Though a growing number of voices in public discourse are expressing reservations about the new space race and its implications, inherently political questions have remained largely untouched by political theorists: Who is space for and for whose benefit? What are the ideological presumptions and functions of private space exploration? To confront this astro-aporia, we proceed in four parts. First, we develop a typology of two broad positions that predominate in contemporary criticism of space exploration: those who are “space pessimists” and (...) those who are “space neutral”; second, we critique those two positions for relying on an instrumental rationality that cedes too much ground to the logic of instrumentalizing and exploiting that which is deemed non-human nature; third, we examine the linked material and ideological forces fueling the current space race and its enthusiastic supporters; and finally, we formulate a dialectical position that remains critical of space exploitation as it is currently undertaken, but on grounds other than mere utility, thus offering a way to reorient the discussion toward a critical theory of space. From this perspective, space's meaning-making role for humanity can be understood as good and should be held in common, rather than being either abandoned or plundered. (shrink)

In the current literature on scientific explanation unification became unfashionable in favour of causal approaches. We want to bring unification back into the picture. In this paper we demonstrate that resemblance questions do occur in scientific practice and that they cannot be properly answered without unification. Our examples show that resemblance questions about particular facts demand what we call causal network unification, while resemblance questions about regularities require what we call mechanism unification. We clarify how these types of unification relate (...) to Philip Kitcher’s account, but also to causal and mechanistic accounts of explanation. (shrink)

In this paper we discuss three interrelated questions. First: is explanation in mathematics a topic that philosophers of mathematics can legitimately investigate? Second: are the specific aims that philosophers of mathematical explanation set themselves legitimate? Finally: are the models of explanation developed by philosophers of science useful tools for philosophers of mathematical explanation? We argue that the answer to all these questions is positive. Our views are completely opposite to the views that Mark Zelcer has put forward recently. Throughout this (...) paper, we show why Zelcer’s arguments fail. (shrink)

The introduction and validation of a new instrument, The Moral Reasoning Inventory, designed to measure an individuals' moral reasoning (MR) in response to two moral dilemmas within a business setting is the subject of this article. The instrument consists of two moral dilemma scenarios with eight MR statements. Two measurement scales were used for analyzing patterns of individual responses: the strength of belief in the reasons and the importance of those reasons for resolving the dilemma. Managers enrolled in a part-time (...) MBA program were administered the new instrument. Data analysis clearly supported the effectiveness of the instrument to differentiate patterns of consistency in MR within decision groups. (shrink)

Moral distress is now being recognized as a frequent experience for many health care providers, and there's good evidence that it has a negative impact on the health care work environment. However, contemporary discussions of moral distress have several problems. First, they tend to rely on inadequate characterizations of moral distress. As a result, subsequent investigations regarding the frequency and consequences of moral distress often proceed without a clear understanding of the phenomenon being discussed, and thereby risk substantially misrepresenting the (...) nature, frequency, and possible consequences of moral distress. These discussions also minimize the intrinsically harmful aspects of moral distress. This is a serious omission. Moral distress doesn't just have a negative impact on the health care work environment; it also directly harms the one who experiences it. In this paper, I claim that these problems can be addressed by first clarifying our understanding of moral distress, and then identifying what makes moral distress intrinsically harmful. I begin by identifying three common mistakes that characterizations of moral distress tend to make, and explaining why these mistakes are problematic. Next, I offer an account of moral distress that avoids these mistakes. Then, I defend the claim that moral distress is intrinsically harmful to the subject who experiences it. I conclude by explaining how acknowledging this aspect of moral distress should reshape our discussions about how best to deal with this phenomenon. (shrink)

This study explores the association between different types of morally challenging interactions during military deployment and response strategies, as well as the mediating role of moral emotions. Interviews with Dutch servicemen who participated in military operations were content coded. We found a relationship between local-cultural and team-related interactions and moral justification; these effects were mediated by other-condemning emotions. Similarly, other-condemning emotions mediated the relationship between local-cultural interactions and relativism. This study points at the importance of other-condemning emotions in shaping military (...) reactions to frequently occurring morally challenging interactions. (shrink)

