An important feature of many conventions is that the agents use an asymmetry to coordinate their behaviour. We call these ‘correlated conventions’. However, a puzzle arises: since any asymmetry works as well as any other, what are the relevant asymmetries on which a given population founds its correlated conventions? In order to gain traction on this question we need an account of both the invention and evolution of correlated conventions. Invention has remained largely unexplored in the literature. In this article (...) we provide a simple model of the origin and subsequent dynamics of correlated conventions. This model can serve as a base for future investigation. (shrink)

This essay addresses a serious question in theistic bioethics—what those of faith ought to make of transhumanism. In it, I argue for two theses: (1) Humanity—having slain Pestilence, War, and Famine—will slay Death as well. (In other words, the transhumanists are descriptively right.) (2) It is not death that really torments us. (In other words, the transhumanists are normatively wrong.) In doing so, I’ll suggest a theological solution to the Fermi Paradox: maybe we have not encountered any other technological civilizations (...) because, while intelligent animals are fairly common in our galaxy, none of the others are driven by the restlessness that would drive us to sail the stars. In other words, maybe none of the others are fallen. (shrink)

Scientific fields frequently need to exchange data to advance their own inquiries. Data unification is the process of stabilizing these forms of interfield data exchange. I present an account of the epistemic structure of data unification, drawing on case studies from model-based cognitive neuroscience (MBCN). MBCN is distinctive because it shows that modeling practices play an essential role in mediating these data exchanges. Models often serve as interfield evidential integrators, and models built for this purpose have their own representational and (...) inferential functions. This form of data unification should be seen as autonomous from other forms, particularly explanatory unification. (shrink)

SummaryThe relationship between travel, travel narrative, and the enterprise of natural history is explored, focusing on activities associated with the early Royal Society. In an era of expanding travel, for colonial, diplomatic, trade, and missionary purposes, reports of nature's effects proliferated, both in oral and written forms. Naturalists intent on compiling a comprehensive history of such phenomena, and making them useful in the process, readily incorporated these reports into their work. They went further by trying to direct the course of (...) travel to suit their ends, but the complex story of how travel influenced the direction of study cannot be told without acknowledging the influence of objects acquired in a random fashion, arriving in a miscellany off returning ships. Travel writing complemented the activity of documenting nature's history, supplementing the range of available testimony. Such accounts of travel became an accepted source for information, cross-references, and queries, ostensibly eliminating error and advancing knowledge. The difficulty of identifying and classifying objects added to the importance of these reports; furthermore, the scope for attending to prodigies created the grounds for accepting tales of marvels and monsters. The fluid exchange between travel, narrative, and natural history often masked rather than exposed problems of belief, testimony, and evidence, perpetuating an economy of error in which knowledge was both advanced and retarded. (shrink)

Metaphysics has undergone two major innovations in recent decades. First, naturalistic metaphysicians have argued that our best science provides an important source of evidence for metaphysical theories. Second, social metaphysicians have begun to explore the nature of social entities such as groups, institutions, and social categories. Surprisingly, these projects have largely kept their distance from one another. Katherine Hawley has recently argued that, unlike the natural sciences, the social sciences are not sufficiently successful to provide evidence about the metaphysical nature (...) of social entities. By contrast, I defend an optimistic view of naturalistic social metaphysics. Drawing on a case study of research into contextual effects in social epidemiology, I show that social science can provide a valuable evidence for social metaphysicians. (shrink)

This article explores the consequences of falling costs of solar and wind power for the ethics of climate change mitigation. We suggest that price competitiveness of renewables reveals a divergence of interest between fossil fuel consumers and producers: cheap renewables strengthen precautionary arguments for aggressive mitigation for consumers but threaten the economic base of producers. As existing applications of the precautionary principle to climate change do not address this issue, we develop a novel approach based on lexical utilities. Given the (...) premise that climate catastrophe entails economic catastrophe but not vice versa, we argue that both producers and consumers should favor mitigation. (shrink)

Equality, similarity and congruence are essential elements of Kant’s theory of geometrical cognition; nevertheless, Kant’s account of them is not well understood. This paper provides historical context for treatments of these geometrical relations, presents Kant’s views on their mathematical definitions, and explains Kant’s theory of their cognition. It also places Kant’s theory within the larger context of his understanding of the quality-quantity distinction. Most importantly, it argues that the relation of equality, in conjunction with the categories of quantity, plays a (...) pivotal and wide-ranging role in Kant’s account of mathematical cognition. (shrink)

