Particular conceptions of reconciliation vary across a number of dimensions. As section 1 explains, the kind of relationship at issue in a specific context affects the type of improvement in relations that might be necessary in order to qualify as reconciliation. Reconciliation is widely taken to be a scalar concept. Section 2 discusses the spectrum of intensity along which kinds of improvement in relationships fall, and indicates why, in particular contexts, theorists often disagree about the point along this spectrum that (...) is morally or politically most significant. Section 3 provides an overview of the processes commonly cited as contributing to reconciliation. These processes are often controversial; those praised by some commentators as appropriate and constructive responses to past conflict are dismissed by others as undermining the moral or political conditions for just and peaceful relations. Section 4 concentrates on the relationship between reconciliation and justice. While some see these values as compatible and mutually supporting, others argue that, especially in the immediate wake of conflict, parties must often choose between reconciliation and justice. (shrink)

In contexts of exposure to atypical stress or adversity, individual and collective resilience refers to the process of sustaining wellbeing by leveraging biological, psychological, social and environmental protective and promotive factors and processes. This multisystemic understanding of resilience is generating significant interest but has been difficult to operationalize in psychological research where studies tend to address only one or two systems at a time, often with a primary focus on individual coping strategies. We show how multiple systems implicated in human (...) resilience can be researched in the same study using a longitudinal, six-phase transformative sequential mixed methods study of 14- to 24-year-olds and their elders in two communities dependent on oil and gas industries. Data collection occurred over a 5-year period, and included: community engagement and the identification of youth health and well-being priorities; participatory youth-centric qualitative research using one-on-one semi-structured interviews and arts-based methods; survey of 500 youth at three time points to assess psychosocial health indicators and outcomes; collection of hair samples to assess stress biomarkers over time; youth-led ecological data collection and assessment of historical socio-economic development data; and community resource mapping with community elders. Analyzing data from these multiple systems will allow us to understand the interrelationship and impact of PPFPs within and across systems. To date, we have undertaken thematic and narrative qualitative analyses, and descriptive analyses of the preliminary ecological and survey data. As we proceed, we will combine these and grounded theory approaches with innovative techniques such as latent transition analysis and network analysis, as well as modeling of economic conditions and spatial analysis of human geographies to understand patterns of PPFPs and their inter-relationships. By analyzing the complexity of data collected across systems we are demonstrating the possibility of conducting multisystemic resilience research which expands the way psychological research accounts for positive development under stress in different contexts. This comprehensive examination of resilience may offer an example of how the study of resilience can inform socially and contextually relevant interventions and policies. (shrink)

The conflict between courts and medicine is best shown in the mental health cases requiring judgment of whether a person should be confined, and whether they should be medicated or left free to decide for themselves. In such cases, deprivation of liberty for noncriminal offenders is at question, but if they are released, they may be exposed to injury or injure others. “Clear and convincing” evidence is hard to prove in such cases.The TOPOFF 2 terrorism preparedness exercise was two years (...) in planning, but the courts were involved only seven days before the exercise. Judge Murphy was put in charge of the Circuit Court building and was asked to stop all court proceedings to stop people from going into a building that might have been contaminated. (shrink)

The category of jus post bellum is a welcome addition to discussions of the justice of war. But, despite its handy Latin label, we will argue that it cannot be properly understood merely as a set of corollaries from jus ad bellum and jus in bello. Instead, an acceptable theory of justice in the postwar period will have to draw on a broader set of normative ideas than those that have been the focus of the just war tradition. In this (...) paper, we will argue that norms of political reconciliation provide some of the resources we need to address postwar justice. (shrink)

