Two distinguished social and political philosophers take opposing positions in this highly engaging work. Louis P. Pojman justifies the practice of execution by appealing to the principle of retribution while Jeffrey Reiman argues that although the death penalty is a just punishment for murder, we are not morally obliged to execute murderers.

What is secularity? Might it yield or define a distinctive form of reasoning? If so, would that form of reasoning belong essentially to our modern age, or would it instead have a considerably older lineage? And what might be the relation of that form of reasoning, whatever its lineage, to the Christian thinking that is often said to oppose it? In the present volume, these and related questions are addressed by a distinguished group of scholars working primarily within the Roman (...) Catholic theological tradition and from the perspectives of Continental philosophy. As a whole, the volume constitutes a conversation among thinkers who agree in their concerns but not necessarily their conclusions. Taken individually, each essay concentrates on a range of historical developments with close attention to their intellectual and sometimes pedagogical implications. Secular reason, they argue, is neither the antipode of Christian thought nor a stable and well-resolved component of it. Christian thinking may engage with secular reason as the site of profound difficulties, but on occasion will also learn from it as a source of new insight. _Christianity and Secular Reason_ contributes to the contemporary discussion of secularity prompted especially by Charles Taylor’s book _A Secular Age_. Unlike Taylor's work, however, this collection concentrates specifically on secular _reason_ and explicitly on its relation to Christianity. In this sense, it is closer to Michael J. Buckley’s _At the Origins of Modern Atheism_ or, to a lesser degree, Louis Dupré’s _Passage to Modernity_, which concern themselves with broad cultural developments. "This volume offers a variety of perspectives, some historical, some normative/constructive, on the questions of the relations between politics/culture/religion and the relations between selfhood/humanity/world. The essays are, without exception, of high quality in both scholarly-exegetical terms, and constructive-normative ones. The writers are learned, sometimes witty, and often interesting." —_Paul Griffiths, Duke Divinity School _ "This is no other volume I know of that covers just this ground. There is a substantial literature on, for example, the Habermas/Ratzinger exhange, and on Kant's view of the relation between philosophy and religion, and on the twelfth century background for thirteenth century reflection on this relation. The merit of _Christianity and Secular Reason_ is that it holds these threads together, and others besides, in a new and fruitful way." —_John E. Hare, Yale University_. (shrink)

Kate Crawford presents AI as “both reflecting and producing social relations and understandings of the world”; or again, as “a form of exercising power, and a way of seeing… as a manifestation of highly organized capital backed by vast systems of extraction and logistics, with supply chains that wrap around the entire planet”. I interpret these material insights through a Marxist understanding of ideology, with reference to Marx/Engels, Guy Debord and Louis Althusser. In the German Ideology, Marx and Engels (...) present ideology as the alienated and alienating discourse of exchange, dissimulating the material forces of production and its science. Guy Debord presents the spectacle as the further representation of capital. The spectacle is a total Weltanschauung, pure appearance, where “whatever appears is good and where what is good, appears.” Above all, the spectacle is ideology, representing “the impoverishment, enslavement and negation of real life”. Louis Althusser presents ideology as essential for the reproduction of labor-power and capital. His notion of “interpellation” explains the subjective uptake of ideology, how we respond, “yes!” to its call. The algorithms of AI are enactments of surplus value generating capital as data. The AI data-world is the spectacle, “the autonomous movement of non-life” (Debord) where the proletariat/consumer is the producer of their own ideological subjection. Is resistance possible? What form might it take? And if AI is understood as ideology, i.e. as a language that obscures the true conditions of real life, then what are those true conditions? What is “real life”? (shrink)

Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age examines a variety of significant multidisciplinary and multicultural topics within the subject of aesthetics. Addressing the vexed relation of the arts and criticism to current political and cultural concerns, the contributors to this volume attempt to bridge the two decades-old gap between scholars and critics who hold conflicting views of the purposes of art and criticism. By exploring some of the ways in which global migration and expanding ethnic diversity are affecting cultural productions and prompting (...) reassessment of the nature and role of aesthetic discourse, this volume provides a new evaluation of aesthetic ideas and practices within contemporary arts and letters. (shrink)

Ten years after the appearance of Günter Blamberger’s award-winning Heinrich von Kleist. Biographie in the original German, the English translation by Sebastian Goth and Kelly Kawar appeared in 202...

