Abstract:This report describes the system of ethical review that was adopted in New Zealand based on the findings and recommendations from the Cartwright Inquiry in 1988. It discusses the changes made to this system under recent governmental initiatives enacted by the National Party, and some of the implications of those changes.

Several philosophers deny that an individual person’s emissions of greenhouse gas do any harm; I call these “individual denialists.” I argue that each individual’s emissions may do harm, and that they certainly do expected harm. I respond to the denialists’ arguments.

Friendship is an important part of the good life. While many roboticists are eager to create friend-like robots, many philosophers and ethicists are concerned. They argue that robots cannot really be our friends. Robots can only fake the emotional and behavioural cues we associate with friendship. Consequently, we should resist the drive to create robot friends. In this article, I argue that the philosophical critics are wrong. Using the classic virtue-ideal of friendship, I argue that robots can plausibly be considered (...) our virtue friends - that to do so is philosophically reasonable. Furthermore, I argue that even if you do not think that robots can be our virtue friends, they can fulfil other important friendship roles, and can complement and enhance the virtue friendships between human beings. (shrink)

This is the first book that explains how you actually go about doing good bioethics. John McMillan develops an account of the nature of bioethics; he reveals how a number of methodological spectres have obstructed bioethics; and then he shows how moral reason can be brought to bear upon practical issues via an 'empirical, Socratic' approach.

In July 2014, the roboticist Ronald Arkin suggested that child sex robots could be used to treat those with paedophilic predilections in the same way that methadone is used to treat heroin addicts. Taking this onboard, it would seem that there is reason to experiment with the regulation of this technology. But most people seem to disagree with this idea, with legal authorities in both the UK and US taking steps to outlaw such devices. In this paper, I subject these (...) different regulatory attitudes to critical scrutiny. In doing so, I make three main contributions to the debate. First, I present a framework for thinking about the regulatory options that we confront when dealing with child sex robots. Second, I argue that there is a prima facie case for restrictive regulation, but that this is contingent on whether Arkin’s hypothesis has a reasonable prospect of being successfully tested. Third, I argue that Arkin’s hypothesis probably does not have a reasonable prospect of being successfully tested. Consequently, we should proceed with utmost caution when it comes to this technology. (shrink)

I introduce two new tools in experimental neurobiology, optogenetics and DREADDs. These tools permit unprecedented control over activity in specific neurons in behaving animals. In addition to their inherent scientific interest, these tools make an important contribution to philosophy of science. They illustrate the very premises of Ian Hacking’s “microscope” argument for the relative independence of experiment from theory. This new example is important for generalizing Hacking’s argument because the background sciences and the fields of engineering producing these tools differ (...) significantly. (shrink)

There’s no doubt that medical ethics should be ‘grounded’, in the sense that it aims to make a practical, normative contribution to significant ethical issues in medicine. There are a number of ways in which ethics can do that, two of which feature in this issue of the Journal of Medical Ethics. One way is by responding to significant new policy or legal developments that will have an impact on clinical practice. This issue discusses two legal developments that matter to (...) patients and healthcare professionals: the sanctions applied to Dr Bawa-Garba and the Supreme Court’s ruling on the withdrawal of artificial nutrition and hydration. A second way of grounding ethical analysis in the reality and complexity of ethical issues is by using empirical methods. There are two papers in this issue from Canada that illustrate how the subtleties of complex ethical issues can be teased out via qualitative methods. Medical tourism is an important and rapidly developing phenomenon that raises a set of interesting and tricky ethical issues.1 It has been discussed in the Journal of Medical Ethics before and its implications for end of life, dentistry and other health interventions have been explored.2 3 Reproductive tourism occurs in many countries and the complications it can create for issues such as the citizenship of resulting children have been discussed at some length in the JME.4 5 Reproductive tourism is a good example of an area where it is particularly important for ethical analysis to be grounded in the facts and reality of a situation and an empirical approach to ethics is therefore a good option for this topic. In this issue, Couture et …. (shrink)

