Myra Hird and Harlan Weaver have been invited by the editors of this special issue to enter into discussion with each other – to conduct a series of interchanges – because of the careful attention their research has paid to the ways in which transness as a lived reality is ontologized in humans, non-human animals, bacteria, and viruses. With this issue’s interchanges, we would like to further the conversation on critically approaching the consequences of merging transness with animality. In (...) the following series of four essay questions, we particularly invited each of these scholars to consider moments of classificatory tension in which taxonomies of human and non-human become inflected and redirected by the categories of race, gender, sexuality, class, ability, and geopolitical location. (shrink)

Richard M Weaver, a thinker and writer celebrated for his unsparing diagnoses and realistic remedies for the ills of our age, is known largely through a few of his works that remain in print. This new collection of Weaver's shorter writings, assembled by Ted J Smith III, Weaver's leading biographer, presents many long-out-of-print and never-before-published works that give new range and depth to Weaver's sweeping thought. Included are eleven previously unpublished essays and speeches that were left (...) in near-final form at the time of Weaver's death in 1963. In all, there are some one hundred and twenty-six essays, speeches, book reviews, and editorials. (shrink)

I will argue, pace a great many of my contemporaries, that there's something right about Boltzmann's attempt to ground the second law of thermodynamics in a suitably amended deterministic time-reversal invariant classical dynamics, and that in order to appreciate what's right about (what was at least at one time) Boltzmann's explanatory project, one has to fully apprehend the nature of microphysical causal structure, time-reversal invariance, and the relationship between Boltzmann entropy and the work of Rudolf Clausius.

Contemporary Roman Catholic ethics endeavors to take sin seriously by offering theologies of sin that emphasize it as a force and as a basic, personal orientation. Such efforts rightly counter the Catholic tradition's earlier reduction of sin to sins, and sins to external acts and moral culpability. But perhaps they go too far in this regard. By engaging Charles Curran, this study argues that inattention to sins undermines the theological referent of sin as a discourse that concerns more than moral (...) culpability, obscures God as the source of freedom and value, and neglects the way in which acts express and sustain sin and fashion a personal orientation. Drawing on the work of Jean Porter, the essay shows that attention to sins highlights the historicity, particularity, and provisionality of human acts because of the theological referent and analogical character of sin and sins. (shrink)

Research supporting cognitive reserve theory suggests that engaging in a variety of cognitive, social, and physical activities may serve as protective factors against age-related changes in mental functioning, especially if the activities are cognitively engaging. Individuals who participate in a variety of cognitive activities have been found to be more likely to maintain a higher level of cognitive functioning and be less likely to develop dementia. In this study, we explore the relationship between engaging in a variety of activities and (...) cognitive performance amongst 206 healthy older adults between the ages of 65–85. Age and years of education were found to be the most significant predictors of a global composite representing cognitive performance, consistent with previous work linking these variables to age-related changes in cognition and the cognitive reserve. We interpret these results to suggest that age and education are better predictors of global cognitive performance in older adults than self-reported activity engagement. (shrink)

This essay defines and critiques ‘methodocentrism’, the belief that predetermined research methods are the determining factor in the validity and importance of educational research. By examining research in science studies and posthumanism, the authors explain how this methodocentrism disenables research from taking account of problems and non-human actants that are presumed to be of no importance or value in existing social science research methodologies, both qualitative and quantitative. Building from a critique of these methods as profoundly anthropocentric, the authors examine (...) three crucial problematics in which methodocentrism functions in educational research: the institutionalization of graduate training, a wide-spread privileging of the visual, and the seeming necessity of ‘data’ in social scientific research methodologies. Ultimately, this article does not reject the necessity of particular studies having methods—rigorous, philosophically grounded approaches to problems in the world—but it argues that the belief that methods must be selected from existing options and assembled before approaching the ‘objects’ of study is not only a form of bad science, it is also deeply implicated in anthropocentric and colonialist politics. Instead, what research requires today is a thorough rethinking of the very distinction between subject and object and a renewed questioning of how agency functions in specific research settings. (shrink)

