In this article we consider what form a future supranational animal protection regime might take. We conclude that no such regime exists at present, although one is likely to develop over the next couple of decades, with two viable options already on the horizon. One model would see the role of the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) extended, whereas the other would occur within the context of the United Nations (UN). The former would suit agricultural interests, whereas the latter (...) would probably appeal to so-called new welfarists. However, neither is likely to satisfy animal rights advocates because both regimes assume animals can be legitimately traded and utilized as means to human ends. (shrink)

The paper explores the promise of ethical codes as a means to control unethical behavior in business. After a review of arguments for ethical codes from outside the business system, the paper outlines the arguments for codes from inside the business system at the level of the industry, firm and individual executive.The paper then discusses the problems of code design — the dilemma between specific practices and general precepts — and offers a model for a thoroughgoing code. This is followed (...) by a discussion of the problems of promulgation and code enforcement. (shrink)

Although a number of articles have addressed ethical perceptions and behaviors, few studies have examined ethics across cultures. This research focuses on measuring the job satisfaction, customer orientation, ethics, and ethical training of automotive salespersons in the U.S. and Taiwan. The relationships of these variables to salesperson performance were also investigated. Ethics training was found to be negatively related to perceived levels of ethicalness and performance. High performance U.S. salespeople reported high ethical behavior, while the opposite was true in Taiwan. (...) Customer orientation in both countries was influenced by ethics training. Managers should evaluate current ethics training programs to insure correct ethical behavior is taught and rewarded. (shrink)

This is an introduction to metaphysics for students and non-philosophers. (Philosophers: it's supposed to be the kind of book you can give to your friends and family, when they ask what you do for a living.) Contents: personal identity, fatalism, time, God, why not nothing?, free will, constitution, universals, necessity and possibility, what is metaphysics? (There is a second edition, which adds chapters on meta-metaphysics and the metaphysics of ethics.).

The prefrontal cortex has long been suspected to play an important role in cognitive control, in the ability to orchestrate thought and action in accordance with internal goals. Its neural basis, however, has remained a mystery. Here, we propose that cognitive control stems from the active maintenance of patterns of activity in the prefrontal cortex that represent goals and the means to achieve them. They provide bias signals to other brain structures whose net effect is to guide the flow of (...) activity along neural pathways that establish the proper mappings between inputs, internal states, and outputs needed to perform a given task. We review neurophysiological, neurobiological, neuroimaging, and computational studies that support this theory and discuss its implications as well as further issues to be addressed. (shrink)

Evidentialism is a view about the conditions under which a person is epistemically justified in having a particular doxastic attitude toward a proposition. Evidentialism holds that the justified attitudes are determined entirely by the person's evidence. This is the traditional view of justification. It is now widely opposed. The essays included in this volume develop and defend the tradition. Evidentialism has many assets. In addition to providing an intuitively plausible account of epistemic justification, it helps to resolve the problem of (...) the criterion, helps to disentangle epistemic and ethical evaluations, and illuminates the relationship between epistemic evaluations of beliefs and the evaluation of the methods used to form beliefs. These issues are all addressed in the essays presented here. External world skepticism poses the classic problem for an epistemological theory. The final essay in this volume argues that evidentialism is uniquely well qualified to make sense of skepticism and to respond to its challenge. Evidentialism is a version of epistemic internalism. Recent epistemology has included many attacks on internalism and has seen the development of numerous externalist theories. The essays included here respond to those attacks and raise objections to externalist theories, especially the principal rival, reliabilism. Internalism generally has been criticized for having unacceptable deontological implications, for failing to connect epistemic justification to truth, and for failing to provide an adequate account of what makes basic beliefs justified. Each of these charges is answered in these essays. The collection includes two previously unpublished essays and new afterwords to five of the reprinted essays; it will be the definitive resource on evidentialism for all epistemologists. (shrink)

Relocation is an increasingly prominent conservation tool for a variety of wildlife, but the technique also is controversial, even among conservation practitioners. An organized framework for addressing the moral dilemmas often accompanying conservation actions such as relocation has been lacking. Ecological ethics may provide such a framework and appears to be an important step forward in aiding ecological researchers and biodiversity managers to make difficult moral choices. A specific application of this framework can make the reasoning process more transparent and (...) give more emphasis to the strong sentiments about non-human organisms held by many potential users. Providing an example of the application of the framework may also increase the appeal of the reasoning process to ecological researchers and biodiversity managers. Relocation as a conservation action can be accompanied by a variety of moral dilemmas that reflect the interconnection of values, ethical positions, and conservation decisions. A model that is designed to address moral dilemmas arising from relocation of humans provides/demonstrates/illustrates a possible way to apply the ecological ethics framework and to involve practicing conservationists in the overall decision-making process. (shrink)

Recent defenders of the cognitive significance of religious language have had to face opponents from two directions; from those who demand that religious language be capable of some form of empirical verification and from those who demand that for religious language to be meaningful it must be capable of being understood in ordinary language. Apologists who have taken the first challenge seriously have strained to show that religious statements can be verified by ‘religious experience’, or by an ‘odd discernment’ or (...) by an ‘eschatological verification’. Each of these responses raises further problems for the defender of religion, but in general they all are subject to their failure to provide an adequate criterion or standard by which they could be inter-subjectively tested. Facing in the other direction, theological apologists have attempted to justify religious expressions by showing that they could be subsumed under special categories of ordinary language; namely those of ‘convictional language’ and ‘performative language’. Although these defenders have shown that religious language has an ‘ordinary usage’, they have not shown that the cognitive elements of this usage can be reduced to the ‘use of ordinary language’. (shrink)