Researchers and managers alike are becoming increasingly interested in the topic of unethical consumer behavior. Where most studies view unethical behavior as something that is identifiable per se, the authors of the present article believe that it only exists because it has been constructed by people operating within a specific context. Hence the efforts made by this paper to explore, at the level of one specific organization, how interactions between employees and consumers might lead to the construct of unethical consumers. (...) Based on a case study of France’s AMDM—a mutual insurance company set up to serve a client base comprising motorcyclists—the paper addresses how one group of consumers ends up being categorized as unethical by revealing the existence of a sensemaking process within the target organization. This process develops in three main phases: the nurturing of a shared ethos; the protection of employees’ recognized status; and the demonization of any group of consumers threatening this status. Managers incorporating this sensemaking process can avoid or mitigate the negative effects befalling organizations when these kinds of unethical consumer behavior are constructed. (shrink)

In recent developments in Artificial Intelligence and especially in robotics we can observe a tendency towards building intelligent artefacts that are meant to be social, to have ‘human social’ characteristics like emotions, the ability to conduct dialogue, to learn, to develop personality, character traits, and social competencies. Care, entertainment, pet and educational robots are conceptualised as friendly, understanding partners and credible assistants which communicate ‘naturally’ with users, show emotions and support them in everyday life. Social robots are often designed to (...) interact physically, affectively and socially with humans in order to learn from them. To achieve this goal, roboticists often model the human‐robot interaction on early caregiver‐infant interactions. In this paper I want to analyse prominent visions of these ‘socio‐emotional’ machines as well as early prototypes and commercial products with regard to the human‐machine interface. By means of this I will ask how feminist critiques of technology could be applied to the field of social robotics in which concepts like sociality or emotion are crucial elements while, at the same time, these concepts play an important role in feminist critiques of technology. (shrink)

"I do not expect a good reception from professional philosophers" wrote Whitehead in 1929, immediately after the publication of Process and Reality. Indeed, it took nearly thirty years before scholars seriously started to try to decipher the book taken as a whole. And there remains today "professional" Whiteheadians who claim that this work can - or even should - be bracketed by anyone wishing to get a clear picture of Whitehead's true speculative agenda. Creativity and Its Discontents aims to provide (...) evidence of the conditions for this state of affairs by gathering and contextualizing all the major reviews (translated where need be) of Process and Reality: its original 1929 edition, its various translations (some of them still ongoing) and its 1978 corrected edition. It is designed as the ideal tool to accompany the recently published Handbook of Whiteheadian Process Thought. (shrink)

This article examines the idea that “human dignity” means that humans as such are valuable. It does so not from a perspective of normative or metaethics but from the perspective of the practice of valuing that consists in manifested dispositions of actions and emotions. From this point of view a commonly neglected problem becomes evident: How can we value a concrete person non-instrumentally without any reference to her individual properties or achievements and without having any relationship with this person? The (...) suggestion for an answer to this question coincidences with an answer to another question concerning the idea of human dignity, namely the question regarding the relation between the ideas of value on the one hand and dignity on the other hand: to be able to explain what it means to value humans as such, we have to assume that “dignity” is not just the indication of a certain value, but is also a condition that humans can be in. (shrink)

In this paper, we analyse the fruitfulness of Ronald Giere’s comparative model for causation in populations. While the original model was primarily developed to capture the meaning of causal claims in the biomedical and health sciences, we want to show that the model is not only useful in these domains, but can also fruitfully be applied to other scientific domains. Specifically, we demonstrate that the model is fruitful for characterizing the meaning of causal claims found in classical genetics, epidemiology and (...) electoral sociology. Additionally, we propose an adapted comparative model which is needed to get a grip on higher level causal claims. We show that such claims are present in population genetics, epidemiology and electoral systems research. We conclude with some reflections on the implications of our findings for the issue of causal pluralism. (shrink)

Jonathan Schaffer has argued that a contrastive causal ontology is beneficial in juridical contexts: lawyers and judges should treat the causal relation as a quaternary relation, not as binary one. In this paper we investigate to what extent a contrastive causal ontology is beneficial in genetics and in physics. We conclude that it is beneficial in these scientific domains. We also point out that the nature of the benefit differs in the three context that we discuss. Key words: Contrastive causation, (...) causation in genetics, causation in physics, Jonathan Schaffer. (shrink)

Clare Palmer has recently argued that most humans have special obligations to assist domesticated animals, because domestication creates vulnerable, dependent individuals, and most humans benefit from the institution of domestication. I argue that Palmer has given us no grounds for accepting this claim, and that one of the key premises in her argument for this claim is false. Next, I argue that voluntarism, which is the view that one acquires special obligations only by consenting to those obligations in some way, (...) offers a plausible explanation of the sorts of cases that motivate Palmer’s analysis. I conclude that voluntarism allows us to explain the prevalent intuition that special obligations to assist often obtain for domesticated animals, but rarely obtain for wild animals. (shrink)