In a recent article, Erik Wielenberg has argued that positive skeptical theism fails to circumvent his new argument from apparent gratuitous evil. Wielenberg’s new argument focuses on apparently gratuitous suffering and abandonment, and he argues that negative skeptical theistic responses fail to respond to the challenge posed by these apparent gratuitous evils due to the parent–child analogy often invoked by theists. The greatest challenge to his view, he admits, is positive skeptical theism. To stave off this potential problem with his (...) argument, he maintains that positive skeptical theism entails divine deception, which creates insuperable problems for traditional theism. This essay shows that Wielenberg is mistaken. Although positive skeptical theism claims that we should expect the appearance of gratuitous evil given Christian theism, this does not entail divine deception. I maintain that God is not a deceiver on positive skeptical theism because God does not meet two requirements to be a deceiver: God does not intend to cause people to believe any false propositions and God does not provide evidence for someone to justifiably believe a false proposition. Consequently, Wielenberg’s new argument from evil fails and positive skeptical theism remains a viable response to the evidential argument from evil. (shrink)

Marc Lange argues that proofs by mathematical induction are generally not explanatory because inductive explanation is irreparably circular. He supports this circularity claim by presenting two putative inductive explanantia that are one another’s explananda. On pain of circularity, at most one of this pair may be a true explanation. But because there are no relevant differences between the two explanantia on offer, neither has the explanatory high ground. Thus, neither is an explanation. I argue that there is no important asymmetry (...) between the two cases because they are two presentations of the same explanation. The circularity argument requires a problematic notion of identity of proofs. I argue for a criterion of proof individuation that identifies the two proofs Lange offers. This criterion can be expressed in two equivalent ways: one uses the language of homotopy type theory, and the second assigns algebraic representatives to proofs. Though I will concentrate on one example, a criterion of proof identity has much broader consequences: any investigation into mathematical practice must make use of some proof-individuation principle. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe paper takes up a conception of substances according to which substances are simple property bearers, properties being modes, particular qualitative ways individual substances are. What a substance does or would do is determined by its qualities. Efficient causation is to be understood as the manifesting of powers possessed by substances owing to their qualitative natures. Although complexes, entities with substantial parts, are not substances, they would be no less real, no less participants in the causal fray. What the substances (...) and properties are is an empirical matter, however, to be settled, if at all, by physics. For all we know, the substances might be particles, or fields, or the universe as a whole. Efficient causation appears to require pluralism: distinct interacting substances. In a non-pluralistic universe, causal truths would be relegated to the manifest image: true still, but made true by non-causal features of the universe perhaps revealed by the scientific image. There remains the final reflection, how shallow, puny, and imperfect are efforts to sound the depths in the nature of things. In philosophical discussion, the merest hint of dogmatic certainty as to finality of statement is an exhibition of folly. : x). (shrink)

Since its modern inception in the early 1970s, informal logic has placed a special emphasis on the analysis of fallacies and argumentative dialogue schemes. Concurrent developments in speech communication circles exhibit a like concentration on the dialectical character of argument.

The worldview of theism proposes an ultimate and global explanation of existence itself. What could such “theological explanation” possibly amount to? I shall consider what is unsatisfactory about a widely accepted answer–namely that existence­ is to be explained as produced and sustained by a supernatural personal agent of unsurpassably great power and goodness. I will suggest an alternative way in which existence could be open to a genuinely ultimate explanation, namely in terms of its being inherently directed upon a supremely (...) good end or telos and existing just because that telos is concretely realized. On this “euteleological” view, theological explanation, though it may need to be compatible with our best scientific theoretical explanations, operates in a clearly distinct explanatory dimension. (shrink)

John Tagg claims that, to answer this question, we must look at the ways in which everything that frames photography - the discourse that surrounds it and the institutions that circulate it - determines what counts as truth.

