This paper argues that it can be morally wrong to be friendly to strangers. More specifically, the paper argues there is a salient pro tanto moral reason against being friendly to strangers in virtue of the structure of interaction. By ‘a salient pro tanto reason’ I mean a reason that is not always decisive, but it is often significant enough that it ought to factor in moral deliberation. My argument is perfectly general, but it is presented to shed light on (...) one specific practical problem. By considering this issue I think we will be able to see what is distinctly wrong with street harassment. I hope to explain why this sort of behavior is morally problematic. Basically, even in its most benign cases, street harassment attempts to place a moral burden on a stranger to respond in kind. The stranger may not wish to bear this burden and that is why there are reasons against creating this burden. It is wrong because it involves treating others as if they owe you attention and acknowledgment, which is to treat strangers as friends. (shrink)

In this paper I will share the evidence of a world-wide so-cio-spiritual paradigm shift in our basic belief systems. This shift is leading to a realignment of our ethical ap-proach to common questions and requires a different col-lective approach in navigating the subject of ethics. I will also share what those different collective approaches can look like.

This critical examination of STEM discourses highlights the imperative to think about educational reforms within the diverse cultural contexts of ongoing environmental and technologically driven changes. Chet Bowers illuminates how the dominant myths of Western science promote false promises of what science can achieve. Examples demonstrate how the various science disciplines and their shared ideology largely fail to address the ways metaphorically layered language influences taken-for-granted patterns of thinking and the role this plays in colonizing other cultures, thus maintaining (...) the myth that scientific inquiry is objective and free of cultural influences. Guidelines and questions are included to engage STEM students in becoming explicitly aware of these issues and the challenges they pose. (shrink)

This study used experimental and correlational techniques to examine perceptions that university faculty hold regarding the practice of professorial selling of examination textbooks to wholesalers. Faculty members (n = 236) from 14 universities and community colleges and a wide variety of academic disciplines responded to a web-based survey. We presented hypothetical selling situations to respondents with manipulated variables consisting of solicitation status (unsolicited versus solicited) and use of money (for faculty or for student activities). Both main effects and the interaction (...) effect were significant such that respondents perceived it to be more ethical to sell an examination book when the book was unsolicited and when the money was being used to fund student activities. The variable most correlated with faculty members' beliefs that book selling is ethical and the faculty members' self-reports of whether or not they have engaged in bookselling was how widespread the practice appeared to be on campus. About 30 percent of faculty members sold textbooks over the past year at a dollar value of about $80 per professor. About 38 percent of respondents reported they believed the practice to be generally ethical. Implications for business ethics theory, students' moral development, and advancement of on-campus codes of ethics policies are discussed along with avenues for future research. (shrink)

In recent years, two important books by Yoram Cohen and Matthew Rutz have marked significant progress in research on the archives of Late Bronze Age Emar in northwestern Syria. Both of them approach Emar by way of its scribes. Cohen undertakes a systematic review of all named scribes identified in texts associated with Emar, while Rutz narrows his object to the building that yielded by far the largest number of excavated tablets. This work is foundational to future work on the (...) Emar texts even as it calls for cautious consideration. (shrink)

Music and Postwar Transitions in the 19th and 20th Centuries is the first book to highlight the significance of the idea of 'postwar transition' in the field of music and to demonstrate how the contribution of musicians, composers, and their publics have influenced contemporary understandings of war. At the intersection of four domains including: the relationship between music and war culture, commemorative and consolatory dimensions of music, migration and exile, and the links between music, cultural diplomacy, and propaganda, leading historians, (...) political scientists, psychologists, and musicologists explore disruptions and connections to music through the backdrop of war. In turn, this volume sheds new light on what has been a blind spot in a growing historiography. (shrink)

The essays in this collection attempt to frame a broad humanist context for various current and historical scientific topics. Subjects range from an astronomical interpretation of Van Gogh's Starry Night to popular misconceptions about Neanderthal humans to the risk factors that are inherent in the development of any new technology.--Editorial review.

(2005). Was Socrates the first philosophical practitioner, the first psychologist, or both? Philosophical Practice: Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 73-74.

