This paper develops twenty hypotheses concerning the relationships among selected individual differences variables (locus of control, delay of gratification, gender, and race) and five different ethical beliefs. The results of a study of collegians provide support for seventeen out of twenty research hypotheses. As predicted, locus of control, delay of gratification, and race are related to ethical beliefs. Also as predicted, gender is not related to ethical beliefs.

The release of genetically engineered organisms into the shared environment raises scientific, ethical, and societal issues. Using some form of democratic deliberation to provide the public with a voice on the policies that govern these technologies is important, but there has not been enough attention to how we should connect public deliberation to the existing regulatory process. Drawing on lessons from previous public deliberative efforts by U.S. federal agencies, we identify several practical issues that will need to be addressed if (...) relevant federal agencies are to undertake public deliberative activities to inform decision‐making about gene editing in the wild. We argue that, while agencies may have institutional capacity to undertake public deliberative activities, there may not be sufficient political support for them to do so. Advocates of public deliberation need to make a stronger case to Congress about why federal agencies should be encouraged and supported to conduct public deliberations. (shrink)

Is it ever fair to limit treatment for diseases like glioblastoma for which prognosis is poor? Because resources are finite and health care spending limits the other possible uses for those resources, limiting access to an intervention that does not generate benefits is ethically sound. Ignoring the balance of benefits and burdens associated with treatment ignores opportunity costs and leads us to treat some lives as more valuable than others. It also ignores evidence that patients and families, when presented with (...) adequate information about the benefits and burdens of aggressive treatment compared with palliative care, often prefer the palliative care option.Should the limitations we set on the availability of care be greater for older people than younger people? Since the 1980s, scholars have called for strong age rationing of medical care in which Medicare would not pay for anything other than palliative care after they have achieved average life expectancy. (shrink)

According to contemporary representationalism, phenomenal qualia—of specifically sensory experiences—supervene on representational content. Most arguments for representationalism share a common, phenomenological premise: the so-called “transparency thesis.” According to the transparency thesis, it is difficult—if not impossible—to distinguish the quality or character of experiencing an object from the perceived properties of that object. In this paper, I show that Husserl would react negatively to the transparency thesis; and, consequently, that Husserl would be opposed to at least two versions of contemporary representationalism. First, (...) I show that Husserl would be opposed to strong representationalism, since he believes the cognitive content of a perceptual episode can vary despite constancy of sensory qualia. Second, I then show that Husserl would be opposed to weak representationalism, since he believes that sensory qualia—specifically, the sort that he calls “kinesthetic sensations”—can vary despite constancy in representational content. (shrink)

An agent is one who regulates his/her own actions through positive and negative feedback. It is painful for a rational being to set himself a task and then find himself unable to complete it entirely as he/she conceives it. To escape this pain, a person may use self-deception to avoid such negative feedback. When this denial becomes universalized, an agent can no longer function as a self-regulating, cybernetic system, i.e., as an agent who directs his/her own actions. Ten types of (...) moral self-deception are distinguished, and the duty of moral self-knowledge is clarified. (shrink)

The need to choose between good things in conflict lies at the heart of politics. Only citizens deliberating together can authoritatively form the democratic public judgment necessary to resolve such conflicts. The key step to arriving at a sound widely supported public judgment is getting all members of the public to “comprehend”---to understand and appreciate---the goods in conflict. Mutual comprehension enables us to combine our individual perspectives without loss, thereby providing the basis for collective deliberation. Such comprehension is essential because (...) the mutual respect between citizens upon which democratic politics depends is impossible without it. Mutual comprehension is possible because we share a common human nature that, despite our manifest and irreducible differences is built around a limited and universal set of human needs and dispositions. (shrink)

Discussions of fairness in the workplace are built on assumptions about the organization of work and about fairness. Writers on business ethics have not appreciated that work is often organized differently in different stages of the life cycle of a firm. In this paper it is argued that the conceptions of fairness applied to a mature firm are often not applicable to a fledgling one. In a mature firm authority and responsibility are typically delegated and divided into specific jobs with (...) relatively rigid boundaries. Thus, it has been argued that fairness in hiring requires specific job descriptions, fairness in remuneration requires standardized and graded salaries, and fairness in due process requires peer review. However, in the formative stages of a corporation, there may be very little differentiation or specialization. There is a continual re-definition of individual tasks through interaction with others as knowledge about products, production, and consumer demand are acquired by trial and error in the marketplace. Fairness takes a different form in this firm. The principle that similar people are to be treated similarly and different people differently can be operationalized in two ways. The mature firm typically focuses on differences; a fledgling, entrepreneurial one on similarities. How some of the issues of fairness in hiring, pay, and due process need to be reformulated once they are placed within the context of an entrepreneurial firm with its emphasis on similarity are then discussed. (shrink)

