Is life meaningless? Does life have enough meaning to make it feel worthwhile? If we think our lives lack meaning, what can we do about it? Finding Meaning in an Imperfect World answers these and other difficult questions, while confronting head-on famous, recurrent theories that insist on life's meaninglessness. Landau shows us how to single out what is meaningful, explains why we sometimes fail to recognize meaning, and suggests ways in which we can resensitize ourselves to it.

Moral Realism is a systematic defence of the idea that there are objective moral standards. Russ Shafer-Landau argues that there are moral principles that are true independently of what anyone, anywhere, happens to think of them. His central thesis, as well as the many novel supporting arguments used to defend it, will spark much controversy among those concerned with the foundations of ethics.

Observing dance improvisation provides a unique opportunity to understand how people collaborate together while creating. It is an opportunity to consider how new ideas appear, not simply from the internal processes of a single creator but rather from the interactions between the minds, bodies and the environment acting on and between a group of improvising dancers. Improvisational scores served in this study as a laboratory into group creativity. Using a video-stimulated recall method, which asks dancers to reflect upon their own (...) processes just after completing the score, I explored the interdependency between meta-cognitive strategies such as imagery and sense awareness, group processes, the role of others in one’s own creative processes, and interactions between bodies and with the environment. As a result I describe how dancers build together a common improvisational space, which allows them to co-create and share their ideas mostly in non-verbal, non-propositional ways. I discuss the co-agency of such a process, showing that intentionality is distributed between dancers at each moment of improvisation and that they are mainly focused on supporting the ideas of others. I also discuss the medium of the body and the embodied response as central to dance improvisation practice. (shrink)

On 9 May 2005, the Israeli Ministry of Health issued guidelines spelling out the conditions under which sex selection by preimplantation genetic diagnosis for social purposes is to be permitted in Israel. This article first reviews the available medical methods for sex selection, the preference for children of a specific gender in various societies and the ethical controversies surrounding PGD for medical and social purposes in different countries. It focuses then on the question of whether procreative liberty or parental responsibility (...) should be the centre of attention in this context. Finally, the article critically examines the new Israeli guidelines and their implications for the women undergoing the necessary medical treatments, for the children born as a result, for other members of the family and for society in general. (shrink)

The David Lewis’s article concerns the issue of penal substitution in the dual context of the contemporary system of criminal law, in which punishment does not perform a compensatory function, and in the context of the Christian interpretation of Christ’s death as Atonement. It may seem that we do not believe in penal substitution, but in fact we do believe in it selectively. There are Christians who believe that Christ’s death is a payment of the debt of punishment owed by (...) the sinners, but do not believe that a murderer’s friend can serve on his behalf a death sentence. Most of us believe in penal substitution with reference to fines but not other kinds of punishment. In both cases the beliefs concerning penal substitution are clearly inconsistent. However, if selective acceptance of penal substitution is so common, perhaps it makes sense after all. (shrink)

There are striking parallels, largely unexplored in the literature, between skeptical arguments against theism and against moral realism. After sketching four arguments meant to do this double duty, I restrict my attention to an explanatory argument that claims that we have most reason to deny the existence of moral facts (and so, by extrapolation, theistic ones), because such putative facts have no causal-explanatory power. I reject the proposed parity, and offer reasons to think that the potential vulnerabilities of moral realism (...) on this front are quite different from those of the theist. Key Words: causal power • explanatory power • Gilbert Harman • moral facts • moral realism • theism. (shrink)

To deal with the upcoming challenges and complexity of the nursing profession, it is deemed important to reflect on our current organization of care. However, before starting to rethink the organization of nursing care, an overview of important elements concerning nursing care organization, more specifically nursing models, is necessary. The aim of this study was to conduct a mapping review, accompanied by an evidence map to map the existing literature, to map the field of knowledge on a meta‐level and to (...) identify current research gaps concerning nursing models in a hospital setting. Next to nursing models, two other organizational correlates seem to be of importance when looking at the organization of nursing care: nurse staffing and skill mix. Although it seems that in recent research, the theoretical focus on the organization of nursing care has been left behind, the increasingly complex healthcare environment might gain from the use of nursing theory, or in this case, care delivery models. As almost no fundamental studies have been done toward the combination of care delivery models, nurse staffing, and skill mix, those elements should be taken into account to fully capture the organization of nursing care in future research. (shrink)

