Ethics, morality, and the study of religious ethics -- Ethics in the Hindu tradition -- Ethics and the Buddha -- The Jewish moral tradition -- Ethics in the Christian tradition -- Islam and Muslim moral ethics -- The Chinese moral tradition -- Additional moral traditions.

Feminist philosophy has recently become recognised as a self-standing philosophical sub-discipline. Still, metaphysics has remained largely dismissive of feminist insights. Here I make the case for the value of feminist insights in metaphysics: taking them seriously makes a difference to our ontological theory choice and feminist philosophy can provide helpful methodological tools to regiment ontological theories. My examination goes as follows. Contemporary ontology is not done via conceptual analysis, but via quasi-scientific means. This takes different ontological positions to be competing (...) hypotheses about reality’s fundamental structure that are then assessed with a loose battery of criteria for theory choice. Such criteria make up the constitutive values of ontology. These values are distinguished from contextual values of a practice: the political and moral values embedded in the social context of inquiry.. (shrink)

The relationship between feminism and metaphysics has historically been strained. Metaphysics has until recently remained dismissive of feminist insights, and many feminist philosophers have been deeply skeptical about any value that metaphysics might have when thinking about advancing gender justice. Nevertheless, feminist philosophers have in recent years increasingly taken up explicitly metaphysical investigations. Such feminist investigations have expanded the scope of metaphysics in holding that metaphysical tools can help advance debates on topics outside of traditional metaphysical inquiry. Moreover, feminist philosophers (...) typically bring new methodological insights to bear on traditional ways of doing philosophy. Feminist metaphysicians have also recently begun interrogating the methods of metaphysics and they have raised questions about what metaphysics as a discipline is in the business of doing. In discussing such methodological issues, Elizabeth Barnes has recently argued that some prevalent conceptions of metaphysics rule out feminist metaphysics from the start and render it impossible. This is bad news for self-proclaimed feminist metaphysicians in suggesting that they are mistaken about the metaphysical status of their work. With this worry in mind, the paper asks: how does feminist metaphysics fare relative to ‘mainstream’ metaphysics? More specifically, it explores how feminist and ‘mainstream’ debates intersect, on what grounds do they come apart, and whether feminist metaphysics qualifies as metaphysics ‘proper’. (shrink)

The paper introduces what is deemed as the general epistemological problem of measurement: what characterizes measurement with respect to generic evaluation? It also analyzes the fundamental positions that have been maintained about this issue, thus presenting some sketches for a conceptual history of measurement. This characterization, in which three distinct standpoints are recognized, corresponding to a metaphysical, an anti-metaphysical, and relativistic period, allows us to introduce and briefly discuss some general issues on the current epistemological status of measurement science.

Rae Langton and Jennifer Hornsby argue that there may be a free-speech argument against pornography, if pornographic speech has the power to illocutionarily silence women: women's locution ‘No!’ that aims to refuse unwanted sex may misfire because pornography creates communicative conditions where the locution does not count as a refusal. Central to this is the view that women's speech lacks uptake, which is necessary for illocutionary acts like that of refusal. Alexander Bird has critiqued this view by arguing that uptake (...) is not necessary for the illocutionary act of refusal. The Hornsby-Langton view, then, is philosophically indefensible. Here I defend the philosophical cogency of the Hornsby-Langton approach. (shrink)

The conventional interpretation of Thomas Aquinas's concept of "moral science" casts it as a knowledge of moral rules that are the outcome of a deductive method of theoretical reason. However, there is a practical moral science that is possessed by ordinary people who are capable of a moral wisdom that is not derived from philosophy. The doctrine concerning this moral science is found in the texts of Aquinas as he takes up and strengthens the philosophy of Aristotle. This book examines (...) how moral science, then, is not a theoretical set of conclusions imposed on the will, but it is rather the grasping of a whole set of human ends that are intellectually apprehended by a compositive method. (Series: Philosophy: Science and Research / Philosophie: Forschung und Wissenschaft - Vol. 42). (shrink)

In philosophy, the problem is philosophy itself; moreover, in every instance this problem is stated according to the historical and personal situation in which the philosopher finds himself, and this situation is in turn determined in large measure ...