This paper argues that a plant together with the symbiotic fungus attached to its roots, a mycorrhizal collective, is an evolutionary individual, and further, that mycorrhizal individuality has important implications for evolutionary theory. Theoretical individuation is defended and then employed to show that mycorrhizal collectives function as interactors according to David Hull’s replicator-interactor model of evolution by natural selection, and because they have the potential to engage in pseudo-vertical transmission, mycorrhizal collectives also function as Darwinian individuals, according to Peter Godfrey-Smith’s (...) Darwinian Populations model of evolution by natural selection. Mycorrhizae in nature usually connect the roots of multiple plants, so mycorrhizal individuality entails the existence of overlapping evolutionary individuals, and because the potential to engage in pseudo-vertical transmission comes in degrees, it follows that these overlapping evolutionary individuals also come in degrees. I suggest here that the degree of evolutionary individuality in a symbiotic collective corresponds to its probability of reproducing with vertical or pseudo-vertical transmission. This probability constitutes a fourth parameter of graded Darwinian individuality in collective reproducers and warrants an update to Godfrey-Smith’s 3D model. (shrink)

Background: Moral distress can be broadly described as the psychological distress that can develop in response to a morally challenging event. In the context of healthcare, its effects are well documented in the nursing profession, but there is a paucity of research exploring its relevance to healthcare assistants. Objective: This article aims to examine the existing research on moral distress in healthcare assistants, identity the important factors that are likely to contribute to moral distress, and propose preventative measures. Research Design: (...) This is a survey of the existing literature on moral distress in healthcare assistants. It uses insights from moral distress in nursing to argue that healthcare assistants are also likely to experience moral distress in certain contexts. Participants and Research Context: No research participants were part of this analysis. Ethical Considerations: This article offers a conceptual analysis and recommendations only. Findings: The analysis identifies certain factors that may be particularly applicable to healthcare assistants such as powerlessness and a lack of ethical knowledge. We demonstrate that these factors contribute to moral distress. Discussion: Recommendations include various preventative measures such as regular reflective debriefing sessions involving healthcare assistants, nurses and other clinicians, joint workplace ethical training, and modifications to the Care Certificate. Implementation of these measures should be monitored carefully and the results published to augment our existing knowledge of moral distress in healthcare assistants. Conclusion: This analysis establishes the need for more research and discussion on this topic. Future research should focus on evaluating the effectiveness of the proposed recommendations. (shrink)

The majority of workplace incivility research has focused on implications of such acts for victims and observers. We extend this work in meaningful ways by proposing that, due to its norm-violating nature, incivility may have important implications for perpetrators as well. Integrating social norms theory and research on guilt with the behavioral concordance model, we take an actor-centric approach to argue that enacted incivility will lead to feelings of guilt, particularly for prosocially-motivated employees. In addition, given the interpersonally burdensome as (...) well as the reparative nature of guilt, we submit that incivility-induced guilt will be associated with complex behavioral outcomes for the actor across both home and work domains. Through an experience sampling study (Study 1) and two experiments (Studies 2a and 2b), we found that enacting incivility led to increased feelings of guilt, especially for those higher in prosocial motivation (Studies 1 and 2a). In addition, supporting our expectations, Study 1 revealed that enacted incivility—via guilt—led to increased venting to one’s spouse that evening at home, increased performance the next day at work, as well as decreased enacted incivility the next day at work. Our findings demonstrate that enacted incivility has complex effects for actors that span the home and work domains. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our results. (shrink)

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, when the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 spilled into the United States and spawned devastating outbreaks in Albany, Georgia, and multiple other cities, news media organizations served an important public health function. Journalists gathered and reported information about a new infectious disease peril, and they used increasing tolls of cases, hospitalizations, and deaths as a shorthand form of risk communication. However, there were ample reasons from the start to question the completeness, accuracy, and fairness of the information (...) that local news sources provided, and reporters repeated in numerous accounts of the Albany hotspot from March to July 2020. The story that went viral adhered to and supported a standard but strikingly deficient explanation of how novel infectious diseases wreak widespread havoc. The conventional outbreak narrative, exemplified by the Albany news coverage, frames causality, spread, and repercussions in ways that implicate personal behaviors while diminishing or disregarding population-level drivers of epidemics and the contribution of institutional lapses in healthcare safety. A second, closely related ramification of this responsibility framing is stigmatization of specific individuals or groups when they are singled out on the basis of an attribute, such as their race/ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation, and identified as bearers and spreaders of a communicable disease. As the COVID-19 pandemic once again demonstrated, and the Albany story epitomizes, the conventional outbreak narrative sends strong stigma cues while leaving large gaps in the information needed to contend more equitably and effectively with emerging infectious diseases. (shrink)

