This case is another in a series intended to highlight the new questions emerging from advances in mapping the human genome and the application of genetic findings to clinical practice. The National Human Genome Research Institute, a component of the National Institutes of Health, by law is directed to designate a portion of its annual budget to furthering understanding of the ethical, legal, and social questions emerging from research on the human genome. As part of the effort, the Institute supports (...) research by scientists and scholars around the nation with the aim of clarifying and resolving the tough ethical and research choices facing this endeavor. But recently it has launched an intramural program, which is expected to take a catalytic role in grappling with the array of issues the researchers face in carrying out investigations in human genetics. (shrink)

This study explored the relation between state medical liability reform measures, hospital malpractice costs, and hospital solvency. It suggests that state malpractice caps are desirable but not essential for improved hospital financial solvency or viability.

In this revised edition of his 1979 classic Political Theory and International Relations, Charles Beitz rejects two highly influential conceptions of international theory as empirically inaccurate and theoretically misleading. In one, international relations is a Hobbesian state of nature in which moral judgments are entirely inappropriate, and in the other, states are analogous to persons in domestic society in having rights of autonomy that insulate them from external moral assessment and political interference. Beitz postulates that a theory of international (...) politics should include a revised principle of state autonomy based on the justice of a state’s domestic institutions, and a principle of international distributive justice to establish a fair division of resources and wealth among persons situated in diverse national societies. (shrink)

Information theory provides a quantitative conceptual framework for understanding the flow of information from the world into and through brains. It focuses our attention on the sets of possible messages a brain's anatomy and physiology enable it to receive. The meanings of the messages arise from the inferences licensed by the brain's processing of them. Different meanings arise at different levels because different representations of the input license different inferences.

The myth of the homeland -- The Nietzschean self-assertion of the German University -- The geo-politics of Heidegger's Mitteleuropa -- Heidegger's Greeks and the myth of autochthony -- Heidegger's "Nietzsche".

James's Fairness in Trade seeks to offer an account of fair trade that is “internal” to an existing practice he describes as “mutual market reliance.” This paper distinguishes several senses of the distinction between “internal” and “external” that occur in the book and asks how, in its various senses, the distinction shapes and influences judgments about the fairness of the practice.

These essays supply a theoretical grounding for the reading of novels, poems, and plays and reveal how the Voegelinian perspective exposes the existential and philosophical dimensions of the literary works themselves.

Proponents of the view that social structures are ontologically distinct from the people in whose actions they are immanent have assumed that structures can stand in causal relations to individual practices. Were causality to be no more than Humean concomitance correlations between structure and practices would be unproblematic. But two prominent advocates of the ontological account of structures, Bhaskar and Giddens, have also espoused a powers theory of causality. According to that theory causation is brought about by the activity of (...) particulars, in the social psychological case, individuals of some sort. Consistence would demand that structure be those individuals. But neither Giddens nor Bhaskar wish to reify structure to the extent that would fit it for a role as a powerful particular. If only human beings can be powerful particulars in these contexts, the only way that structures can be real must be as properties of conversational interactions. Human action is social just in so far as people direct themselves to engage well in joint activities with others. (shrink)

The collapse of historicism was not merely the demise of an academic tradition but signified a shift in the understanding of hermeneutics and metaphysics. Whereas earlier books have explored the rise and dominance of historicism within academic history, this is the first to trace its collapse and to show how it was shaped by larger philosophical and scientific concerns. Charles R. Bambach's lucid account of the demise of historicism within the context of German metaphysics provides a rich new perspective (...) on the development of the young Heidegger's concept of "historicity" and on the origins of postmodern thought. Bambach reconstructs the methodological debates arising from a pervasive sense of crisis among German philosophers in the late nineteenth century. He details the divergent attempts by the Neo-Kantians, Nietzsche, and Dilthey to overcome the limitations of historical relativism. Heidegger's view of "historicity," Bambach shows, radically transforms the problematic of historicism into a discourse concerning the crisis of philosophical modernity. (shrink)

Paper presented to the Twenty-seventh Hume Society Conference, 26 July 2000, Williamsburg, Virginia. -/- At the time I thought there was a stronger link between Maclaurin and Hume, but in discussions at and after the meeting, decided Hume was not taking his mechanics out of Maclaurin’s Account. Although I still have found Maclaurin useful in interpreting Hume -- see Sapadin 1997 for a discussion of popular Newtonianism in Hume's day -- I suspect my draft suffers somewhat from ambivalence. There are (...) still similarities, and possible avenues of influence, arguing that Hume was not ignorant of the new mechanics, but it also becomes clear that he did not understand it: although he adopts the Newtonian measure of force, he misapplies it. (shrink)

Human rights have become one of the most important moral concepts in global political life over the last 60 years. Charles Beitz, one of the world's leading philosophers, offers a compelling new examination of the idea of a human right.