A Kantian evaluation of Taylorism in the workplace requires a consideration of four problems; (1) the conditions of agency, (2) the relation of Taylorism to these conditions, (3) an explanation of the method given by the Typic for applying the Categorical Imperative, and (4) the actual application of the Categorical Imperative to Taylorism. An agent who views himself as a performer is distinguished from an agent who is a mere observer of his own actions, and it is argued that Taylorism (...) in effect attempts to remove the purposiveness of action from the workmen and to reduce them to the state of being mere observers of their own actions. Then it is argued that in order for one to attempt to think of a maxim as a universal law, one must posit a universal and necessary connection between the circumstances and the performances and then another such connection between the action and the purpose to be achieved. A model is constructed using heat-seeking machines, and it is argued that a principle analogous to Taylorism could not hold as a universal law for such machines. Thus, Taylorism is not an acceptable solution to the problem of coordinating the activities of self-directed agents within the workplace. (shrink)

This paper analyzes individual probabilistic predictions of state outcomes in the 2008 U.S. presidential election. Employing an original survey of more than 19,000 respondents, ours is the first study of electoral forecasting to involve multiple subnational predictions and to incorporate the influence of respondents’ home states. We relate a range of demographic, political, and cognitive variables to individual accuracy and predictions, as well as to how accuracy improved over time. We find strong support for wishful thinking bias in expectations, as (...) Republicans gave higher probabilities to McCain victories and were worse at overall prediction. In addition, we find that respondents living in states with higher vote shares for Obama performed better at prediction and displayed less wishful thinking bias. We conclude by showing that suitable aggregations of our respondents’ predictions outperformed Intrade (a prediction market) and fivethirtyeight.com (a poll-based forecast) at most points in time. (shrink)

The Hebrew Psalter is a repertoire of paired phenomena. From parallelisms to twin Psalms, biblical scholars have paid attention to these structural and poetical features as keys to unlocking and interpreting the meaning and theology of these psalms. Unfortunately, the otherwise admirable results of these exegetical works remain abstract and largely removed from the interests of the African reader. An alternative way of engaging these texts is to realise that paired phenomena are not exclusive to the Hebrew Psalter. African indigenous (...) sacred texts such as the Adinkra of the Akan people equally contain similar phenomena though relatively little attention has been paid to them. This article, using a dialogical approach of African Biblical Hermeneutics, studies the twin Psalms 111 and 112 as an example of a paired phenomenon in the Psalter. It brings this text into dialogue with the Adinkra denkyemfunefu to illustrate how focussing on similar structural phenomena in either text uncovers the same theme of the common good in either text and facilitates the reception of the biblical discourse in contemporary African contexts.Contribution: It is argued that common literary features in biblical and African indigenous sacred texts could be harnessed as vehicles for facilitating the reception of biblical discourse in contemporary Africa. (shrink)

If we ask ourselves whether ultimate moral conflicts exist, and if we take seriously the goal of capturing ordinary emotional experience in our views about morality, we find the evidence mixed. We might have some reason for concluding that some situations are ultimate moral conflicts, but we also have good reasons of the same kind for concluding that these situations are not ultimate moral conflicts. So this kind of argument does not provide secure enough footing for any sort of powerful (...) criticism of moral theories which deny the existence of ultimate moral conflicts. Those who want to argue for the reality of ultimate moral conflicts can still argue from something other than ordinary emotional experience. Any such alternative strategy, though, will involve a retreat from the idea that ordinary emotional experience provides unambiguous support for the existence of ultimate moral conflicts and a secure point from which to criticize moral theories.I conclude, then, that accepting the reality of ultimate moral conflicts does not allow a truer picture of ordinary emotional experience. I am not sure, though, that this should be good news for those who believe in a moral realm without ultimate moral conflicts. What is most striking about ordinary emotional experience is not its tendency to support one or another picture of the moral realm, with or without ultimate moral conflicts, but its failure to endorse any very determinate picture of a moral realm. This suggests a rather shocking gap in our understanding of the concepts of moral obligation, prohibition, and permission, concepts which, after all, are alleged to play a familiar and vital role in our lives. Perhaps this gap can be filled by arguments beginning somewhere other than ordinary emotional experience. (Although skeptics will point to the failure of deontic logicians to find any decisive reason to choose between accounts that do and do not permit ultimate moral conflicts.) Alternatively, though, the ambiguity of ordinary emotional experience on the question of ultimate moral conflict might provide one kind of support for the suspicion, famously entertained by Elizabeth Anscombe, that the word “ought,” used to refer to a specifically moral realm, is a word “containing no intelligible thought: a word retaining the suggestion of force, and apt to have a strong psychological effect, but which no longer signifies a real concept at all - No content could be found in the notion ‘morally ought’; if it were not that - philosophers try to find an alternative (very fishy) content and to retain the psychological force of the term.” G.E.M. Anscombe, “Modem Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy 33 (1958): 8. (shrink)

