Professionals, it is said, have no use for simple lists of virtues and vices. The complexities and constraints of professional roles create peculiar moral demands on the people who occupy them, and traits that are vices in ordinary life are praised as virtues in the context of professional roles. Should this disturb us, or is it naive to presume that things should be otherwise? Taking medical and legal practice as key examples, Justin Oakley and Dean Cocking develop a rigorous (...) articulation and defence of virtue ethics, contrasting it with other types of character-based ethical theories and showing that it offers a promising new approach to the ethics of professional roles. They provide insights into the central notions of professional detachment, professional integrity, and moral character in professional life, and demonstrate how a virtue-based approach can help us better understand what ethical professional-client relationships would be like. (shrink)

We present a formal system, E, which provides a faithful model of the proofs in Euclid's Elements, including the use of diagrammatic reasoning.

Joseph Heath defends competitive markets and conceptualizes business ethics with reference to Pareto efficiency, which he takes to be the “implicit morality of the market.” His justification for markets is that they generate Pareto efficient outcomes, meaning that markets optimally satisfy consumer preferences. And, for Heath, business ethics is the set of normative constraints—regulation and beyond-compliance norms—needed to preserve that outcome. The present paper accepts Heath’s claim that the economic justification for markets is ethical, in that satisfying consumer preferences is (...) a good. But, contra Heath, the ethical consideration at work is a consequentialist one; and acknowledging this consequentialism exposes limitations of Heath’s “market failures” approach to business ethics. We suggest two limitations, and we expect many will accept our argument that Heath’s conception of business ethics is too narrow. The present paper outlines two broader implications. First, acknowledging that the justification for markets is ethical eliminates the apparent—and false—conflict between purportedly amoral economic activity on one hand and ethical considerations on the other; instead, business ethics is a matter of weighing the consequentialist ethical benefit of economic activity and markets against other moral arguments/other ethical considerations. Second, Heath restricts business ethics to the constraints needed to protect the market’s ability to efficiently satisfy consumer preferences, constraints he calls “efficiency imperatives”; this restriction supports the widespread tendency to think that all social problems are economic; and, a business ethics so-conceived diminishes the perceived importance of noneconomic values—this attitude is dangerous. (shrink)

This book investigates the metaphysical position of dual-aspect monism, with particular emphasis on the concept of meaning as a fundamental feature of the fabric of reality.

State and civil society -- Empire without state -- Politics of life -- Saint Foucault -- Blood-dried codes -- The state of immanence -- Virtual state-making -- When society prevails -- Political and economic theology -- Foucault's apologia of neoliberalism.

We analyze the pointwise convergence of a sequence of computable elements of L1 in terms of algorithmic randomness. We consider two ways of expressing the dominated convergence theorem and show that, over the base theory RCA0, each is equivalent to the assertion that every Gδ subset of Cantor space with positive measure has an element. This last statement is, in turn, equivalent to weak weak Königʼs lemma relativized to the Turing jump of any set. It is also equivalent to the (...) conjunction of the statement asserting the existence of a 2-random relative to any given set and the principle of Σ2 collection. (shrink)

While this ‘extraordinary’ book appears as an intermezzo within the Homo Sacer series (Negri, 2008), it supports two fundamental theses with its own philological, epigraphic, liturgical and religious-historical research, and a close reading of figures such as Ernst Kantorowicz and Marcel Mauss. These theses concern political power first as an articulation of sovereign reign and economic government and, secondly, as constituted by acclamations and glorification. These can be approached theoretically through its author’s engagement with Michel Foucault’s genealogy of governmentality and (...) with the Erik Peterson/Carl Schmitt debate on the closure of political theology. Agamben’s reformulation of power and his derivation of liberal governmentality from the theological oikonomia prove convincing. A renewed analytics of power and politics of resistance should be possible, however, without recourse to a project seeking to deactivate all profane powers including those of public bureaucracies. (shrink)

This article approaches social media from the theory of the religio-political practice of acclamation revived by Agamben and following twentieth-century social and political thought and theology (of Weber, Peterson, Schmitt, Kantorowicz). It supplements that theory by more recent political-theoretical, historical and sociological investigations and regards acclamation as a ‘social institution’ following Mauss. Acclamation is a practice that forms publics, whether as the direct presence of the ‘people’, mass-mediated ‘public opinion’, or a ‘public mood’ decipherable through countless social media postings. The (...) article surveys issues of differential geographies of access, weighting of posts, value-creation, orality and gesture, algorithmic governmentality, and Big Data and knowledge production. It argues that social media constitute a public from a mass of individualized, private postings. It concludes that they make possible forms of political calculability and action, yet are continuous with ritual and liturgical elements of political life. This study contributes to an analytics of publicity. (shrink)

