In “Robots, Trust and War” Simpson claims that victory in counter-insurgency conflicts requires that military forces and their governing body win the ‘hearts and minds’ of civilians. Consequently, forces made up primarily of autonomous robots would be ineffective in these conflicts for two reasons. Firstly, because civilians cannot rationally trust them because they cannot act from a motive based on good character. If they ever did develop this capacity then the purpose of sending them to war in our stead would (...) be lost because there would be no moral saving. Secondly, because if robot forces did offer a moral saving then this would signal that the deploying government could not be trusted to be committed to the conflict. I disagree with both claims. I argue firstly that there are less demanding grounds that could allow robot forces to be trusted sufficiently to be effective whilst still achieving a moral saving over the deployment of human ones. Secondly, that this moral saving would not necessarily signal that the deploying body lacked commitment because its interpretation would be highly context-dependent. I conclude therefore, contra-Simpson, that robot forces could plausibly be effective in counter-insurgency engagements in the foreseeable future. I suggest therefore that there may be a case for developing a more finely grained understanding of the opportunities for, and challenges of, their use. (shrink)

Experimental research is commonly held up as the paradigm of "good" science. Although experiment plays many roles in science, its classical role is testing hypotheses in controlled laboratory settings. Historical science is sometimes held to be inferior on the grounds that its hypothesis cannot be tested by controlled laboratory experiments. Using contemporary examples from diverse scientific disciplines, this paper explores differences in practice between historical and experimental research vis-à-vis the testing of hypotheses. It rejects the claim that historical research is (...) epistemically inferior. For as I argue, scientists engage in two very different patterns of evidential reasoning and, although there is overlap, one pattern predominates in historical research and the other pattern predominates in classical experimental research. I show that these different patterns of reasoning are grounded in an objective and remarkably pervasive time asymmetry of nature. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales. By Oliver Sacks.

In her 2004 book Carol Gould addresses the fundamental issue of democratizing globalization, that is to say of finding ways to open transnational institutions and communities to democratic participation by those widely affected by their decisions. The book develops a framework for expanding participation in crossborder decisions, arguing for a broader understanding of human rights and introducing a new role for the ideas of care and solidarity at a distance. Reinterpreting the idea of universality to accommodate a multiplicity of (...) cultural perspectives, the author takes up a number of applied issues, including the persistence of racism, cultural rights, women's human rights, the democratic management of firms, the use of the Internet to enhance political participation, and the importance of empathy and genuine democracy in understanding terrorism and responding to it. Accessibly written with a minimum of technical jargon this is a major contribution to political philosophy. (shrink)

How to formulate the doctrine of relativism -- Evaluating the doctrine of relativism.

Abstract: The emergence of cross-border communities and transnational associations requires new ways of thinking about the norms involved in democracy in a globalized world. Given the significance of human rights fulfillment, including social and economic rights, I argue here for giving weight to the claims of political communities while also recognizing the need for input by distant others into the decisions of global governance institutions that affect them. I develop two criteria for addressing the scope of democratization in transnational contexts— (...) common activities and impact on basic human rights —and argue for their compatibility. I then consider some practical implications for institutional transformation and design, including new forms of transnational representation. (shrink)

In this book, Carol Gould offers a fundamental reconsideration of the theory of democracy, arguing that democratic decision-making should apply not only to politics but also to economic and social life. Professor Gould redefines traditional concepts of freedom and social equality, and proposes a principle of Equal Positive Freedom in which individual freedom and social co-operation are seen to be compatible. Reformulating basic conceptions of property, authority, economic justice and human rights, the author suggests a number of ways in (...) which these principles could be realised in social institutions. She also discusses such issues as democratic control of technology, the nature of democratic personality, and the question of democracy in international relations. (shrink)

To contribute more effectively to conservation reform, environmental ethics needs a motivational turn, referenced to the best scientific information about motivation. I address the pivotal questions What actually motivates people to conserve nature? and What ought to motivate people to conserve nature? by proposing a framework for understanding motivations and developing motivationally relevant criteria for environmental ethics. The need for an adequate philosophy of psychology for moral philosophy, identified by Elizabeth Anscombe 50 years ago, remains. Only from a psychologically informed (...) motivational framework for morality can ethicists understand and address the widespread rhetoric behaviors gap plaguing conservation. (shrink)

