Background: Legislative changes are resulting in assisted death as an option for people at the end of life. Although nurses’ experiences and perspectives are underrepresented within broader ethical discourses about assisted death, there is a small but significant body of literature examining nurses’ experiences of caring for people who request this option. Aim: To synthesize what has been learned about nurses’ experiences of caring for patients who request assisted death and to highlight what is morally at stake for nurses who (...) undertake this type of care. Design: Qualitative meta-synthesis. Methods: Six databases were searched: CINAHL, Medline, EMBASE, Joanna Briggs Institute, PsycINFO, and Web of Science. The search was completed on 22 October 2014 and updated in February 2016. Of 879 articles identified from the database searches, 16 articles were deemed relevant based on inclusion criteria. Following quality appraisal, 14 studies were retained for analysis and synthesis. Results: The moral experience of the nurse is (1) defined by a profound sense of responsibility, (2) shaped by contextual forces that nurses navigate in everyday end-of-life care practice, and (3) sustained by intra-team moral and emotional support. Discussion: The findings of this synthesis support the view that nurses are moral agents who are deeply invested in the moral integrity of end-of-life care involving assisted death. The findings further demonstrate that to fully appreciate the ethics of assisted death from a nursing standpoint, it is necessary to understand the broader constraints on nurses’ moral agency that operate in everyday end-of-life care. Ethical considerations: Research ethics board approval was not required for this synthesis of previously published literature. Conclusion: In order to understand how to enact ethical practice in the area of assisted death, the moral experiences of nurses should be investigated and foregrounded. (shrink)

Unbelievable Errors defends an error theory about all normative judgements: not just moral judgements, but also judgements about reasons for action, judgements about reasons for belief, and instrumental normative judgements. This theory states that normative judgements are beliefs that ascribe normative properties, but that normative properties do not exist. It therefore entails that all normative judgements are false. -/- Bart Streumer also argues, however, that we cannot believe this error theory. This may seem to be a problem for the (...) theory. But he argues that it makes this error theory more likely to be true, since it undermines objections to the theory and it makes it harder to reject the arguments for the theory. -/- He then sketches how certain other philosophical theories can be defended in a similar way. He concludes that to make philosophical progress, we need to make a sharp distinction between a theory's truth and our ability to believe it. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue that contractualism, even when it is actually used to construe our moral duties towards non-human animals, does not do so naturally. We can infer from our experiences with companion animals that we owe moral duties to them because of special relationships we are in with them. We can further abstract that we owe general moral duties to non-human animals because they are the kinds of beings that we can have relationships with, and because of the (...) capacities that make possible this relational capacity. This type of approach better explains our duties to non-human animals and other non-rational beings than does the trustee account that Scanlon leaves room for in his contractualism. (shrink)

In this paper, a reaction is presented to Siegel’s claim that the pragma-dialectical theory of argumentation ignores or neglects epistemological viewpoints that he finds vital to any normative theory of argumentation. The focus is on the most important problems in Siegel’s argument: 1) the ambiguity of the term ‘argument’ and the alleged negligence of this ambiguity in pragma-dialectics; 2) the critical rational perspective of the pragma-dialectical account; and 3) the alleged negligence of the “abstract propositional sense” of argument in pragma-dialectics.

Academic misconduct distorts the relationship between scientific practice and the knowledge it produces. The relationship between science and the knowledge it produces is, however, not something universally agreed upon. In this paper I will critically discuss the moral status of an act of research misconduct, namely plagiarism, in the context of different epistemological positions. While from a positivist view of science, plagiarism only influences trust in science but not the content of the scientific corpus, from a constructivist point of view (...) both are at stake. Consequently, I argue that discussions of research misconduct and responsible research ought to be explicitly informed by the authors’ views on the relationship between science and the knowledge it produces. (shrink)

There is a wealth of experimental data showing that the way a problem is framed may have an effect on people's choices and decisions. Based on a semantic analysis of evaluative expressions like ‘good’, I propose a new explanation of such framing effects. The key idea is that our choices and decisions reveal a counterfactual systematicity: they carry information about the choices and decisions we would have made if the facts had been otherwise. It is these counterfactual alternatives that may (...) diverge between otherwise equivalent versions of the same task, and thus explain the effects of framing. (shrink)

