SMEs are the driving force of economies. However, they face challenges that affect their long-term survival, such as developing ethical business environments. Business ethicsrelated research is underdeveloped in SMEs, thus limiting our understanding of business ethics in SMEs. The purpose of this qualitative study was to investigate how business ethics is conceptualised in SMEs, using the Delphi Technique. In SMEs, business ethics is viewed as doing the right thing, having integrity, being transparent, trustworthy, and behaving responsibly towards internal and external (...) parties. The contribution of this article is that business ethics is perceived as upholding quality, being transparent and trustworthy. (shrink)

I argue that assertoric content functions as a means for us to track the responsibilities undertaken by communicators, and that distinctively assertoric commitments are distinguished by being generated directly in virtue of the words the speaker uses. This raises two questions: (a) Why are speakers responsible for the content thus generated? (b) Why is it important for us to distinguish between commitments in terms of their manner of generation? I answer the first question by developing a novel responsibility based metasemantics. (...) I answer the second by reference to the conflicting pressures governing the resources we have available for appraising speech. (shrink)

A satisfactory theory of linguistic communication must explain how it is that, through the interpersonal exchange of auditory, visual, and tactile stimuli, the communicative preconditions for the acquisition of testimonial knowledge regularly come to be satisfied. Without an account of knowledge-yielding communication this success condition for linguistic theorizing is left opaque, and we are left with an incomplete understanding of testimony, and communication more generally, as a source of knowledge. This paper argues that knowledge-yielding communication should be modelled on knowledge (...) itself. It is argued that knowledge-yielding communication occurs iff interlocutors coordinate on truth values in a non-lucky and non-deviant way. This account is able to do significant explanatory work: it sheds light on the nature of referential communication, and it allows us to capture, in an informative way, the sense in which interlocutors must entertain similar propositions in order to communicate successfully. (shrink)

This paper argues that underlying social biases are able to affect the processes underlying linguistic interpretation. The result is a series of harms systematically inflicted on marginalised speakers. It is also argued that the role of biases and stereotypes in interpretation complicates Miranda Fricker's proposed solution to epistemic injustice.

This paper introduces and argues for contrastivism about intentions. According to contrastivism, intention is not a binary relation between an agent and an action. Rather, it is a ternary relation between an agent, an action, and an alternative. Contrastivism is introduced via a discussion of cases of known but (apparently) unintended side effects. Such cases are puzzling. They put pressure on us to reject a number of highly compelling theses about intention, intentional action, and practical reason. And they give rise (...) to a puzzle about rather than constructions such as ‘I intend to φ rather than ψ’: In side effect cases it can seem wrong to claim that the subject intends to φ, yet acceptable to claim that they intend to φ rather than ψ. This cries out for explanation. Contrastivism provides a unified response to all of these problems. (shrink)

In the epistemology of testimony it is often assumed that audiences are able to reliably recover asserted contents. In the philosophy of language this claim is contentious. This paper outlines one problem concerning the recovery of asserted contents, and argues that it prevents audiences from gaining testimonial knowledge in a range of cases. The recovery problem, in essence, is simply that due to the collective epistemic limitations of the speaker and audience speakers will, in certain cases, be insensitive to the (...) ways in which they may be misinterpreted. As a result audiences’ beliefs will often fail the safety and sensitivity conditions on knowledge. Once the problem has been outlined and distinguished from several related problems in the philosophy of language and the epistemology of testimony, a series of responses are considered. The first response holds that audiences possess defeaters in recovery problem cases, and thus wouldn’t form beliefs. The second response holds that the beliefs audiences form are very coarse grained, meaning they are not very vulnerable to failures of safety and sensitivity. The final response holds that the objects of speaker meaning are not propositional. All three responses are found to be unsatisfactory. (shrink)

I outline what I call the ‘deniability problem’, explain why it is problematic, and identify the range of utterances to which it applies (using religious discourse as an example). The problem is as follows: To assign content to many utterances audiences must rely on their contextual knowledge. This generates a lot of scope for error. Thus, speakers are able to make assertions and deny responsibility for the proposition asserted, claiming that the audience made a mistake. I outline the problem (a (...) limited version of which Fricker 2012 discusses), before explaining why it is problematic. Firstly it blocks testimonial knowledge according to assurance views. Secondly it prevents epistemic buck passing (the importance of which is emphasized by Goldberg 2006 and McMyler 2013). Finally, it removes a key disincentive to dishonesty. The recent literature on context sensitivity (particularly Cappelen and Lepore 2004) seems to entail that the problem applies to a very wide range of utterances. I consider a series of responses which fail to provide a solution, but which help us narrow down the scope of the problem. (shrink)

After spending time with this book the reader should be able to tackle virtually any philosophical theme in contemporary geographic thought.

In this paper we argue that knowledge is characteristically safe true belief. We argue that an adequate approach to epistemic luck must not be indexed to methods of belief formation, but rather to explanations for belief. This shift is problematic for several prominent approaches to the theory of knowledge, including virtue reliabilism and proper functionalism (as normally conceived). The view that knowledge is characteristically safe true belief is better able to accommodate the shift in question.