This essay proposes a comprehensive blueprint for the hylomorphic foundations of cosmology. The key philosophical explananda in cosmology are those dealing with global processes and structures, the regularity of global regularities, and the existence of the global as such. The possibility of elucidating these using alternatives to hylomorphism is outlined and difficulties with these alternatives are raised. Hylomorphism, by contrast, provides a sound philosophical ground for cosmology insofar as it leads to notions of cosmic essence, the unity of complex essences, (...) and globally emergent properties. These are used as the basis to account for the aforementioned cosmological explananda and to resolve two problems in the philosophy of cosmology: the meta-law dilemma and the uniqueness of the universe. In summary, cosmology needs hylomorphism because it is able to ground cosmology’s efforts as a scientific inquiry. It can do so because hylomorphism philosophically accounts for changing substances and aggregates of substances, the various scales of law-governed behavior measured by the natures of those substances, and how those substances as parts relate to the universe as a whole. (shrink)

O contraste entre o espaço das razões e o reino da lei ao qual Sellars implicitamente apela não estava disponível antes dos tempos modernos. Os filósofos modernos não sentiram uma tensão entre a ideia de que o conhecimento tem um status normativo e a ideia de um exercício de poderes naturais. Porém, a ascensão da ciência moderna tornou disponível uma concepção de natureza que faz a advertência de uma falácia naturalista na epistemologia inteligível. Por isso o contraste que Sellars traça (...) pode estabelecer uma agenda para a filosofia hoje. Eu quero distinguir duas maneiras de empreender tal projeto. A ideia é a de que a organização do espaço das razões não é, como Sellars sugere, estranha ao tipo de estrutura que a ciência natural descobre no mundo. Pensar e conhecer são parte de nossa maneira de ser animais. Para mostrar isso, vou distinguir entre dois tipos de naturalismo: um naturalismo restritivo e um naturalismo liberal. Quero sugerir que o argumento de Millikan em favor de um naturalismo restritivo ao criticar a semântica fregiana está contaminado pela adesão a um cartesianismo residual. Esse é o resultado de uma troca familiar; o preço de descartar o imaterialismo cartesiano, enquanto se permanece no interior do naturalismo restritivo, é o de que a parte que se escolheu da natureza não é mais especial o suficiente para ser creditada com poderes de pensamento. Vou argumentar que o lugar próprio à ideia de “apreender sentidos” está em descrever padrões em nossas vidas – nossas vidas mentais, nesse caso – que são inteligíveis somente em termos das relações que estruturam o espaço das razões. Essa padronização envolve racionalidade genuína, não apenas “racionalidade mecânica”. O naturalismo liberal não precisa nada mais, para fazer a ideia de “apreender sentidos” não-problemática, do que uma insistência perfeitamente razoável em que tais padrões realmente moldam as nossas vidas. (shrink)

Sir John Templeton (1912–2008), the Wall Street legend who has been described as “arguably the greatest global stock picker of the twentieth century,” clearly knew what it took to be successful. The most important thing, he observed, was to have strong convictions that guided your life—this was the common denominator he saw in all successful people and enterprises. Fortunately for us, he was eager to share his own blueprint for personal success and happiness with the rest of the world. (...) In The Templeton Plan, he laid out the twenty-one guiding principles by which he governed both his professional and personal life. These principles were grounded in virtues that he considered important enough to be considered the “laws of life”—they include honesty, perseverance, thrift, enthusiasm, humility, and altruism. From this moral foundation, Templeton formulated a step-by-step plan to help improve anyone’s personal and professional life. Among the steps he enumerates, readers will find: · Four exercises that will help anyone find the positive in every negative · How to be the one person in ten that will productively use more time than they waste · The secret trait that separates great workers from good workers · How to control your thoughts for effective action · The practical applications of a sense of humility · How successful people approach risks differently from most people Taken as a whole, the lessons contained within his twenty-one steps will help readers make lasting friendships, reap significant financial rewards, and find personal satisfaction. Ever a believer in the future’s vast potential, Templeton hoped that sharing his principles would inspire others to seek their own laws of life, formulate their own plans, and find success and happiness on a scale exponentially greater than his own. He freely admitted that he didn’t know everything and that there was yet much to be discovered about prosperity and joy. The Templeton Plan not only offers his recipe for success, but also shows us the way to formulate our own plans. (shrink)

La critique par le Professeur Sheldon du naturalisme contemporain tel qu’il est exposé dans le volume Naturalism and the Human Spirit consiste en une « accusation » centrale : ce naturalisme serait un matérialisme pur et simple. Cette charge est étayée par l’argument suivant : puisque la méthode scientifique qu’adoptent les naturalistes pour acquérir une connaissance fiable de la nature est incapable de produire une connaissance du mental ou du spirituel, la « nature » est donc, pour les natu...