Disjunctivists hold that perceiving external objects is fundamentally different from any experiential state that is not a perception. In fact, roughly speaking, disjunctivists say that they have nothing in common. Suppose that it appears to someone as though she perceives something. Disjunctivists say that there are two disparate sorts of facts that could make this true. Either she is genuinely perceiving something, or she is in an experiential state of merely apparent perception. An apparent perception is fundamentally unlike a perception. (...) Disjunctivists differ in what they say the fundamental difference is. We’ll get to some of that shortly. First I’ll say where I’m headed here. (shrink)

Abstract:In recent years, many business ethicists have raised problems with the “ethics pays” credo. Despite these problems, many continue to hold it. I argue that support for the credo leads business ethicists away from a potentially fruitful approach found in Hume’s moral philosophy. I begin by demonstrating that attempts to support the credo fail because proponents are trying to provide an answer to the “Why be moral?” question that is based on rational self-interest. Then, I show that Hume’s sentiments-based moral (...) theory provides an alternative to the credo that points toward a more fruitful approach to business ethics. Along the way, I examine a recent social contract alternative to the credo that, despite many appealing features, is less effective than is the Humean alternative. Finally, I develop a Humean approach to business ethics and demonstrate why it is a desirable alternative that business ethicists should explore. (shrink)

This chapter formulates a rational uniqueness principle holding that those who are epistemic peers on a proposition, in that they know that they share all rational considerations concerning the truth of the proposition, cannot be justified in having different attitudes toward it. It then argues against the principle, primarily on the grounds that such peers may rationally regard themselves as differing in their basis for rational belief, or their evidence, on the topic. The rationality of their differing perspectives can justify (...) having different attitudes toward the disputed proposition. (shrink)

How do you tell what’s right from what’s wrong? Can you always? What’s the difference between deduction, induction, and abduction? What are the best techniques for making an argument logically sound? In this fascinating little book, the smallest on its subject ever produced, philosopher Earl Fontainelle explores the ancient art of discursive Logic and demonstrates some of the techniques that have long been used to triumph over the debates and deceptions that assail us every day. Filled with helpful examples of (...) good and bad reasoning, Logic is an invaluable introduction to a defining human characteristic. (shrink)

By a "literary system" we must mean two distinct yet related matters: a discrete and continuous literary history of "occurrences" such as that we designate as English literature; and a continuous set of ideas about what that first system is. To be sure, the first consists in our thought of it, which is to say of literary creations in temporal series. But the literary creations themselves represent a development or, at a minimum, a sequence of examples of literary knowledge or (...) what may be generally termed poems. That temporally serial set of creations of knowledge had individual knowers in its creators, its poets. Our historical knowledge of the poems consists of ideas about their serial, differentiated character, about their relation to each other, and about their relationship to their creators and the times in which they were created. The second sense of a literary system involves what we call criticism, knowledge about that knowledge is synchronic, as we consider such things as epics, tragedies, lyrics, or novels as categories possessing some validity. But this second kind of literary system has also an historical, diachronic character by virtue of the fact that there were generations before which the novel did not exist or generations during which the novel evolved as a kind of literature whose possibilities were exploited and altered. Without the novel in its history, there can be no history of criticism about the novel. These two varieties of literary system can be designated, then, as literary systems proper and as critical systems. The second does require the existence of the first, in spite of seeming exceptions. We might imagine a new nation wishing to have a literature it does not presently possess. The literature envisioned would imply a poetics prior to the emergent literary system, but the poetics would be borrowed from another literature in which the literary system had predated its critical system. Earl Miner is Townsend Martin, Class of 1917, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. "That Literature is a Kind of Knowledge," his previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, appeared in the Spring 1976 issue. His works include Literary Uses of Typology from the Middle Ages to the Present and Japanese Linked Poetry. Part II of the present essay appeared in the Spring 1979 issue of Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

Self‐renewal and differentiation of stem cells are tightly regulated processes subject to intrinsic and extrinsic signals. Molecular chaperones and co‐chaperones, especially heat shock proteins (Hsp), are ubiquitous molecules involved in the modulation of protein conformational and complexation states. The function of Hsp, which are typically associated with stress response and tolerance, is well characterized in differentiated cells, while their role in stem cells remains unclear. It appears that embryonic stem cells exhibit increased stress tolerance and concomitant high levels of chaperone (...) expression. This review critically evaluates stem cell research from a molecular chaperone perspective. Furthermore, we propose a model of chaperone‐modulated self‐renewal in mouse embryonic stem cells. (shrink)

Yoder rearranges the theological landscape -- North American Mennonite experience -- Amsterdam 1952 -- American church and society in the postwar era -- Mennonite mentors at Goshen College -- European experience and the debate about war -- A European assignment -- Relating to European Mennonite churches -- Confronting the moral question of war -- The world council of churches debate -- Doctoral studies with Barth and Cullman -- The theology of Karl Barth -- Oscar Cullmann and biblical studies -- Other (...) European conversations -- Disseration on the Swiss anabaptists -- Historical anabaptist research -- The core of anabaptist beliefs -- Constructing an anabaptist theology -- Understanding the "politics of Jesus " -- Characterizing theologies -- Yoder's theological language -- Yoder's constructive theology -- A lived praxis -- The "politics of Jesus " as social practice -- The challenge of just peacebuilding -- Basic principles of the "politics of Jesus ' -- A conversation with Catholic peace traditions -- Just peacebuilding collaboration -- The social praxis of the Christian community -- A religious peacebuilding program. (shrink)