Professor Flathman's main aim in this interesting paper is to set forth what we might call the “moderation thesis.” It holds that there may be occasions when the best thing to do, all things considered, is to violate a right – at least if the violation takes the form of what Flathman calls “civil encroachment” or “civil non-enforcement.” Moreover, it would be desirable, in a society whose practices include rights, for this belief to be generally accepted, so that those who (...) engaged with good reason in “civil encroachment” would receive the sympathetic support of the community. Let me begin by trying to explain the source of the problem to which this thesis is a response. As Flathman notes, rights have a discretionary character: if I have a right to do or to have something, it is up to me whether to do it or to have it. Having a right, I am entitled to make a choice. Since we cannot say, in advance, what choice I will make, we cannot say, in advance, what will be the state of the world after I make it. But since it seems plain that some states of the world are more desirable than others, it will always be possible that the consequences of my choice will be worse, on the whole, than the consequences of some other choice that I might have made but did not. To moderate rights is apparently to act in ways that redress or compensate for the undesirable results of their exercise. (shrink)

Numbers are symbols manipulated in accord with the axioms of arithmetic. They sometimes represent discrete and continuous quantities, but they are often simply names. Brains, including insect brains, represent the rational numbers with a fixed-point data type, consisting of a significand and an exponent, thereby conveying both magnitude and precision.

The settlement of the Second World War yielded two important changes in the normative order of international relations. These are the prohibition of war except in self‐defence, expressed in the UN Charter and the limitation of sovereignty by a common set of protections of individuals, expressed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Looked at in historical perspective, these innovations are two dimensions of a single movement – a collective effort at the global level to impose discipline on the (...) external and internal behaviour of states. Neither innovation lacks ambition, but of the two, the more far‐reaching is certainly the doctrine of human rights. It aims to bring the domestic conduct of governments under agreed international norms – to define and establish ‘a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations’ (UDHR, Preamble) to which the organized international community can hold individual governments accountable. (shrink)

Nihilism, Nietzsche and the Doppelganger Problem Was Nietzsche a nihilist? Yes, because, like J. L. Mackie, he was an error-theorist about morality, including the elitist morality to which he himself subscribed. But he was variously a diagnostician, an opponent and a survivor of certain other kinds of nihilism. Schacht argues that Nietzsche cannot have been an error theorist, since meta-ethical nihilism is inconsistent with the moral commitment that Nietzsche displayed. Schacht’s exegetical argument parallels the substantive argument (advocated in recent years (...) by Wright and Blackburn) that Mackie’s error theory can’t be true because if it were, we would have to give up morality or give up moralizing. I answer this argument with a little bit of help from Nietzsche. I then pose a problem, the Doppelganger Problem, for the meta-ethical nihilism that I attribute to Mackie and Nietzsche. (If A is a moral proposition then not-A is a moral proposition: hence not all moral propositions can be false.) I solve the problem by reformulating the error theory and also deal with a variant of the problem, the Reinforced Doppelganger, glancing at a famous paper of Ronald Dworkin’s. Thus, whatever its demerits, the error theory, is not self-refuting, nor does it require us to give up morality. (shrink)

Contemporary ethical thought owes a great deal to David Hume whose work has inspired theories as diverse as non-cognitivism, error theory, quasi-realism, and instrumentalism about practical reason. This timely volume brings together an international range of distinguished scholars to discuss and dispute issues revolving around three closely related Humean themes which have recently come under close scrutiny. First is Hume's infamous claim that 'Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions'. Second, the Motivation Argument for the (...) view that 'The rules of morality...are not conclusions of our reason'. The third and final theme is that of virtue, re-examined here in the context of new interpretational debates concerning Hume's thought on moral motivation. Contributors: Annette Baier, Stephen Finlay, Kent Hurtig, Rosalind Hursthouse, Richard Joyce, Norva Y. S. Lo, Graham Oddie, Herlinde Pauer-Studer, Luke Russell, Constantine Sandis, Michael Smith, Christine Swanton. (shrink)