Interest in the future, clinical implementation of uterus transplantation for uterine factor infertility was recently boosted by the demonstration of proof-of-concept for deceased uterus donation/transplantation. The ethical dimensions of living and deceased uterus transplantation are explored and addressed in the paper through their comparison to the ethical elements of an existing, legal, assisted reproduction practice in some high-income countries, i.e., gestational surrogacy. A set of six ethics lenses is used in the comparative analysis: reproductive autonomy and rights, informed choice/consent, (...) relevant critical relational theories, health equity, theoretical application of the accepted living donation standard, and comparative benefits and burdens considerations. Gestational surrogacy, as currently practiced in some high-income countries, is the assumed, theoretical base-threshold for determination of ethical acceptability in assisted reproduction practices. The analysis demonstrates that : 1) the ethical acceptability of living uterus donation/transplantation is less than that of gestational surrogacy in high-income countries, and 2) the ethical acceptability of deceased uterus donation/transplantation is roughly equivalent to that of gestational surrogacy. This leads to the conclusion that, at the present time, only one version of uterus transplantation practice, i.e., deceased uterus transplantation, should be considered ethically acceptable for possible clinical implementation in high-income countries. (shrink)

This first-ever collection of original essays devoted to philosopher, theologian, and poet Jean-Louis Chrétien’s work, this interdisciplinary collection includes Chrétien’s collaborators, successors, and Anglophone interpreters and explores themes of temporality, prayer, and religious reading.

The growth of positive psychology has birthed debate on the nature of what “positive” really means. Conceptualizations of positive attributes vary across psychological perspectives, and it appears these definitional differences stem from standards for “positive” espoused by three normative ethical frameworks: consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics. When definitions of “positive” do not align with one of these ethical schools, it appears researchers rely on preference to distinguish positive attributes. In either case, issues arise when researchers do not make their theoretical (...) alignment explicit, leading to value-laden, often subjective criteria being smuggled into science as a description of what is positive. To foster a deeper critical understanding of the different approaches, we examine how these conceptual definitions of positive attributes (mis)align with their ethical traditions or fail to align with an ethical school. (shrink)

A model of the neuropsychology of anxiety is proposed. The model is based in the first instance upon an analysis of the behavioural effects of the antianxiety drugs in animals. From such psychopharmacologi-cal experiments the concept of a “behavioural inhibition system” has been developed. This system responds to novel stimuli or to those associated with punishment or nonreward by inhibiting ongoing behaviour and increasing arousal and attention to the environment. It is activity in the BIS that constitutes anxiety and that (...) is reduced by antianxiety drugs. The effects of the antianxiety drugs in the brain also suggest hypotheses concerning the neural substrate of anxiety. Although the benzodiazepines and barbiturates facilitate the effects of γ-aminobutyrate, this is insufficient to explain their highly specific behavioural effects. Because of similarities between the behavioural effects of certain lesions and those of the antianxiety drugs, it is proposed that these drugs reduce anxiety by impairing the functioning of a widespread neural system including the septo-hippocampal system, the Papez circuit, the prefrontal cortex, and ascending monoaminergic and cholinergic pathways which innervate these forebrain structures. Analysis of the functions of this system suggests that it acts as a comparator: it compares predicted to actual sensory events and activates the outputs of the BIS when there is a mismatch or when the predicted event is aversive. Suggestions are made as to the functions of particular pathways within this overall brain system. The resulting theory is applied to the symptoms and treatment of anxiety in man, its relations to depression, and the personality of individuals who are susceptible to anxiety or depression. (shrink)

Time underlies many interesting human behaviors. Thus, the question of how to represent time in connectionist models is very important. One approach is to represent time implicitly by its effects on processing rather than explicitly (as in a spatial representation). The current report develops a proposal along these lines first described by Jordan (1986) which involves the use of recurrent links in order to provide networks with a dynamic memory. In this approach, hidden unit patterns are fed back to themselves: (...) the internal representations which develop thus reflect task demands in the context of prior internal states. A set of simulations is reported which range from relatively simple problems (temporal version of XOR) to discovering syntactic/semantic features for words. The networks are able to learn interesting internal representations which incorporate task demands with memory demands: indeed, in this approach the notion of memory is inextricably bound up with task processing. These representations reveal a rich structure, which allows them to be highly context‐dependent, while also expressing generalizations across classes of items. These representations suggest a method for representing lexical categories and the type/token distinction. (shrink)

Business professions are increasingly faced with the question of how to best monitor the ethical behavior of their members. Conflicts could exist between a profession's desire to self-regulate and its accountability to the public at large. This study examines how members of one profession, public accounting, evaluate the relative effectiveness of various self-regulatory and externally imposed mechanisms for promoting a climate of high ethical behavior. Specifically, the roles of independent public accountants, regulatory and rule setting agencies, and undergraduate accounting (...) education are investigated. Of 461 possible respondents, 230 questionnaires (a 49.6% response rate) indicated that the profession's own rule setting body (The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants) and the use of peer review were perceived as the most effective mechanisms, while government regulation was ranked least. Respondents also evaluated the extent to which ethics should be covered in the accounting curriculum. For every course, the CPAs believed a greater emphasis on ethics is appropriate than presently exists. Suggestions for more effectively integrating ethics into accounting courses are made. Finally, respondents were also asked whether in answering the questionnaire they used a definition of ethics as either the Professional Code of Conduct or a moral and philosphical framework for guiding beliefs. Those who viewed ethics as abiding by a professional code had more confidence in the mechanisms addressed in this study to aid the public accounting profession's ability to ensure high ethical standards of conduct. Methodological implications of this distinction for future studies in business ethics are discussed. (shrink)

