In the literature on medical ethics, it is generally admitted that vulnerable persons or groups deserve special attention, care or protection. One can define vulnerable persons as those having a greater likelihood of being wronged – that is, of being denied adequate satisfaction of certain legitimate claims. The conjunction of these two points entails what we call the Special Protection Thesis. It asserts that persons with a greater likelihood of being denied adequate satisfaction of their legitimate claims deserve special attention, (...) care or protection. Such a thesis remains vague, however, as long as we do not know what legitimate claims are. This article aims at dispelling this vagueness by exploring what claims we have in relation to health care – thus fleshing out a claim-based conception of vulnerability. We argue that the Special Protection Thesis must be enriched as follows: If individual or group X has a greater likelihood of being denied adequate satisfaction of some of their legitimate claims to physical integrity, autonomy, freedom, social provision, impartial quality of government, social bases of self-respect or communal belonging, then X deserves special attention, care or protection. With this improved understanding of vulnerability, vulnerability talk in healthcare ethics can escape vagueness and serve as an adequate basis for practice. (shrink)

Einstein’s theory of Special relativity is founded on an error made by Hendrick Lorentz. It is not necessary to expose the mathematical inconsistencies of special relativity, since the theory collapses by simply exposing the error made by Lorentz. In doing so, it not only causes special relativity to collapse, but also general relativity, and the many theories built upon these two deceptive theories. There are many claims of tests made which supposedly prove SR or GR, such as the eclipse of (...) 1919, the Hafele-Keating experiment, GPS, the orbit of Mercury, and muons. The error of these will also be shown as well as an area of astronomy which has been negatively impacted by SR. The epistemology approach to special relativity: you can know it is a false theory when the theory requires deceiving the student for acceptance and the tests which support the theory can be proven false. (shrink)

In evolutionary biology changes in population structure are explained by citing trait fitness distribution. I distinguish three interpretations of fitness explanations—the Two‐Factor Model, the Single‐Factor Model, and the Statistical Interpretation—and argue for the last of these. These interpretations differ in their degrees of causal commitment. The first two hold that trait fitness distribution causes population change. Trait fitness explanations, according to these interpretations, are causal explanations. The last maintains that trait fitness distribution correlates with population change but does not cause (...) it. My defense of the Statistical Interpretation relies on a distinctive feature of causation. Causes conform to the Sure Thing Principle. Trait fitness distributions, I argue, do not. *Received July 2009; revised October 2009. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy/Institute for the History, Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto, Victoria College, 91 Charles Street West, Toronto, ON M5S 1K7, Canada; e‐mail: denis[email protected]. (shrink)

It is human nature to wonder how things might have turned out differently--either for the better or for the worse. For the past two decades psychologists have been intrigued by this phenomenon, which they call counterfactual thinking. Specifically, researchers have sought to answer the "big" questions: Why do people have such a strong propensity to generate counterfactuals, and what functions does counterfactual thinking serve? What are the determinants of counterfactual thinking, and what are its adaptive and psychological consequences? This important (...) work brings together a collection of thought-provoking papers by social and cognitive psychologists who have made important theoretical and empirical contributions to our understanding of this topic. The essays in this volume contain novel theoretical insights, and, in many cases descriptions of previously unpublished empirical studies. The Psychology of Counterfactual Thinking provides an excellent overview of this fascinating topic for researchers, as well as advanced undergraduates and graduates in psychology--particularly those with an interest in social cognition, social judgment, decision judgment, decision making, thinking and reasoning. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:In a series of reports the United Nations Special Representative on the issue of Human Rights and Transnational Corporations has emphasized a tripartite framework regarding business and human rights that includes the state “duty to protect,” the TNC “responsibility to respect,” and “appropriate remedies” for human rights violations. This article examines the recent history of UN initiatives regarding business and human rights and places the tripartite framework in historical context. Three approaches to human rights are distinguished: moral, political, and legal. (...) It is argued that the tripartite framework’s grounding of the responsibility of TNCs to respect human rights is properly understood as moral and not merely as a political or legal duty. A moral account of the duty of TNCs to respect basic human rights is defended and contrasted with a merely strategic approach. The main conclusion of the article is that only a moral account of the basic human rights duties of TNCs provides a sufficiently deep justification of “the corporate responsibility to respect human rights” feature of the tripartite framework. (shrink)

Introduction In ancient rome, legend has it, a plebeian revolt was once quelled when the tribune Menenius Agrippa argued ...