El mérito principal de este libro es la audacia de la perspectiva escogida: la disyuntiva, por decirlo sumariamente, “entre Dios y la nada”. Fiel a ella, y elevándola a condición de eje hermenéutico, Vicente Serrano reconstruye los hitos fundamentales del proceso, atendiendo especialmente al propio Jacobi, pero también a los “grandes” del Idealismo Alemán, así como a Nietzsche, a Heidegger, a Michel Foucault, a las diversas teorizaciones “posmodernas” —o no— de los últimos tiempos. Es posible, en efecto, que haya más (...) teología en la filosofía contemporánea, allí donde su presencia lo es bajo la forma de una abrasadora ausencia, que allí donde se ofrece a rostro abierto… ese es, en cualquier caso, el desafío hermenéutico de este trabajo memorable. Memorable también por su materialismo crítico de fondo. (shrink)

Spelman has famously argued against gender realism (the view that women have some social feature in common that makes them women). Many feminist philosophers have accepted Spelman’s argument and gender realist positions are, generally speaking, rejected. I show that Spelman’s arguments are inadequate and do not give good reasons to reject gender realism per se. I also propose a gender realist position that makes use of David Armstrong’s work on complex universals.

This book examines contemporary structural social injustices from a feminist perspective. It asks: what makes oppression, discrimination, and domination wrongful? Is there a single wrongness-making feature of various social injustices that are due to social kind membership? Why is sexist oppression of women wrongful? What does the wrongfulness of patriarchal damage done to women consist in? In thinking about what normatively grounds social injustice, the book puts forward two related views. First, it argues for a paradigm shift in focus away (...) from feminist philosophy that is organized around the gender concept woman, and towards feminist philosophy that is humanist. This is against the following theoretical backdrop: Politically effective feminism requires ways to elucidate how and why patriarchy damages women, and to articulate and defend feminism's critical claims. In order to meet these normative demands an influential theoretical outlook has emerged: for emancipatory purposes feminist philosophers should articulate a thick conception of the gender concept woman around which feminist philosophical work is organized. However, Part I of the book argues that we should resist this move, and that feminist philosophers should reframe their analyses of injustice in humanist terms. Second, the book spells out a humanist alternative to the more prevalent gender-focus in feminist philosophy. This hinges on a notion of dehumanization, which Part II of the book develops. The argued for understanding of dehumanization is used to explicate the wrongness-making feature of social injustices, both in general and of those due to patriarchy. Dehumanization is not another form of injustice-rather, it is that which makes forms of social injustice unjust. The book's second part then provides a regimentation of social injustice from a feminist perspective in order to spell out the specifics of the proposed humanist feminism, and to demonstrate how it improves some non-feminist analyses of injustice too. (shrink)

Some commentators have condemned Kant’s moral project from a feminist perspective based on Kant’s apparently dim view of women as being innately morally deficient. Here I will argue that although his remarks concerning women are unsettling at first glance, a more detailed and closer examination shows that Kant’s view of women is actually far more complex and less unsettling than that attributed to him by various feminist critics. My argument, then, undercuts the justification for the severe feminist critique of Kant’s (...) moral project. (shrink)

This collection of eleven new essays contains the latest developments in analytic feminist philosophy on the topic of pornography. While honoring early feminist work on the subject, it aims to go beyond speech act analyses of pornography and to reshape the philosophical discourse that surrounds pornography. A rich feminist literature on pornography has emerged since the 1980s, with Rae Langton's speech act theoretic analysis dominating specifically Anglo-American feminist philosophy on pornography. Despite the predominance of this literature, there remain considerable disagreements (...) and precious little agreement on many key issues: What is pornography? Does pornography constitute women's subordination and silencing? Does it objectify women in harmful ways? Is pornography authoritative enough to enact women's subordination? Is speech act theory the best way to approach pornography? Given the deep divergences over these questions, the first goal of this collection is to take stock of extant debates in order to clarify key feminist conceptual and political commitments regarding pornography. This volume further aims to go beyond the prevalent speech-acts approach to pornography, and to highlight novel issues in feminist pornography-debates, including the aesthetics of pornography, trans* identities and racialization in pornography, and putatively feminist pornography. (shrink)