Perhaps the most difficult part of the famous inscription from Heraclea is the opening section of the extant text, where from a given form of procedure it is required to determine the subject matter. A solution of this puzzling problem, which I proposed some months ago, has recently been made the subject of an interesting article in this journal by Dr. E. G. Hardy. Mr. Hardy has long been engaged in this field, and has rendered much useful service. In this (...) article, however, he seems to be interested in my views chiefly in their relation to his own theory. This is apparent in his agreements with me. For example, one aim of my study was to identify the professiones of Cicero's letters ad Att. xiii. 33, 1, and ad Fam. xvi. 23, 1, with those provided for in the first section of the inscription. It appeared that the returns mentioned by Cicero were registrations of property, that they were to be made yearly, and that they had their prototype in the annual property census of Egypt. It also seemed clear that Caesar's recensus populi of 46 was modelled on the Egyptian kατ' oίkíαm άπoγραφήiKíαν. With these preliminary conclusions Mr. Hardy is not unwilling to agree. He even goes so far as to say that I have made a good case for ‘a new system of professiones somehow relating to property and introduced in 46.’ He thinks too that the settlement of the frumentations as a part of a more comprehensive legislative scheme would be most appropriate. So far so good, but when it comes to the vital point of admitting a connection between these matters and vv. 1–19 of the Tablet he draws back as if from some fatal step. (shrink)

This definitive study of an important Sufi work by the "Greatest Shayk" of Islamic mysticism presents a provocative new perspective on the fundamental question of the nature and authority of individual sainthood in organized, prophetic religion.

BioShock Infinite begins with the question of “founding.” One enters Columbia for the first time on “Secession Day,” the anniversary of Columbia's secession from the United States in 1902, and the commemoration of the founding of Columbia as the “New Eden.” Racial difference is one of the major antagonisms in BioShock Infinite. BioShock Infinite exemplifies Carl Schmitt's concept of the political, as grounded on fundamental antagonisms that express the will of “the people” of Columbia. Sovereignty is the power to decide (...) what one will do outside of any rules or laws. The questions of decision and responsibility play a key role in the story and gameplay of BioShock Infinite. Players are forced to make a number of decisions throughout BioShock Infinite, without any way of knowing what the outcomes of these decisions will be. It turns out that none of these decisions has any real impact on the game. (shrink)

In Part I of Christianity and History, the author asks whether the committed Christian should be more conscious than the uncommitted of some meaning in history. In answering this he offers a critique of Arnold Toynbee and makes some penetrating observations on the teaching of history. Part II is concerned with the author's special field-the Protestant Reformation and its origins. Calvinism, with its dynamic sense of the historical process, receives special treatment, and there is a brilliant essay on Machiavelli and (...) Thomas More. Three of the essays included in this new book appear here for the first time. Originally published in 1964. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

In this paper, I will critique Paul Draper’s recent model of God’s motivational structure, according to which God can make hard choices. I will argue that this model illegitimately treats value in a purely teleological way, as something to be promoted. Following T.M. Scanlon’s work on value theory, when we consider the fact that value is to be respected rather than merely promoted, this realization will significantly foreclose on the possible cases in which hard choices can conceivably be made by (...) God. Most importantly, I challenge the idea that God can face hard choices between aesthetic and moral value in the way Draper suggests. (shrink)

Gricean pragmatics. Saying vs. implicating ; Discourse and cooperation ; Conversational implicatures ; Generalised vs. particularised ; Cancellability ; Gricean reasoning and the pragmatics of what is said -- The standard recipe for Q-implicatures. The standard recipe ; Inference to the best explanation ; Weak implicatures and competence ; Relevance ; Conclusion -- Scalar implicatures. Horn scales and the generative view ; Implicatures and downward entailing environments ; Disjunction : exclusivity and ignorance ; Conclusion -- Psychological plausibility. Charges of psychological (...) inadequacy ; Logical complexity ; Abduction ; Incremental processing ; The intentional stance ; Alternatives ; Conclusion -- Nonce inference or defaults?. True defaults ; Strong defaultism ; Weak defaultism ; Contextualism ; Conclusion -- Intentions, alternatives, and free choice. Free choice ; Problems with the standard recipe ; Intentions first ; Free choice explained ; Comparing alternatives ; Two flavours of Q-implicature ; Conclusion -- Embedded implicatures : the problems. The problems ; Varieties of conventionalism ; Against conventionalism ; Conclusion -- Embedded implicatures : a Gricean approach. Disjunction ; Belief reports ; Factives and other presupposition inducers ; Indefinites ; Contrastive construals and lexical pragmatics ; Conclusion. (shrink)