Business ethicists have written much about ethical issues in employment. Except for a handful of articles on the very high pay of chief executive officers and the very low pay of workers in overseas sweatshops, however, little has been written about the ethics of compensation. This is prima facie strange. Workers care about their pay, and they think about it in normative terms. This article's purpose is to consider whether business ethicists' neglect of the normative aspects of compensation is (...) justified. I examine several possible justifications for neglecting compensation and show that they fail. What remains is a case for thinking that it is worthy of normative analysis. (shrink)

Proper functionalism claims that a belief has epistemic warrant only if it’s formed according to the subject’s truth-aimed cognitive design plan. The most popular putative counter-examples to proper functionalism all involve agents who form beliefs in seemingly warrant-enabling ways that don’t appear to proceed according to any sort of design. The Swampman case is arguably the most famous scenario of this sort. However, some proper functionalists accept that subjects like Swampman have warrant, opting instead to adopt a non-standard account of (...) design. But critics of proper functionalism hold that this strategy comes at a high cost: the design-plan condition now seems explanatorily superfluous. James Taylor construes cases like Swampman as posing a dilemma for the proper functionalist: either deny warrant in these cases and concede that proper functionalism doesn’t capture our intuitions, or affirm warrant and undermine the explanatory power of the design-plan condition. Proper functionalists have replied to both horns of this dilemma. Recently, Kenny Boyce and Andrew Moon have argued that warrant-affirming intuitions on cases like Swampman are motivated by a principle that has a clear counter-example. Also, Alvin Plantinga presents a set of cases that supposedly cause problems for any analysis of warrant that lacks a design-plan condition. In this essay, I present a counter-argument to Boyce and Moon’s argument, and show that a more robust reliability condition can accommodate Plantinga’s problem cases. I conclude that we’re left with no good reason to doubt that cases like Swampman raise a troubling dilemma for the proper functionalist. (shrink)

“The Nature of Belief Systems” sets forth a Hobson's choice between rule by the politically ignorant masses and rule by the ideologically constrained—which is to say, the doctrinaire—elites. On the one hand, lacking comprehensive cognitive structures, such as ideological “belief systems,” with which to understand politics, most people learn distressingly little about it. On the other hand, a spiral of conviction seems to make it difficult for the highly informed few to see any aspects of politics but those that confirm (...) the cognitive structures that organize their political perceptions. This is a troubling situation for any consequentialist democratic political theory, according to which what is crucial is the electorate's (and subsidiary decision makers') ability to make informed policy judgments, not their possession of willful but uninformed political “attitudes.” Any political theorist who does not take democracy to be an end in itself (regardless of its consequences) should be concerned about Converse's findings. (shrink)

Scholars in both digital humanities and media studies have noted an apparent disconnect between computation and the interpretive methods of the humanities. Alan Liu has argued that literary scholars employing digital methods encounter a “meaning problem” due to the difficulty of reconciling algorithmic methods with interpretive ones. Conversely, the media scholar Friedrich Kittler has questioned the adequacy of hermeneutics as a means of studying computers. This paper argues that that this disconnect results from a set of contingent decisions made in (...) both humanistic and mathematical disciplines in the first half of the nineteenth century that delineated, with implications that continue to resonate in the present day, which aspects of human activity would come to be formalized in algorithms and which would not. I begin with a discussion of Nicolas de Condorcet, who attempted, at the height of the 1789 revolution, to turn algebra into a universal language; his work, I argue, exemplifies the form of algorithmic thinking that existed before the Romantic turn. Next, I discuss William Wordsworth’s arguments about the relationship of poetry and science. While Wordsworth is sometimes viewed as a critic of science, I argue that his polemic is specifically targeted at highly politicized projects like Condorcet’s that sought to supplant existing modes of thought with scientific rationality. Finally, I demonstrate the importance of Romantic thought for George Boole, creator of the logic system that would eventually form the basis of digital electronics. The reason Boole was able to succeed where Condorcet had failed, I argue, was that Romantic notions of culture enabled him to reconcile a mechanical view of mathematical reasoning with an organic view of the development of meaning—a dichotomy that remains a key assumption of computer interfaces in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