A Scientific Integrity Consortium developed a set of recommended principles and best practices that can be used broadly across scientific disciplines as a mechanism for consensus on scientific integrity standards and to better equip scientists to operate in a rapidly changing research environment. The two principles that represent the umbrella under which scientific processes should operate are as follows: Foster a culture of integrity in the scientific process. Evidence-based policy interests may have legitimate roles to play in influencing aspects of (...) the research process, but those roles should not interfere with scientific integrity. The nine best practices for instilling scientific integrity in the implementation of these two overarching principles are Require universal training in robust scientific methods, in the use of appropriate experimental design and statistics, and in responsible research practices for scientists at all levels, with the training content regularly updated and presented by qualified scientists. Strengthen scientific integrity oversight and processes throughout the research continuum with a focus on training in ethics and conduct. Encourage reproducibility of research through transparency. Strive to establish open science as the standard operating procedure throughout the scientific enterprise. Develop and implement educational tools to teach communication skills that uphold scientific integrity. Strive to identify ways to further strengthen the peer review process. Encourage scientific journals to publish unanticipated findings that meet standards of quality and scientific integrity. Seek harmonization and implementation among journals of rapid, consistent, and transparent processes for correction and/or retraction of published papers. Design rigorous and comprehensive evaluation criteria that recognize and reward the highest standards of integrity in scientific research. (shrink)

Ethics and compliance officers (ECOs) are organizational agents who are responsible for ensuring employees’ ethical and legally compliant behavior. In their ethical organizational roles, ECOs impose ethical expectations on others. In our study, we find that doing so provokes a challenging interpersonal dual threat dynamic where ECOs are perceived as threatening and feel threatened in return, which is a dynamic that ECOs must navigate to be successful. To better understand how ECOs navigate this dynamic, we explore the ethical role identity (...) work that ECOs engage in and demonstrate how ECOs make sense of and respond to the threat dynamic that occurs as they enact their roles. We found two types of identity work: (1) tensions that pull role incumbents toward personalized or impersonalized approaches in their interactions with others and (2) tactics that address the threats and tensions. We also find that ECOs’ identity work facilitates ethical and identity growth for the role incumbent. To make these contributions, we employ grounded theory methods and draw primarily upon a rich qualitative dataset of interviews with ethics and compliance officers. The model we derived from our research contributes to the behavioral ethics literature by illustrating the challenges yet growth possible in enacting ethical organizational roles. (shrink)

The sixteen essays in Gender Struggles address a wide range of issues in gender struggles, from the more familiar ones that, for the last thirty years, have been the mainstay of feminist scholarship, such as motherhood, beauty, and sexual violence, to new topics inspired by post-industrialization and multiculturalism, such as the welfare state, cyberspace, hate speech, and queer politics, and finally to topics that traditionally have not been seen as appropriate subjects for philosophizing, such as adoption, care work, and the (...) home. (shrink)

Although virtually all comparative research about risk perception focuses on which hazards are of concern to people in different culture groups, much can be gained by focusing on predictors of levels of risk perception in various countries and places. In this case, we examine standard and novel predictors of risk perception in seven sites among communities affected by a flood in Mexico (one site) and volcanic eruptions in Mexico (one site) and Ecuador (five sites). We conducted more than 450 interviews (...) with questions about how people feel at the time (after the disaster) regarding what happened in the past, their current concerns, and their expectations for the future. We explore how aspects of the context in which people live have an effect on how strongly people perceive natural hazards in relationship with demographic, well-being, and social network factors. Generally, our research indicates that levels of risk perception for past, present, and future aspects of a specific hazard are similar across these two countries and seven sites. However, these contexts produced different predictors of risk perception—in other words, there was little overlap between sites in the variables that predicted the past, present, or future aspects of risk perception in each site. Generally, current stress was related to perception of past danger of an event in the Mexican sites, but not in Ecuador; network variables were mainly important for perception of past danger (rather than future or present danger), although specific network correlates varied from site to site across the countries. (shrink)

In Punishment and the Moral Emotions, Jeffrie Murphy rejects his earlier, strong endorsements of retributivism. Questioning both our motivations for embracing retributivism and our views about the basis of desert, he now describes himself as a “reluctant retributivist.” In this essay, I argue that Murphy should reject retributivism altogether. Even if we grant that criminals have negative desert, why should we suppose that it is desert of suffering? I argue that it is possible to defend desert-based theories of (...) punishment that reject this view of the object of desert. I consider, but reject, expressivist versions of such a theory. (shrink)

Philosophy is shaped by life and life is shaped by philosophy. This is reflected in The Philosophical I, a collection of 16 autobiographical essays by prominent philosophers.