In his new book, Constitutional Essentials, Frank Michelman provides a splendid elaboration and defense of ‘the constitutional theory of political liberalism’ implicit in John Rawls’s classic work, Political Liberalism. In this essay, we make some observations about what a difference 30 years makes, comparing the political and constitutional climate in which Rawls wrote and published Political Liberalism in 1993 with the climate in which Michelman wrote and published this exegesis of it. We focus on (1) changes in our circumstances of (...) pluralism, including the accentuation of polarization and unreasonable views, and (2) the simultaneous breakdown of trust in the Supreme Court authoritatively to resolve disputes concerning constitutional essentials. Throughout, we acknowledge and seek to reckon with the possibility that Michelman may have given Rawls’s liberal principle of legitimacy its fullest, most coherent account just at the moment when the possibility of realizing it seems to be passing. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Rhetorical Investigations: Studies in Ordinary Language Criticism, and: Ordinary Language Criticism: Literary Thinking after Cavell after WittgensteinRichard FlemingRhetorical Investigations: Studies in Ordinary Language Criticism, by Walter Jost; 368 pp. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004, $55.00. Ordinary Language Criticism: Literary Thinking after Cavell after Wittgenstein, edited by Kenneth Dauber and Walter Jost; 353 pp. Evansville: Northwestern University Press, 2003, $29.95 paper.On the question of ordinary language criticism and (...) philosophy, "Who pleases whom?" Judging by many of the articles, essays, and books of the last decade the answer might be: almost nobody pleases anyone. Whether in appreciation or incomprehension of its importance and substance, renewed efforts at understanding, redirections of thinking, and disappointments and frustrations with the [End Page 209] subject-matter are prevalent when ordinary language is the topic of discussion. These two recent books tend to strengthen this assessment. Rhetorical Investigations is a sustained effort to "revisit" and "rethink" grammatical (conceptual) reflections on ordinary language and literature; and in so doing provide a "reinvention" of characteristics of literary theory through an extensive and detailed consideration of the work of Robert Frost. Although sometimes overreaching in its efforts (particularly when discussing logic), it imaginatively uses rhetoric and ordinary language concerns as a means of direction and focus for new, explanatory discussions in literary—philosophical analysis. Ordinary Language Criticism (part of the general series, "Rethinking Theory," edited by Gary Saul Morson) is a diverse and uneven collection of fifteen articles concerning and using ordinary language interests, several of which (R. M. Berry, Garry L. Hagberg, Richard Eldridge, Gerald L. Bruns) valuably repay the diligence needed to discover them in 350 plus pages. The text includes an editors' introduction that voices the wish to "return criticism to its grounds in the 'ordinary' or natural language we all speak" and (unsuccessfully but lustily) pronounces and explains "ordinary language criticism" as a new yet traditional area of study. ("New" in that it takes "as its point of departure" the ordinary language philosophy of Wittgenstein, and "traditional" in that "all criticism is really ordinary language criticism.") The editors further undertake in this introduction the endeavor to sketch something of a program for the book, meant to show connected promptings among the various writings, whereas the specific authors themselves settle down quickly and separately to a critical work at hand without particular references to each other. Both of these texts, like others in this field of study before, valuably raise questions and apprehensions of what use there is in talk about ordinary language. The best of such material provides provocations for thinking that are to be found nowhere else. The worst of such books and articles is that they prejudice sensible people against the study of the ordinary.Can one conceive of something to say about these two books that the authors and the current readers haven't already heard or of which they can be profitably reminded? It certainly would not be wise to presume such a grand stand. This is a large question to which only a small answer might be given here. Setting aside the perhaps undiscussable differences of what we each see of primary importance in the primary texts and how best to read them, one issue and difference of understanding, specific and plain enough to state briefly, perhaps usefully does arise. It is a lack of a clear sense of the "ordinary," its distinctiveness, its implications; and thereby a continuation of many of the confusions that have inhabited philosophical and literary writing before and after Wittgenstein turned his attention to the matter. Is this not partly why frustrations of understanding, disagreements in thinking, and displeasures in discussion remain pervasive and unrelenting?This difficulty and difference with such work can only prove worthwhile introducing, however, against a background of agreement over the centrality [End Page 210] of a cluster of issues, of which three might be specified: a first agreement concerns the sensitivity or fear that something is being missed or remains unintelligible in the culture about the ordinary; a respect for the ordinary is a needed, often unnoticed beginning of our reflections. Rhetorical Investigations importantly develops its analyses from such a perspective (Jost's... (shrink)

Faculty members at Canadian business schools were surveyed regarding their ethical perceptions of behaviours related to undergraduate instruction. Fifty-five behavioural statements were listed and respondents were asked to rate the extent to which they felt each behaviour was ethical or unethical. The only item that respondents endorsed as unequivocally unethical (90% indicated it was definitely unethical) was Becoming sexually involved with an undergraduate in one of your classes. We also compared the results of our sample to those of an American (...) sample. Overall, an interesting pattern of differences emerged between the responses obtained in Canada and the U.S. In general, the direction of the significant differences was such that Canadian professors viewed the behaviours in question as less ethical than did their American counterparts. (shrink)

1. What is it according to Berkeley for bodies to exist in the mind? Maybe no simple or single answer to this question fits everything that he says about it in the Principles and Dialogues , but I think he gives or suggests an answer in Principles section 49 that he may have to give or be willing to accept across the board. The trouble is that this answer comes with a fairly high price.