In this original and compelling book, Jeffrey P. Bishop, a philosopher, ethicist, and physician, argues that something has gone sadly amiss in the care of the dying by contemporary medicine and in our social and political views of death, as shaped by our scientific successes and ongoing debates about euthanasia and the "right to die"--or to live. __The Anticipatory Corpse: Medicine, Power, and the Care of the Dying__, informed by Foucault's genealogy of medicine and power as well as by (...) a thorough grasp of current medical practices and medical ethics, argues that a view of people as machines in motion--people as, in effect, temporarily animated corpses with interchangeable parts--has become epistemologically normative for medicine. The dead body is subtly anticipated in our practices of exercising control over the suffering person, whether through technological mastery in the intensive care unit or through the impersonal, quasi-scientific assessments of psychological and spiritual "medicine." The result is a kind of nihilistic attitude toward the dying, and troubling contradictions and absurdities in our practices. Wide-ranging in its examples, from organ donation rules in the United States, to ICU medicine, to "spiritual surveys," to presidential bioethics commissions attempting to define death, and to high-profile cases such as Terri Schiavo's, __The Anticipatory Corpse__ explores the historical, political, and philosophical underpinnings of our care of the dying and, finally, the possibilities of change. A ground-breaking work in bioethics, this book will provoke thought and argument for all those engaged in medicine, philosophy, theology, and health policy. "With extraordinary philosophical sophistication as well as knowledge of modern medicine, Bishop argues that the body that shapes the work of modern medicine is a dead body. He defends this claim decisively with with urgency. I know of no book that is at once more challenging and informative as __The Anticipatory Corpse. __To say this book is the most important one written in the philosophy of medicine in the last twenty-five years would not do it justice. This book is destined to change the way we think and, hopefully, practice medicine." --_Stanley Hauerwas, Duke Divinity School _ "Jeffrey Bishop carefully builds a detailed, scholarly case that medicine is shaped by its attitudes toward death. Clinicians, ethicists, medical educators, policy makers, and administrators need to understand the fraught relationship between clinical practices and death, and __The Anticipatory Corpse __is an essential text. Bishop's use of the writings of Michel Foucault is especially provocative and significant. This book is the closest we have to a genealogy of death." --_Arthur W. Frank, University of Calgary _ "Jeffrey Bishop has produced a masterful study of how the living body has been placed within medicine's metaphysics of efficient causality and within its commitment to a totalizing control of life and death, which control has only been strengthened by medicine's taking on the mantle of a bio-psycho-socio-spiritual model. This volume's treatment of medicine's care of the dying will surely be recognized as a cardinal text in the philosophy of medicine." --_H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., Rice University, Baylor College of Medicine_. (shrink)

We consider the efficacy of various forms of reinforcement learning with punishment in evolving linguistic conventions in the context of Lewis-Skyrms signalling games. We show that the learning strategy of reinforcement with iterative punishment is highly effective at evolving optimal conventions in even complex signalling games. It is also robust and can be easily extended to a self-tuning variety of reinforcement learning. We briefly discuss some of the virtues of reinforcement with iterative punishment and how it may be related to (...) learning in nature. (shrink)

The need for quantitative measurement represents a unifying bond that links all the physical, biological, and social sciences. Measurements of such disparate phenomena as subatomic masses, uncertainty, information, and human values share common features whose explication is central to the achievement of foundational work in any particular mathematical science as well as for the development of a coherent philosophy of science. This book presents a theory of measurement, one that is "abstract" in that it is concerned with highly general axiomatizations (...) of empirical and qualitative settings and how these can be represented quantitatively. It was inspired by, and represents a generalization and extension of, the last major research work in this field, Foundations of Measurement Vol. I, by Krantz, Luce, Suppes, and Tversky published in 1971. (shrink)

The dissertation seeks to characterize the style of government embodied in Adam Smith's vision of civil society. It is composed of two parts. The first, preparatory part develops a framework for offering a historically sensitive interpretation of Smith's works by drawing on and criticizing the treatment of the eighteenth century in the work of several contemporary political theorists and historians of political thought. Part II gives the full-fledged interpretation of Smith's thought, based on both detailed textual interpretation and broad contextual (...) juxtaposition. Smith's highly systematic knowledge of the governance of conduct in civil society forms an innovative response to a political problem first articulated in sixteenth-century raison d'etat, reformulated in seventeenth-century natural jurisprudence, the eighteenth-century discourse of polite sociability and its Mandevillean critique, and posed in acute form by Hume. The problem was how to secure the survival, and enhance the strength, of the political order under conditions both of international military-commercial competition and potentially devastating internal social conflict that could eventuate in the kinds of civil wars that wracked the seventeenth century. ;Accepting Hume's reduction of civil society to an immanent plane devoid of providential guarantee of social harmony, Smith shows, in a first moment, how individuals in civil society are able to govern themselves freely and naturally, and how social order is produced and reproduced naturally. The sympathetic sociability and the natural development of the individual's conscience and sense of duty depicted in The Theory of Moral Sentiments and the commercial society depicted in the Wealth of Nations seem to obviate the need for invasive political governance. To this extent, Smith's "system of natural liberty" entails a minimal style of governance, oriented around the negative activity of administering justice, that is, of protecting individuals' rights by preventing and punishing injustice. However, Smith observes that the contemporary form of civil society necessarily produces among those he calls "the labouring poor," who constitute "the great body of the people," the very forces of "faction" and "fanaticism" that threaten to destroy political authority and social tranquillity. In response, Smith theorizes a more minute, controlling style of governance, oriented around the positive activity of forming and reforming the unruly lower ranks through habituation to a condition of orderliness, discipline and moderation. Smith takes up a series of existing practices for moderating conduct and forming character---practices embodied in educational, military, religious, manufactory and even recreational institutions---and projects them into an overall governmental strategy, theoretically unifying them by means of the jurisprudential category of police. Commerce, polite sociability, the self-governing individual, the practice of justice, the stability of government---in short, civil society as such---turn out to be dependent on the effective subjection of the great body of the people to police institutions. In Smith's comprehensive picture of civil society and government, justice and police represent not an ideal for civil society and its unfortunate but merely de facto subversion, respectively, but rather two ideals of civil society which exist in a relationship of uneasy complementarity. (shrink)