Principles of bcnciiccnce require us to promote the good. If we believe that a plausible mom] conception will contain some such principle, we must address the issue of the demands it imposes on agents. Some writers have defended extremely demanding principles, while others have argued that only principles with limited demands are acceptable. In this paper I su ggest that we 100k at the demands 0f beneficencc in a different way; 0ur concern should not just be with the extent of (...) the demands faced by individual agents. Instead, we should consider how the demands imposed Ol'] an agent by a principle of beneiiccncc are affected by the level of compliance with the principle by others. Act—consequ@ntia.lism, for example, in effect requires each complying agent to shoulder her share of the demands of bcncficcnce plus as many of the shares of noncomplying agents as would be optimal. I suggest that we focus OH this feature ofconsequentialism, and not just on the very high demands it can impose Ol'] individual agents. Thus I defend the View that principles of beneiicence should not demand more of agents as expected compliance by othcr agents decreases, and formulate a principle of bencficcnce that meets this condition. This View about beneiicence and compliance is supported by a particular conception 0f beneiiccnce. Rather than as an aim we each have as individuals, benciicence could be understood as a cooperative project, where each of us aims to promote the good together with others. If s0, it would be natural t.. (shrink)

In honor of William Wainwright, this article takes up his interest in interreligious dialogue. It pursues two goals simultaneously: One is to provide a better model for understanding philosophy of religion. Terrence Tilley claims that there is the standard model which is mistaken in that it takes arguing for religious beliefs to be equivalent to justifying commitment to a religion. He promotes a practical model, which has its ancestry in the writings of Michel de Montaigne and Blaise Pascal. This model (...) begins with the lived practices of religion and justifies its intellectual content as explanation for the rightness of this way of life. Wainwright’s work fits into the practical model, but Tilley provides a description and a stronger basis for it. The second goal is to provide much more adequate epistemological resources than those used by the standard model, with contributions from Catholic modernist theologian George Tyrrell, recent philosopher of science Imre Lakatos, and Alasdair MacIntyre, who became interested in evaluating traditions, in science, in moral reasoning, and finally what he came to call large-scale traditions. The problem he needed to overcome is the fact that such traditions carry their own, often different, concepts of reasoning. The possibility of fruitful rational conversation between religions is illustrated here by an account of dialogue between Christianity and Shi’ia Islam, as exemplified in David Burrell’s ability to use conversation with Islamic thought to clarify for Christians their own doctrines of the Trinity, the mediation of Christ, and original sin. (shrink)

In many ways, we live in propitious times for gay and lesbian people. In 1996, the Supreme Court struck down Colorado law prohibiting any kind of protected status based on sexual orientation. In 2003, the Supreme Court held that states may not criminalize sexual conduct between consenting adults of the same sex in private, so long as no money changes hands. In 2010, the Congress repealed the “Don't Ask, Don't Tell” policy that excluded openly gay men and lesbians from military (...) service. In 2013, the Supreme Court struck down key elements of the Defense of Marriage Act that prohibited any federal recognition of same‐sex marriage. Most states do not allow same‐sex marriage, but more and more states are joining the fold. Likewise, most U.S. states do not forbid discrimination based on sexual orientation, but the number that does is increasing. Arguably, no other social minority has made as much legal progress in so short a time. Despite these advances, the story of gay and lesbian people and the law is not yet finished, and the meaning of homosexuality for bioethics is still being written too. Concerns about gay and lesbian people remain important to bioethics in key domains, especially in seeing to the conferral of optimal health care benefits and in sorting through the priorities and social effects of research. Progress in these domains still involves lifting certain burdens of medical and social misjudgments about same‐sex attraction. (shrink)