In earlier work ( Cleland [2001] , [2002]), I sketched an account of the structure and justification of ‘prototypical’ historical natural science that distinguishes it from ‘classical’ experimental science. This article expands upon this work, focusing upon the close connection between explanation and justification in the historical natural sciences. I argue that confirmation and disconfirmation in these fields depends primarily upon the explanatory (versus predictive or retrodictive) success or failure of hypotheses vis-à-vis empirical evidence. The account of historical explanation that (...) I develop is a version of common cause explanation. Common cause explanation has long been vindicated by appealing to the principle of the common cause. Many philosophers of science (e.g., Sober and Tucker) find this principle problematic, however, because they believe that it is either purely methodological or strictly metaphysical. I defend a third possibility: the principle of the common cause derives its justification from a physically pervasive time asymmetry of causation (a.k.a. the asymmetry of overdetermination). I argue that explicating the principle of the common cause in terms of the asymmetry of overdetermination illuminates some otherwise puzzling features of the practices of historical natural scientists. (shrink)

The Church-Turing thesis makes a bold claim about the theoretical limits to computation. It is based upon independent analyses of the general notion of an effective procedure proposed by Alan Turing and Alonzo Church in the 1930''s. As originally construed, the thesis applied only to the number theoretic functions; it amounted to the claim that there were no number theoretic functions which couldn''t be computed by a Turing machine but could be computed by means of some other kind of effective (...) procedure. Since that time, however, other interpretations of the thesis have appeared in the literature. In this paper I identify three domains of application which have been claimed for the thesis: (1) the number theoretic functions; (2) all functions; (3) mental and/or physical phenomena. Subsequently, I provide an analysis of our intuitive concept of a procedure which, unlike Turing''s, is based upon ordinary, everyday procedures such as recipes, directions and methods; I call them mundane procedures. I argue that mundane procedures can be said to be effective in the same sense in which Turing machine procedures can be said to be effective. I also argue that mundane procedures differ from Turing machine procedures in a fundamental way, viz., the former, but not the latter, generate causal processes. I apply my analysis to all three of the above mentioned interpretations of the Church-Turing thesis, arguing that the thesis is (i) clearly false under interpretation (3), (ii) false in at least some possible worlds (perhaps even in the actual world) under interpretation (2), and (iii) very much open to question under interpretation (1). (shrink)

The main question examined is: How do nurses and other healthcare professionals ensure ethical interprofessional collaboration-in-practice as an everyday practice actuality? Ethical interprofessional collaboration becomes especially relevant and necessary when interprofessional practice decisions are contested. To illustrate, two healthcare scenarios are analyzed through three ethics lenses. Biomedical ethics, relational ethics, and virtue ethics provide different ways of knowing how to be ethical and to act ethically as healthcare professionals. Biomedical ethics focuses on situated, reflective, and nonabsolute principled justification, all things (...) considered; relational ethics on intersubjective, professional, and institutional relations; and virtue ethics on prephilosophical tradition and what it means to be good and to be human embedded in social and political community. Analysis suggests that interprofessional collaboration-in-practice may be more rhetoric than actuality. Key challenges of interprofessional collaboration-in-practice and specific conditions perpetuating dissension and conflict are outlined with specific education and policy recommendations included. (shrink)