This article details day-to-day ethics issues facing MBAs who occupy entry-level and mid-level management positions and offers defined examples of the stressors these managers face. The study includes lower-level managers, essentially excluded from extant literature, and focuses on workplace behaviors both undertaken and observed. Results indicate that pressures from internal organization sources, and ambiguity in letter versus spirit of rules, account for over a third of the most frequent unethical situations encountered, and that most managers did not expect to face (...) those issues. Various contextual factors accounted for 32% of the organizational factors that affected decisions. We discuss implications for the workplace, especially the unique ethics challenges for newer managers. (shrink)

This study presents scientific theories about the female body in Greece of the 5th and 4th centuries BC. It demonstrates the influence of cultural preconceptions on such theories, and of scientific theories on cultural attitudes.

The claim that everyone ought to be treated with respect is a familiar and widely accepted prescription in recent moral philosophy, often expressed as a principle of ‘respect for persons.’ I argue that this principle need not be justified by a claim that every person possesses some feature – dignity, autonomy, value, or the like – that makes her worthy of respect. There is abundant conceptual space within many approaches to moral philosophy, including a Kantian approach, to affirm a duty (...) of respect for all persons, while denying that the duty is justified by the respect-worthiness of every person. (shrink)

In the UK, many have argued that the past five years or so have seen an increase in the radicalism and visibility of feminist activism, jarring somewhat with the strong emphasis on loss in much recent scholarship – as well as media commentary – on feminist politics. Against this backdrop, this article asks how, and to what extent, this resurgence of feminist activism has unsettled the centrality of loss within the affective economies of contemporary British feminism, by examining a range (...) of recent texts produced within academic, activist, publishing and media spheres. After arguing that attachments to loss remain remarkably intransigent, the latter part of the article draws on Sara Ahmed’s account of ‘sticky affects’ to provide a theoretical account of why notions such as ‘young women are not feminist’ and ‘feminist activism is a thing of the past’ continue to yield such force despite empirical evidence to the contrary. (shrink)

This conceptual paper presents a radical humanist framing of the relationship between human needs and social welfare. It draws and develops its conceptualisation of radical humanism from the early philosophical writings of Marx in which he identified the radical constitutive needs of the human species. It seeks to translate the definitive characteristics of humanity's ‘species being’ – namely consciousness, ‘work’, sociality and historical development – into overarching claims or social rights to autonomous thinking, creative activity, mutual caring and human progress. (...) It argues for a ‘needs-first ethos’ from within which critically to evaluate welfare policy and practice, and through which to conceptualise approaches that humanise rather than dehumanise. (shrink)

The Menexenus is also known as Plato's Epitaphios or Funeral Oration. The body of the work is a fictional funeral oration, composed as an example of what should be said at a public funeral for Athenians who have fallen in war. The oration is framed by an encounter between Socrates and a certain Menexenus, an eager young man who thinks he has reached the end of education and philosophy, but who is still rather young to take an active party in (...) the city's affairs. Nevertheless, he is anxious to follow in the tradition of his family, which has always provided someone to look after the Athenians . Menexenus' interest in public affairs has led him to attend a meeting of the Council at which a speaker was to be chosen to compose and deliver the funeral oration at the imminent public funeral. However, no final decision was reached at the meeting, and Menexenus remarks that by the time the choice is made, the speaker will have almost to improvise his speech. Socrates gently mocks Menexenus' respect for public orators, saying that speeches about a dead person follow a predictable pattern; a speaker exaggerates all a dead person's good points and minimizes all the bad, so that one who has died appears a paragon of virtue even if he was not really good for much. Socrates claims that listening to such public orations, when not only individuals but also the state is eulogized, always makes him feel that in living in Athens he is living in the Islands of the Blessed. (shrink)