Kant’s ethics conceives of rational beings as autonomous–capable of legislating the moral law, and of motivating themselves to act out of respect for that law. Kant’s ethics also includes a notion of the highest good, the union of virtue with happiness proportional to, and consequent on, virtue. According to Kant, morality sets forth the highest good as an object of the totality of all things good as ends. Much about Kant’s conception of the highest good is controversial. This paper focuses (...) on the apparent conflict between Kant’s claim that we are autonomous, and passages in which he seems to suggest that we require belief in the possibility of the highest good to motivate moral action. I distinguish three distinct versions of these problematic claims that seem to be present in Kant’s texts: that the highest good serves as (1) a motivational supplement to respect for the moral law, (2) a fundamental spring of right action, and (3) a condition of the bindingness of moral requirements. I argue that the texts are better interpreted to yield alternatives to (2) and (3) that do not conflict with our autonomy. I also argue that, properly understood, (1) does not conflict with our autonomy. In arguing for the last claim, I explore Kant’s notion of radical evil and its implications for human agency and virtue. (shrink)

Standard Kripke models are inadequate to model situations of inexact knowledge with introspection, since positive and negative introspection force the relation of epistemic indiscernibility to be transitive and euclidean. Correlatively, Williamson’s margin for error semantics for inexact knowledge invalidates axioms 4 and 5. We present a new semantics for modal logic which is shown to be complete for K45, without constraining the accessibility relation to be transitive or euclidean. The semantics corresponds to a system of modular knowledge, in which iterated (...) modalities and simple modalities are not on a par. We show how the semantics helps to solve Williamson’s luminosity paradox, and argue that it corresponds to an integrated model of perceptual and introspective knowledge that is psychologically more plausible than the one defended by Williamson. We formulate a generalized version of the semantics, called token semantics, in which modalities are iteration-sensitive up to degree n and insensitive beyond n. The multi-agent version of the semantics yields a resource-sensitive logic with implications for the representation of common knowledge in situations of bounded rationality. (shrink)

Kant’s _Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals_, first published in 1785, is still one of the most widely read and influential works of moral philosophy. This Broadview edition combines a newly revised version of T.K. Abbott’s respected translation with material crucial for placing the _Groundwork_ in the context of Kant’s broader moral thought. A varied selection of other ethical writings by Kant on subjects including our moral duties, fundamental principles of justice, the concept of happiness, and the relation of morality (...) to religion are included, along with important criticisms of Kant’s ethics by Fichte, Schiller, Hegel, and Sidgwick. (shrink)

The Social Scientist's Bestiary addresses a number of important theoretical and philosophical issues in the social sciences from the perspective of contemporary philosophy of science. It is intended to guide social scientists - researchers, teachers and students - so that they will not fall victim to the beasts they will encounter in the course of their enquiries. Such beasts include holism, post-positivistic work in the philosophy of science, Kuhnian relativism, the denial of objectivity, hermeneutics and several others, both good and (...) bad. (shrink)

Global climate change is one of the most daunting ethical and political challenges confronting humanity in the twenty-first century. The intergenerational and transnational ethical issues raised by climate change have been the focus of a significant body of scholarship. In this new collection of essays, leading scholars engage and respond to first-generation scholarship and argue for new ways of thinking about our ethical obligations to present and future generations. Topics addressed in these essays include moral accountability for energy consumption and (...) emissions, egalitarian and libertarian perspectives on mitigation, justice in relation to cap and trade schemes, the ethics of adaptation and the ethical dimensions of the impact of climate change on nature. (shrink)

This paper examines Kant's accounts of friendship and marriage, and argues for what can be called an ideal of “moral marriage” based on Kant's notion of moral friendship. After explaining why Kant values friendship so highly, it gives an account of the ways in which marriage falls far short, according to Kant, of what friendship has to offer. The paper then argues that many of Kant's reasons for finding marriage morally impoverished compared with friendship are wrong‐headed. The paper further argues (...) that a few of Kant's views about friendship are false. The main point is that, when we slightly revise Kant's account of friendship and jettison Kant's misguided notions about marriage, we see that marriages can aspire to much of the same moral richness as friendships. Finally, the paper argues that this friendship model of marriage does not obscure the important ways in which marriages and friendships differ. (shrink)