Fundamental to spatial knowledge in all species are the representations underlying object recognition, object search, and navigation through space. But what sets humans apart from other species is our ability to express spatial experience through language. This target article explores the language ofobjectsandplaces, asking what geometric properties are preserved in the representations underlying object nouns and spatial prepositions in English. Evidence from these two aspects of language suggests there are significant differences in the geometric richness with which objects and places (...) are encoded. When an object is named (i.e., with count nouns), detailed geometric properties – principally the object's shape (axes, solid and hollow volumes, surfaces, and parts) – are represented. In contrast, when an object plays the role of either “figure” (located object) or “ground” (reference object) in a locational expression, only very coarse geometric object properties are represented, primarily the main axes. In addition, the spatial functions encoded by spatial prepositions tend to be nonmetric and relatively coarse, for example, “containment,” “contact,” “relative distance,” and “relative direction.” These properties are representative of other languages as well. The striking differences in the way language encodes objects versus places lead us to suggest two explanations: First, there is a tendency for languages to level out geometric detail from both object and place representations. Second, a nonlinguistic disparity between the representations of “what” and “where” underlies how language represents objects and places. The language of objects and places converges with and enriches our understanding of corresponding spatial representations. (shrink)

This paper reconstructs what I take to be the central evolutionary debunking argument that underlies recent critiques of moral realism. The argument claims that given the extent of evolutionary influence on our moral faculties, and assuming the truth of moral realism, it would be a massive coincidence were our moral faculties reliable ones. Given this coincidence, any presumptive warrant enjoyed by our moral beliefs is defeated. So if moral realism is true, then we can have no warranted moral beliefs, and (...) hence no moral knowledge. In response, I first develop what is perhaps the most natural reply on behalf of realism namely, that many of our highly presumptively warranted moral beliefs are immune to evolutionary influence and so can be used to assess and eventually resuscitate the epistemic merits of those that have been subject to such influence. I then identify five distinct ways in which the charge of massive coincidence has been understood and defended. I argue that each interpretation is subject to serious worries. If I am right, these putative defeaters are themselves subject to defeat. Thus many of our moral beliefs continue to be highly warranted, even if moral realism is true. (shrink)

The traditional conception of ethical theory sees it as the project of developing a coherent set of rules from which one can infer all determinate moral verdicts. I am not optimistic about the prospects for constructing such a theory. To explain this pessimism, we need to understand what moral rules are and what roles they might play in ethical theory.

Landau also pushes the role of syntax and its mapping to semantics in learning what some would consider “easy words”—the simplest spatial prepositions in English, in and on. Taking as a starting point that the syntactic distribution of a word is a reflex of its meaning, Landau shows that careful study of how children and adults linguistically encode a range of containment and support configurations reveals a special status for “core” configurations in each domain. She proposes that children (...) come to learning spatial terms with the expectation that configurations reflecting core concepts of containment and support will be expressed with the maximally simple, unmarked, linguistic expression. (shrink)

Introduction -- Part I: The good life -- Hedonism : its powerful appeal -- Is happiness all that matters? -- Getting what you want -- Problems for the desire theory -- Part II: Doing the right thing -- Morality and religion -- Natural law theory -- Psychological egoism -- Ethical egoism -- Consequentialism : its nature and attractions -- Consequentialism : its difficulties -- The kantian perspective : fairness and justice -- The kantian perspective : autonomy and respect -- The (...) social contract tradition : theory and attractions -- The social contract tradition : problems and prospects -- Ethical pluralism and absolute moral rules -- Ethical pluralism : prima facie duties and ethical particularism -- Virtue ethics -- Feminist ethics -- Part III: The status of morality -- Ethical relativism -- Moral nihilism -- Ten arguments against moral objectivity. (shrink)

Simon Blackburn has developed an interesting challenge to moral realism based on its alleged inability to account for supervenience relations between the moral and nonmoral. If supervenience holds, then any base property once giving rise to a supervening one must always do so. The realist accepts supervenience, but also (according to Blackburn) accepts the claim that nonmoral base properties do not necessitate the moral ones that supervene on them. This combination is thought deadly, because it leaves the realist without an (...) explanation of why ethical supervenience should be true. I offer three responses on behalf of the moral realist. The first rejects the need for explanation, arguing that supervenience should be understood as closely analogous to Leibniz's law, which, I argue, needs no defense. I next argue that ethical naturalism may be right, and if so, would provide an adequate response to Blackburn. Lastly, I show that the success of Blackburn's arguments implies a global antirealism, and so does not, as he claims, amount to a special problem for realism in ethics. (shrink)

