We argue on consequentialist grounds for the transfer of Sandai, an orangutan, to an orangutan sanctuary. First, we show that satisfying his interest in being transferred brings far greater value than the value achieved by keeping him confined. Second, we show that he has the capacities sufficient for personhood. Third, we show that all persons have a right to relative liberty insofar as they have interests they can exercise only under conditions of relative liberty. Fourth, we show that individuals need (...) not be able to assume social obligations and duties in order to be rights holders. -/- Our argument reflects commitments, as we say, to consequentialist reasoning about moral problems. However, we note that influential representatives of the other dominant ethical traditions—the deontological and Aristotelian traditions—reach our conclusion, too. It makes no difference, in this instance, which ethical theory one adopts. Under all of them, Sandai is a person with an interest in relative liberty entitled to habeas corpus protection. (shrink)

We present ethical reasons that the court should grant the Nonhuman Rights Project’s (NhRP) request for habeas corpus relief for Happy, an elephant. Happy has a basic interest in not being confined, an interest that should be legally protected just as the human interest in not being confined is legally protected. Since the decision in The Nonhuman Rights Project, Inc. v Breheny failed to weigh Happy’s interests properly, we ask this body to correct the error.

Should the law recognize an elephant’s right to be released from solitary confinement? The New York State Court of Appeals—the highest court in the State of New York—will consider this question on May 18. At issue is an Asian elephant named Happy. But happy she is not. Every human being has a right to bodily liberty because they have strong interests that this right protects. Since Happy has the same strong interests, the Court should recognize Happy’s right to be freed (...) from solitary confinement. (shrink)

FOREWORD. Gilbert Gottlieb and the Developmental Point of View. I. INTRODUCTION. 1. Developmental Systems, Nature-Nurture, and the Role of Genes in Behavior and Development: On the Legacy of Gilbert Gottlieb. 2. Normally Occurring Environmental and Behavioral Influences on Gene Activity: From Central Dogma to Probabilistic Epigenesis. II. THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS FOR THE DEVELOPMENTAL STUDY OF BEHAVIOR AND GENETICS. 3. Historical and Philosophical Perspectives on Behavioral Genetics and Developmental Science. 4. Development and Evolution Revisited. 5. Probabilistic Epigenesis and Modern Behavioral and Neural (...) Genetics. 6. The Roles of Environment, Experience, and Learning in Behavioral Development. 7. Contemporary Ideas in Physics and Biology in Gottlieb’s Psychology. III. EMPIRICAL STUDIES OF BEHAVIORAL DEVELOPMENT AND GENETICS. 8. Behavioral Development during the Mother-Young Interaction in Placental Mammals: The Development of Behavior in the Relationship with the Mother. 9. Amniotic Fluid as an Extended Milieu Interieur. 10. Developmental Effects of Selective Breeding for an Infant Trait. 11. Emergence and Constraint in Novel Behavioral Adaptations. 12. Nonhuman Primate Research Contributions to Understanding Genetic and Environmental Influences on Phenotypic Outcomes across Development. 13. Interactive Contributions of Genes and Early Experience to Behavioural Development: Sensitive Periods and Lateralized Brain and Behaviour. 14. Trans-Generational Epigenetic Inheritance. 15. The Significance of Non-Replication of Gene-Phenotype Associations. 16. Canalization and Malleability Reconsidered: The Developmental Basis of Phenotypic Stability and Variability. IV. APPLICATIONS TO DEVELOPMENT. 17. Gene-Parenting Interplay in the Development of Infant Emotionality. 18. Genetic Research in Psychiatry and Psychology: A Critical Overview. 19. On the Limits of Standard Quantitative Genetic Modeling of Inter-Individual Variation: Extensions, Ergodic Conditions and a New Genetic Factor Model of Intra-Individual Variation. 20. Songs My Mother Taught Me: Gene-Environment Interactions, Brain Development and the Auditory System: Thoughts on Non-Kin Rejection, Part II. 21. Applications of Developmental Systems Theory to Benefit Human Development: On the Contributions of Gilbert Gottlieb to Individuals, Families, and Communities. (shrink)