This paper is a presentation of Russian translation of the article « La Défenestration » by Marc Richir. In this paper we depict the philosophical context in which the article was written and define its place in the totality of Richir’s works. Our main goal is to help the reader to understand the features of Richir’s complex thought and to give explicit definition to the term “defenestration.” The defenestration, understood as a philosophical concept, is a process of reconsideration of major (...) phenomenological presuppositions. Thus, we distinguish three main steps of defenestration basing on Richir’s critique of previous phenomenologists: 1) the abolition of the transcendental ego as a structure external to “the world”; 2) the rejection of the universe of beings as the one and only universe people inhabit ; 3) rethinking the phenomenalisation on the basis of “nothing” as a primary universe and, therefore, overcoming the classical dualism of the sensible and the intelligible. We conclude that by analyzing systems of previous philosophers through the concept of defenestration Richir in this early work determines the direction of his future philosophical research. (shrink)

This article addresses the recent reception of Franz Brentano's writings on consciousness. I am particularly interested in the connection established between Brentano's theory of consciousness and higher-order theories of consciousness and, more specifically, the theory proposed by David Rosenthal. My working hypothesis is that despite the many similarities that can be established with Rosenthal's philosophy of mind, Brentano's theory of consciousness differs in many respects from higher-order theories of consciousness and avoids most of the criticisms generally directed to them. This (...) article is divided into eight parts. The first two sections expound the basic outline of Rosenthal's theory, and the third summarizes the principal objections that Rosenthal addresses to Brentano, which I, then, examine in sections 4 and 5. In sections 6 and 7, I discuss Brentano's principle of the unity of consciousness, and in section 8, I consider the scope of the changes that Brentano brings to his theory of consciousness in his later writings, which follow the 1874 publication of Psychology. I then draw the conclusion that Brentano's theory rests on a view of intransitive and intrinsic self-consciousness. (shrink)

In July 2008, Pacific Rim Mining, a socially responsive Canadian gold mining Multinational Corporation (MNC) with $77 million invested in El Salvador, experienced a 30% decline in stock price when it suspended exploration drilling for gold there. In April 2009, the company filed a lawsuit against the government of El Salvador through Central American Free Trade Agreement to recover its investments plus damages. This corporate failure is explored based on: (1) four globalization economic development models, (2) the social, political, and (...) economic history of El Salvador, (3) the El Salvador gold mining industry, and (4) social movement reactions to international mining companies. MNCs must carefully engage "Social Justice" Nongovernment Organizations when pursuing economic development projects to ensure a nation's successful integration into the global economy. (shrink)

The main aim of this paper is to propose the inclusion of the expertise of a prudent agent in the reflective equilibrium procedure, adding a disposition to identify reasonable beliefs that would be seen as the starting point of the method, which could avoid the criticism of conservatism and subjectivism. To do so, I will begin by analyzing the central characteristics of the method and its main faults. Afterwards, I will investigate the characteristics of prudence as a disposition to identify (...) the adequate means to achieve a good end. With this in mind, I will apply prudence to the procedure, so that it will be carried out by an agent who deliberates well, identifying reasonable moral beliefs and, then, we must justify them based on their consistency with ethical principles and with the factual beliefs of relevant scientific theories. Finally, I will argue that this deliberative process is consistent with ethical pluralism and democracy, and can be taken as a kind of moral knowledge. (shrink)

We build an א₁-categorical but not א₀-categorical theory whose only computably presentable model is the saturated one. As a tool, we introduce a notion related to limitwise monotonic functions.

Philosophic thoughts.--Letter on the blind.--Addition to the letter on the blind.--Letter on the deaf and dumb.

If a catalogue were made of terms commonly used to affirm the adequacy of critical interpretations of works of art, one word certain to be included would be “plausible.” Yet this term is one which has received precious little attention in the literature of aesthetics. This is odd, inasmuch as I find the notion of plausibility central to an understanding of the nature of criticism. “Plausible” is a perplexing term because it can have radically different meanings depending on the circumstances (...) of its employment. In the following discussion, I will make some observations about the logic of this concept in connection with its uses in two rather different contexts: the context of scientific inquiry on the one hand, and that of aesthetic interpretation on the other. In distinguishing separate senses of “plausible,” I shall provide reasons to resist the temptation to imagine that because logical aspects of two different types of inquiry, science and criticism, happen to be designated by the same term, they may to that extent be considered to have similar logical structures. (shrink)