_Material Feminisms: New Directions for Education_ provides a range of powerful theoretical and innovative methodological examples to illuminate how new material feminism can be put to work in education to open up new avenues of research design and practice. It poses challenging questions about the nature of knowledge production, the role of the researcher, and the critical endeavour arising from inter- and post-disciplinarity. Working with diffractive methodologies and new materialist ecological epistemologies, the book offers resources for hope which widen the (...) scope for how educational problems are interrogated, and provides a political counter-movement to neo-positivist, outcomes-based approaches within education. Inspired by writers such as Barad, Bennett, and Deleuze and Guattari, the book makes a radical break with cognitive, dualist, and universal conceptions of human subjectivity and intelligence in education. By taking its starting point as the co-consitutiveness of discourse, materiality, corporeality, and place, the book foregrounds educational practices as material enactments of multiple, non-linear, entangled, affective, and relational forces. It offers new insights into how gender, class, and ethnicity are constituted in, and by, material assemblages that are often submerged or ‘unseen’. This book is an essential starting place for those intrigued by what new theoretical accounts of materiality, posthumanism, and affect can offer educational research. Diffractive methodologies challenge readers to take a fuller range of actors into account than in ‘objective’ humanist methodologies, and in so doing to pay closer attention to what data is. It invites researchers to engage with long-standing feminist concerns about power and knowledge production in research processes. This book was originally published as a special issue of _Gender and Education. _. (shrink)

When naming certain hand-held, man-made tools, American Sign Language signers exhibit either of two iconic strategies: a handling strategy, where the hands show holding or grasping an imagined object in action, or an instrument strategy, where the hands represent the shape or a dimension of the object in a typical action. The same strategies are also observed in the gestures of hearing nonsigners identifying pictures of the same set of tools. In this paper, we compare spontaneously created gestures from hearing (...) nonsigning participants to commonly used lexical signs in ASL. Signers and gesturers were asked to respond to pictures of tools and to video vignettes of actions involving the same tools. Nonsigning gesturers overwhelmingly prefer the handling strategy for both the Picture and Video conditions. Nevertheless, they use more instrument forms when identifying tools in pictures, and more handling forms when identifying actions with tools. We found that ASL signers generally favor the instrument strategy when naming tools, but when describing tools being used by an actor, they are significantly more likely to use more handling forms. The finding that both gesturers and signers are more likely to alternate strategies when the stimuli are pictures or video suggests a common cognitive basis for differentiating objects from actions. Furthermore, the presence of a systematic handling/instrument iconic pattern in a sign language demonstrates that a conventionalized sign language exploits the distinction for grammatical purpose, to distinguish nouns and verbs related to tool use. (shrink)

This book deals with the major ethical and social implications of computer networking and its technological development. In this book, a number of leading thinkers--philosophers, computer scientists and researchers--address some fundamental questions posed by the new technology.

Representing species-specific proteins and protein complexes in ontologies that are both human and machine-readable facilitates the retrieval, analysis, and interpretation of genome-scale data sets. Although existing protin-centric informatics resources provide the biomedical research community with well-curated compendia of protein sequence and structure, these resources lack formal ontological representations of the relationships among the proteins themselves. The Protein Ontology (PRO) Consortium is filling this informatics resource gap by developing ontological representations and relationships among proteins and their variants and modified forms. Because (...) proteins are often functional only as members of stable protein complexes, the PRO Consortium, in collaboration with existing protein and pathway databases, has launched a new initiative to implement logical and consistent representation of protein complexes. We describe here how the PRO Consortium is meeting the challenge of representing species-specific protein complexes, how protein complex representation in PRO supports annotation of protein complexes and comparative biology, and how PRO is being integrated into existing community bioinformatics resources. The PRO resource is accessible at http://pir.georgetown.edu/pro/. (shrink)

This paper explores the character of emotion and its value in understanding ethical dilemmas in work organisations. Specifically, we examine the emotional labour of human resource professionals. Through in-depth interviews and diary study, we uncover the emotional and ethical struggles of HRPs as they search for the ‘right thing to do’ in situated interaction. Through the lens of emotion, we chart the process of how the very framing of what is deemed ‘right’ can move from the social to the moral (...) order and vice versa. Based on our findings, we contribute to understanding the linkages between emotional and ethical dilemmas, and how expectations of multiple ‘others’ at the individual, interpersonal and organisational level shape and constrain ethical choices. (shrink)

This article argues that Thomas Pogge's important theory of global justice does not adequately appreciate the relation between interactional and institutional accounts of human rights, along with the important normative role of care and solidarity in the context of globalization. It also suggests that more attention needs to be given critically to the actions of global corporations and positively to introducing democratic accountability into the institutions of global governance. The article goes on to present an alternative approach to global justice (...) based on a more robust conception of human rights grounded in a conception of equal positive freedom, in which these rights are seen to apply beyond the coercive political institutions to which Pogge primarily confines them (e.g. to prohibiting domestic violence), and in which they can guide the development of economic, social and political forms to enable their fulfillment. (shrink)