The concept of corporate citizenship as a form of corporate social responsibility theory challenged the traditionally accepted socio‐economic division of labor between government and corporations. Although the concept has been around for decades, its validity and applicability are still a matter of debate, with attention to the “chameleon” nature of the concept. Therefore, this paper defines and applies a conceptual framework to examine whether corporate social and political engagement is necessary and, if so, in what form it is beneficial for (...) both the company and society. This is the objective of the present study. The method used in this paper is critical analysis, i.e. the evaluation of arguments both pro and con, and the comparison of these arguments with empirical evidence within the defined conceptual framework. The study shows that the demand for corporate activism is contradictory, so companies need to determine whose interests they represent or balance between different expectations. In addition to analyzing and evaluating corporate activism from a specific conceptual framework, the novelty of the study lies in its differentiated approach to corporate citizenship according to the scope of the companies and in the corresponding proposal for a new socio‐economic division of labor between governments and corporations. (shrink)

In this article, I revisit Landau and Jackendoff's () paper, “What and where in spatial language and spatial cognition,” proposing a friendly amendment and reformulation. The original paper emphasized the distinct geometries that are engaged when objects are represented as members of object kinds, versus when they are represented as figure and ground in spatial expressions. We provided empirical and theoretical arguments for the link between these distinct representations in spatial language and their accompanying nonlinguistic neural representations, emphasizing the (...) “what” and “where” systems of the visual system. In the present paper, I propose a second division of labor between two classes of spatial prepositions in English that appear to be quite distinct. One class includes prepositions such as in and on, whose core meanings engage force-dynamic, functional relationships between objects, with geometry only a marginal player. The second class includes prepositions such as above/below and right/left, whose core meanings engage geometry, with force-dynamic relationships a passing or irrelevant variable. The insight that objects’ force-dynamic relationships matter to spatial terms’ uses is not new; but thinking of these terms as a distinct set within spatial language has theoretical and empirical consequences that are new. I propose three such consequences, rooted in the fact that geometric knowledge is highly constrained and early-emerging in life, while force-dynamic knowledge of objects and their interactions is relatively unconstrained and needs to be learned piecemeal over a lengthy timeline. First, the two classes will engage different learning problems, with different developmental trajectories for both first and second language learners; second, the classes will naturally lead to different degrees of cross-linguistic variation; and third, they may be rooted in different neural representations. (shrink)

This paper explores the notions of competitive and noncompetitive value and examines how they both affect meaning in life. The paper distinguishes, among other things, between engaging with competitive value and participating in a competition; between competitive value and comparative value; between competing with others and competing with oneself; and between subjective and objective aspects of both competitive and noncompetitive value. Since any competitive value is also comparative value, the paper criticizes Harry Frankfurt’s claim that comparative value is just a (...) ‘formal characteristic of the relationship between two items’, from which nothing follows about their value or desirability. The paper also argues that, overall, noncompetitive value has the advantage overcompetitive value in terms of attaining meaning in life. Reasons for this claim include that: competitive value relates less than noncompetitive value to what is meaningful in life; competitive value is harder to attain than noncompetitive value; competitive value depends more than noncompetitive value on luck and on what other people do; and competitive value is more likely to lead to stress, hypocrisy, and aggression. (shrink)

Since September 11, 2001, many people in the United States have been more inclined to use the language of good and evil, and to be more comfortable with the idea that certain moral standards are objective (true independently of what anyone happens to think of them). Some people, especially those who are not religious, are not sure how to substantiate this view. Whatever Happened to Good and Evil? provides a basis for exploring these doubts and ultimately defends the objectivity of (...) ethics. Engaging and accessible, it is the first introduction to meta-ethics written especially for students and general readers with no philosophical background. Focusing on the issues at the foundation of morality, it poses such questions as: How can we know what is right and wrong? Does ethical objectivity require God? Why should I be moral? Where do moral standards come from? What is a moral value, and how can it exist in a scientific world? Do cultural diversity and persistent moral disagreement support moral skepticism? Writing in a clear and lively style and employing many examples to illustrate theoretical arguments, Russ Shafer-Landau identifies the many weaknesses in contemporary moral skepticism and devotes considerable attention to presenting, and critiquing, the most difficult objections to his view. Also included in the book are a helpful summary of all the major arguments covered, as well as a glossary of key philosophical terms. Whatever Happened to Good and Evil? is ideal for a variety of philosophy courses and compelling reading for anyone interested in ethics. (shrink)

This book describes the state of astrobiology in Europe today and its relation to the European society at large. With contributions from authors in more than 20 countries and over 30 scientific institutions worldwide, the document illustrates the societal implications of astrobiology and the positive contribution that astrobiology can make to European society. The book has two main objectives: 1. It recommends the establishment of a European Astrobiology Institute (EAI) as an answer to a series of challenges relating to astrobiology (...) but also European research, education, and society at large. 2. It also acknowledges the societal implications of astrobiology, and thus the role of the social sciences and humanities in optimizing the positive contribution that astrobiology can make to the lives of the people of Europe and the challenges they face. (shrink)