Prior research on ethics codes has suggested, but rarely tested, the effects of code design alternatives on the impact of codes. This study considers whether the presence of explanatory rationales and descriptions of sanctions in ethics codes affects recipients'' responses to a code. Theories of organizational justice and persuasive communication support an expectation that rationales and sanctions will be positively related to code recipients'' recall of code content and perceptions of organizational justice. Content recall is an obvious precondition of code (...) compliance; justice perceptions have multiple implications for the attitudes and actions of organizational members. Results show that explanatory rationales are associated with a statistically significant increase in perceptions of organizational procedural justice, but that rationales and sanctions generally show no relationship to distributive justice perceptions and accurate content recall. These results suggest that common prescriptions regarding ethics code design are of uncertain value apart from further research which unearths the relationships among the intended and perceived purposes of codes, the organizational settings in which they are applied, and a wide variety of code designs. (shrink)

Semantics for Reasons is a book about what we mean when we talk about reasons. It not only brings together the theory of reasons and natural language semantics in original ways but also sketches out a litany of implications for metaethics and the philosophy of normativity. In their account of how the language of reasons works, Bryan R. Weaver and Kevin Scharp propose and defend a view called Question Under Discussion Reasons Contextualism. They use this view to argue for (...) a series of novel positions on the ontology of reasons, indexical facts, the reasons-to-be-rational debate, moral reasons, and the reasons-first approach. (shrink)

Fundamental Causation addresses issues in the metaphysics of deterministic singular causation, the metaphysics of events, property instances, facts, preventions, and omissions, as well as the debate between causal reductionists and causal anti-reductionists. The book also pays special attention to causation and causal structure in physics. Weaver argues that causation is a multigrade obtaining relation that is transitive, irreflexive, and asymmetric. When causation is singular, deterministic and such that it relates purely contingent events, the relation is also universal, intrinsic, and (...) well-founded. He shows that proper causal relata are events understood as states of substances at ontological indices. He then proves that causation cannot be reduced to some non-causal base, and that the best account of that relation should be unashamedly primitivist about the dependence relation that underwrites its very nature. The book demonstrates a distinctive realist and anti-reductionist account of causation by detailing precisely how the account outperforms reductionist and competing anti-reductionist accounts in that it handles all of the difficult cases while overcoming all of the general objections to anti-reductionism upon which other anti-reductionist accounts falter. This book offers an original and interesting view of causation and will appeal to scholars and advanced students in the areas of metaphysics, philosophy of science, and philosophy of physics. (shrink)

Philosophers who have written on modesty have largely agreed that it is a virtue, and that it therefore has an important psychological component. Mere modest behavior, it is often argued, is actually false modesty if it is generated by the wrong kind of mental state. The philosophical debate about modesty has largely focused on the question of which kind of mental state—cognitive, motivational, or evaluative—best captures the virtue of modesty. We therefore conducted a series of experiments to see which philosophical (...) account matches the folk concept of modesty. Surprisingly, we found that the folk concept is primarily behavioral. This leads us to argue that modesty may not be a virtue, but that if it is none of the extant philosophical accounts have properly explained why. (shrink)

Self love is an inescapable problem for ethics, yet much of contemporary ethics is reluctant to offer any normative moral anthropologies. Instead, secular ethics and contemporary culture promote a norm of self-realization which is subjective and uncritical. Christian ethics also fails to address this problem directly, because it tends to investigate self love within the context of conflicts between the self's interests and those of her neighbors. Self Love and Christian Ethics argues for right self love as the solution of (...) proper self-relation that intersects with love for God and love for neighbor. Darlene Fozard Weaver explains that right self love entails a true self-understanding that is embodied in the person's concrete acts and relations. In making this argument, she calls upon ethicists to revisit ontological accounts of the self and to devote more attention to particular moral acts. (shrink)

Reviewing works by James Alison, Alistair McFadyen, Andrew Sung Park, Ted Peters, and Solomon Schimmel, the author suggests that the status and (dys)function of the discourse/doctrine of sin highlight tensions between theology and ethics in ways that suggest the character, limits, and promise of religious ethics. This literature commends attention to sin‐talk because it helps religious ethicists to render more adequately the dynamics of human agency, sociality, and culture and because it raises questions about the nature and task of theology, (...) faith, and morality. Yet these volumes also indicate that religious ethics should pay more attention to particular sins. (shrink)

