This paper investigates why some companies give to charity and others do not. The study uncovers a strong relationship between the personal attitudes of the charitable decision maker and the firm's giving behavior. This relationship indicates that the human element of personal attitudes may interact and play a very important role in a firm's decision to become involved with philanthropic activities. The study also shows that firms who have a history of giving to charity cite altruistic motives for their behavior. (...) On the other hand, firms that do not give to charity tend to use business reasons to explain their non-involvement. (shrink)

The primary objective was to review pediatric ethics consultations at a large academic health center over a nine year period, assessing demographics, ethical issues, and consultant intervention. The secondary objective was to describe the evolution of PECs at our institution. This was a retrospective review of Consultation Summary Sheets compiled for PECs at our Academic Health Center between January 2008 and April 2017. There were 165 PECs reviewed during the study period. Most consult requests came from the inpatient setting, with (...) the Pediatric and Neonatal Intensive Care Units being the highest utilizers. Consultation utilization increased over the study period. The most common patient age was less than one year. Physicians were most likely to request consultation. Patient Best Interest, Withholding/Withdrawing of Life Sustaining Therapy, and Provider Moral Distress were ethical issues most commonly identified by the consultants. Making recommendations was the most common consultant intervention. The ethics consultation process evolved over time from informal provider discussions, to a hospital infant care review committee, to a pediatric only consultation service, to a combined adult/pediatric consultation service, with variable levels of salary support for consultants. Ethics consultation requests are growing at our institution. Similarities in identified ethical issues exist between our findings and existing literature, however meaningful comparisons remains elusive secondary to variability in approaches to investigation and reporting. A combined paid/volunteer/trainee ethics consultation service model appears sustainable and real time ethics consultation is feasible using this approach. (shrink)

There is a consensus among interpreters that Kant denies non-human animals possess discursive abilities but that he ascribes to them conscious representations in some more primitive sense. I argue this latter interpretive claim is not justified by the textual evidence. There is in Kant’s early published writings and unpublished remarks extensive evidence that he denies animals possess conscious representations. I examine this material in detail. I explain the competing view of Georg Friedrich Meier (1718-1777), at which some of Kant’s early (...) remarks are directed. I then explain Kant’s denial of animal consciousness with reference to his early views on the relation between faculty psychology, the capacity for judgment, and consciousness. Corroborating evidence for Kant’s denial of animal consciousness occurs in remarks in the student lecture notes that span thirty years. I explain why the strongest textual evidence to which interpreters have typically appealed is inadequate for ascribing to Kant a commitment to animal consciousness. This paper helps clarify the interpretive challenges for those who wish to claim the Critical Kant ascribes consciousness to animals. (shrink)

Rudolf Carnap gilt unbestritten als einer der eminentesten Vertreter des logischen Empirismus. Im Band 2 der Reihe "Texte zur Wissenschaftlichen Weltauffassung" werden alle wesentlichen Aspekte seiner Philosophie zusammenhAngend dargestellt und kritisch analysiert. Lothar Krauth beurteilt dabei Carnaps Bedeutung vor einem breiten, philosophiehistorischen Hintergrund. Nicht nur sein EinfluA und seine Vordenkerrolle im Wiener Kreis werden diskutiert, sondern auch die mehrfache Wandlung in Carnaps Denken. So erklArt sich manche allzu groAe Vereinfachung, mancher Radikalismus als erster Ansatz, der spAter A1/4berarbeitet, zu einem (...) tragfAhigen Bestandteil kommender analytischer Sprachtheorie ausgebaut wurde. (shrink)

We provide a justification for political liberalism’s Reciprocity Principle, which states that political decisions must be justified exclusively on the basis of considerations that all reasonable citizens can reasonably be expected to accept. The standard argument for the Reciprocity Principle grounds it in a requirement of respect for persons. We argue for a different, but compatible, justification: the Reciprocity Principle is justified because it makes possible a desirable kind of political community. The general endorsement of the Reciprocity Principle, we will (...) argue, helps realize joint political rule and relationships of civic friendship. The main obstacle to the realization of these values is the presence of reasonable disagreement about religious, moral, and philosophical issues characteristic of liberal societies. We show the Reciprocity Principle helps to overcome this obstacle. (shrink)

Environmental controversies are often framed as conflicts between environmentalist and antienvironmentalist positions. The underlying dimensions of ethics and justice tend to be overlooked. This article seeks to integrate insights from environmental ethics and sociological observations through a case study of a watershed conflict. A controversy emerged in the 1990s when residents of the New York City watershed filed a lawsuit to block NYC’s proposed regulations for the land surrounding the streams and reservoirs that supply NYC’s drinking water. The conflict was (...) resolved after NYC agreed to provide economic development funds to the watershed towns in exchange for accepting the regulations. An analysis of interviews with NYC watershed town supervisors reveals that the conflict was resolved because underlying competing theories of justice were addressed. This contradicts the popular narrative that an environmental conflict can be resolved when competing parties come to the realization that natural ecosystems provide valuable water-purification services. (shrink)

Philosophy &Public Affairs, Volume 47, Issue 1, Page 72-103, Winter 2019.