The three faces of Francesco Petrarca -- Erasmus: the man in the middle -- Machiavelli and political realism -- Thomas More: the king's good servant but God's first -- Castiglione: a gentleman in Urbino -- Rabelais and the wisdom of laughter -- Montaigne and the wisdom of experience -- Cervantes: life as literature -- Shakespeare.

This introduction to nonviolent movements analyzes fourteen classic and contemporary cases to show how nonviolent strategies can work where violent warfare has failed. Drawing on practitioner knowledge and diverse philosophical and religious texts, Michael K. Duffey offers a multifaceted argument for embracing nonviolent resolutions to conflict.

Homer and the heroic ideal -- Hesiod, poet of everyday life -- Aeschylus and the institution of justice -- Sophocles, the Theban plays -- Euripides and the twilight of the gods -- The inquiries of Herodotus of Halicarnassus -- Thucydides, power and pathos -- Aristophanes and the serious business of comedy -- Plato, philosophy, and poetry -- Aristotle and the invention of political science.

Many older people need external support for their daily living. A large minority of older adults with low or modest pension incomes face financial strains from the high cost of illness, and many older people in urban areas live in social isolation. Indeed, population aging has become a policy topic of concern. The policy debate since the end of the twentieth century about the future of public pensions and health and long‐term care programs has increasingly framed the growing numbers of (...) older people in alarmist terms. Unfounded claims about the unaffordability and unsustainability of social policies supporting older people have become common currency, often disguised as concerns about intergenerational justice. Such claims and concerns hinder clear thinking about proper social and fiscal policies, housing, health care, and labor markets to safeguard the well‐being of older people in aging societies. (shrink)

I argue Leibniz could not have been a dualist since his notion of matter is not defined by extension but by mentalistic "primitive passive force." So Leibniz was some kind of idealist. However, Leibniz was neither a phenomenal idealist like Berkeley nor a conceptualist idealist like Hegel. Instead, despite some suggestions in favor of the latter kind of idealism, Leibniz must be regarded as an idealist who admitted extraconceptual considerations irreducible to materialism.

I present an original model in judgment aggregation theory that demonstrates the general impossibility of consistently describing decision-making purely at the group level. Only a type of unanimity rule can guarantee a group decision is consistent with supporting reasons, and even this possibility is limited to a small class of reasoning methods. The key innovation is that this result holds when individuals can reason in different ways, an allowance not previously considered in the literature. This generalizes judgment aggregation to subjective (...) decision situations, implying that the discursive dilemma persists without individual agreement on the logical constraints. Notably, the model mirrors the typical method of choosing political representatives, and thus suggests that no voting procedure other than unanimity rule can guarantee representation that reflects electorate opinion. Finally, I apply the results to a normative argument for unanimity rule in contract theory and juries, as well as to problems posed for deliberative democratic theory and the concept of representation. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend Husserl against Derrida's critique that Husserl's phenomenology is of a piece with the "the metaphysics of presence." I show much of Derrida's critique can be met by what Husserl calls "genetic phenomenology.".

Recently, a number of epistemologists have argued that there are no non-conceptual elements in representational content. On their view, the only sort of non-conceptual elements are components of sub-personal organic hardware that, because they enjoy no veridical role, must be construed epistemologically irrelevant. By reviewing a 35-year-old debate initiated by Dagfinn F.

Norris et al.'s claim that feedback is unnecessary is compromised by (1) a questionable application of Occam's razor, given strong evidence for feedback in perception; (2) an idealization of the speech recognition problem that simplifies those aspects of the input that create conditions where feedback is useful; (3) Norris et al.'s use of decision nodes that incorporate feedback to model some important empirical results; and (4) problematic linking hypotheses between crucial simulations and behavioral data.