The aim of this longitudinal study was to investigate the temporal dynamics of ethical organisational culture and how it associates with well-being at work when potential changes in ethical culture are measured over an extended period of 6 years. We used a person-centred study design, which allowed us to detect both typical and atypical patterns of ethical culture stability as well as change among a sample of leaders. Based on latent profile analysis and hierarchical linear modelling we found longitudinal, concurrent (...) relations and cumulative gain and loss cycles between different ethical culture patterns and leaders’ well-being. Leaders in the strongest ethical culture pattern experienced the highest level of work engagement and a decreasing level of ethical dilemmas and stress. Leaders who gave the lowest ratings on ethical culture which also decreased over time reported the highest level of ethical dilemmas, stress, and burnout. They also showed a continuous increase in these negative outcomes over time. Thus, ethical culture has significant cumulative effects on well-being, and these longitudinal effects can be both negative and positive, depending on the experienced strength of the culture’s ethicality. (shrink)

This qualitative study explores how business leaders narrate their personal ways of recognizing, reasoning, and resolving moral conflicts and what these stories reveal about their moral identity processes within organizational contexts. Based on interviews with 25 business leaders, 4 moral identity statuses were identified: achievement, moratorium, foreclosure, and diffusion. The moral identity statuses were based on how leaders approached and interpreted moral conflicts and what the influence of the organizational context was in their moral decision-making processes. Some remained steadfast in (...) adhering to their previous value commitments, while others tried to avoid taking any clear moral standpoint. Still others experienced moral conflicts as disequilibrating events that triggered reflective processes and developmental cycles of moral identity change. These moral identity statuses hold implications for facilitating moral identity development among business leaders in the context of work. (shrink)

The paper introduces and formally defines a functional concept of a measuring system, on this basis characterizing the measurement as an evaluation performed by means of a calibrated measuring system. The distinction between exact and uncertain measurement is formalized in terms of the properties of the traceability chain joining the measuring system to the primary standard. The consequence is drawn that uncertain measurements lose the property of relation-preservation, on which the very concept of measurement is founded according to the representational (...) viewpoint. Finally, from the analysis of the inter-relations between calibration and measurement the fundamental reasons of the claimed objectivity and intersubjectivity of measurement are highlighted, a valuable epistemological result to characterize measurement as a particular kind of evaluation. (shrink)

Nurses’ duties and patients’ rights have been important foci in nursing. Nurses’ rights legitimate the power and responsibility of the profession. There are few published articles on this subject in the nursing science literature. This article is a theoretical examination of nurses’ rights that aims to structure (i.e. show the internal logic of) those that have been little studied. It is based on the philosophical literature and published research. Nurses’ rights can be divided into: human and civil rights, rights based (...) on health care legislation, professional rights, and earned rights. In this context, professional rights relate to nursing and also to tasks shared with other health care professions. Analyzing nurses’ rights will help to promote these rights, improve nurses’ position both nationally and internationally, and provide possibilities for enhancing patient care. (shrink)

We offer an analysis of future morphemes as epistemic operators. The main empirical motivation comes from the fact that future morphemes have systematic purely epistemic readings—not only in Greek and Italian, but also in Dutch, German, and English will. The existence of epistemic readings suggests that the future expressions quantify over epistemic, not metaphysical alternatives. We provide a unified analysis for epistemic and predictive readings as epistemic necessity, and the shift between the two is determined compositionally by the lower tense. (...) Our account thus acknowledges a systematic interaction between modality and tense—but the future itself is a pure modal, not a mixed temporal/modal operator. We show that the modal base of the future is nonveridical, i.e. it includes p and ¬p worlds, parallel to epistemic modals such as must, and present arguments that future morphemes are a category that stands in between epistemic modals and predicates of personal taste. We identify, finally, a subclass of epistemic futures which are ratificational, and argue that will is a member of this class. (shrink)

ABSTRACTBrian Epstein’s The Ant Trap is a praiseworthy addition to literature on social ontology and the philosophy of social sciences. Its central aim is to challenge received views about the social world – views with which social scientists and philosophers have aimed to answer questions about the nature of social science and about those things that social sciences aim to model and explain, like social facts, objects and phenomena. The received views that Epstein critiques deal with these issues in an (...) overly people-centered manner. After all, even though social facts and phenomena clearly involve individual people arranged in certain ways, we must still spell out how people are involved in social facts and phenomena. There are many metaphysical questions about social properties, relations, dependence, constitution, causation, and facts that cannot be answered just be looking at individual people alone. In order to answer questions about how one social entity depends for its existence on another, we need different metaphysical tools. Epstein thus holds that social ontological explanations would greatly benefit from making use of the theoretical toolkit that contemporary analytical metaphysics has to offer. He focuses specifically on two metaphysical instruments: grounding and anchoring. This paper examines Epstein’s understanding and use of these tools. I contend that Epstein is exactly right to say that contemporary metaphysics contains many theoretical instruments that can be fruitfully applied to social ontological analyses. However, I am unconvinced that Epstein’s tools achieve what they set out to do. In particular, I will address two issues: How is grounding for Epstein meant to work? Is anchoring distinct from grounding, and a relation that we need in social ontology? (shrink)

Constituye la primera publicación del Seminario Internacional de Jóvenes Investigadores, foro creado en el Instituto de Filosofía, perteneciente al Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas.