Philosophers after Leibniz used a technical idiom to classify and explain the nature of mental content. Substantive philosophical claims were formulated in terms of this vocabulary, including claims about the nature of mental representations, concepts, unconscious mental content, and consciousness. Despite its importance, the origin and development of this vocabulary is insufficiently well understood. More specifically, interpreters have failed to recognize the existence of two distinct and influential versions of the post-Leibnizian idiom. These competing formulations used the same technical terms (...) and taxonomic relations but assigned different connotations to those terms and employed different criteria for their application. This paper explains the two most influential versions of the post-Leibnizian idiom. (shrink)

This paper examines some French feminist uses of Lacanian psychoanalysis. I focus on two Lacanian influenced accounts of psychological oppression, the first by Luce Irigaray and the second by Julia Kristeva, and I argue that these accounts fail to meet criteria for an adequate political psychology.

According to a traditional view, one lies if and only if one asserts what one believes is false and with the intent to deceive one’s audience. Recently, many theorists have challenged the requirement of intent to deceive. The principal reason offered appeals to so-called bald-faced lies wherein one asserts what one believes is false without intent to deceive. I argue that, assuming a reasonable model of assertion, two of the most prominent examples of bald-faced lies fail to be genuinely assertoric. (...) As such, they fail as counter-examples to the view that intent to deceive is a necessary condition on lying. (shrink)

The essays in "The Crisis of American Democracy: Essays on a Failing Institution" seek to answer central questions about American democracy, such as: if American democracy is failing, what are the causes of this failure? What are the consequences? And what can be done to fix it? These standalone essays present diverse perspectives on some of the impediments to achieving a true democracy in the present-day United States of America, as well as prescriptions for overcoming these obstacles. Leading academics from (...) across North America, contribute their perspectives on this timely debate. (shrink)

Given recent scientific findings suggesting that our world is part of a multiverse, Leland Harper argues that we ought to abandon the idea of an active God in Judeo-Christian theism. This shift results in a more coherent, cohesive and, ultimately, better account of God than is currently offered by the Judeo-Christian monotheistic tradition.

Political liberals ask citizens not to appeal to certain considerations, including religious and philosophical convictions, in political deliberation. We argue that political liberals must include a demanding requirement of intellectual modesty in their ideal of citizenship in order to motivate this deliberative restraint. The requirement calls on each citizen to believe that the best reasoners disagree about the considerations that she is barred from appealing to. Along the way, we clarify how requirements of intellectual modesty relate to moral reasons for (...) deliberative restraint. And we argue against attempts to weaken our requirement of intellectual modesty by emphasizing those moral reasons. (shrink)

Some interpreters claim Kant distinguishes between organisms and living things. I argue that this claim is underdetermined by the textual evidence. Once this is recognized, it becomes a real possibility that Kant’s various remarks about the essential properties of living things generalize to organisms as such. This, in turn, generates a puzzle. Kant repeatedly claims that the capacity for representation is essential to the nature of a living thing. If he does not distinguish between living things and organisms, then how (...) might the capacity for representation be essential to the latter? Drawing on the writings of Kant and his contemporaries, I reconstruct a framework within which representational capacities might conceivably be thought to play this role. On this view, what distinguishes an organism from mechanically explicable products of nature is its capacity for endogenous behavior that is instinctual and representationally mediated. (shrink)

This chapter explores how morality can be rational if moral intuitions are resistant to rational reflection. There are two parts to this question. The normative problem is whether there is a model of moral justification which can show that morality is a rational enterprise given the facts of moral dumbfounding. Appealing to the model of reflective equilibrium for the rational justification of moral intuitions solves this problem. Reflective equilibrium views the rational justification of morality as a back-and-forth balancing between moral (...) theory and moral intuition, and therefore does not require that individual moral intuitions be directly responsive to rational reflection. The psychological problem is whether human psychology actually implements the processes required for reflective equilibrium. The psychological problem is far more difficult, and requires appealing to a dual-process view of moral judgement that regards moral intuitions and moral theories as belonging to different mental systems. (shrink)

There is an emerging consensus among interpreters that in his Critical writings Kant ascribes unconscious representations to the mind. The nature and extent of this ascription over the course of Kant’s philosophical development is however not well understood. I argue that from his earliest published writings Kant consistently ascribes unconscious representations to the mind; that some of these representations are unconscious in the strong sense that they are not available to introspection; and that Kant extends his commitment to unconscious representations (...) by ascribing to the mind unconscious acts of judging and reasoning. (shrink)