This essay introduces a special report from The Hastings Center entitled Democracy in Crisis: Civic Learning and the Reconstruction of Common Purpose, which grew out of a project supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. This multiauthored report offers wide‐ranging assessments of increasing polarization and partisanship in American government and politics, and it proposes constructive responses to this in the provision of objective information, institutional reforms in government and the electoral system, and a reexamination of cultural and (...) political values needed if democracy is to function well in a pluralistic and diverse society. The essays in the special report explore the norms of civic learning and institutions, social movements, and communal innovations that can revitalize civic learning in practice. This introductory essay defines and explains the notion of civic learning, which is a lynchpin connecting many of the essays in the report. Civic learning pertains to the ways in which citizens learn about collective social problems and make decisions about them that reflect the duties and responsibilities of citizenship. Such learning can occur in many social settings in everyday life, and it can also be facilitated through participation in the processes of democratic governance on many levels. Civic learning is not doctrinaire and is compatible with a range of public goals and policies. It is an activity that increases what might be called the democratic capability of a people. (shrink)

Since Horn (1972) the notion of conversational implicature proposed by Grice has been put to use to explain certain interpretive differences between expressions in natural language and their counterparts in formal logic. For example, the sentences in (1) seem to convey more than they would be expected to if the natural language disjunction or had the same meaning as the logical disjunction ∨, or if the quantificational determiner some was interpreted as the existential quantifier ∃.

Hastings Center Report, Volume 52, Issue 5, Page 42-43, September–October 2022.

Based in a global array of case studies - Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Turkey, and Islamic education in the United States - this volume shows how the discourse concerning educational technology in the Islamic world has emphasized neoliberal and neofundamentalist themes, and argues that the design and implementation of educational technologies in schools would be better accomplished by taking a culturally grounded approach. This approach would be rooted in the context and local needs of learners, with implications and possible application (...) in the Muslim world and beyond. (shrink)

As an incredibly diverse religious system, Buddhism is constantly changing. The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Buddhism offers a comprehensive collection of work by leading scholars in the field that tracks these changes up to the present day. Taken together, the book provides a blueprint to understanding Buddhism's past and uses it to explore the ways in which Buddhism has transformed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The volume contains 41 essays, divided into two sections. The essays in the first section (...) examine the historical development of Buddhist traditions throughout the world. These chapters cover familiar settings like India, Japan, and Tibet as well as the less well-known countries of Vietnam, Bhutan, and the regions of Latin America, Africa, and Oceania. Focusing on changes within countries and transnationally, this section also contains chapters that focus explicitly on globalization, such as Buddhist international organizations and diasporic communities. The second section tracks the relationship between Buddhist traditions and particular themes. These chapters review Buddhist interactions with contemporary topics such as violence and peacebuilding, and ecology, as well as Buddhist influences in areas such as medicine and science. Offering coverage that is both expansive and detailed, The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Buddhism delves into some of the most debated and contested areas within Buddhist Studies today. (shrink)

Hierarchies abound to help us organize our world. A hierarchy places items into a general order, where more ‘general’ is also more ‘abstract’. The etymology of hierarchy is grounded in notions of religious and social rank. This article, after a historical review, focuses on knowledge systems, an interloper of the term hierarchy since at least the 1800s. Hierarchies in knowledge systems include taxonomies, classification systems, or thesauri in information science, and systems for representing information and knowledge to computers, notably ontologies (...) and knowledge representation languages. Hierarchies are the logical underpinning of inference and reasoning in these systems, as well as the scaffolding for classification and inheritance. Hierarchies in knowledge systems express subsumption relations that have flexible variants, which we can represent algorithmically, and thus computationally. This article dissects that variability, leading to a proposed typology of hierarchies useful to knowledge systems. The article argues through a perspective informed by Charles Peirce that natural hierarchies are real, can be logically determined, and are the appropriate basis for knowledge systems. Description logics and semantic language standards reflect this perspective, importantly through their open-world logic and vocabularies for generalized subsumption hierarchies. Recent research suggests possible mechanisms for the emergence of natural hierarchies. (shrink)

The breadth of themes addressed in this issue of the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy is striking. These articles brim with some of the most foundational questions one can ask in bioethics and the philosophy of medicine: Under what circumstances might we risk some harm in pursuit of a greater good? In the setting of experimental therapies, how should we weigh the potential risk and benefit for an individual patient against the broader potential benefit realized for society as a whole? (...) How might we consistently differentiate health from pathology? Under what circumstances might we say that a human being has died? Does acknowledging particular things as good generate duties? Duties for whom and enforced by whom? These articles share a preoccupation with foundational questions that must be addressed in any sound bioethics curriculum, and they make clear that our answers to these questions are not simply theoretical but manifest in policy and in practice. (shrink)