It seems to be a widely shared view that any defensible desire-fulfillment theory of welfare must be framed not in terms of what an agent, in fact, desires but rather in terms of what an agent would desire under hypothetical conditions that include improved information. Unfortunately, though, such accounts are subject to serious criticisms. In this paper I show that in the face of these criticisms the best response is to jettison any appeal to idealized information conditions: the considerations put (...) forward in support of the appeal to what would be desired in hypothetical circumstances of improved information do not, in fact, give adequate reason to make that appeal. (shrink)

This paper is a critical analysis of the concept of mental disorder recently advanced by Jerome Wakefield. Wakefield suggests that mental disorders are most aptly conceived as "harmful dysfunctions" involving two distinct and separable components: the failure of the mechanism in the person to perform a natural function for which the mechanism was designed by natural selection, and a value judgment that the dysfunction is undesirable.

It is often argued that the rule of law is only instrumentally morally valuable, valuable when and to the extent that a legal system is used to purse morally valuable ends. In this paper, I defend Lon Fuller’s view that the rule of law has conditional non-instrumental as well as instrumental moral value. I argue, along Fullerian lines, that the rule of law is conditionally non-instrumentally valuable in virtue of the way a legal system structures political relationships. The rule of (...) law specifies a set of requirements which lawmakers must respect if they are to govern legally. As such, the rule of law restricts the illegal or extra-legal use of power. When a society rules by law, there are clear rules articulating the behavior appropriate for citizens and officials. Such rules ideally determine the particular contours political relationships will take. When the requirements of the rule of law are respected, the political relationships structured by the legal system constitutively express the moral values of reciprocity and respect for autonomy. The rule of law is instrumentally valuable, I argue, because in practice the rule of law limits the kind of injustice which governments pursue. There is in practice a deeper connection between ruling by law and the pursuit of moral ends than advocates of the standard view recognize. The next part of this paper outlines Lon Fuller’s conception of the rule of law and his explanation of its moral value. The third.. (shrink)

Ernest Sosa and others have proposed a safety condition on knowledge: If S knows p, then in the nearest (non-actual) worlds in which S believes p, p is true.1 Colloquially, this is the idea that knowing requires not being easily mistaken. Here, I will argue that like another condition requiring a counterfactual relation between a subject’s belief and the world, viz. Robert Nozick’s sensitivity condition, safety leads, in certain cases, to the unacceptable result that knowledge is not closed under known (...) implication. (shrink)

In this paper, we present a Capabilities -based Approach to the acceptability and the tolerability of risks posed by natural and man-made hazards. We argue that judgments about the acceptability and/or tolerability of such risks should be based on an evaluation of the likely societal impact of potential hazards, defined in terms of the expected changes in the capabilities of individuals. Capabilities refer to the functionings, or valuable doings and beings, individuals are able to achieve given available personal, material, and (...) social resources. The likely impact of a hazard on individuals’ capabilities should, we argue, be compared against two separate thresholds. The first threshold specifies the minimum level of capabilities attainment that is acceptable in principle for individuals to have in the aftermath of a hazard over any period of time. This threshold captures the level that individuals’ capabilities ideally should not fall below. A risk is acceptable if the probability that the attained capabilities will be less than the acceptable level is sufficiently small. In practice, it can be tolerable for some individuals to temporarily fall below the acceptable threshold, provided this situation of lower capabilities attainment is temporary, reversible, and the probability that capabilities will fall below a tolerability threshold is sufficiently small. This second, tolerable threshold delimits an absolute minimum level of capabilities attainment below which no individual in a society should ever fall, regardless of whether that level of capabilities attainment is temporary or reversible. In this paper, we describe and justify this Capabilities -based Approach to the acceptability and tolerability of risks. We argue that the proposed theoretical framework avoids the limitations in current approaches to acceptable risk. The proposed approach focuses the attention of risk analysts directly on what should be our primary concern when judging the acceptability and the tolerability of risks, namely, how risks impact the well-being of individuals in a society. Also, our Capabilities -based Approach offers a transparent, easily communicable way for determining the acceptability and the tolerability of risks. (shrink)