Aging at work is a dynamic process. As individuals age, their motives, abilities and values change as suggested by life-span development theories (Kanfer & Ackerman, 2004; Lang & Carstensen, 2002). Their growth and extrinsic motives weaken while intrinsic motives increase (Kooij, De Lange, Jansen, Kanfer, & Dikkers, 2011), which may result in workers investing their resources in different areas accordingly. However, there is significant individual variability in aging trajectories (Hedge, Borman, & Lammlein, 2005). In addition, the changing nature of work, (...) the evolving job demands, as well as the available opportunities at work may no longer be suitable for older workers, increasing the likelihood of person-job misfit. The potential misfit may, in turn, impact how older workers perceive themselves on the job, which leads to conflicting work identities. With the traditional job redesign approach being a top-down process, it is often difficult for organizations to take individual needs and skills into consideration and tailor jobs for every employee (Berg, Dutton, & Wrzesniewski, 2010). Therefore, job crafting, being an individualized process initiated by employees themselves, can be a particularly valuable mechanism for older workers to realign and enhance their demands-abilities and needs-supplies fit. Through job crafting, employees can exert personal agency and make changes to the task, social and cognitive aspects of their jobs with the goal of improving their work experience (Wrzesniewski & Dutton, 2001). Building on the Life Span Theory of Control (Heckhausen & Schulz, 1995), we posit that job crafting, particularly cognitive crafting, will be of increasing value as employees age. Through reframing how they think of their job and choosing to emphasize job features that are personally meaningful, older workers can optimize their resources to proactively redesign their jobs and maintain congruent, positive work identities. (shrink)

In the technical literature of computer science, the concept of an effective procedure is closely associated with the notion of an instruction that precisely specifies an action. Turing machine instructions are held up as providing paragons of instructions that "precisely describe" or "well define" the actions they prescribe. Numerical algorithms and computer programs are judged effective just insofar as they are thought to be translatable into Turing machine programs. Nontechnical procedures (e.g., recipes, methods) are summarily dismissed as ineffective on the (...) grounds that their instructions lack the requisite precision. But despite the pivotal role played by the notion of a precisely specified instruction in classifying procedures as effective and ineffective, little attention has been paid to the manner in which instructions "precisely specify" the actions they prescribe. It is the purpose of this paper to remedy this defect. The results are startling. The reputed exemplary precision of Turing machine instructions turns out to be a myth. Indeed, the most precise specifications of action are provided not by the procedures of theoretical computer science and mathematics (algorithms) but rather by the nontechnical procedures of everyday life. I close with a discussion of some of the rumifications of these conclusions for understanding and designing concrete computers and their programming languages. (shrink)

The first book of NE is organised on the model of investigating definitions described in the second Book of the Posterior Analytics, although, of course, with some adaptation due to the subject matter. It first establishes if the object exists and looks for the meaning of the terms used in common language to indicate it, next considers some necessary qualities of the object and then concludes with a definition of the object. We find there a dialectical syllogism of definition, and (...) not the procedure in three steps described in NE VII 1, sometimes called 'the method of ethics'. In fact, the method described in NE VII 1 does not apply to the first book of the NE. Its relevance for the NE has been somehow exaggerated. (shrink)

For feminists, working in/with the ‘posts’ is, always has been, and must be, a collective and collaborative endeavour. Increasingly, post-inquiry involves taking seriously multiplicities of humans, nonhumans, more-than-and-other-than-humans, multispecies and natureculture entities, including viral, microbial, elemental and atmospheric relationalities. The individual papers in this Special Issue, this editorial, and the Special Issue as a whole attest to this imperative pull to the collective-collaborative in seeking to explore the entangled relations of/between feminisms and the ‘posts’. As a collaborative-collective multiplicity, the Special (...) Issue interrogates what these entangled relations offer for reconfiguring gender and education research, theory, pedagogic practice, activism and praxis. (shrink)

This book deals with moral dilemmas and the development of ethical reasoning in two senses.