Genetic testing reveals information about a patient's health status and predictions about the patient's future wellness, while also potentially disclosing health information relevant to other family members. With the increasing availability and affordability of genetic testing and the integration of genetics into mainstream medicine, the importance of clarifying the scope of confidentiality and the rules regarding disclosure of genetic findings to genetic relatives is prime. The United Nations International Declaration on Human Genetic Data urges an appreciation for principles of equality, (...) justice, solidarity and responsibility in the context of genetic testing, including a commitment to honoring the privacy and security of the person tested. Considering this global mandate and recent professional statements in the context of a legal amendment to patient privacy policies in Australia, a fresh scrutiny of the legal history of a physician's duty to warn is warranted. This article inquiries whether there may be anything ethically or socially amiss with a potential future recommendation for health professionals or patients to universally disclose particular cancer predisposition genetic diagnosis to genetic family members. While much of the discussion remains applicable to all genetic diagnosis, the article focuses on the practice of disclosure within the context of BRCA1/2 diagnosis. An ‘ethic of care’ interpretation of legal tradition and current practice will serve to reconcile law and medical policy on the issue of physician disclosure of genetic results to family members without patient consent. (shrink)

I show how Sir William Rowan Hamilton’s philosophical commitments led him to a causal interpretation of classical mechanics. I argue that Hamilton’s metaphysics of causation was injected into his dynamics by way of a causal interpretation of force. I then detail how forces are indispensable to both Hamilton’s formulation of classical mechanics and what we now call Hamiltonian mechanics (i.e., the modern formulation). On this point, my efforts primarily consist of showing that the contemporary orthodox interpretation of potential energy is (...) the interpretation found in Hamilton’s work. Hamilton called the potential energy function the “force-function” because he believed that it represents forces at work in the world. Various non-historical arguments for this orthodox interpretation of potential energy are provided, and matters are concluded by showing that in classical Hamiltonian mechanics, facts about the potential energies of systems are grounded in facts about forces. Thus, if one can tolerate the view that forces are causes of motion, then Hamilton provides one with a road map for transporting causation into one of the most mathematically sophisticated formulations of classical mechanics, viz., Hamiltonian mechanics. (shrink)

In this chapter I proffer a success argument for classical logical consequence. I articulate in what sense that notion of consequence should be regarded as the privileged notion for metaphysical inquiry aimed at uncovering the fundamental nature of the world. Classical logic breeds necessitism. I use necessitism to produce problems for both ontological naturalism and atheism.

This empirical study of Fortune 1000 firms assesses the degree to which those firms have adopted various practices associated with corporate ethics programs. The study examines the following aspects of formalized corporate ethics activity: ethics-oriented policy statements; formalization of management responsibilities for ethics; free-standing ethics offices; ethics and compliance telephone reporting/advice systems; top management and departmental involvement in ethics activities; usage of ethics training and other ethics awareness activities; investigatory functions; and evaluation of ethics program activities. Results show a high (...) degree of corporate adoption of ethics policies, but wide variability in the extent to which these policies are implemented by various supporting structures and managerial activities. In effect, the vast majority of firms have committed to the low cost, possibly symbolic side of ethics management (e.g., adoption of ethics codes and policies, etc.). But firms differ substantially in their efforts to see that those policies or codes actually are put into practice. (shrink)

In what has become a classic work, Richard M. Weaver unsparingly diagnoses the ills of our age and offers a realistic remedy. He asserts that the world is intelligible, and that man is free. The catastrophes of our age are the product not of necessity but of unintelligent choice. A cure, he submits, is possible. It lies in the right use of man's reason, in the renewed acceptance of an absolute reality, and in the recognition that ideas—like actions—have consequences.

After an introduction which demonstrates the failure of the equational analogue of Beth?s definability theorem, the first two sections of this paper are devoted to an elementary exposition of a proof that a functional constant is equationally definable in an equational theory iff every model of the set of those consequences of the theory that do not contain the functional constant is uniquely extendible to a model of the theory itself.Sections three, four and five are devoted to applications and extensions (...) of this result.Topics considered here include equational definability in first order logic, an extended notion of definability in equational logic and the synonymy of equational theories.The final two sections briefly review some of the history of equational logic. (shrink)

Causation in Physics demonstrates the importance of causation in the physical world. It details why causal mastery of natural phenomena is an important part of the effective strategies of experimental physicists. It develops three novel arguments for the viewpoint that causation is indispensable to the ontology of some of our best physical theories. All three arguments make much of the successes of experimental physics.