One of the central questions in both metaethics and empirical moral psychology is whether moral judgments are the products of reason or emotions. This way of putting the question relies on an overly simplified view of reason and emotion as two fully independent cognitive faculties whose causal contributions to moral judgment can be cleanly separated. However, there is a significant body of evidence in the cognitive sciences that seriously undercuts this conception of reason and emotion, and supports the view that (...) moral judgments are caused by a complex interplay of psychological mechanisms that are both cognitive and affective, but in a way that is not simply a function of the independent causal contributions of reason and emotion. The paper concludes by considering the implications of this view for metaethics. (shrink)

In the 1950s and 1960s, prominent institutional economists in the United States offered what became the orthodox theory on the obstacles to commercializing scientific knowledge. According to this theory, scientific knowledge has inherent qualities that make it a public good. Since the 1970s, however, neoliberalism has emphasized the need to convert public goods to private goods to enhance economic growth, and this theory has had global impacts on policies governing the generation and diffusion of scientific research and innovation. We critique (...) the foundational conceptualizations of scientific knowledge as either public or private by examining Germany’s treatment of scientific outputs as club goods. We then compare the relative impacts on social welfare of distinct United States and German approaches to food and agricultural research and innovation. We conclude with reflections on how these findings might contribute to a democratic debate on how best to manage scientific knowledge to enhance social welfare. (shrink)

Some claim Kant’s commitment to the explanatory priority of judgments over concepts is one of his most important contributions to the philosophy of mind. There is, however, extensive disagreement over the nature and extent of this commitment. Existing interpretations ignore a substantial body of textual evidence and offer no account of the origins of Kant’s view. This paper corrects for these deficiencies. I explain, first, the relevant accounts of concept possession Kant encountered in the writings of his predecessors; and, second, (...) how within this context he first expressed a commitment to the view that conceptual content is explanatorily dependent on acts of judgment. I then argue that Kant endorsed a second form of discursive primacy, namely, the view that every use of a concept in conscious thought about an object has the form of a judgment. (shrink)

As efforts to commercialize university research outputs continue, critics charge that universities and university scientists are failing to live up to their public-interest purpose. In this paper, I discuss the distinctions between public-interest and private-interest research institutions and how commercialization of university science may be undermining the public interest. I then use Jürgen Habermas’s concept of communicative action as the foundation for efforts to establish public spaces for ethical deliberation among scientists and university administrators. Such ethical deliberation is necessary to (...) facilitate discussion on whether public-interest science should be the research university’s primary purpose and what institutional rules and resources are needed to honor that purpose. (shrink)

Seemingly, in an attempt to appease both the micro-physicists and the classical theists, Nancey Murphy and Thomas Tracy have each developed accounts of God which allow for Him to act, in an otherwise causally closed natural world, through various micro-processes at the subatomic level. I argue that not only do each of these views skew the accounts of both micro-physics and theism just enough to preclude the appeasement of either group but that both accounts can aptly be classified as, what (...) I term, epistemic deism. I go on to argue that epistemic deism is a weak brand of deism that ultimately provides us with little to no answers to any of serious questions discussed within the philosophy or religion. (shrink)

This book unearths and outlines the semantic foundations of white fragility and their consequences for racial justice in the United States. It argues that by expanding our racial vocabulary in certain ways, we can make progress toward justice equally enjoyed by all.