The legal basis for processing personal data and some other types of Big Data is often the informed consent of the data subject involved. Many data controllers, such as social network sites, offer terms and conditions, privacy policies or similar documents to which a user can consent when registering as a user. There are many issues with such informed consent: people get too many consent requests to read everything, policy documents are often very long and difficult to understand and users (...) feel they do not have a real choice anyway. Furthermore, in the context of Big Data refusing consent may not prevent predicting missing data. Finally, consent is usually asked for when registering, but rarely is consent renewed. As a result, consenting once often implies consent forever. At the same time, given the rapid changes in Big Data and data analysis, consent may easily get outdated. This paper suggests expiry dates for consent, not to settle questions, but to put them on the table as a start for further discussion on this topic. Although such expiry dates may not solve all the issues of informed consent, they may be a useful tool in some situations. (shrink)

For decades, healthcare has relied on data-driven algorithms to guide clinical practice. Recent advances in machine learning have opened up new possibilities in the field, enabling detailed analyse...

In this thesis, William Alston’s influential defense of divine command theory is critically evaluated. It is argued that Alston, in positing evaluative particularism, undermines his defense because moral particularism, a rival theory of moral obligation, follows from evaluative particularism. Furthermore, the moral particularist need not deny that God has moral obligations. Even if evaluative particularism did not entail moral particularism, it fails to makes God’s commands non-arbitrary, contrary to Alston’s claims. On divine command theory, God does not make commands for (...) moral reasons, which is a fundamental principle of moral agency, necessary for any moral action to be non-arbitrary. Also, the divine nature does not uniquely pick out particular good actions to be obligatory. It is also objected that Alston’s evaluative particularism posits a God which is either conceptually incoherent or non-existent, demonstrated by an evidential argument from evil given in the paper. (shrink)

Many think that evolutionary biology has relevance to ethics, but how far that relevance extends is a matter of debate. It is easy to show that pop sociobiological approaches to ethics all commit some type of naturalistic fallacy. More sophisticated attempts, like Donald Campbell's, or, more recently, Robert Richards', are not so easily refuted, but I will show that they too reason fallaciously from facts to values. What remains is the possibility of an evolutionary search for human nature. Unfortunately, evolutionary (...) theory itself seems to imply that the quest for human nature will not be very promising. As far as there is such a thing as human nature, we will have to know it before we can meaningfully talk about its evolution. Anthropological data suggest that we differ widely in our normative judgments. And even where we seem to agree, there is good reason to doubt that we really do so. (shrink)

What is property, and why does our species happen to have it? In The Property Species, the economist Bart Wilson explores how we acquire, perceive, and know the custom of property, and why this might be relevant to social scientists, philosophers, and legal scholars for understanding how property works in the twenty-first century.

I have elsewhere given three arguments for the claim that there can be a reason for a person to perform an action only if this person can perform this action. Henne, Semler, Chituc, De Brigard, and Sinnott-Armstrong make several objections to my arguments. I here respond to their objections.

Henry Sidgwick was one of the great intellectual figures of nineteenth-century Britain. He was first and foremost a great moral philosopher, whose masterwork The Methods of Ethics is still widely studied today. He also wrote on economics, politics, education and literature. He was deeply involved in the founding of the first college for women at the University of Cambridge. He was also much concerned with the sexual politics of his close friend John Addington Symonds, a pioneer of gay studies. Through (...) his famous student, G. E. Moore, a direct line can be traced from Sidgwick and his circle to the Bloomsbury group. Bart Schultz has written a magisterial overview of this great Victorian sage. This biography will be eagerly sought out by readers interested in philosophy, Victorian literary studies, the history of ideas, the history of psychology and gender and gay studies. (shrink)

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong argues that 'ought' does not entail 'can', but instead conversationally implicates it. I argue that Sinnott-Armstrong is actually committed to a hybrid view about the relation between 'ought' and 'can'. I then give a tensed formulation of the view that 'ought' entails 'can' that deals with Sinnott-Armstrong's argument and that is more unified than Sinnott-Armstrong's view.

Conditional sentences with quantifying expressions are systematically ambigous. In one reading, the if -clause restricts the domain of the overt quantifier; in the other, the if -clause restricts the domain of a covert quantifier, which defaults to epistemic necessity. Although the ambiguity follows directly from the Lewis- Kratzer line on if, it is not generally acknowledged, which has led to pseudoproblems and spurious arguments.