In 1999, the Journal of Business Ethics published its 1 500th article. This article commemorates the journal's quest "to improve the human condition" (Michalos, 1988, p. 1) with a summary and assessment of the first eighteen volumes. The first part provides an overview of JBE, highlighting the journal's growth, types of methodologies published, and the breadth of the field. The second part provides a detailed account of the quantitative research findings. Major research topics include (1) prevalence of ethical behavior, (2) (...) ethical sensitivities, (3) ethics codes and programs, (4) corporate social performance and policies, (5) human resource practices and policies, and (6) professions – accounting, marketing/sales, and finance/strategy. Much remains to be done. (shrink)

This volume presents a selection of the political writings of one of the most significant figures of the French enlightenment. It contains the most important articles that Diderot contributed to the Encyclope;die, of which he was principal editor, the complete texts of his Supple;ment au Voyage de Bougainville and Observations sur le Nakaz (translated into English here for the first time), and a substantial number of his contributions to Raynal's Histoire des Deux Indes. The editors' introduction puts these works in (...) context, showing their essential features and underlying coherence. (shrink)

It is commonly thought that evolution is a chance process, an idea found in popular writings on evolution, but also in academic writing in a broad range of scientific disciplines: scientific, philosophical and theological. One problem is that words such as ‘chance’ and ‘random’ are used with a range of different meanings according to context, and in evolutionary biology the word ‘chance’ is sometimes used in a way that is different from its use in mathematics and philosophy. The present article (...) aims to clarify the range of meanings and to argue the case that the evolutionary process is far from being a ‘theory of chance’ from biological, mathematical, or indeed philosophical and theological perspectives. (shrink)

This article looks at the term dharma as used in a ivth century Indian Buddhist text, the Dharmadharmatāvibhāga. The difficulties of translations mentioned by several translators are a symptom of a problem of the interpretation and touch upon the function of such terms. We are therefore faced with a philosophical problem where philosophy itself is praxis.

Rather than simply outlining the classical and modern theories of learning, this widely adopted text brings the material to life through case studies that engage students in debates about what really happens in classrooms. Students are encouraged to test the strengths and weaknesses of each theory so that, ultimately, they will learn to formulate their own philosophies of teaching and learning. The new Fifth Edition of Perspectives on Learning features: A discussion of common sense and learning theories. A new chapter (...) on Transfer of Learning. Consideration of recent developments in brain science. A thoroughly updated list of Recommendations for Further Reading. Perspectives on Learning is one of the five books in the highly regarded Teachers College Press THINKING ABOUT EDUCATION SERIES, now in its Fifth Edition. All of the books in this series are designed to help pre- and in-service teachers bridge the gap between theory and practice. (shrink)

The argument of J. M. E. McTaggart in ‘The Unreality of Time’ (Mind 1908) fails logically. There is no A series as such, but there is a shifting past-present-future arrangement within and consistent with the earlier-later B series, past being always earlier, future always later, present always a position earlier or later. An exactly similar logical structure is constructible within the number series, by making each number as one goes up it in turn (it does not matter what ‘it’, or (...) ‘present’, means, ontologically). The subsequent argument that past-present-future time falls into contradiction then fails also, and proves to be equivocal. (shrink)

FORGERY and PLAGIARISM are both forms of fraud. In committing art forgery I claim my work is by another person. As a plagiarist, I claim another person’s work is my own. In forgery, someone’s name is stolen in order to add value to the wrong work; in plagiarism someone’s work is stolen in order to give credit to the wrong author.

The most notorious and celebrated forger of the twentieth century, Han van Meegeren (1889-1947), was born in the Dutch town of Deventer. He was fascinated by drawing as a child, and pursued it despite his father’s disapproval, sometimes spending all his pocket money on art supplies. In high school he was able finally to receive professional instruction, and went on to study architecture, according to his father’s wishes. In 1911 he married Anna de Voogt. His artistic talents were recognized when (...) he soon after won first prize and a gold medal from the General Sciences Section of the Delft Institute of Technology for a drawing of a church interior. He agreed to sell this drawing, but was discovered by his wife making a copy of it to sell as the original. She dissuaded him from carrying out this small swindle, but the incident is the first evidence of an interest in faking, even if in this case the artist was merely forging his own prize-winning work. (shrink)

Norman presents intriguing arguments in support of a mapping between ecological and constructivist visual cognition, on the one hand, onto the dorsal ventral dual route processing hypothesis, on the other hand. Unfortunately, his account is incompatible with developmental data on the functional emergence of the dorsal and ventral routes. We argue that it is essential for theories of adult visual cognition to take constraints from development seriously.