This case deals with the corporate response to a crisis and the successful evacuation of approximately 900 hotel guests, staff, and family members of staff whowere stranded in the Fairmont New Orleans hotel by Hurricane Katrina. This rescue effort, spearheaded by managers at the sister Fairmont hotel in Dallas, Texas, was completed shortly after 12 a.m. on Friday, September 2, 2005, when the last bus with evacuees pulled into the Dallas Fairmont after making a round trip of more than 1000 (...) miles — and about 64 hours after planning began. This case is particularly significant for lessons that may be derived about crisis management and leadership, and it also raises several interesting ethical issues. The case, which relies on field research plus secondary sources, is appropriate for business ethics and business strategy courses. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 7.2 (2002) 194-196 [Access article in PDF] The Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir by Suzanne Antonetta. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2001. Pp. 242. Hardback $26; paper $15.00. ISBN 1-5824-3209-0. Memoirs rely on the power of recollection to reproduce the inward texture of experience. Autobiographies cast their authors as historians of the self, combing through documents and old letters, checking facts. In her first prose work, (...) the accomplished poet Suzanne Antonetta crosses the boundary between memoir and autobiography. Interweaving the rough textures of memory with slick surfaces of corporate data, she gives us a lyric meditation on the struggle to become undeceived. Recounting both the facts of corporate malfeasance and our fantastic capacity to filter our reality, she captures the relation between failures of understanding and failures of responsibility. She shows us how difficult it is to accept an unofficial truth. The Body Toxic is a thoughtful and obsessively readable contribution to environmental ethics.Antonetta tells us of childhood exposure to toxic wastes in a penurious and neglected corner of Barnegat Bay. She writes in retrospect, with painfully acquired knowledge of cancer clusters and disease-ridden families. [End Page 194] Her own body's malformed reproductive organs, riddled with tumors, prove spectacularly and tragically infertile when quadruplets spontaneously abort. Sharp backward glances at childhood pleasures; crabbing, berrying, and running through the sweet-smelling spray of DDT, twist us around. Children of the 1960s trail through pesticide as if the weekly truck brought some poisonous ice cream. The mosquitoes thrived: what happened to the children? We revisit these scenes obliquely. Denzer-Schaefer empties its effluent into the bay, cost-efficient Ciba-Geigy rids their chemical wastes through a pipe running straight into the woods, the local farm has become an illegal toxic dump for an unscrupulous contractor. Fire at a nearby nuclear weapons silo has hapless firemen spraying radioactive water into the air. The government responds: they build a chain link fence around the site. A nuclear power plant of the 'old-school' emanates levels of radioactivity to rival Chernobyl. The plant managers assiduously cover it up. This is not some national catalogue of Superfund sites: all take place within a dozen or so miles of a childhood summer house in New Jersey. These shards of a case study are scattered throughout Antonetta's non-linear narrative, piecing together experience, cause and effect.But this work is more ethically and artistically ambitious than the artificial clarity of case studies. Powerfully, Antonetta shows us the inner tangle of toxic mental life: the depression, listlessness, confusion, and self-medication of barely cognized symptoms. Self-clouding toxicity affects both the body and the mind. She fears that she and other family members are not right in the head. How far can she trust herself, and how far can she trace the causes? Is it heredity? Is it toxicity? Has toxic exposure potentiated some family trait? She reads out strings of hazardous chemicals like a rosary, overdetermining all of her symptoms. The distance between cause and effect shields the guilty. Strong toxicity undermines the ability of its victims to understand and act. The Body Toxic is part case study, part phenomenology of altered consciousness, and all too human. A course in environmental ethics could make imaginative use of its insights into a wide range of anthropocentric concerns. Antonetta considers questions of environmental justice, religious beliefs about the natural order, environmental responsibility and property rights, nuclear risk, and cost-benefit analysis in multi-dimensional form, an entry point for philosophical reflection. The Body Toxic is stimulating, controversial, and beautifully written.Many great works of literature signal their ethical intent by fostering a sense of identification with their subjects or protagonists. Antonetta's deft [End Page 195] blunt portraiture expands our moral sensibility by showing us how to be concerned for people with whom we are not meant to identify. The story begins before the beginning, with Antonetta's immigrant family. They are strangely familiar and not entirely sympathetic people, isolated between first generation immigrant cultures and fantasies of prosperous America, clinging to islands of... (shrink)

Durkheim écrit ce livre avec un but double : d'abord il voulait expliquer ce qui crée une société, ce qui la tient ensemble ; ensuite il voulait éclaircir l'influence qu'a la société sur la pensée logique. Pour Durkheim, la religion est la clé utilisée pour déverrouiller ces deux problématiques.Dans ce livre, Durkheim argumente que les représentations religieuses sont en fait des représentations collectives : l'essence du religieux ne peut être que le sacré. Il est une caractéristique qui se trouve universellement (...) dans toutes les religions. Le sacré, être collectif et impersonnel, représente ainsi la société elle-même. Ensuite il argumente que la société a un impact majeur dans la genèse de la pensée logique. C'est la société qui fournit à l'individu les catégories (le temps, l'espace, le nombre etc.) et les concepts nécessaires pour la pensée logique. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the apraxia argument in Cicero’s Academica. It proposes that the argument assumes two modes: the evidential mode maintains that skepticism is false, while the pragmatic claims that it is disadvantageous. The paper then develops a tension between the two modes, and concludes by exploring some differences between ancient and contemporary skepticism.