Psikoloji, nörobiyoloji, felsefe ve diğer pek çok disiplinde benliğe ilişkin çok sayıda farklı problemler var. Nörobiyolojide, çalışılan benlik problemlerinin pek çoğunun patolojinin çeşitli formlarıyla ilgili olduğu izlenimine sahibim –dürüstlükteki sorunlar, tutarlılık veya benliğin işlevi. Bu patolojiler hakkında söyleyecek hiçbir şeyim yok çünkü neredeyse onlar hakkında hiçbir şey bilmiyorum. Ben bu patolojilere yalnızca ayrık-beyin hastaları gibi doğrudan benliğin problemleriyle ilgiliyseler değineceğim.

This book critically examines the conception of legal science and the nature of law developed by Hans Kelsen. It provides a single, dedicated space for a range of established European scholars to engage with the influential work of this Austrian jurist, legal philosopher, and political philosopher. The introduction provides a thematization of the Kelsenian notion of law as a legal science. Divided into six parts, the chapter contributions feature distinct levels of analysis. Overall, the structure of the book provides a (...) sustained reflection upon central aspects of Kelsenian legal science and the nature of law. Parts one and two examine the validity of the project of Kelsenian legal science with particular reference to the social fact thesis, the notion of a science of positive law and the specifically Kelsenian concept of the basic norm. The next three parts engage in a critical analysis of the relationship of Kelsenian legal science to constitutionalism, practical reason, and human rights. The last part involves an examination of the continued pertinence of Kelsenian legal science as a theory of the nature of law with a particular focus upon contemporary non-positivist theories of law. The conclusion discusses the increasing distance of contemporary theories of legal positivism from a Kelsenian notion of legal science in its consideration of the nature of law. (shrink)

In dit stimulerende en diepgravende boek onderzoekt John D. Caputo het religieuze denken. Tijdens dit onderzoek komen fascinerende vragen aan de orde: 'Wat heb ik lief als ik God liefheb?' en 'Wat heeft Star Wars ons te zeggen over de huidige beleving van religie?' (proberen we altijd een manier te vinden om te zeggen: 'God zij met je'?) Waarom betekent religie voor zoveel mensen een moreel houvast in een postmoderne, nihilistische tijd? Is het mogelijk om 'religie zonder religie' te (...) hebben? Via een bespreking van enkele huidige beelden van religie, zoals Robert Duvall's film The Apostle , biedt Caputo ook een aantal fascinerende en originele inzichten in religieus fundamentalisme. (shrink)

The aim of the paper is to reconstruct and present in a critical perspective the main methodological devices of John Rawls’ Political Liberalism, which introduces the idea of the overlapped consensus as a way to guarantee, in a political sense, social justice within contemporary democratic societies. Those methodological devices are presented in order to reveal their conceptual failures when contrasted with real world situations and to indicate three elements: a) the psychologism of the theory which reduces the individuals of (...) the comprehensive doctrines to an inhuman procedural forgetting of the historical facticity that defines them and provides them with meaning and identity; b) how unfair the overlapped consensus might be, considering that it is developed without taking into account the doctrines and at the expenses of the historical processes for power and struggles for recognition of such doctrines; iii) the limited reach of the methodological devices when applied to the real world, i.e., that when those devices are faced with the realities of the doctrines they lack practical justification. Because of that, liberalism should be considered as another tradition which struggles with the doctrines. (shrink)

I outline two ways of reading what is at issue in the exclusion problem faced by non-reductive physicalism, the “vertical” versus “horizontal”, and argue that the vertical reading is to be preferred to the horizontal. I discuss the implications: that those who have pursued solutions to the horizontal reading of the problem have taken a wrong turn.

This edition of John M. Lothian’s transcription of an almost com­plete set of a student’s notes on Smith’s lectures given at the University of Glasgow in 1762–63_ _brings back into print not only an important discovery but a valuable contribution to eighteenth-century rhetorical theory.