This study examines inter-firm buyer–supplier relationships through an ethical lens. Drawing on the concept of reciprocity in social exchange theory as well as resource dependence theory, we examine the effect of customers’ unethical practices on their suppliers’ intention to continue their business relationships with their customers. Specifically, we distinguish two types of unethical practices: unfair business practices, which directly target suppliers and socially irresponsible practices, which have an impact on wider society. Integrating social exchange theory and resource dependence theory, we (...) investigate the effects of two moderating factors: suppliers’ dependence on their customers and the benefits derived from the supplier–customer relationship. Using data obtained from 506 managers from small-to-medium-sized firms, our findings show that both customers’ unfair business practices and socially irresponsible practices have negative relationships with their suppliers’ intention to continue the relationships. These effects are moderated by supplier dependence and benefits derived from their customers. Overall, our study shows that intention to continue in these relationships, in response to unethical practices by customers, is bounded by supplier self-interest and resource dependence. Our study is one of the few to examine suppliers’ responses to unethical practices and our findings are consistent with the notion of weak reciprocity, rather than strong reciprocity that predominates in the literature. (shrink)

With the broad interest in the concept of "self-care" within popular discourse, there is a growing focus among philosophers, scholars of religion, political theorists, and others on the idea of "spiritual exercises," the ethics of "the care of the self," and attending concepts, yet little has been written on the politics of this broad class of concerns. This book investigates the political consequences of practices of the self in the work of several key 20th-century thinkers-Pierre Hadot, Georges Friedmann, Michel Foucault, (...) Martin Luther King, Jr., and Audre Lorde. Using Hadot's working definition of spiritual exercises as "voluntary, personal practices intended to bring about a transformation of the individual, a transformation of the self," Daniel Wyche frames his argument with the questions: how, and under what conditions, can the ethics of "the care of the self" take the form of "the care of the other" in the sense of material political transformation and vice versa? Are there historical examples in which the two are coterminous? How might we articulate a genuinely holistic relationship between the two? He argues that understanding the politics of self-change necessarily entails that we reframe the practical and conceptual relationships between individual moral action and collective, systemic political life in such a way that ethics and politics can be thought together-neither prior to the other-and finds in King's political self-purification and Lorde's self-preservation forms that such a politics might take. (shrink)

The original essays in this volume, while written from diverse perspectives, share the common aim of building a constructive dialogue between two currents in philosophy that seem not readily allied: Wittgenstein, who urges us to bring our words back home to their ordinary uses, recognizing that it is our agreements in judgments and forms of life that ground intelligibility; and feminist theory, whose task is to articulate a radical critique of what we say, to disrupt precisely those taken-for-granted agreements in (...) judgments and forms of life. Wittgenstein and feminist theorists are alike, however, in being unwilling or unable to "make sense" in the terms of the traditions from which they come, needing to rely on other means—including telling stories about everyday life—to change our ideas of what sense is and of what it is to make it. For both, appeal to grounding is problematic, but the presumed groundedness of particular judgments remains an unavoidable feature of discourse and, as such, in need of understanding. For feminist theory, Wittgenstein suggests responses to the immobilizing tugs between modernist modes of theorizing and postmodern challenges to them. For Wittgenstein, feminist theory suggests responses to those who would turn him into the "normal" philosopher he dreaded becoming, one who offers perhaps unorthodox solutions to recognizable philosophical problems. In addition to an introductory essay by Naomi Scheman, the volume’s twenty chapters are grouped in sections titled "The Subject of Philosophy and the Philosophical Subject," "Wittgensteinian Feminist Philosophy: Contrasting Visions," "Drawing Boundaries: Categories and Kinds," "Being Human: Agents and Subjects," and "Feminism’s Allies: New Players, New Games." These essays give us ways of understanding Wittgenstein and feminist theory that make the alliance a mutually fruitful one, even as they bring to their readings of Wittgenstein an explicitly historical and political perspective that is, at best, implicit in his work. The recent salutary turn in philosophy toward taking history seriously has shown how the apparently timeless problems of supposedly generic subjects arose out of historically specific circumstances. These essays shed light on the task of feminist theorists—along with postcolonial, queer, and critical race theorists—to "rotate the axis of our examination" around whatever "real need[s]" might emerge through the struggles of modernity’s Others. Contributors are Nancy E. Baker, Nalini Bhushan, Jane Braaten, Judith Bradford, Sandra W. Churchill, Daniel Cohen, Tim Craker, Alice Crary, Susan Hekman, Cressida J. Heyes, Sarah Lucia Hoagland, Christine M. Koggel, Bruce Krajewski, Wendy Lynne Lee, Hilda Lindemann Nelson, Deborah Orr, Rupert Read, Phyllis Rooney, and Janet Farrell Smith. (shrink)