ABSTRACT In this paper I examine some of the issues surrounding the moral status of the therapy known as ‘deprogramming’. I argue against the extreme view that all deprogrammings are morally impermissible. In certain instances deprogramming is morally justified because it is quite capable of restoring the conditions needed for the exercise of autonomy. The view of autonomy I am following is that constructed by Gerald Dworkin, wherein two conditions must be met in describing a person as autonomous—authenticity and procedural (...) independence. Autonomy of another type, described by Dworkin as authenticity plus substantive independence, may be lost by persons involved in cults but in those instances deprogramming as reconstructed in this paper is not a morally justified measure. (shrink)

The problem with reductionism in biology is not the reduction, but the implicit attitude of determinism that usually accompanies it. Methodological reductionism is supported by deterministic beliefs, but making such a connection is problematic when it is based on an idea of determinism as fixed predictability. Conflating determinism with predictability gives rise to inaccurate models that overlook the dynamic complexity of our world, as well as ignore our epistemic limitations when we try to model it. Furthermore, the assumption of a (...) strictly deterministic framework is unnecessarily hindering to biology. By removing the dogma of determinism, biological methods, including reductive methods, can be expanded to include stochastic models and probabilistic interpretations. Thus, the dogma of reductionism can be saved once its ties with determinism are severed. In this paper, I analyze two problems that have faced molecular biology for the last 50 years—protein folding and cancer. Both cases demonstrate the long influence of reductionism and determinism on molecular biology, as well as how abandoning determinism has opened the door to more probabilistic and unconstrained reductive methods in biology. (shrink)

This study uses three audit-specific ethical dilemmas to assess the level of ethical reasoning between Chinese accounting students (as proxies for new entrants to the auditing profession) and experienced auditors. A sample of U.S. accounting students is used as a base for comparison. Consistent with expectations based on particularly salient aspects of Chinese national culture, we find the Chinese students’ levels of ethical reasoning to be significantly lower than those of their U.S. counterparts in the two cases that invoked these (...) cultural attributes. In contrast, the Chinese students’ level of ethical reasoning is slightly higher than that of the U.S. students in the third, control case. We further find that the Chinese auditors’ levels of ethical reasoning are even lower than those of the Chinese students in two cases, while not being significantly different in the third. Together, these findings suggest that cross-national differences in auditors’ ethical reasoning depend on the nature of the ethical dilemma and caution against wholesale inferences about ethical reasoning levels in China. (shrink)

Drawing on Pennock’s theory of scientific virtues, we are developing an alternative curriculum for training scientists in the responsible conduct of research that emphasizes internal values rather than externally imposed rules. This approach focuses on the virtuous characteristics of scientists that lead to responsible and exemplary behavior. We have been pilot-testing one element of such a virtue-based approach to RCR training by conducting dialogue sessions, modeled upon the approach developed by Toolbox Dialogue Initiative, that focus on a specific virtue, e.g., (...) curiosity and objectivity. During these structured discussions, small groups of scientists explore the roles they think the focus virtue plays and should play in the practice of science. Preliminary results have shown that participants strongly prefer this virtue-based model over traditional methods of RCR training. While we cannot yet definitively say that participation in these RCR sessions contributes to responsible conduct, these pilot results are encouraging and warrant continued development of this virtue-based approach to RCR training. (shrink)

When there have been substantial failures by institutional leadership in their oversight responsibility to protect research integrity, the public should demand that these be recognized and addressed by the institution itself, or the funding bodies. This commentary discusses a case of research failures in developing genomic predictors for cancer risk assessment and treatment at a leading university. In its review of this case, the Office of Research Integrity, an agency within the US Department of Health and Human Services, focused their (...) report entirely on one individual faculty member and made no comment on the institution’s responsibility and its failure to provide adequate oversight and investigation. These actions missed an important opportunity to emphasize the institution’s critical responsibilities in oversight of research integrity and the importance of institutional transparency and accountability. (shrink)