In a recent article Iddo Landau has defended his distinction between perspectives on and standards of meaning in life to support his rebuttal of a familiar pessimistic objection to the meaningfulness of human life. According to that complaint, human life is meaningless when viewed from a detached, cosmic, or sub specie aeternitatis [SSA] perspective. Landau argues that a cosmic perspective need not entail a comparably high standard of meaningfulness. What counts on his view then is not the perspective, which (...) is compatible with any number of possible standards for what constitutes an adequate amount of meaningfulness, but the standard that sets that threshold. In this article I argue that Landau has 1.a.) underestimated the severity of the pessimists’ critique of the availability of any standards for meaningfulness and has also 1.b.) misunderstood the pessimists to be saying that human lives are meaningless because they make an insufficient spatio-temporal impact. I argue further that 2.a.) Landau has left unexplained on what basis we would locate the standard of meaning, leaving a gap in his account. Finally, I maintain that 2.b.) by acknowledging that the ontological, normative, or theological content of the SSA perspective can influence the placing of that standard, Landau leaves himself open to the plausible alternative possibility that the meaning of a life is settled not by the standard itself but by the character attributed to the SSA perspective. (shrink)

Recently in this journal, Jessica Morley and colleagues (AI & SOC 2023 38:411–423) review AI ethics and education, suggesting that a cultural shift is necessary in order to prepare students for their responsibilities in developing technology infrastructure that should shape ways of life for many generations. Current AI ethics guidelines are abstract and difficult to implement as practical moral concerns proliferate. They call for improvements in ethics course design, focusing on real-world cases and perspective-taking tools to immerse students in challenging (...) situations with relatable personal, social and environmental implications. The present paper considers the ACTWith model of moral cognition for use in such training contexts. Morley and colleagues' paper and contemporary literature are reviewed. Whistleblowing as a source for relatable case studies is discussed, and the purpose of ethics education considered. The ACTWith model is introduced, and correlations with contemporaries noted. The ACTWith model has been successfully employed in a broad range of technology ethics courses in the Netherlands and South Korea. Illustrations are offered. Correlations with contemporary efforts are drawn in the context of software engineering. Summary discussion considers strengths and limitations of the ACTWith program. Overall, the paper emphasizes training high-level moral reasoning through guided inquiry education informing lifetime professional practice, and indicates an outstanding need for teachers able to do the job. (shrink)

Critical-care decision making is highly complex, given the need for health care providers and organizations to consider, and constructively respond to, the diverse interests and perspectives of a variety of legitimate stakeholders. Insights derived from an identified set of ethics-related considerations have the potential to meaningfully inform inclusive and deliberative policy development that aims to optimally balance the competing obligations that arise in this challenging, clinical decision-making domain. A potential, constructive outcome of such policy engagement is the collaborative development of (...) an as-fair-as-possible dispute resolution process that incorporates an appropriated-justified, defensible critical-care obligation threshold. (shrink)

Given that the mind is the brain, as materialists insist, those who would understand the mind must understand the brain. Assuming that arrays of neural firing frequencies are highly salient aspects of brain information processing (the vector functional account), four hurdles to an understanding of the brain are identified and inspected: indeterminacy, micro-specificity, chaos, and openness.

In recent decades, increased attention has been given to the place of the victim within criminal justice systems. Advocates have called for recognition and participation for victims of crime, and widespread political support throughout common law jurisdictions has resulted in a number of reforms. While some have proven uncontroversial, the question of victim input into sentencing decisions has emerged as a highly contentious issue within scholarship. Scholars have been concerned with the potentially corrupting influence of victims’ private preferences and dispositions (...) on otherwise principled public decision-making. Exacerbating these concerns has been conceptual and normative ambiguity regarding the relationship of victims to public sentencing processes. Such questions relate to the proper relationship between individuals and public decision-making, and are thus usefully dealt with through political theory and the lens of citizenship. The present article applies deliberative democratic theory and argues that it accounts for scholars’ concerns while also providing direction through conceptual and normative clarity, reconciling in theoretical terms victim input with a public sentencing process. Moreover, it also argues that the framework highlights ways in which victims can make active contributions to processes of public deliberation by introducing novel perspectives and information, thereby enhancing the quality of sentencing decisions. Lastly, the article anticipates potential objections regarding the capacity of victims to meet civic standards in practice, pointing to a growing body of empirical research which suggests victims’ potential and emphasizes the importance of being attentive to questions of procedural design to realize it. (shrink)