We agree that social interaction is crucial for understanding the development of theory of mind, but suggest that further elaboration of certain issues is needed. Detailed description of the knowledge structure of a developing theory of mind is necessary, and the notion of criteria for the use of mental state terms requires consideration of the sentence structures in which such terms appear.

A supplemental text for an Issues in Early Childhood Education or Introduction to Early Childhood Education course in Early Childhood Education departments or in Child and Family Studies departments. Covers five leading theorists whose perspectives are studied and applied widely in early childhood education. The book distills each theorist's work and explains how it relates to early care and education. Brief, inexpensive; a perfect complement to foundational courses.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Whose Aristotle? Which Aristotelianism? A Historical Prolegomenon to Thomas Farrell’s Norms of Rhetorical CultureCarol PosterThe description of various works of logical and rhetorical theory as “Aristotelian,” although far from unusual, is not particularly informative, because it assumes, incorrectly, that there is some ultimate singular Aristotle being imitated by all authors who consider themselves, or who are labeled by others, Aristotelian. In fact, there never has been an interpretation of (...) Aristotle that satisfies the canon of St. Vincent of Lerins, “quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est”; instead, there have been almost as many Aristotles as there have been interpreters of Aristotle. Thomas Farrell’s Norms of Rhetorical Culture (1993), therefore, is not so much situated against the background of some single, unique, undisputed Aristotle but, rather, as he himself mentions, within an evolving tradition of Aristotelianism.The historical transformations of Aristotle include two distinct traditions, one oriented toward scientific-technical philosophy andthe other toward rhetorical-poetic and ethical humanism.1 The technical-philosophccical tradition, in which Aristotle was conceived primarily [End Page 375] as metaphysician and natural philosopher, emphasized the logical treatises of the organon, the speculative systems of the Physics and Metaphysics, and the scientific works of the biological treatises. This tradition originated in the Greco-Roman middle and Neoplatonic schools and has had a continuous history stretching through the Middle Ages, Counterreformation, neo-Thomism, and certain contemporary European postmodernisms. The rhetoricalhumanistic tradition, on the other hand, emphasizing the Rhetoric, Poetics, Politics, and ethical treatises, views Aristotle as a practical philosopher, concerned with the productive arts and those matters about which knowledge is probable rather than certain. This rhetorical-humanistic tradition was a relatively negligible aspect of Aristotle’s ancient reception, had a slight presence in the Islamic and Latin traditions, developed in certain strands of Renaissance humanism, and came to fruition in the late eighteenth century, primarily, though not exclusively, within a Protestant tradition. In eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century Britain, the rhetorical-humanistic Aristotle found expression directly in neoclassical poetics and, in a more complicated fashion, in a group of authors (including the Scottish moderates and the slightly later Oxford Noetics) who enlisted Aristotle in a battle against skepticism and materialism. It is the latter of the two strands of the rhetorical-humanistic Aristotle that resurfaces (albeit in an indirect and mediated fashion) in the work of Alastair MacIntyre, Richard McKeon (and other members of the Chicago school), and Thomas Farrell, who used Aristotle’s model of probable deliberation and habituated virtue to construct an alternative to twentieth-century skepticism and materialism.Significant Strata of Aristotelian ReceptionThe history of Aristotelian reception is not monolithic. There has been tremendous variation across periods and national traditions of what works were considered authentically Aristotelian, which of those works were considered important, and how they were interpreted. The phases of Aristotelian reception immediately relevant to Farrell’s work include Greco-Roman Platonism, Islamic commentary, medieval Latin Christianity, Renaissance humanistic textual recovery, neoclassical “Aristotelianism,” early modern Aristotelianism and anti-Aristotelianism, and the nineteenthcentury rehabilitation of Aristotle. This article will summarize briefly pre eighteenth-century interpretations of Aristotle as prolegomena to a close analysis of the works of two eighteenth-century Scotsmen, James Moor [End Page 376] and John Gillies, whose reconfiguration of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Poetics, and Organon as tools for practical wisdom in modern society anticipated (and, albeit indirectly, influenced) Farrell.2AntiquityTwo distinct strands of Aristotelian reception, the rhetorical-humanistic and technical-philosophical, originated in antiquity. Of these, the rhetorical-humanistic strand was substantially less important. Neither the Poetics nor the Rhetoric was well known in antiquity. The Rhetoric was not the subject of a Greek commentary until the Byzantine period and, although occasionally cited by Greco-Roman rhetoricians including Cicero, Quintilian, and Dionysus of Halicarnassus, was not widely or carefully read.3 The Poetics was also virtually unknown and was never the subject of an ancient commentary.4The Greek commentaries on Aristotle, which are predominantly technical-philosophical in character, include some fifteen thousand pages of extant text. Despite the existence of a distinct ancient Peripatetic school, the majority of commentaries were produced in the Platonic schools, where the works of Aristotle... (shrink)