Was heißt es, sich in unserer globalisierten Welt als eine vollverantwortliche Person zu verstehen und zu verhalten? Einerseits scheint es richtig, dass wir global verantwortlich sind, d.h. dass wir auch gegen entferntes Leid etwas tun sollten; andererseits aber ist wegen vielfacher Überforderungsproblemen unklar ist, wie man diese Verantwortung tatsächlich übernehmen können soll – was wiederum dagegen spricht, dass wir diese Verantwortung berechtigtermaßen zuschreiben können. Um einen Aspekt dieses großen Themas zu behandeln, konzentriere ich mich in diesem Aufsatz auf den Anwendungsbereich (...) von extremer Armut und argumentiere in folgenden Schritten. Zuerst spitze ich das Thema zu auf ein Problem, das Samuel Scheffler in diesem Zusammenhang konstatiert hat, nämlich einen Widerstreit zwischen dem, was Verantwortung unter den Bedingungen der Globalisierung bedeutet und dem, wie wir uns grundsätzlich als Handelnde zu verstehen gewohnt sind. Dann zeige ich erstens, dass dem Thema einer epistemischen Überforderung dabei entscheidendes Gewicht zugesprochen wird, zweitens jedoch, dass sich, genauer besehen, dieses Problem gar nicht in dieser Art stellt. Dafür schlage ich eine Analyse des Verantwortungsbegriffs vor, die es ermöglicht, Kriterien zu identifizieren, anhand derer gewisse Grenzen gezogen werden können, so dass die Zuschreibung der Verantwortung gerechtfertigt werden kann. (shrink)

In this paper we elaborate Ned Hall's theoretical utility perspective for causation in everyday contexts. We do this by presenting some instances of it, thereby adding some flesh to the skeleton that Hall has provided. Our elaboration of the theoretical utility perspective also provides arguments for it: the instances we present show the fruitfulness of the approach. A question raised by Hall's proposal is: should we give up descriptive analysis of causation (and descriptive analysis in general) completely? We argue that, (...) at least for causation, traditional descriptive conceptual analysis must be given up. However, we also argue that a more modest variant of descriptive conceptual analysis can be useful. (shrink)

The present paper has the purpose of making a critical approach of the so called “independence thesis” (Unabhängigkeitsthese) between Law and Ethics based on the Kantian text about equity in his Doctrine of Law. To this critical approach, a weakening of the “independence thesis” is demonstrated according to some endogenous concepts of the Kant work, which we believe deals with an oblique opening of the Kantian’s law to ethics. To demonstrate this, we follow a methodological analytic way divided in three (...) moments: (i) an analysis of the concept of law in Kant; (ii) an explanatory approach of the “independence thesis”; and (iii) a critical approach of the “independence thesis”. (shrink)

This article suggests a novel way to advance a current debate in the philosophy of mathematics. The debate concerns the role of diagrams and visual reasoning in proofs—which I take to concern the criteria of legitimate representation of mathematical thought. Drawing on the so-called ‘maverick’ approach to philosophy of mathematics, I turn to mathematical practice itself to adjudicate in this debate, and in particular to category theory, because there (a) diagrams obviously play a major role, and (b) category theory itself (...) addresses questions of representation and information preservation over mappings. We obtain a mathematical answer to a philosophical question: a good mathematical representation can be characterized as a category theoretic natural transformation. (shrink)

On se rappelle l’un des problèmes soulevés, en 1975, par John Greville Agard Pocock dans son ouvrage intitulé Le Moment machiavélien : dans l’Angleterre du XVIIe siècle, les idées républicaines et machiavéliennes devaient trouver à se développer dans un environnement intellectuel dominé par des concepts monarchiques, juridiques et théologiques, peu à même de conduire à une définition de l’Angleterre comme polis ou de l’Anglais comme citoyen. Dans ce même ouvrage, Pocock indiquait en outre, sans toutefois développer cette indication, que Francis (...) Bacon connaissait Machiavel à un degré qui aurait mérité d’être discuté plus en détail. Il s’agit de prendre cette dernière remarque au sérieux et, du coup, de tenter de mesurer, en confrontant notamment la pensée politique de Bacon à celle de Juste Lipse et à celle de Giovanni Botero, comment est déjà en germe, dans l’œuvre du Lord Chancelier, une reconceptualisation proprement civique des institutions politiques. Cette enquête nous conduira dès lors, nécessairement, à interroger le statut accordé par Bacon à l’économie et aux activités marchandes. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in (...) the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)