Disaster response is a highly collaborative and critical process that requires the involvement of multiple emergency responders (ERs), ideally working together under a unified command, to enable a rapid and effective operational response. Following the 9/11 and 11/13 terrorist attacks and the devastation of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, it is apparent that inadequate communication and a lack of interoperability among the ERs engaged on-site can adversely affect disaster response efforts. Within this context, we present a scenario-based terrorism case study to (...) highlight the challenges of operational disaster command and response. In this article, which is based on the French emergency response doctrine, we outline a semantics-based common operational command system that is designed to guarantee an efficient information flow among ERs. Our focus is on offering to all ERs, a real-time operational picture of the situation in order to enable multilevel coordination among firefighters, police, healthcare units, public authorities, and other stakeholders. Our approach consolidates information to promote timely sharing of data among ERs. The proposed system is based on an ontology that has been developed to represent the different types of knowledge on the part of ERs, providing a shared vocabulary that covers a variety of interoperability concerns. (shrink)

Culture is surely important in human learning. But the relation between culture and psychological mechanism needs clarification in three areas: (1) All learning takes place in real time and through real-time mechanisms; (2) Social correlations are just a kind of learnable correlations; and (3) The proper frame of reference for cognitive theories is the perspective of the learner.

This paper looks at an argument strategy for assessing the epistemic closure principle. This is the principle that says knowledge is closed under known entailment; or (roughly) if S knows p and S knows that p entails q, then S knows that q. The strategy in question looks to the individual conditions on knowledge to see if they are closed. According to one conjecture, if all the individual conditions are closed, then so too is knowledge. I give a deductive argument (...) for this conjecture. According to a second conjecture, if one (or more) condition is not closed, then neither is knowledge. I give an inductive argument for this conjecture. In sum, I defend the strategy by defending the claim that knowledge is closed if, and only if, all the conditions on knowledge are closed. After making my case, I look at what this means for the debate over whether knowledge is closed. (shrink)

The debate over scientific or critical realism is characterized by confusion, which I claim is a result of approaching the issue from both modern and ‘postmodern’ perspectives. Modern thought is characterized by foundationalism in epistemology and representationalism in philosophy of language, while holism in epistemology and the theory of meaning as use in philosophy of language are postmodern. Typical forms of scientific realism (which seek referents for theoretical terms or correspondence accounts of the truth of scientific theories) are positions at (...) home only in a modern framework. Postmodern presuppositions of other participants in the debate account for the ability of opponents to talk past one another. (shrink)

Although the role of fairness in tax compliance has been of increasing interest among the academic and professional tax communities, very little is known about the role of interactional fairness. Interactional fairness refers to the quality of the treatment provided to individuals from authority figures, such as tax authority representatives. We conduct an experiment using US taxpayers to examine the role of interactional fairness on tax compliance intentions, and how detection influences this relation. Taxpayers’ detection salience reflects their perceptions that (...) they will be audited by the tax authority. Using insights from conditional cooperation theory, we predict and find that detection moderates the relation between interactional fairness and tax compliance intentions, such that the effect of interactional fairness on tax compliance intentions diminishes with higher detection. We discuss the implications of our results for tax policy. (shrink)

I distinguish three evolutionary explanations of mental illness: first, breakdowns in evolved computational systems; second, evolved systems performing their evolutionary function in a novel environment; third, evolved personality structures. I concentrate on the second and third explanations, as these are distinctive of an evolutionary psychopathology, with progressively less credulity in the light of the empirical evidence. General morals are drawn for evolutionary psychiatry.