Recent downward trends in corporate giving have renewed interest in the factors that shape corporate philanthropy. This paper examines the relationships between charitable contributions, firm size and industry. Improvements over previous studies include an IRS data base that covers a much broader range of firm sizes and industries as compared to previous studies and estimation using an instrumental variable technique that explicitly addresses potential simultaneity between charitable contributions and profitability. Important findings provide evidence of a cubic relationship between charitable giving (...) and firm size and evidence of strong industry effects. The plus-minus-plus regression coefficient sign pattern for the cubic firm size model suggests that small and large firms give more relative to total receipts with lower giving ratios among medium size firms. One interpretation for this finding is that small firms are close to the communities they serve while high visibility creates a need for large firm philanthropy. Strong industry effects provide evidence of inter-industry differences in giving culture and/or different public relations requirements across industries. (shrink)

The Peoples of the Arctic and Arctic health and sustainability are highly interconnected and essentially one and the same. An appropriate path to a sustainable Arctic involves a shift away from individual learning and achieving toward community leadership and the betterment of society. This article draws upon mindset theory from Western psychology and Indigenous relational accountability to propose and outline a model for achieving sustainability in the Arctic. The geographic focus is the North American Arctic. The principles of the argument (...) and the foundations of the model may apply across the Circumpolar North. The paper is a call to action for social scientists and policy makers in the Arctic to implement an Indigenous-led and self-determined social science. Empowering and supporting Indigenous leaders and scholars to direct and conduct autonomous social science research would inherently produce well-being and sustainability for Indigenous communities and regions. The arguments are supported by an inductive analysis of peer-reviewed literature, and the model is organized and illustrated using a schematic of concentric circles. The foundational elements of the model include: Indigenous sovereignty, Indigenous ontology, Indigenous models of sustainability, and Indigenous scholarship. Environmental scientists, resource managers, and policy makers are directed to better understand, accept, and support Indigenous science as a comprehensive and valid knowledge system; change how they use key terminology in research; rethink research roles; and amend processes and timelines for research development and funding. To achieve the desired outcomes for community well-being and Arctic sustainability, Arctic social scientists should seriously consider centering Indigenous science, especially in Indigenous communities. (shrink)

Explores the sublime as an unmasterable excess of beauty that marks the limit of representation, in language that requires a firm grasp on the concepts and terminology of modern (that is, pre-postmodern) philosophy.

The word “model” is highly ambiguous, and there is no uniform terminology used by either scientists or philosophers. Here, a model is considered to be a representation of some object, behavior, or system that one wants to understand. This article presents the most common type of models found in science as well as the different relations—traditionally called “analogies”—between models and between a given model and its subject. Although once considered merely heuristic devices, they are now seen as indispensable to modern (...) science. There are many different types of models used across the scientific disciplines, although there is no uniform terminology to classify them. The most familiar are physical models such as scale replicas of bridges or airplanes. These, like all models, are used because of their “analogies” to the subjects of the models. A scale model airplane has a structural similarity or “material analogy” to the full scale version. This correspondence allows engineers to infer dynamic properties of the airplane based on wind tunnel experiments on the replica. Physical models also include abstract representations which often include idealizations such as frictionless planes and point masses. Another, but completely different type of model, is constituted by sets of equations. These mathematical models were not always deemed legitimate models by philosophers. Model-to-subject and model-to-model relations are described using several different types of analogies: positive, negative, neutral, material, and formal. (shrink)

The contentious, topical debate about whether faith-based health care organizations should be granted accommodation on the basis of institutional conscientious objection to medical assistance is dying (MAiD) is addressed through a comparative analysis of arguments on both sides of the issue that references such relevant considerations as: claimed ‘moral-authority’, competing rights-based claims, obligations arising from patient welfare principles, formal justice, dissimilarity in consequences, and two illustrative arguments from analogy. The analysis leads to the conclusion that nonconditional accommodation on the basis (...) of institutional conscientious objection to MAiD is not ethically acceptable in Canada. A compromise mechanism, consisting of a suggested set of pragmatic conditions, is proposed that could effectively balance the competing moral responsibilities that arise from this conclusion and a core assumption of the paper, i.e., that some dominant faith-based health institutions can legitimately request, and expect, that provincial/territorial governments pay them a measure of respect in their operational, health-care-delivery decision making because of these institutions’ long history of providing high quality, health care in Canada. It is further suggested that provincial/territorial governments only allow large, publicly funded, faith-based health care organizations to enact a conditional version of accommodation on the basis of institutional conscientious objection to MAiD in circumstances where the organization has entered into a formal agreement with the relevant health department to meet the proposed, compromise conditions (or a relevantly-similar set of conditions). (shrink)