The variety of feminist thought has produced many fruitful discussions and debates. Liberal, radical, postmodern, psychoanalytic, and other feminists have criticized each others' work and underlying presuppositions. The aim of this paper is to point out a prejudice which has not yet received sufficient attention, although it lies at the base of a fair amount of feminist research: the bias that whereas men are bad and aggressive, women are good and peaceful. Although as an explicit view this contention has been (...) debated, its distortive influence on feminist research has so far remained undiscussed. In what follows I present examples of the effect of this bias on feminist research . Then I suggest why the bias has not yet been discussed . Finally I argue that feminist research should be as critically received and treated as any other. (shrink)

Oxford Studies in Metaethics is the only periodical publication devoted exclusively to original philosophical work on the foundations of ethics. It provides an annual selection of much of the best new scholarship in the field. Its broad purview includes work at the intersections of ethical theory with metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. OSME provides an excellent basis for understanding recent developments in the field; those who would like to acquaint themselves with the current state of play (...) in metaethics would do well to start here. (shrink)

Oxford Studies in Metaethics is the only publication devoted exclusively to original philosophical work in the foundations of ethics. It provides an annual selection of much of the best new scholarship being done in the field. Its broad purview includes work being done at the intersection of ethical theory and metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. The essays included in the series provide an excellent basis for understanding recent developments in the field; those who would like to (...) acquaint themselves with the current state of play in metaethics would do well to start here. (shrink)

I criticize an important argument of Michael Smith, from his recent book The Moral Problem (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). Smith's argument, if sound, would undermine one form of moral externalism 2013 that which insists that moral judgements only contingently motivate their authors. Smith claims that externalists must view good agents as always prompted by the motive of duty, and that possession of such a motive impugns the goodness of the agent. I argue (i) that externalists do not (ordinarily) need to assign (...) moral agents such as a motive, and (ii) that possession of this motive, when properly understood, is morally admirable. (shrink)

_Ethical Theory: An Anthology_ is an authoritative collection of key essays by top scholars in the field, addressing core issues including consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics, as well as traditionally underrepresented topics such as moral knowledge and moral responsibility. Brings together seventy-six classic and contemporary pieces by renowned philosophers, from classic writing by Hume and Kant to contemporary writing by Derek Parfit, Susan Wolf, and Judith Jarvis Thomson Guides students through key areas in the field, among them consequentialism, deontology, contractarianism, (...) and virtue ethics Includes coverage of metaethics, normative ethics, and practical ethics Reaches beyond traditional texts by also including important, but usually underrepresented, topics such as moral knowledge, moral standing, moral responsibility, and ethical particularism Raises questions about the status and rational authority of morality. (shrink)

This paper argues that participants in the subjectivism/objectivism/hybridism debate, a central issue in recent meaning in life research, conflate two different distinctions marked by the terms objective and subjective, one having to do with the question of whether life's meaningfulness depends on factors internal or external to the agent, the other having to do with the question of whether there is any ‘absolute’ as opposed to ‘relative’ truth about the first question. The paper then argues that a distinctive type of (...) hybridism with respect to the first sense is true. To vindicate this type of hybridism, the paper identifies, by using examples and counterexamples, internal and external necessary conditions for having meaningful lives. In this type of hybridism, internal states that are not directed at external factors, such as autonomy, serenity and contentment, are also taken account of, and, more generally, internal and external factors need not relate to each other at all. Further, although the more a combination of internal and external factors is valuable the more meaningful a life is, not any increase in the value of any relevant internal or external factor enhances meaning. (shrink)

Are moral systems actually impediments to leading a truly good human life? What is good and what is not good? Do we need anyone to tell us these things? With Russ Shaffer-Landau, Bryan Van Norden, and Richard Garner.

Based on an analysis of 137 texts written by pupils, this paper examines pupils? humour directed at teachers, its types and social functions. The collected data are divided into three categories that describe different modes of teachers as targets of pupils? humour. The first mode describes teachers as unintentionally comical, the second as duped by their pupils and the third as intentional users of humour. The analysis focuses on different functions that pupils? humour directed at teachers fulfils in the social (...) life of the classroom. The paper concludes by showing how key functions of social humour (such as creation of solidarity, negotiation of power and realisation of personal needs) are connected to the three modes of pupils? humour directed at teachers. (shrink)