From the ethics perspective, “duty of care” is a difficult and contested term, fraught with misconceptions and apparent misappropriations. However, it is a term that clinicians use frequently as they navigate COVID-19, somehow core to their understanding of themselves and their obligations, but with uncertainty as to how to translate or operationalize this in the context of a pandemic. This paper explores the “duty of care” from a legal perspective, distinguishes it from broader notions of duty on professional and personal (...) levels, and proposes a working taxonomy for practitioners to better understand the concept of “duty” in their response to COVID-19. (shrink)

Researchers are pursuing various ways to synthesise human male and female gametes, which would be useful for people facing infertility. Some people are unable to conceive children with their partner because one of them is infertile in the sense of having an anatomical or physiological deficit. Other people—in same sex couples—may not be individually infertile but situationally infertile in relation to one another. Segers et al have described a pathway towards synthetic gametes that would rely on embryonic stem cells, rather (...) than somatic cells. This pathway would be advantageous, they say, for same-sex couples even though it would not offer those couples 50%–50% shared genetics in their children but only 50%–25%. It is unclear, however, why this approach should be preferred morally speaking since it represents a falling off from the kind of shared genetics in children that are functionally a gold standard in parents' expectations generally. Despite raising concerns about whether genetic relatedness is necessary or sufficient as a condition of parental interest in children, Segers et al cede the sociocultural importance of that standard. If so, same-sex couples seem entitled to press a case for some measure of research priority that would offer the same level of access to that social good as everyone else. (shrink)

Language has been argued to arise, both ontogenetically and phylogenetically, from specific patterns of brain wiring. We argue that it can further be shown that core features of language processing emerge from particular phasal and cross-frequency coupling properties of neural oscillations; what has been referred to as the language ‘oscillome’. It is expected that basic aspects of the language oscillome result from genetic guidance, what we will here call the language ‘oscillogenome’, for which we will put forward a list of (...) candidate genes. We have considered genes for altered brain rhythmicity in conditions involving language deficits: autism spectrum disorders, schizophrenia, specific language impairment and dyslexia. These selected genes map on to aspects of brain function, particularly on to neurotransmitter function. We stress that caution should be adopted in the construction of any oscillogenome, given the range of potential roles particular localized frequency bands have in cognition. Our aim is to propose a set of genome-to-language linking hypotheses that, given testing, would grant explanatory power to brain rhythms with respect to language processing and evolution. (shrink)

Conceivability is an important source of our beliefs about what is possible; inconceivability is an important source of our beliefs about what is impossible. What are the connections between the reliability of these sources? If one is reliable, does it follow that the other is also reliable? The central contention of this paper is that suitably qualified the reliability of inconceivability implies the reliability of conceivability, but the reliability of conceivability fails to imply the reliability of inconceivability.

Michael J. Almeida offers two criticisms of the argument of my ‘A trilemma for divine command theory’. The first criticism is that I mistakenly assume the validity of the following inference pattern: property A is identical to property B; property B supervenes on property C; therefore, property A supervenes on property C. The second criticism is that I have misinterpreted the moral-supervenience thesis upon which I rely in making this argument. The first of Almeida's criticisms is completely untenable. The second (...) of his criticisms casts doubt on my argument, a doubt that I can mitigate but not entirely dispel. (Published Online August 11 2004). (shrink)

This article examines the applicability of character and virtue ethics to international marketing. The historical background of this field, dimensions of virtue ethics and its relationship to other ethical theories are explained. Five core virtues – integrity, fairness, trust, respect and empathy – are suggested as especially relevant for marketing in a multicultural and multinational context. Implications are drawn for marketing scholars, practitioners and educators.

ABSTRACTThis article offers a novel sceptical argument that the sensitivity-contextualist must say is sound; moreover, she must say that the conclusion of this argument is true at ordinary standards. The view under scrutiny has it that in different contexts knowledge-attributing sentences express different propositions, propositions which differ in the stretch of worlds across which the subject is required to track the truth. I identify the underlying reason for the sceptical result and argue that it makes sensitivity-contextualism irremediably flawed. Contextualists, I (...) conclude, should abandon sensitivity for some other piece of epistemic machinery. (shrink)

This paper reports on a study of large U.S. based corporations concerning the status of formal ethics statements. Almost all responding firms (91%) have promulgated a formal code of ethics while one-half have published values statements and about one-third have a corporate credo. Analysis of these statements concentrated on to whom they are communicated; whether codes of ethics contain information pertinent to the industry, include sanctions for violations and provide specific guidance regarding gifts. Conclusions and implications for managers and researchers (...) are drawn. (shrink)