I argue that a practical deliberator may have good reasons not to consider some option even though that option is what there is most reason, all things considered, for her to do. The most interesting reasons not to consider an option arise in cases where an agent cannot be compensated in kind for the loss of goods that she values. Where this is the case, an attitude of conservatism is warranted: it is reasonable to begin deliberation by considering only ‘no-regrets’ (...) options, and to proceed to considering other possibilities only when the cost of continuing to consider only no-regrets options has become intolerably high. The account that I develop illuminates intuitions that help motivate deontological moral thought, and it can shed light on the complaint that there is something wrong with the way in which schematic thought experiments are frequently used in philosophy to drive moral theorizing. (shrink)

The “new” agricultural biotechnologies are presently high-priority items on the national research agenda. The promise of increased efficiency and productivity resulting from products and processes derived from biotech is thought to justify the commitment to R&D. Nevertheless, critics challenge the environmental safety as well as political-economic consequences of particular products of biotech, notably, ice-nucleating bacteria and the bovine growth hormone. In this paper the critics' arguments are analyzed in explicitly ethical terms, and assessed as to their relative merits. In (...) some cases, a principle of “do no foreseeable harm” as well as a clear determination of likely harms would force us to conclude that research, development, and diffusion of a product or process derived from biotechnology is ethically wrong. In all cases, one conclusion that can be reached is that everyone involved in research, development, marketing and adoption of biotech products is responsible for the results of their actions; thus, each individual has a responsibility to consider a broader range of values and goals that effect and are effected by the biotechnology effort. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Transcendence, Immanence, and Ultimacy: The Theological Adequacy of Religious NaturalismJeffrey B. Speaks (bio)I. IntroductionIn the Introduction of Volume II of his Systematic Theology, Paul Tillich positions his “self-transcendent” and “ecstatic” conception of God as a via media that moves beyond the conflict of supranaturalism and naturalism.1 While Tillich’s rejection of Supranaturalism (i.e., God as a being, or the highest being) and more aggressively reductive forms of naturalism (i.e., eliminative (...) materialism) is not surprising, ST:II has remained a challenging piece for the religious naturalist due to Tillich’s rejection of non-reductive, religious forms of naturalism (as well as pantheism) as theologically insufficient. For Tillich, even a religious naturalism that claims God is “identical with natura naturans, the creative nature, the creative ground of all natural objects” is objectionable because it “denies the infinite distance between the whole of finite things and their infinite ground, with the consequence that the term ‘God’ becomes interchangeable with the term ‘universe’ and therefore is semantically superfluous.”2 For the religious naturalist who has taken seriously Tillich’s claim that the object of religious concern should be something ultimate (i.e., the religious ultimate should also be metaphysically ultimate), this critique has the potential to be devastating by leaving the religious naturalist open to the charge of idolatry. Clearly, the challenge that Tillich raises to religious naturalism must be explored, wrestled with, and answered.The central problem that Tillich raises is that of transcendence—namely, that to qualify as metaphysically and religiously ultimate the referent of the word “God” must infinitely transcend the finite creature. How is it possible for a religious naturalism to register infinite transcendence (whether it uses the language of God or not) in what is often considered to be a radically immanentist theology? To establish the theological adequacy of religious naturalism, it is necessary to clarify what are religiously significant conceptions of transcendence and establish a metric by which varieties of religious naturalism can be evaluated. [End Page 44]The first section of this article will unpack Tillich’s conceptions of supra-naturalism, naturalism, and ecstatic/self-transcendent theism to clarify his critique of religious naturalism and explain why Tillich thinks infinite self-transcendence is necessary for a theologically satisfactory religious ultimate. The second section of this article will develop a conceptual framework for evaluating dimensions of transcendence within a religious naturalist metaphysical system. It will establish immanent transcendence as a vague comparative category, within which are three dimensions of transcendence at play: axiological self-transcendence, conceptual transcendence, and ontological transcendence. The three dimensions provide a framework for evaluating a religious naturalist philosophical theology: high scores in all three dimensions show that metaphysics registers a greater degree of transcendence. The third section of the article will test the evaluative framework on a test-subject, by examining the role of transcendence in Donald A. Crosby’s Religion of Nature.3 It will be shown that Crosby’s metaphysics show a great deal of promise in the dimensions of axiological self-transcendence and conceptual transcendence, but cannot register the degree of ontological self-transcendence that Tillich thinks an adequate religious ultimate requires.II. Paul Tillich’s Self-Transcendent TheismIn between the publication of the first and second volumes of his Systematic Theology, Tillich faced substantial criticism over the doctrine of God developed in the first volume: namely, that God is to be identified as being-itself, and beyond this statement “nothing else can be said about God as God which is not symbolic.”4 In the second volume, Tillich hoped to shed new light on his conception by reframing his God as being “beyond naturalism and supranaturalism,” or as “[overcoming] the conflict of naturalism and supranaturalism.”5 As Tillich’s terminology is somewhat idiosyncratic (e.g., supranaturalism), it behooves the reader to carefully determine what Tillich means by these terms in order to properly identify why his ecstatic conception of God overcomes this conflict.Tillich defines supranaturalism as the belief that God is the highest being. “In this position [God] has brought the universe into being at a certain moment... governs it according to his plan, directs it toward an end, interferes... (shrink)

“Pragmatic encroachers” about knowledge generally advocate two ideas: (1) you can rationally act on what you know; (2) knowledge is harder to achieve when more is at stake. Charity Anderson and John Hawthorne have recently argued that these two ideas may not fit together so well. I extend their argument by working out what “high stakes” would have to mean for the two ideas to line up, using decision theory.