Jeffrey King, Scott Soames, and others have recently challenged the familiar identification of a Russellian proposition, such as the proposition that Brutus stabbed Caesar, with an ordered sequence constructed out of objects, properties, and relations. There is, as they point out, a surplus of candidate sequences available that are each equally serviceable. If so, any choice among these candidates will be arbitrary. In this paper, I show that, unless a controversial assumption is made regarding the nature of nonsymmetrical relations, none (...) of the proffered candidate sequences are in fact adequate to the play the role. Moreover, as I argue, the most promising alternative theory of relations—one that avoids the problematic assumption and, in addition, fits most naturally into the sequentialist’s framework—fails to meet a basic requirement: it cannot distinguish between the proposition that Brutus stabbed Caesar and the proposition that Caesar stabbed Brutus. The upshot is that the conspicuously structured entities that are widely assumed to be up to the task of “playing the proposition role” shed no light on the very structure they are invoked to represent. (shrink)

This volume, the twenty-fifth year of published proceedings, contains papers and commentaries presented to the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy during academic year 2008-9. The papers treat thinkers ranging from Heraclitus and Anaxagoras, to Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, and to Chyrsippus and Proclus.

This volume, the twenty-eighnth year of published proceedings, contains papers and commentaries presented to the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy during academic year 2011-12. The papers treat thinkers ranging from early Greek cosmology, to several on Plato and one each on Aristotle and Plotinus.

A fundamental shift has taken place in the relationship between images of the past and educational policy making. In the 1930s and 1940s, a shared public past was incorporated in State policy to denote gradual evolution towards improvement in education and in the wider society. This consensual image has become fractured and less comforting especially since the 1970s. In particular, it has divided into a largely alienated or estranged public past, and personalised images of a reassuring and nostalgic 'private past'. (...) This privatising of the past has exerted an increasing influence in education policy in the 1980s and 1990s, reflecting the concurrent trend towards an emphasis on 'choice and diversity' in education. (shrink)

My reply to Macpherson begins by addressing whether it is effects of cognition on early vision or perceptual performance that I am interested in. I proceed to address Macpherson’s comments on evidence from cross-modal effects, interpretations of linguistic effects on image detection, evidence from illusions, and the usefulness of predictive coding for understanding cognitive penetration. By stressing the interactive and distributed nature of neural processing, I am committing to a collapse between perception and cognition. Following such a collapse, the very (...) question of whether cognition affects perception becomes ill-posed, but this may be for the best. (shrink)

Management plays an important role in reinforcing ethics in organizations. To support this aim, managers must use incentive and goal programs in ethical ways. This study examines experimentally the potential ethical costs associated with incentive-driven and goal-induced employee behavior from a managerial perspective. In a quasi-experimental setting, 243 MBA students with significant professional work experience evaluated a hypothetical employee’s ethical behavior under incentive pay systems modeled on a business case. In the role of the employee’s manager, participants evaluated the ethicality (...) of the employee’s incentive-driven and goal-induced ethical/unethical behavior and the outcomes of behavior, with consequences that were either favorable or unfavorable to the organization. The results indicated that participants discounted the ethical considerations of incentive-driven and goal-induced behavior when consequences were favorable to the organization. Participants’ morals and outcome orientations were also significantly related to their ethical judgments and intentions to intervene. The implications of these findings for research and practice are discussed. (shrink)

This article marshals the known evidence for the political relations between the Seljuk sultan of Anatolia or Rūm, Kay Kāʾūs I (r. 608–616/1211–1220), and the Assassins or Ismailis in Iran and Syria. This evidence indicates that the sultan corresponded with the grand master of the Assassins in Iran, was aware of their activities in western Iran and of their coreligionists in Syria, paid protection money to them, and included them in his political calculations.