A lot of what we understand to be trust is not trust; it is, instead, an active and conscious decision to feign trust. We call this ‘as-if’ trust. If trust involves taking on risks and vulnerabilities, as-if trust involves taking on surplus risks and vulnerabilities. People may decide to act as if they trust in many situations, even when they do not have sufficient warrant to trust – which is to say even when they do not trust. Likewise, people might (...) decide to act as if they trust even when they have good reasons to actively distrust. The surplus risks of as-if trust may be worth taking in a number of different contexts and for many reasons. We argue that as-if trust is a concept that should be added to our theoretical, practical, and political vocabularies of trust and distrust. In doing so, we discuss the main reasons for someone to act as if they trust. We then show that the practice of as-if trust has been recognized by other scholars but treated as trust. In response, we clarify how as-if trust differs from trust, and we discuss the utility and ubiquity of as-if trust, especially in politics. (shrink)

In this dissertation I argue for a wider and more robust notion of the modularity of mind thesis. The developmental disorder of autism is the prime analytic tool for developing this approach. I argue that a variety of other approaches are deeply flawed in that they cannot account for the autistic spectrum disorder. I mean by this the autistic profile of deficits such as the lack of social interaction and the avoidance of social contact. I begin with Fodorian modularity. I (...) argue that autism presents us with a case that threatens the division Fodor has between modules and central systems. The autistic disorder exemplifies an area of higher cognition that has many of the properties commonly associated with modular processing. Since Fodor cannot opt for a modular account of theory of mind it must be that his account of central systems is incorrect. I next argue that Baron-Cohen's amended modular architecture cannot explain autism since the autistic deficit cannot be due to a defective module for processing intentional action. Furthermore, his use of modularity threatens to make his view of cognition incoherent. Finally I take up Gopnik and Meltzoff's approach that eschews any type of modularity and instead posits a general learning mechanism. If autism, as they claim, were a general theory-building problem, then one should expect to see other behavioral deficits in other areas of autistic cognition. We do not. I then offer an alternative version of modularity inspired by Karmiloff-Smith . It gives us advantages. On Karmiloff-Smith's account we would expect the autistic deficit to have more perceptually basic components and recent research is bearing this out. Progressive modularity also provides us with a framework in which to understand the ways autistic persons understand the social world. This approach also seeks to unify the cognitive work being done on development with burgeoning work on development in neuroscience. (shrink)

Some philosophers have recently complained that moral theories almost always portray the distresses of ordinary people in moral predicaments as irrational. In the name of having a minimally realistic picture of ethical thought, these philosophers argue that accounts of morality must allow for strong moral dilemmas, choices involving mutually exclusive all-things-considered requirements or jointly exhaustive all-things-considered prohibitions. In this dissertation I clarify and reject several versions of this argument, which I call the argument from experience. ;In chapters one and two (...) I define strong moral dilemmas as essentially involving conflicts of moral reasons, and reject as premature attempts to reduce questions about strong dilemmas to questions about deontic logic. I accept the goal of representing ordinary experience faithfully, and ask whether a theory will necessarily distort that experience if it employs interpretations of 'ought' and 'prohibited' in ways guaranteeing a priori that there are no strong dilemmas. ;The argument from experience claims that people can have a justifiably high degree of confidence that they are in strong moral dilemmas, and in chapter three I question whether people ever have the needed sorts of confidence about the limits of their abilities, the precise location of their wrongdoing, or the futility of continued moral deliberation. ;In chapter four I reject specific arguments based on regret and guilt. The tendency to feel unavoidable agent-regret or guilt allegedly shows that the agent sees the choice as a strong dilemma, and the appropriateness of such distresses allegedly shows that the agent's way of seeing things is rational. I reply that someone can feel agent-regret without endorsing any moral judgment involving 'ought' or 'prohibited', and that guilt is never unavoidably appropriate. ;In chapter five I trace the failure of the argument from experience to the presence in ordinary thought of a notion of blame which is both conceptually guaranteed always to be avoidable and regarded as an infallible indicator of moral requirement and prohibition. I am led to wonder, finally, why this notion of blame should play a privileged role in philosophical pictures of morality. (shrink)

Motivated by the disproportionately high incidence of fraudulent financial reporting in the IT sector where technological capability is a major source of competitive advantage, this study investigates the possible relationship between technological capability and fraud probability in the IT sector. Technological capability is measured by a firm’s technical efficiency relative to peers in transforming cumulative R&D resources into innovative output, which is a source of competitive advantage, according to the resource-based view of the firm. Technical efficiency is estimated via data (...) envelopment analysis. A sample of fraud firms taken from Accounting and Auditing Enforcement Releases is matched with control samples of non-fraud firms. Consistent with the RBV, technological capability is found to have a negative and economically significant effect on fraud probability. Moreover, fraud probability is insignificantly associated with the scale efficiency of innovative activities, as investment in R&D resources per se is not a source of sustainable competitive advantage. (shrink)