Achieving a high quality of life is dependent upon how individuals face adversity. Positive psychological interventions are well-suited to support coping efforts; however, experimental research is limited. The purpose of the current research was to examine whether different savoring interventions could increase important coping resources in response to a social-evaluative hassle. We completed an experimental mixed subject design study with a university student sample. All participants completed a hassle induction task and were then randomly assigned into different intervention groups. (...) Positive emotion ratings were collected at three points in time. Results revealed a significant time x intervention interaction effect, such that individuals in the savoring the moment intervention reported higher levels of positive emotions compared to individuals assigned to the true control group, guided imagery control group, and savoring through reminiscence intervention. Such findings represent a significant extension to savoring theory and offer support for savoring the moment exercises as a primary prevention strategy to bolster effective responses to social-evaluative hassles. (shrink)

Delve into the intriguing world of bioethics with a twist, where each ethical dilemma is introduced with a dramatic moral mystery story. Far from the usual medical case studies, these tales are crafted not just to educate but to captivate. This innovative resource presents sixty riveting topics designed to educate and captivate medical healthcare students and practitioners. Each issue focuses on high-yield content crucial for boards, licensing exams, and continuing medical education for students and practitioners. The book is an (...) essential reference for clinical practice, ethics consultations. (shrink)

This essay explores the historical roots of biopolitics by investigating the structural homology between the supremely virtuous king discussed in Aristotle’s Politics and the sovereign living law advanced in On Law and Justice, accepted here as authored by Archytas of Tarentum. Archytas’s sovereign incarnates a divine law in order to ground the written law of the city and to constitute the way of life proper to the citizenry. The identity of life and law in his person exempts this sovereign from (...) the written laws he grounds just as Aristotle’s king cannot be subjected to law because he is a law unto himself. Despite this homology, Archytas’s sovereign exemplifies a highly determinate way of life fully constituted by law while an analysis of Aristotle’s king reveals a double determination of the virtuous exemplar as both sovereign and exile. This double determination both exhibits and complicates the logic of exclusion that, for Agamben, makes Western politics biopolitical from its inception. (shrink)

A recent noninterventionist account of divine agency has been proposed that marries the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics to the instability of chaos theory. On this account, God is able to bring about observable effects in the macroscopic world by determining the outcome quantum events. When this determination occurs in the presence of chaos, the ability to influence large systems is multiplied. This paper argues that although the proposal is highly intuitive, current research in dynamics shows that it is far (...) less plausible than previously thought. Chaos coupled to quantum mechanics proves to be a shaky foundation for models of divine agency. (shrink)

: The supply of organs for transplant remains inadequate to meet the needs of waiting patients, in spite of many programs and approaches to increase rates of donation. Over the years there have been numerous proposals to introduce schemes that would move toward the outright sale of organs. Three articles in this issue of the Journal propose methods for increasing organ supply—two by moving toward a market approach and the third by advocating a change in social culture. All three suffer (...) from shortcomings, including the endorsement and encouragement of the exploitation of those who may offer organs. Although the shortage of organs must be addressed, the social price of a market in organs is too high, and proposals to encourage a rethinking of social responsibility are unlikely to be effective. (shrink)

In this provocative contribution to both psychoanalytic theory and the philosophy of science, Louis Berger grapples with the nature of "consequential" theorizing, i.e., theorizing that is relevant to what transpires in clinical practice. By examining analysis as a genre of "state process formalism" - the standard format of scientific theories - Berger demonstrates why contemporary theorizing inevitably fails to explain crucial aspects of practice. His critique, in this respect, pertains both to the formal structure of psychoanalytic explanation and the (...) technical language through which this structure gains expression. The pragmatic recommendations that issue from this critique are illustrated with respect to a number of perennial problem areas besetting analysis and cognate disciplines. In a discussion that encompases theories of affect, issues in family therapy, the nature of first-language acquisition, and the philisophical topics of free will and determinism, Berger shows that certain systems of representation _can_ describe the psychological realm adequately, and that such systems necessarily follow modern physics in rejecting naive assumptions about the separability of theory and practice. His proposals culminate in a "nonhierarchical" conception of psychoanalytic theory that assigns a separate status to the clinically pragmatic level of theorizing. In both his critique of contemporary analysis and his reconstructive proposals, Berger fuses into a highly readable argument a fascinating range of insights culled from epistemology, linguistics, physics, logic, computer science, history, and aesthetics. More impressively still, he demonstrates how an investigation of psychoanalytic theory can serve as a vehicle for examining pervasive epistemological issues in both philosophy and the social sciences. (shrink)