Many philosophers hypothesize that our concept of personal identity is partly constituted by the one-person-one-place rule, which states that a person can only be in one place at a time. This hypothesis has been assumed by the most influential contemporary work on personal identity. In this paper, we report a series of studies testing whether the hypothesis is true. In these studies, people consistently judged that the same person existed in two different places at the same time. This result undermines (...) some widely held philosophical assumptions, supports others, and fits well with recent discoveries on identity judgments about inanimate objects and non-human animals. (shrink)

In (Weaver 2021), I showed that Boltzmann’s H-theorem does not face a significant threat from the reversibility paradox. I argue that my defense of the H-theorem against that paradox can be used yet again for the purposes of resolving the recurrence paradox without having to endorse heavy-duty statistical assumptions outside of the hypothesis of molecular chaos. As in (Weaver 2021), lessons from the history and foundations of physics reveal precisely how such resolution is achieved.

Abstract:This paper delineates the normative and empirical approaches to business ethics based upon five categories: 1) academic home; 2) language; 3) underlying assumptions; 4) theory purpose and scope; 5) theory grounds and evaluation criteria. The goal of the discussion is to increase understanding of the distinctive contributions of each approach and to encourage further dialogue about the potential for integration of the field.

Abstract:Organizational justice and injustice are widely noted influences on employees’ ethical behavior. Corporate ethics programs also raise issues of justice; organizations that fail to “follow-through” on their ethics policies may be perceived as violating employees’ expectations of procedural and retributive justice. In this empirical study of four large corporations, we considered employees’ perceptions of general organizational justice, and their perceptions of ethics program follow-through, in relation to unethical behavior that harms the organization, and to employees’ willingness to help the organization (...) by reporting ethical problems and issues to management. Results show that when employees perceive general organizational justice and ethics program follow-through, there is less unethical behavior and greater willingness to report problems. General justice and ethics program follow-through also interact with each other, showing that the impact of ethics initiatives is influenced by the organizational context. (shrink)

The question of violence and how society can emancipate oneself from it has occupied many philosophers. Walter Benjamin attempted to answer this question in 1920 through the notion of divine violence. This idea has recently been resurrected by philosophers such as Jacques Derrida, Jürgen Habermas, Slavoj Žižek and Judith Butler. Divine violence is turned to as a means of emancipating society from systemic oppression and coercive law. However, it is a notion that has been met by major critiques. Most notable (...) is Jacques Derrida’s critique given in Force of Law: The Mystical Foundations of Authority. This article examines Judith Butler’s turn to divine violence in opposition to the critique of divine violence given by Derrida. Butler attempts to merge divine violence and non-violence to create a means of non-violent revolution capable of emancipating society from oppression and coercive law. However, to make this argument, Butler needs to overcome Derrida’s objection that suggests that divine violence is a dangerous notion with the potential to justify horrendous forms of political violence. Does Butler successfully create a non-violent divine violence capable of achieving this desired emancipation? Or does divine violence continue to be a notion with a dangerously destructive potential as Derrida suggests? These are the questions that this article attempts to answer through a detailed examination of both Butler’s and Derrida’s work on divine violence. Ultimately, it is established that divine violence should be jettisoned into the realm of the divine, rather than harnessed for political ends. (shrink)

It appears that spouses have less reason to hold each other to a norm of monogamy than to reject the norm. The norm of monogamy involves a restriction of spouses' aeeess to two things of value: sex and erotic love. This restriction initially appears unwarranted but can be justified. There is reason for spouses to aeeept the norm of monogamy if their marriage satisfies three conditions. Otherwise, there is reason to permit non-monogamy. Some spouses have reason to accept the norm (...) of monogamy because this will avoid reasonable hurt and prevent diversion of resourees needed to sustain the marriage. Other spouses have reason to permit non-monogamy to allow the spouses access to aspects of a well-rounded life. The choice to be either monogamous or non-monogamous ean also be non-instrumentally valuable if chosen for the right reasons. (shrink)

One hundred years ago the expression "God is dead" was first used by Nietzsche. Now, Nietzsche was reared in a christian home, but at the university he decided there was no god.Now, this philosophy began to pervade German thought. And I believe that history is going to say that this philosophy … contributed to a religious, moral and intellectual vacuum, and into that vacuum came Nazism and the concept of the super race that produced Hitler and the second World War.Now, (...) if we in America reject the idea of god and all that that means, we're going to have a vacuum in which either a fascist type or a communist type of ideology is going to come in … that could eventually lead, in my opinion, to anarchy and chaos.The... (shrink)