FN:s allmänna förklaring om de mänskliga rättigheterna innehåller en katalog över ett antal mänskliga fri- och rättigheter. I den här uppsatsen argumenterar jag för att det krävs en kvantifierad deontisk logik för att förstå den logiska formen hos flera av de normer som uttrycks i denna förklaring. Jag kommer att gå igenom ett antal argument som intuitivt är giltiga, men som inte kan bevisas i klassisk logik. Därefter kommer jag att visa hur dessa argument kan formaliseras och bevisas med hjälp (...) av kvantifierad deontisk logik. Diskussionen ger stöd åt uppfattningen att vi behöver en kvantifierad deontisk logik för att analysera många typer av normativa uttryck och kastar också förhoppningsvis nytt ljus över hur vissa centrala utsagor i FN:s allmänna förklaring bör tolkas och vilken logisk form de har. (shrink)

The article reconstructs the diffusion of the ideas of the Scottish philosophical school (Reid, Smith, Stewart) in France in the early nineteenth century and the role played by the Geneva philosopher Pierre Prevost. Prevost emphasizes the originality of the Scottish school compared with the French and German school in his writing “Reflections after my translation of the posthumous works of Adam Smith” of 1797. From at least 1792 already Prevost had begun a correspondence with Dugald Stewart, which lasted until the (...) death of the latter in 1828. About twenty letters of Stewart to Prevost are preserved in Geneva. Through the mediation of Prevost the Scottish Enlighteners influenced the development of French philosophy from Ideology towards Eclecticism (Degérando, Pictet, Royer-Collard, Cousin). (shrink)

Provides an overview of the anonymous work of sophistic rhetoric known as Dissoi Logoi or Double Arguments.

In this paper, I discuss Plato’s famous passage about τὸ ἐξαίφνης (to exaiphnēs) in Plato’s Parmenides 156c–e. I argue that we should resist interpreting this notion as a subset of the now (to nun). Instead, we should understand it as a basic and sui generis feature of the word of becoming, something that has a relative temporal location (in the past, present, or future concerning other events and processes) but does not constitute time (chronos) or is a part of it. (...) Yet, I explain, its oddness lies not only in its lack of duration but in its capacity to secure the persistence of the things that switch between motion and rest (and all other incompatible states and processes) without causally interacting with them. (shrink)

This article intends to show how the philosophy of Kant supposes a rupture with the doctrines based on a system of absolute rationality, where the most important element is the unity of reason. In this way, it will try to underline the main critiques of the Prussian philosopher to theories based on the unity of reason and direct access to reality, as well as exposing the Kantian proposal of a unitary formal rational structure, but with several irreconcilable uses.

One of the most important developments in international medicine over the past two decades has been a turn to the market as a way of coping with rising costs and responding to calls for more freedom from government control. A full moral evaluation of the relationship of medicine and the market requires asking a wide range of questions bearing on the meaning and impact of market strategies on the economics of health care and on the clinical and public health outcomes (...) of those strategies. A number of the leading questions are presented and some provisional answers offered. (shrink)

L'aviation a un siècle et la commémoration de l'évènement s'est accompagnée jusqu'ici d'une certaine discrétion. Ce livre entre dans le monde réel de l'aéronautique, de ses matières et de ses moteurs, décrit la navigation, le pilotage et jusqu'à la conception des avions modernes. On en tire de là une philosophie de la technique.