_A concise history of “just price,” from Aristotle to the present day_ The question of what constitutes a fair price has been at the center of market interactions since the time of Aristotle. Should a seller sell to the highest bidder, or is there some other standard, such as a morally defined price, to be applied? Charles R. Geisst traces the ways that philosophers, religious leaders, and economists have sought to answer that question, from antiquity through the modern era. (...) Aristotle’s thinking on usury influenced the idea of pricing well into the Renaissance. In his view, money was barren and should not be used to beget more money. As trade became more extensive, the strictures placed on pricing by Aristotelian thinking began to fall away, replaced by Roman and common-law conceptions of value and interest. Geisst’s book follows the evolution of that thought—influenced along the way by figures such as Copernicus, Fibonacci, Adam Smith, Marx, Cassel, and Keynes—and charts parallel developments in European and Islamic notions of fair pricing. Today, pricing is seen as an economic inevitability, dictated by the laws of supply and demand. But this has not always been the case. As Geisst argues, the idea of a just price was once a moral concept, long before it was an economic one. (shrink)

l. There is an antinomy in Hare's thought between Ought-Implies-Can and No-Indicatives-from-Imperatives. It cannot be resolved by drawing a distinction between implication and entailment. 2. Luther resolved this antinomy in the l6th century, but to understand his solution, we need to understand his problem. He thought the necessity of Divine foreknowledge removed contingency from human acts, thus making it impossible for sinners to do otherwise than sin. 3. Erasmus objected (on behalf of Free Will) that this violates Ought-Implies-Can which he (...) supported with Hare-style ordinary language arguments. 4. Luther a) pointed out the antinomy and b) resolved it by undermining the prescriptivist arguments for Ought-Implies-Can. 5. We can reinforce Luther's argument with an example due to David Lewis. 6. Whatever its merits as a moral principle, Ought-Implies-Can is not a logical truth and should not be included in deontic logics. Most deontic logics, and maybe the discipline itself, should therefore be abandoned. 7. Could it be that Ought-Conversationally-Implies-Can? Yes - in some contexts. But a) even if these contexts are central to the evolution of Ought, the implication is not built into the semantics of the word; b) nor is the parallel implication built into the semantics of orders; and c) in some cases Ought conversationally implies Can, only because Ought-Implies-Can is a background moral belief. d) Points a) and b) suggest a criticism of prescriptivism - that Oughts do not entail imperatives but that the relation is one of conversational implicature. 8. If Ought-Implies-Can is treated as a moral principle, Erasmus' argument for Free Will can be revived (given his Christian assumptions). But it does not 'prove' Pelagianism as Luther supposed. A semi-Pelagian alternative is available. (shrink)

Part of our fascination with the Maya can be attributed to the fact that they were literate . . . that is, the Classic Maya possessed a visible language that consisted of letters and a grammar, and one of the products of their literacy was the book. (Aveni 1992b, p.3).

Beatrice Han argues that the theories of subjection (determinism: structure) and subjectivation (freedom: agency) are the “the blind spot of Foucault's work:” to the very end of his life, in being transcendental and historical theories, respectively, they were in irresolvable conflict. In part I, I have argued that Foucault encourages us to situate the theories of the subject in an un-thematized reach for a metaphysics of realism which, in effect, was to ground his uncertain complementary reach for a naturalist conduct (...) of research. In part II I also argue that it is this fundamental feature of Foucault's Foucault that drives his returns to Kant, the purpose of which is to resolve the conflicting theories of the subject, and thus to solve his Giddensian problem of structure and creativity. Locating the returns and their purpose in my context of Science for Humanism and the recovery of human agency, I ultimately argue that Foucault's two special returns to Kant in order to solve his structure/agency problem led to two unfortunate solutions. The resort to Baudelair's aesthetic subject is a failed solution in so far as it regresses to being a pre-noumenal conception of the subject. The subsequent mere reinstatement of Kant's subject as causally empowered, minus the noumenalism, is nothing more than a reclamation of Kant's conception. Only the reconstruction of Foucault's realism permits us to assert that he could have moved beyond the reclamation of human agency to its recovery. (shrink)