argue, this reality is but the effect of the adoption of a notion of instrumental pragmatic rationality which denies the existence of any other possible reality as the actualization of different determinations of Reason. While following (...) Deleuze s notion of deterritorialization, I ll show that the real philosophical choice does not concern the introduction of new moves that create differentiations within a universal game, but that it is concerned with the possible abolition of the agency which is instantiated within the collective network. (shrink)

The paper reconstructs the conception of the soul by the Spanish Jesuit Juan Maldonado, one of the first Jesuits who lectured on the Aristotelian De anima, through the analysis of the synthesis of the lectures he gave in Paris. Maldonado maintains the definition of the soul as form of the body but also suggests that there are more forms in the human compound. The paper aims to solve this tension through the comparison with the later De anima by Francisco Suárez.

In this paper the authors deals with the relation between the Irish Franciscan Hugh McCaghwell’s commentary on Scotus’s De anima (1639) and Suárez’s (1621). It is shown that the latter provided a model and a reference text for McCaghwell who reproduces the philosopher’s thought within his commentary. Moreover, the explicit and implicit quotations of Suárez are taken into account: far from admitting his debt, McCaghwell criticizes the philosopher when he does not seem to follow the Scotist path. The commentary’s sections (...) analysed are those concerning the Scotist account of abstraction and the cognition of material substances. (shrink)