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's approach to natural scientific research has unmistakable parallels to phenomenology. These parallels are clear enough to allow one to say confidently that Goethe's delicate empiricism is indeed a phenomenology of nature. This paper examines how Goethe's criticisms of Newton anticipated Husserl's announcement of the crisis of the modern sciences, and it describes how Goethe, at a critical juncture in cultural history, addressed this emerging crisis through a scientific method that is virtually identical to the method of (...) contemporary empirical-phenomenological research in the human sciences. Goethe's practice of science shares with phenomenology a participatory, morally-responsive, and holistic approach to the description of dynamic life-world phenomena. Delicate empiricism has its own version of the phenomenological epoché, and, like Husserl's technique of imaginative variation, it strives to disclose the essential or archetypal structure of the phenomenon through the endowment of human imagination. However, a close reading of Goethe suggests that the tendency amongst some scholars to distinguish phenomenology as human science from the natural sciences is actually a costly error which unwittingly falls prey to implicit Cartesian assumptions. Goethe, however, manages to avoid these problems by performing from the first a phenomenology of nature's sensibility. (shrink)

The dominated convergence theorem implies that if is a sequence of functions on a probability space taking values in the interval [0, 1], and converges pointwise a.e., then converges to the integral of the pointwise limit. Tao [26] has proved a quantitative version of this theorem: given a uniform bound on the rates of metastable convergence in the hypothesis, there is a bound on the rate of metastable convergence in the conclusion that is independent of the sequence and the underlying (...) space. We prove a slight strengthening of Tao’s theorem which, moreover, provides an explicit description of the second bound in terms of the first. Specifically, we show that when the first bound is given by a continuous functional, the bound in the conclusion can be computed by a recursion along the tree of unsecured sequences. We also establish a quantitative version of Egorov’s theorem, and introduce a new mode of convergence related to these notions. (shrink)

Benjamin Franklin, the colonial American, maintained a now little-known interest in geological questions for more than sixty years. He began as a follower of English theorists, but soon assimilated some of their ideas with original speculations and discoveries, particularly regarding earthquakes. Though Franklin became famous for his experiments with electricity, he never attempted to explain earthquakes as if they were electrical phenomena; others, however, did. Through his access to American materials, Franklin contributed significantly to the work of several English and (...) French geological theorists. Though some of his own theories were ultimately of limited value, Franklin played an important role in the international science of his time. In addition to his other accomplishments, he was colonial America's foremost student of geology. (shrink)

Wittgenstein's complex and demanding work challenges much that is taken for granted in philosophical thinking as well as in the theorizing of art, theology, science and culture. Each essay in this collection explores a key concept involved in Wittgenstein's thinking, relating it to his understanding of philosophy, and outlining the arguments and explaining the implications of each concept. Concepts covered include grammar, meaning and meaning-blindness language-games and private language, family resemblances, psychologism, rule-following, teaching and learning, avowals, Moore's Paradox, aspect seeing, (...) the meter-stick, and criteria. Students new to Wittgenstein and readers interested in developing their understanding of specific aspects of his philosophical work will find this book very welcome. (shrink)

In this essay, I respond to A. W. Moore’s instructive chapter on Frege. I respond by asking various questions, and I question particularly Moore’s claim that Frege, in reacting to Benno Kerry, falls into Hegelian excess. I toy with responding to my question by regarding Frege as anticipating a Wittgensteinian-Heideggerian exaction. It remains unclear whether this constitutes (much) progress.

This article investigates how historians have sought to foster empathic identification with victims in various narratives on the genocide of European Jewry. It takes historians’ extreme reactions to Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executionersas a point of departure, and argues that most historical narratives fail to address how graphic writing about atrocities generates identification with both perpetrators and victims. The essay then analyses how some historians have sought, successfully or not, to overcome this problem.

Contemporary political economy debates tend to assume that an increase in productivity automatically leads to an equal increase in workers’ wages. This assumption shapes the way that many scholars think about economic globalization, as well as domestic policy reforms. This assumption is particularly widespread in the field of international political economy, where it is implicitly incorporated through the use of neoclassical economic models. Rather than explore the distributional struggle between capital and labor, these models use the assumption of full employment (...) to predict that policies that increases worker productivity automatically leads to an equal increase in workers’ wages. In contrast, this article argues that the degree to which wages increase along with productivity depends on the domestic institutions that protect workers’ rights to act collectively. This article tests the relationship between worker productivity and wages by analyzing data from twenty-eight manufacturing industries, in 117 countries, from 1986 to 2002. The results demonstrate that the degree to which an increase in worker productivity leads to an increase in wages depends on a country’s level of protection for labor rights. (shrink)