We have arrived at an inflection point, a moment in history when the sentience, conscious- ness, intelligence, agency, and even the moral agency of many nonhuman animals can no longer be questioned without ignoring centuries of accumulated scientific knowledge. Nowhere is this more true than in our understanding of nonhuman primates (NHPs). A neu- roethics committed to probing the ethical implications of brain research must be able to respond to and anticipate the challenges ahead as brain projects globally prepare to (...) increase the use of NHPs in research. This requires adopting a less anthropocentric focus that includes nonhuman animals within its scope. But the Neuroethics Roadmap represents a missed opportunity to critically examine the future direction of research with NHPs in an ethically-responsive neuroscience. (shrink)

Currently living people cannot be said to be wronged because of the wrongless emissons of greenhouse gases by past people. According to the usual subjunctive-historical understanding of harm, currently living people cannot be said to be harmed by the impact of greenhouse emissions on their well-being. By relying on a subjunctive-threshold notion of harm we can justify conclusions about both the present generation’s duties not to violate the rights of future generations, and the present generation’s duties to compensate currently living (...) people for the harms inflicted upon them through the lasting impact of wrongless past harms. This interpretation supports a forward-looking understanding of the grounds of our relating to wrongless past harms. The significance of past harms lies in their consequences for the well-being of currently living and future people. The subjunctive-threshold notion of harm lends support to a standard of minimal, general, and universal justice. Those actors who are in a position to fulfill its requirements are under a duty to do so. Especially the rich and powerful countries ought to counteract the harmful impact of past greenhouse emissions. (shrink)

Quentin Smith has argued (Philosophical Studies, 1987, pp. 371-392) that the token-reflexive and the date versions of the new tenseless theory of time are open to insurmountable difficulties. I argue that Smith's central arguments are irrelevant since they rest upon methodological assumptions accepted by the old tenseless theory, but rejected by the new tenseless theory.

In a recent article in this journal, Heidi Giannini (2017) has argued that the Christian doctrines of love and of hope require Christians to endorse universal, unconditional forgiveness, understood in terms of the renunciation of “negative reactive attitudes.” She also addresses criticisms of this interpretation. It is argued that Giannini has failed to provide a Christian justification for universal, unconditional forgiveness. Part of the problem is that she espouses a definition of forgiveness and an understanding of the nature of forgiveness (...) that, as a result of neglecting the teaching of the New Testament, exhibits a number of incoherencies and theological weaknesses. Her account is also vulnerable to philosophical and moral criticisms of a serious nature. (shrink)

It is shown that the paradoxes of confirmation are closely linked to the paradoxes of material implication and that they can be avoided by formulating natural laws in terms of a genuine if-Connective rather than the material conditional. However, Natural laws so expressed are not confirmed by simple conjunctions. The question then is whether the common assumption that simple conjunctions do confirm universal generalizations is correct. The answer given is that it is not. In particular, A confirming proposition of the (...) form 'this is a black raven' is not equivalent to 'this is a raven and this is black'. (shrink)

It sometimes happens that a philosopher will develop a view on some topic and then later come to reject it. J. L. Austin was perhaps unique in that he not only rejected a philosophical view of which he himself was the author, he patiently developed the view and then showed it to be ultimately unsatisfactory within the compass of the same work. And he did this not once but three times, in material intended for publication. I am thinking, of course, (...) of his notion of performative utterances: the view that there is a class of utterance, the members of which would on standard grammatical grounds be classed as statements, yet whose proper business is not to state anything but to perform some act. For example, to say ‘I promise to be there’ is to promise to be there, and not to state that one promises nor even to state that one will be there. (shrink)

Jerry L. Walls, the author of books on hell and heaven, completes his tour of the afterlife with a philosophical and theological exploration and defense of purgatory, the traditional teaching that most Christians require a period of postmortem cleansing and purging of their sinful dispositions and imperfections before they will be fully made ready for heaven. He examines Protestant objections to the doctrine and shows that the doctrine of purgatory has been construed in different ways, some of which are fully (...) compatible with Protestant theology. In particular, while purgatory has often been understood as matter of punishment in order to make satisfaction for sins that have not been fully remitted, it can also be seen as the completion of the sanctification process, an account of the doctrine that is fully consistent with the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith. Purgatory assumes not only continuity of personal identity but also gradual moral and spiritual growth between death and resurrection. Different theories of personal identity are examined and assessed in light of these assumptions. Walls also shows that the traditional doctrine of purgatory is not understood as a second chance for salvation, but goes on to argue that it should be modified to allow for postmortem repentance. He concludes with an examination of C.S. Lewis's writings on purgatory, and suggests that Lewis can be a model for evangelicals and other Protestants to engage the doctrine of purgatory in a way that is true to their theology. (shrink)

A student considering a career as a financial advisor is confronted by a common industry practice that some consider misleading and unethical. The case fosters financial literacy by allowing students to connect theory to practice through the analysis of a highly realistic brokerage statement using Microsoft Excel. It permits an instructor to seamlessly inject an ethical component into an accounting or finance course while simultaneously sharpening students' understanding of key financial concepts such as bond valuation and yield to maturity.

This paper describes the change of emphasis that occurred in the teaching of ethics to small groups of clinical students. Although the original focus of the course was on the analysis of ethical dilemmas associated with individual patients known to the students, it soon became evident that there were, for the students themselves, more fundamental ethical dilemmas in their new role as clinical students. These included worries about how to respond when patients asked questions which their consultants had previously deceived (...) them about, worries about inflicting pain on patients, as with intravenous cannulation, and the role of the medical student in the clinical team. We emphasise the need to explore student experiences as part of the process of ethics teaching. (shrink)

A new formulation involving fulfillment of all the Kolmogorov axioms is suggested for acomplete probability theory. This proves to be not a purely mathematical discipline. Probability theory deals with abstract objects—images of various classes of concrete objects—whereas experimental statistics deals with concrete objects alone. Both have to be taken into account. Quantum physics and classical statistical physics prove to be different aspects ofone probabilistic physics. The connection of quantum mechanics with classical statistical mechanics is examined and the origin of the (...) Schrödinger equation is elucidated. Attention is given to the true meaning of the wave-corpuscle duality, and the incompleteness of nonrelativistic quantum mechanics is explained. (shrink)