Mental causation occurs when mental entities cause other mental and physical entities: seeings causing believings, itches causing scratchings, headaches causing eye twitches, and so on. The term “mental causation” is most often used to refer to the problem of mental causation, which is really a collection of problems with each possessing its own character and tradition of debate. The problem of mental causation began in earnest with an objection to Cartesian dualism raised by Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia (how can immaterial (...) minds causally interact with material bodies?) and still persists via a series of different objections raised against various views including non-reductive physicalism, anomalous monism, and psychological externalism. What unites the different problems of mental causation is their attempt to address a question of this general form: is model x of the non-causal mental-physical relationship (e.g., non-reductive physicalism) consistent with there being mental causation? A negative answer is usually taken to constitute a fatal objection to model x, but not always. There have been two major avenues of inquiry since Elizabeth’s original objection began the debate: (a) what theories of causation can tell us about the consistency of model x with mental causation; or (b) what theories about the non-causal mental-physical relationship can tell us about the consistency of model x with mental causation. Nearly every contribution in the literature on the problem of mental causation can be understood as belonging in either category (a) or (b), or as containing distinguishable elements which so belong. The most important discussions about mental causation have taken place over the last few decades, hence this entry will focus largely on work conducted in that period. Mental causation is also discussed in other areas of philosophy, such as political philosophy or ethics, but this entry will be primarily concerned with the metaphysical and philosophy of mind literature. (shrink)

This two-volume work, first published in 1843, was John Stuart Mill's first major book. It reinvented the modern study of logic and laid the foundations for his later work in the areas of political economy, women's rights and representative government. In clear, systematic prose, Mill disentangles syllogistic logic from its origins in Aristotle and scholasticism and grounds it instead in processes of inductive reasoning. An important attempt at integrating empiricism within a more general theory of human knowledge, the work (...) constitutes essential reading for anyone seeking a full understanding of Mill's thought. Volume 1 contains Mill's introduction, which elaborates upon his definition of logic as 'not the science of Belief, but the science of Proof, or Evidence'. It also discusses methods of logical reasoning - propositions and syllogisms. Volume 2 contains 'On the Logic of the Moral Sciences', in which Mills applies empirical reasoning to human behaviour. (shrink)

In response to the recent resurgence of idealism among a cluster of Christian theologians and philosophers, this article raises a difficulty for Christians to be idealists. Unlike traditional accounts of Christianity that must explain why God permits or allows evil, idealists face a different and more difficult problem—namely why does God willfully and directly produce experiences of evil. Because the metaphysics of idealism requires God to produce experiences of evil directly and willfully, it is difficult to reconcile it with the (...) essential goodness of God. The existence of matter, therefore, may play an important role in maintaining God’s innocence while allowing creatures to exercise free will. (shrink)

As John Henry Newman reflected on 'The Idea of a University' more than a century and a half ago, Bradley C. S. Watson brings together some of the nation's most eminent thinkers on higher education to reflect on the nature and purposes of the American university today. Their mordant reflections paint a picture of the American university in crisis. This book is essential reading for thoughtful citizens, scholars, and educational policymakers.

John Benson; XIV—The Characterisation of Actions and the Virtuous Agent, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 63, Issue 1, 1 June 1963, Pages 251–266.

Discutamos el principio de la acción mínima (PMA) y su conexión con el axioma tomista operari sequitur esse. El PMA se llama uno de los principios más profundos de la naturaleza. Después de una exposición breve del principio, pasemos a investigar esto en tres etapas aporéticas. La primera etapa involucra una pregunta de prioridad: ¿el PMA—es una causa o un efecto? En la segunda etapa analizamos la conexión entre un comportamiento global y los individuos a escala local: ¿es el PMA (...) una característica verdadera debido a lo que es cierto acerca de las naturalezas de las sustancias? En la etapa final, relacionamos el PMA al axioma tomista operari sequitur esse. La idea clave es que las formas de los objetos físicos no son simplemente determinaciones intrínsecas sino que también establecen de manera extrínseca varias relaciones. Las formas de los individuos son, a través de estas relaciones esenciales, extrínsecas y determinables, partes formales de un todo cósmico. Esto concuerda con la idea tomista de que la forma del universo—el tipo natural del mundo—es su misma unidad de orden. (shrink)