The aim of this paper is to describe the way in which argumentative patterns come into being in plenary debate over legislative issues in the European Parliament. What kind of argumentative patterns are to be expected within this macro context? It is shown that the argumentative patterns that come into being in legislative debate in the European Parliament depend for the most part on the problem-solving argumentation that is put forward in the opening speech by the rapporteur of the parliamentary (...) committee report. This argumentation can be pragmatic problem-solving argumentation or complex problem-solving argumentation. The most important prototypical argumentative patterns are investigated in the argumentation put forward by the Members of parliament. This investigation is based on an inventory of the arguments that can in principle be used to support or attack the initial problem-solving argumentation put forward by the rapporteur. (shrink)

Many philosophers argue that the error theory should be rejected because it is incompatible with standard deontic logic and semantics. We argue that such formal objections to the theory fail. Our discussion has two upshots. First, it increases the dialectical weight that must be borne by objections to the error theory that target its content rather than its form. Second, it shows that standard deontic logic and semantics should be revised.

This is an attempt at reviving Kneale's version of the description theory of names, which says that a proper name is synonymous with a definite description of the form ‘the individual named so-and-so’. To begin with, I adduce a wide range of observations to show that names and overt definites are alike in all relevant respects. I then turn to Kripke's main objection against Kneale's proposal, and endeavour to refute it. In the remainder of the paper I elaborate on Kneale's (...) analysis, adopting a theory of presupposition proposed by van der Sandt. (shrink)

Many philosophers claim that it cannot be the case that a person ought to perform an action if this person cannot perform this action. However, most of these philosophers do not give arguments for the truth of this claim. In this paper, I argue that it is plausible to interpret this claim in such a way that it is entailed by the claim that there cannot be a reason for a person to perform an action if it is impossible that (...) this person will perform this action. I then give three arguments for the truth of the latter claim, which are also arguments for the truth of the former claim as I interpret it. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 38, Issue 1, pp 129 - 147 The essay investigates elements of sixteenth-century scholastic thought that have played a role in Grotius’s doctrine of necessity: the nature of the rights of the person in extreme need; the relation of the right of necessity to self-preservation; the compact that lies at the origin of property rights; and finally the obligation of restitution once the emergency is over. Grotius did not develop the doctrine of necessity as an abstract principle (...) about the relationship between private property and subsistence rights. Instead, he used it primarily as a normative principle on permissible behavior in times of war. The comparison with sixteenth-century thought and the practical purposes for which he developed the principle help to understand better the Grotian conception about the subjective nature of the right of necessity and its normative foundation. (shrink)

In this volume, Geurts takes discourse representation theory (DRT), and turns it into a unified account of anaphora and presupposition, which he applies not only to the standard problem cases but also to the interpretation of modal expressions, attitude reports, and proper names. The resulting theory, for all its simplicity, is without doubt the most comprehensive of its kind to date. The central idea underlying Geurts' 'binding theory' of presupposition is that anaphora is just a special case of presupposition projection. (...) But this is only one of the ways in which the concept of presupposition is taken beyond its traditional limits. Geurts shows, furthermore, that presupposition projection is crucially involved in several phenomena that are not usually viewed in presuppositional terms, such as modal subordination, de re readings of attitude reports, and rigid designation. While making his case for DRT and the binding theory, Geurts also presents an incisive analysis of what is probably still the most influential account of presupposition, viz. the satisfaction theory, demonstrating that there are fundamental problems not only with this theory but with the very framework in which it is couched. (shrink)

This paper focuses on argumentation the institutional context of debate in the European Parliament. A parliamentary debate is a distinct argumentative activity type. In the pragma-dialectical approach, argumentative activity types are defined as conventionalized argumentative practices in which the possibilities for strategic maneuvering are predetermined. What are the characteristics of the activity type of a debate in European Parliament that predetermine the possibilities for strategic maneuvering?

According to the error theory, normative judgements are beliefs that ascribe normative properties, even though such properties do not exist. In this paper, I argue that we cannot believe the error theory, and that this means that there is no reason for us to believe this theory. It may be thought that this is a problem for the error theory, but I argue that it is not. Instead, I argue, our inability to believe the error theory undermines many objections that (...) have been made to this theory. (shrink)