Discrimination represents an important moral problem in the field of business ethics, and is often directed against minority groups. While most of the extant literature studies discrimination against employees, this paper studies discrimination against minority customers, addressing whether customers speaking English with an accent are discriminated against when contacting companies with a complaint. We draw upon the two literature streams of business ethics and service recovery to address discrimination in the service recovery process, as the recovery process after a service (...) failure constitutes a critical incident for customers, in which discrimination would be a particularly important moral problem. The findings confirm that customers speaking with an accent are discriminated against, as employees may evaluate customers as both less credible and less competent depending on their accent. We further show that this discrimination extends to negative outcomes: service employees offer customers speaking with an accent lower compensation, and are less likely to go the extra mile for them. Having identified the existence of a discriminatory practice in the service recovery process, we further uncover both an underlying reason and a potential solution. Our results show that employees’ level of cultural intelligence helps alleviate discrimination. We conclude that companies could benefit from including cultural intelligence in the recruitment and training of their employees. (shrink)

Rovane explores eight related claims: persons are not merely rational, but possess full reflective rationality; there is a single overarching normative requirement that rationality places on persons, which is to achieve overall rational unity within themselves; beings who possess full reflective rationality can enter into distinctively interpersonal relations, which involve efforts at rational influence from within the space of reasons; a significant number of moral considerations speak in favor of defining the person as a reflective rational agent; this definition of (...) the person has led Locke and others to distinguish personal identity from animal identity; although it is a platitude that a person has special reason to be concerned for its own well being, it is not obvious how best to account for that platitude; groups of human beings and parts of human beings might qualify as individual agents and, hence, as individual persons in their own right; there is a sense in which the normative requirements of rationality are not categorical but merely hypothetical. (shrink)

Coming more than a decade after I first argued that people who are oppressed have an obligation to resist their oppression, this paper expands the implications of the original account and connects it up to some of the important contemporary work published in oppression studies in the interim. I then move on to respond to two critical objections to my view. The first objection charges that the typical severity of oppressive harms is not sufficiently great to ground a general obligation (...) of resistance. The second objection charges that this project would do better to conceive of resistance in political, rather than moral, terms. (shrink)

The author compares myths about meat-eating with myths about manliness, and seeks to explore the literary, scientific, and social connections between meat-eating, male dominance, and war. Drawing on such sources as butchering texts, cookbooks, Victorian hygiene manuals, and Alice Walker, the author argues in favor of linking feminist and vegetarian theory.

This article argues that prevailing accounts of structural injustice, which focus on the way our replication of social practices has unjust consequences for individuals, tend to be insufficiently attentive to the differential power relations within the institutions that structure these practices. For economic exploitation, a structural account would instead locate domination in the operation of the system itself, and would distinguish it from the general constraint characteristic of all social practices as given or inherited. The argument further suggests limits to (...) unitary group agency approaches to corporations, and proposes construing them as artifacts as much as agents, while corporate responsibility would need to better track the division of power between top managers and workers within firms. (shrink)

An affectionate and thoughtful look at the history of county fairs and their tradition and persistence today reveals the county fair as an important institution that helped define America as a nation of free-thinking, self-reliant, and ...