Annie Besant has rarely been identified as a philosopher. Her work as an ethicist has been obscured by the reaction of critics to her abandonment of Anglican Christianity for serial eng...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 30.2 (2000) 3-24 [Access article in PDF] Agamben's Potential Leland Deladurantaye Giorgio Agamben. Potentialities: Collected Essays In Philosophy. Ed., trans., and intro. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1999. [P] It is only after a long and arduous frequenting of names, definitions, and facts that the spark is lit in the soul which, in enflaming it, marks the passage from passion to accomplishment.--Giorgio Agamben, The Idea of (...) ProseIn a preface written for the French translation of his Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience, Giorgio Agamben states that"every written work can be regarded as the prologue (or rather, the broken cast) of a work never penned, and destined to remain so, because later works, which in turn will be the prologues or the moulds for other absent works, represent only sketches or death masks." 1 This remark, which describes every work of art as a preface, does not simply refer to the impossibility of translating the all of life into a single work. Nor does it simply refer to those purely empirical obstacles which stand in the way of creation, preventing the work of art from attaining the plenitude it might have hoped for had not greedy wine-merchants, harrying tailors, and eloquent panderers distracted the Great Minds from their tasks. Instead, in returning every work of art to its originary hesitation, in evoking the oscillation between work and draft, effort and accomplishment, Agamben invokes a much richer and darker potentiality lying at the heart of the work. It is this richer and darker potentiality that constitutes the central concern of Agamben's thought and that gives its name to this collection. Yet what is named in this potentiality? What is the nature of the potentiality of which Agamben speaks? What is this potentiality the potential for?Before advancing in the investigation of this question, let us look briefly at what is gathered together under its name. In this collection of essays by a thinker of unquestionable brilliance one finds a number of axes. The first of these is that of chronology: the essays presented in this volume stretch from 1975 to 1996 and thus cover the period during which works such as Stanzas, Infancy and History, The Idea of Prose, and The Coming Community were prepared and published. The second axis--the one that dictates the ordering of the texts found in this volume and which is the choice of the editor and not the author--is a thematic one: the book is divided into four sections entitled respectively, "Language," "History," "Potentiality," and "Contingency." 2 One notes the presence of other, more fugitive axes such as those which can be found in connections between different essays in the collection (as in the case of the remark from a late Byzantine lexicon cited in the closing paragraphs of the first essay, which receives a magisterial, thirty-page gloss in the last, richest essay in the collection) and between the essays gathered together in this volume and Agamben's other written works (the question [End Page 3] of the genealogy of the sacred, which lies at the heart of Agamben's most recent works, is evoked here in the closing lines of the eighth essay in this collection; the question of a philosophy of life as the coming philosophy in the chronologically final essay in this volume [chapter 14] thus announces Agamben's more recent studies on the politico-philosophical concept of life). These last two axes confront the reader with all the more urgency, as no major thinker since Walter Benjamin has occupied himself with such a tensely, densely interconnected constellation of concerns at the heart of such seeming diversity of subject. At the hub of these axes, which accelerate and blur in the reading of the work, lies the animating, abiding concern of Agamben's thought: potentiality. The Potentiality of Language, or Matter 1.1 This preface with which we began, and which finds itself near the chronological midpoint of the essays gathered together in this volume, contains a singular profession de foi. After suggesting that, "if for every author there exists a... (shrink)

We agree with Cesario's premise but reject his conclusion: Although experimental studies of racial stereotyping, weapons perception, and shoot decisions typically exclude real-world contextual factors and thus have limited relevance to race disparities, these excluded factors comprise systemic, institutional, and individual-level biases that are more likely to amplify racial disparities than negate them.

Science and technology studies (STS) research challenges the concept of technological determinism by investigating how the end users of a technology influence that technology’s trajectory. STS critiques of determinism are needed in studies of agricultural technology. However, we contend that focusing on the agency of end users may mask the role of political-economic factors which influence technology developments and applications. This paper seeks to mesh STS insights with political-economic perspectives by accounting for relationships between availability of diverse technologies, variations in (...) political-economic structures, and farmer interests and characteristics. We present the results of an analysis on the recent development of three wheat varieties: (a) a wheat variety that was modified genetically to tolerate the herbicide glyphosate, (b) wheat varieties with characteristics selected to serve specific markets, (c) and emerging research and development of perennial wheat varieties. Using data obtained through a survey of wheat growers in Washington State, we analyzed whether farmer interest in these three clusters of wheat varieties was associated with distinct individual characteristics and attitudes and whether those characteristics and attitudes are consistent with political economic structures. Although our analysis did not allow us to assess the degree of direct influence that farmers have on the technological development trajectory for these types of wheat, we were able to document variation in technological alternatives and farmer characteristics related to different political-economic trends. (shrink)

When Leland Miles arrived as the University of Bridgeport's new president in 1974, the institution had substantial financial problems, declining enrollments, and a newly unionized faculty. This essay is a first-person account of his efforts to work with an immature union and his attempt to save the Liberal Arts at a time of growing student demand for professional degrees.

From the mid 1990s to the early 2000s there has been a debate between Jerome Gellman and Evan Fales regarding the epistemic status of mystical religious experience. Gellman argues that mystical religious experiences provide some justification for the belief that God exists when taken in conjunction with a variety of other experiential evidence. Fales takes a naturalistic approach and argues that instances of mystical theistic experiences are only tools by which the mystic attempts to gain greater social status. In this (...) article I summarize the debate and go on to raise three objections to Fales’ naturalistic account: that any naturalistic explanation would fail to account for the richness and variety of all mystical religious experiences; that if there were a naturalistic account for each and every mystical religious experience across time then the list of naturalistic explanations would be so exhaustive that it would seem arbitrary that no theistic explanation is included; and that the brand of reductionism put forth by Fales only shows that, at best, it would not be reasonable for external observers to take my mystical religious experience as evidence for God’s existence, but that this should make absolutely no difference to the experiencer. (shrink)