Drawing deeply from Wittgenstein's later works, Thomas Morawetz has articulated a vision of legal decision making according to which it is not a defect, but inherent in the very nature of law, for there to be disagreement among judges regarding their legal decision‐making strategies. Central to Morawetz's account is the notion of a legal grammatical proposition. This essay argues that because legal grammatical remarks lack any truth‐value, they cannot play a justificatory role. This would imply that the rule of law (...) is no more justifiable than the violent alternatives used by anarchists and religious fanatics. (shrink)

According to the naive theory of belief reports, our intuition that “Lois believes that Kent flies” is false results from our mistakenly identifying what this sentence implicates, which is false, with what it says, which is true. Whatever the merits of this proposal, it is here argued that the naive theory’s analysis of negative belief reports—sentences such as “Lois doesn't believe that Kent flies”—gives rise to equally problematic clashes with intuition, but that in this case no “pragmatic” explanation is available. (...) In particular, it is argued that there are situations at which, although “Lois believes that Superman flies” and “Lois doesn't believe that Kent flies” appear consistent, a speaker must contradict himself when he utters both. It is also argued that the hidden-indexical theory of belief reports—which otherwise respects our ordinary intuitions regarding belief reports—similarly fails to explain this intuition. (shrink)

Plotinus’ account of matter in Ennead III 6[26] 11-15 serves two purposes. The terms, evil and ugly, present the negative side of matter’s causality, providing for the change characteristic of the sensible world and the possibility of ontological evil and privation as well as of moral evil among human beings. The receptacle and other images from Plato’s Timaeus present the positive side of this causality, matter as allowing for the presence of forms in the bodies of the sensible world. Plotinus (...) explicitly articulates the linguistic problem surrounding the nature of matter, since language is derived from the corporeal and thus needs constant correction when applied to matter as incorporeal. His use of language, thus, always has two phases, first, capturing the nature of matter as aptly as possible, and second, highlighting the difference between matter and the image, analogy, or metaphor used to help explain it. (shrink)

This article examines some of the interactions between law, science, and society taking place during a trial. By focusing on a restricted set of scientific and nonscientific actors engaged in negotiating the meaning, relevance, and reliability of scientific evidence, the article illustrates how the categories—law, science, and society—are inextricably interrelated in the legal negotiations and outcome. The introduction of scientific evidence into adversarial legal settings produces strategies, opinions, and claims that are not shaped solely by scientists, lawyers, or legal processes. (...) The situated law-science negotiations provide a site where social order and scientific knowledges are mutually constituted. The outcome of specific law-science interactions will be open to a range of readings and constraints that are not reducible to some putatively correct scientific understanding nor adequately described as the distortion of scientific evidence by the legal system. (shrink)

Volume 33 contains papers and commentaries presented to the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy during academic year 2015-16. Works: Parmenides’ _Poem, Posterior Analytics_ and _Poetics_, Gorgias. Topics: liar’s paradox, syllogism and nature, authorial freedom, _ousia_ and the true and good.

Considers Peter Leeson's arguments regarding the economic viability of workplace democracy.

How should universities help their life science faculty members to integrate discussions of ethics into their courses? The Iowa State University Model Bio-ethics Institutes offer one model.

Behaviorists accept, but go beyond, Williams' notion that there is an evolutionary origin to some unlearned pain behaviors. A behavior-analytic developmental model is a better fit for explaining the totality of pain behaviors. This model focuses on respondent-operant interactions and views much pain behavior as “mands” (i.e., demands). Behaviorally based explanations from the crying and social referencing literature support this model.

This study assesses the disconnect between television news directors' and journalism students' perceptions of issues in media ethics. Responses from 60 news directors and 166 students enrolled in ethics courses at three universities offer insight into what issues practitioners actually face, what issues students think they will face, and how serious each group perceives potential ethical dilemmas to be. Both groups agree that ethics is best learned on the job.

In a number of places over the last few years Hayden White has attacked a view of history which I shall call the common-sense position and which runs as follows. Although moral and aesthetic assessments play some role in the writing of history, historians are to a large extent concerned with making true statements about the past and with giving correct explanations pf past events, and these central activities can and ought to be assessed by empirical standards, which on the (...) whole are not dissimilar to those employed in the sciences. For White, historical accounts are more like literary fictions than like scientific accounts. They are to be assessed ultimately by appeal to pragmatic, moral, and aesthetic considerations rather than to empirical ones. My aim in this paper is mainly critical. I shall examine a number of claims and arguments which White puts forward in opposition to the common-sense position and argue that they do nothing to undermine it. I shall concentrate mainly on his article "The Historical Text as a Literary Artifact" (in Clio, Vol. Ill, No. 3, June, 1974), although I shall be making some reference to his book Metahistory (John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1973). (shrink)