Although advance care planning can lead to more patient-centered care, the communication around it can be challenging in acute care hospitals, where saving a life or shortening hospitalization is important priorities. Our qualitative study in an acute care hospital in Japan revealed when specifically physicians and nurses start communication to facilitate ACP. Seven physicians and 19 nurses responded to an interview request, explaining when ACP communication was initiated with 32 patients aged 65 or older. Our qualitative approach employed descriptive analysis (...) to identify major themes, which included “initiation by patients” and “initiation by healthcare professionals.” In the latter case, seven specific triggers were identified: when the patients’ medical condition changed in terms of symptom relief, when the patients’ medical condition changed in terms of prognostic prediction, when serious events occurred, when a choice of treatment was presented, when the location for end-of-life care was chosen, when the patients’ cognitive function deteriorated, and when serious events settled down. Within this group of healthcare professionals, physicians were more focused on changes in their patients’ medical condition, whereas nurses focused more on their patients’ desire for a long-term perspective. Nurses encouraged patients to consider ACP themselves, which developed into an approach to respect patients’ autonomy. In acute care hospitals, it appeared to be desirable to have an early discussion where patients could understand the significance ACP, which would matter even after their discharge from the hospital. (shrink)

The present study had two major aims: first, to examine the construct validity of the Finnish 58-item Corporate Ethical Virtues scale (CEV; Kaptein in J Org Behav 29:923–947, 2008) and second, to examine whether the associations between managers’ perceptions of ethical organisational culture and their occupational well-being (emotional exhaustion and work engagement) are indirectly linked by ethical strain, i.e. the tension which arises from the difference in the ethical values of the individual and the organisation he or she works for. (...) The sample consisted of 902 managers from different organisations, in middle and upper management levels, aged 25–68 years. The results of the confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) provided support to the hypothesised eight-factor structure of the CEV scale; i.e. the scale contained the factors of clarity, congruency of supervisors, congruency of senior management, feasibility, supportability, transparency, discussability and sanctionability. In addition, it emerged from the CFAs that the high intercorrelations of these factors can be explained by the second-order factor of ethical culture. The managers’ perceptions of the ethical culture prevailing in their organisations were associated with their occupational well-being both directly (high-work engagement) and indirectly via a low level of ethical strain (low-emotional exhaustion). Thus, the findings indicated that the ethical culture of organisations plays a major role in managers’ occupational well-being. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to discuss the ethical issues impacting the phenomenon of patient safety and to present implications for nursing management. Previous knowledge of this perspective is fragmented. In this discussion, the main drivers are identified and formulated in ‘the ethical imperative’ of patient safety. Underlying values and principles are considered, with the aim of increasing their visibility for nurse managers’ decision-making. The contradictory nature of individual and utilitarian safety is identified as a challenge in nurse management (...) practice, together with the context of shared responsibility and identification of future challenges. As a conclusion, nurse managers play a strategic role in patient safety. Their role is to incorporate ethical values of patient safety into decision-making at all levels in an organization, and also to encourage clinical nurses to consider values in the provision of care to patients. Patient safety that is sensitive to ethics provides sustainable practice where the humanity and dignity of all stakeholders are respected. (shrink)

Feminism is the movement to end women’s oppression. One possible way to understand ‘woman’ in this claim is to take it as a sex term: ‘woman’ picks out human females and being a human female depends on various anatomical features (like genitalia). Historically many feminists have understood ‘woman’ differently: not as a sex term, but as a gender term that depends on social and cultural factors (like social position). In so doing, they distinguished sex (being female or male) from gender (...) (being a woman or a man), although most ordinary language users appear to treat the two interchangeably. More recently this distinction has come under sustained attack and many view it nowadays with (at least some) suspicion. This entry (around 12 000 words in length) outlines and discusses distinctly feminist debates on sex and gender. (shrink)