Do individuals have a positive right of self-defence? And if so, what are the limits of this right? Under what conditions does this use of force extend to the defence of others? These are some of the issues explored by Dr Uniacke in this comprehensive 1994 philosophical discussion of the principles relevant to self-defence as a moral and legal justification of homicide. She establishes a unitary right of self-defence and the defence of others, one which grounds the permissibility of the (...) use of necessary and proportionate defensive force against culpable and non-culpable, active and passive, unjust threats. Particular topics discussed include: the nature of moral and legal justification and excuse; natural law justifications of homicide in self-defence; the Principle of Double Effect and the claim that homicide in self-defence is justified as unintended killing; and the question of self-preferential killing. This is a lucid and sophisticated account of the complex notion of justification, revolving around a critical discussion of trends in the law of self-defence. (shrink)

Discusses the ethical issues involved in the use of human embryonic stem cells in regenerative medicine.

The book explores the origin story of the Open Government Partnership and place the open government reform movement in the context of the long history of public sector reform.

A key focus in many debates surrounding the harm in hate speech centres on the subordinating impact hate speech has on its victims. Under such a view, and provided there exists a requisite level of speaker authority a particular speech situation, hate speech can be conceived as something which directly impact’s the victim’s status, and can be contrasted to the view that such speech merely expresses hateful ideas. Missing from these conceptions, however, are the ways in which intersubjective, recognition-sensitive relations (...) influence the kind of harm likely to result from such an act. Understanding the central role of first-person experience is crucial, as, while a victim may have little influence in how their social status is impacted by such an act, the possibility for ‘speaking back’ requires that individuals are equipped with the conditions necessary to reject the authority claims of the speaker. On such a view, this paper aims to use this feature of intersubjectivity to explore the potential ways in which an act of hate speech can be ‘robbed’ of some of its harm by having its authority claims rejected by the victim. Utilizing this enhanced understanding, I reflect upon one particular real-world example of hate speech, in which the target rejects the status-undermining claims made upon her. In the last section, I propose a general institutional outlook aimed towards aiding would-be victims of hate speech to respond to such attempts at normative authority exertion. (shrink)

Proportionality is widely accepted as a necessary condition of justified self-defense. What gives rise to this particular condition and what role it plays in the justification of self-defense seldom receive focused critical attention. In this paper I address the standard of proportionality applicable to personal self-defense and the role that proportionality plays in justifying the use of harmful force in self-defense. I argue against an equivalent harm view of proportionality in self-defense, and in favor of a standard of proportionality in (...) self-defense that requires comparable seriousness and takes into account the wrong, as opposed simply to the harm that the victim is fending off. I distinguish the standard of proportionality in self-defense from proportionality in circumstances of necessity, and I discuss whether proportionality is an internal or an external constraint on the right of self-defense. (shrink)

Connects the work of Merleau-Ponty to environmental studies.

In this paper, I offer a new interpretation of Aristophanes’ speech in Plato’s Symposium. Though Plato deliberately draws attention to the significance of Aristophanes’ speech in relation to Diotima’s (205d-206a, 211d), it has received relatively little philosophical attention. Critics who discuss it typically treat it as a comic fable, of little philosophical merit (e.g. Guthrie 1975, Rowe 1998), or uncover in it an appealing and even romantic treatment of love that emphasizes the significance of human individuals as love-objects to be (...) valued for their own sakes (e.g. Dover 1966, Nussbaum 1986). Against the first set of interpreters, I maintain that Aristophanes’ speech is of the utmost philosophical significance to the dialogue; in it, he sets forth a view of eros as a state of lack and a corresponding desire for completion, which is the starting-point for Diotima’s subsequent analysis. Against the second, I argue that Aristophanes’ speech contains a profoundly pessimistic account of eros. Far from being an appreciative response to the individuality of the beloved, eros, for Aristophanes, is an irrational urge, incapable of satisfaction. It is this irrationality that precludes Aristophanes’ lovers from achieving the partial satisfaction of erotic desire that is open to their Socratic counterparts through their relationship to the forms. (shrink)

In “The Place of Philosophy in Bioethics Today,” Blumenthal-Barby and colleagues argue that philosophy is indispensable to the field of bioethics (Blumenthal-Barby et al. 2022). Nonetheless, they i...

Alongside the major narratives of ethics in the tradition of Western philosophy, a reader with an eye to the vague and the peripheral, to the turbulent and shifting, will uncover minor lines of thinking--and with them, new histories and thus new futures. Minor Ethics develops a new approach to reading texts from the history of philosophical ethics. It aims to enliven lines of thought that are latent and suppressed within the major ethical texts regularly studied and taught, and to include (...) texts and ideas that have been excluded from the canon of Western ethics. The editors and contributors have put Gilles Deleuze's concepts--such as affect, assemblage, and multiplicity--into conversation with a range of ethical texts from ancient thought to the present. Rather than aiming for a coherent whole to emerge from these threads, the essays maintain a vigilant alertness to difference, to vibrations and resonances that are activated in the coupling of texts. What emerges are new questions, new problems, and new trajectories for thinking, which have as a goal the liberation of ethical questioning. Minor Ethics takes up a range of canonical ethical questions and thinks through concrete ethical problems relating to drug addiction, environmental responsibility, xenophobia, trauma, refugees, political parties, and cultural difference. The responses to these concerns demonstrate the minoritarian promise of the opening up of ethical thinking. (shrink)