Animal welfare science has advanced greatly in the last several decades. This trend is also evident in the zoo and aquarium community, where resources are increasingly being dedicated to better understanding how captivity impacts animals and how best to assess and improve the welfare of individual animals living in the care of humans. In this book, Chapter One examines how far the zoo community has come in addressing the welfare needs of animals in varying housing conditions and highlights areas in (...) need of further attention and research. Chapter Two discusses animal welfare from the viewpoints of cruelty, conservation of wild animals and veterinary attention. Chapter Three examines the justifications for the criminalisation of bestiality and argues that bestiality should be placed within the confines of animal welfare legislation and the focus should be on the animal and respecting the animal and its need to be able to exhibit normal behaviour patterns and its need to be protected from sexual abuse. Chapter Four analyzes from a legal perspective the European Unions (EU) measures and strategies for animal welfare in its external relations and highlights the development of the concept of animal welfare in the EU and in its relationships with the rest of the world. Chapter Five studies the growing demand for healthier animal products and the improvement of animal well-being. (shrink)

In an attempt to improve upon Alexander Pruss’s work (The principle of sufficient reason: A reassessment, pp. 240–248, 2006), I (Weaver, Synthese 184(3):299–317, 2012) have argued that if all purely contingent events could be caused and something like a Lewisian analysis of causation is true (per, Lewis’s, Causation as influence, reprinted in: Collins, Hall and paul. Causation and counterfactuals, 2004), then all purely contingent events have causes. I dubbed the derivation of the universality of causation the “Lewisian argument”. The (...) Lewisian argument assumed not a few controversial metaphysical theses, particularly essentialism, an incommunicable-property view of essences (per Plantinga’s, Actualism and possible worlds, reprinted in: Davidson (ed.) Essays in the metaphysics of modality, 2003), and the idea that counterfactual dependence is necessary for causation. There are, of course, substantial objections to such theses. While I think a fight against objections to the Lewisian argument can be won, I develop, in what follows, a much more intuitive argument for the universality of causation which takes as its inspiration a result from Frederic B. Fitch’s work (J Symb Logic 28(2):135–142, 1963) [with credit to who we now know was Alonzo church’s, Referee Reports on Fitch’s Definition of value, in: (Salerno (ed.), New essays on the knowability paradox, 2009)] that if all truths are such that they are knowable, then (counter-intuitively) all truths are known. The resulting Church–Fitch proof for the universality of causation is preferable to the Lewisian argument since it rests upon far weaker formal and metaphysical assumptions than those of the Lewisian argument. (shrink)

Ethical sensitivity was introduced to caring science to describe the first component of decision making in professional practice; that is, recognizing and interpreting the ethical dimension of a care situation. It has since been conceptualized in various ways by scholars of professional disciplines. While all have agreed that ethical sensitivity is vital to practice, there has been no consensus regarding its definition, its characteristics, the conditions needed for it to occur, or the outcomes to professionals and society. The purpose of (...) this article is to explore the meaning of the concept of ethical sensitivity based on a review of the professional literature of selected disciplines. Qualitative content analysis of the many descriptors found within the literature was conducted to enhance understanding of the concept and identify its essential characteristics. Ethical sensitivity is considered to be an emerging concept with potential utility in research and practice. (shrink)

Background Despite national increase in pediatric ethics consultation volume over the past decade, protected time and resources for healthcare ethics consultancy work has lagged.Methods Correlation study investigating potential associations between ethics consult volume reported by recent national survey of consultants at children’s hospitals and five programmatic domains.Results 104 children’s hospitals in 45 states plus Washington DC were included. There was not a statistically significant association between pediatric ethics consult volume and hospital size, rurality of patient population, or number of consultants. (...) Academically-affiliated children’s hospitals had fewer ethics consults compared to nonacademically affiliated. Association was found between full-time equivalent (FTE) hours and number of ethics consults (p < 0.0001). Spearman rank correlation between ethics consult volume and FTE was 0.5.Conclusions While the results of this study should be interpreted with caution, investment in protected time for ethics consultancy work may translate into increased volume of pediatric ethics consults. (shrink)

A Dedekind algebra is an order pair (B, h) where B is a non-empty set and h is a similarity transformation on B. Each Dedekind algebra can be decomposed into a family of disjoint, countable subalgebras called the configurations of the algebra. There are 0 isomorphism types of configurations. Each Dedekind algebra is associated with a cardinal-valued function on called its configuration signature. The configuration signature counts the number of configurations in each isomorphism type which occur in the decomposition of (...) the algebra. Two Dedekind algebras are isomorphic iff their configuration signatures are identical. It is shown that configuration signatures can be used to characterize the homogeneous, universal and homogeneous-universal Dedekind algebras. This characterization is used to prove various results about these subclasses of Dedekind algebras. (shrink)