Climate change poses a serious problem for established ethical theories. There is no dearth of literature on the subject of climate ethics that break down the complexity of the issue, thereby enabling one to arrive at partial conclusions such as: 'historical justice demands us to do this...' or 'intergenerational justice demands us to do that...'. In contrast, this article attempts to face up to this complexity, that is: to end with a synthesis of the arguments into what can be considered (...) to be the most reasonable and fairest approach to the politics of climate change on a global scale. A significant part of the paper is devoted to the questions whether or not a) historical emissions and b) population changes are relevant to how emissions rights should be distributed. I discuss the merits and drawbacks of each perspective and briefly outline the normative justifications. (shrink)

Human behavior depends on the ability to effectively introspect about our performance. For simple perceptual decisions, this introspective or metacognitive ability varies substantially across individuals and is correlated with the structure of focal areas in prefrontal cortex. This raises the possibility that the ability to introspect about different perceptual decisions might be mediated by a common cognitive process. To test this hypothesis, we examined whether inter-individual differences in metacognitive ability were correlated across two different perceptual tasks where individuals made judgments (...) about different and unrelated visual stimulus properties. We found that inter-individual differences were strongly correlated between the two tasks for metacognitive ability but not objective performance. Such stability of an individual’s metacognitive ability across different perceptual tasks indicates a general mechanism supporting metacognition independent of the specific task. (shrink)

This paper develops the concept of the ‘continuum of destructiveness’ in relation to organizational corruption. This notion captures the slippery slope of wrongdoing as actors engage in increasingly dubious practices. We identify four kinds of individuals along this continuum in corrupt organizations, who range from complete innocence to total guilt. They are innocent bystanders, innocent participants, active rationalizers and guilty perpetrators. Traditional explanations of how individuals move from bystander status to guilty perpetrators usually focus on socialization and institutional factors. In (...) addition to these factors, we propose that the very distance between an act and its ethical consequences (ethical distance) may also play a determining role – if not always in the same way – in the transition process. Having developed this conceptual argument, we conclude with a discussion of managerial and research implications. (shrink)

This is the second of two papers responding (somewhat belatedly) to ‘recent’ commentary on various aspects of hyperplane dependence (HD) by several authors. In this paper I focus on the issues of the general need for HD dynamical variables, the identification of physically meaningful localizable properties, the basis vectors representing such properties and the relationship between the concepts of ‘localizable within’ and ‘measureable within’. The authors responded to here are de Koning, Halvorson, Clifton and Wallace. In the first paper of (...) this set (Fleming 2003b) I focused on the issues of the relations of HD to state reduction and unitary evolution and addressed comments of Maudlin and Myrvold. The central conclusion argued for in this second paper (§§ 5, 7) is the non-existence of strictly localizable objects or measurement processes and the consequent undermining of the principle of universal microcausality. This contrasts with the existence of strictly localizable properties and results in the consequent priority of the concept of ‘localizable within’ over ‘measureable within’. The paper opens with discussions of the need for and status of HD dynamical variables which are responses to anonymous queries. (shrink)

In Timothie Bright and the Origins of Early Modern Shorthand, J. D. Fleming brings together two areas of sixteenth-century intellectual history. One is the period emergence of artificial systems for verbatim shorthand notation-a crucial episode in the history of information. The other is the ancient medical discourse of melancholy humour, or black bile. Timothie Bright (1550-1615), physician and priest, prompts the juxtaposition. For he was the author, not only of the period's original shorthand manual-Characterie (1588)-but also of the first (...) book in English on the dark humour: The Treatise of Melancholy (1586). Bright's account of melancholy involves a cybernetic phenomenology of the human. Essentially, we are psyches (souls or minds). We are sealed off from our bodies, operating them as automata across an interface. Psychological presence, for Bright, is illusion and pathology. Engrossing performances or representations therefore bring great danger, and so does the doctrine of predestination-less for its content than its typical delivery. Painful preaching was indispensable in sixteenth-century English Protestantism. But it falls foul of Bright's proscriptions. This is followed by his publication of the first known system for verbatim shorthand notation since antiquity, its technique heavily inflected toward a vocabulary of the pulpit. The passionate, oral performance of the inspired preacher receives an unprecedented textual preservative-and prophylactic. Bright's technology of information serves his phenomenology of alienation. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of the early modern period, the tradition of melancholy, and the history of information-as theory, and technology. (shrink)