In this chapter I hope to persuade you that defective contexts are more ubiquitous than we typically assume. In doing, so I will draw attention to a number of pressing social and theoretical issues which arise once we start to consider defective contexts. I will proceed by pointing to a number of ways in which defective contexts can emerge without self-correcting in the manner envisioned by Stalnaker. First I will consider situations in which some, but not all interlocutors recognise that (...) the context is defective. I will then consider cases of opaquely defective contexts, and the question of what it is for a context to be “close enough” to being non-defective. (shrink)

The article examines the first phase of the universalistic interpretations in Juri Lotman’s semiotics, which is characterized by holism and maximalism derived from the Saussurean cultural concept. There is an analysis of Juri Lotman’s 1967 lecture, previously unpublished, where universal status is accorded to text functions (including magic functions). Such an approach is a substantial revision of the Saussurean understandings of the relationship between language and speech. This interpretation of magic is compared with the examination of the same concept in (...) Juri Lotman’s 1981 article “Contract and self-sacrifice as archetypical cultural models”, which substantially contradicts the concept developed in his 1967 lecture. Both these magic models produce a number of objections, and apparently seem to bear the deforming traces of their respective universalistic theoretical schema. (shrink)

Big Data research is currently split on whether and to what extent Twitter can be characterized as an informational or social network. We contribute to this line of inquiry through an investigation of digital humanities scholars’ uses and gratifications of Twitter. We conducted a thematic analysis of 25 semi-structured interview transcripts to learn about these scholars’ professional use of Twitter. Our findings show that Twitter is considered a critical tool for informal communication within DH invisible colleges, functioning at varying levels (...) as both an information network and a social network. We find that Twitter follow relationships reflect common academic interests and are closely tied to scholars’ pre-existing social ties and conference or event co-attendance. The concept of the invisible college continues to be relevant but requires revisiting. The invisible college formed on Twitter is messy, consisting of overlapping social contexts, scholars with different habits of engagement, and both formal and informal ties. Our research illustrates the value of using multiple methods to explore the complex questions arising from Big Data studies and points toward future research that could implement Big Data techniques on a small scale, focusing on sub-topics or emerging fields, to expose the nature of scholars’ invisible colleges made visible on Twitter. (shrink)

At the heart of the Christian faith is a particular understanding of God, and the task of theology is to give an account of that vision under specific historical conditions. That is the challenge, burden, and privilege of theology. This research focuses on how that assignment is undertaken in contemporary Systematic Theology and proposes, in a modest manner, a specific direction for the development of a doctrine of God.

The Hebrew Bible is quoted and alluded to in 4QInstruction. There is an obvious similarity between the way the raz nihyeh of 4QInstruction and Lady Wisdom in Proverbs 8 function. This intertextual study investigates this phenomenon by comparing 4Q416 2 III 8-21 and 4Q417 1 I with Proverbs 8:12-21 and 8:22-31. It is concluded that apocalyptic influence changed the character of Lady Wisdom but not her essential function.

How is it that a speaker _S_ can at once make it obvious to an audience _A_ that she intends to communicate some proposition _p_, and yet at the same time retain plausible deniability with respect to this intention? The answer is that _S_ can bring it about that _A_ has a high justified credence that ‘_S_ intended _p_’ without putting _A_ in a position to know that ‘_S_ intended _p_’. In order to achieve this _S_ has to exploit a (...) sense in which communication can be lottery-like. After defending this view of deniability I argue that it compares favorably to a rival account recently developed by Dinges and Zakkou (Mind, https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/fzac056, 2023 ). (shrink)

The notion of ubuntu and communalism is of great importance in anAfrican educational discourse, as well as inAfrican Philosophy of Education and in Africanphilosophical discourse. Ubuntu is aphilosophy that promotes the common good ofsociety and includes humanness as an essentialelement of human growth.

Brian Loar [1976] observed that communicative success with singular terms requires more than correct referent assignment. For communicative success to be achieved, the audience must assign the right referent in the right way. Loar, and others since, took this to motivate Fregean accounts of the semantics of singular terms. Ray Buchanan [2014] has recently responded, maintaining that, although Loar is correct to claim that communicative success with singular terms requires more than correct referent assignment, this is compatible with direct reference (...) approaches, as long as one also endorses an independently motivated Gricean view of communicative intentions. This paper argues that Buchanan's Gricean view cannot account for the full range of Loar cases. In doing so, it aims to explicate the structure of Loar's cases and thus to clarify the conditions that a theory must meet in order to adequately meet his challenge. (shrink)

This article discusses the following question: what epistemic relation must audiences bear to the content of assertions in order to gain testimonial knowledge? There is a brief discussion of why this issue is of importance, followed by two counterexamples to the most intuitive answer: that in order for an audience to gain testimonial knowledge that p they must know that the speaker has asserted p. It is then suggested that the argument generalises and can be made to work on different (...) sets of assumptions about the conditions for knowledge, and the conditions under which a proposition is asserted. (shrink)

There is an emerging skepticism about the existence of testimonial knowledge-how :387–404, 2010; Poston in Noûs 50:865–878, 2016; Carter and Pritchard in Philos Phenomenol Res 91:181–199, 2015a). This is unsurprising since a number of influential approaches to knowledge-how struggle to accommodate testimonial knowledge-how. Nonetheless, this scepticism is misguided. This paper establishes that there are cases of easy testimonial knowledge-how. It is structured as follows: first, a case is presented in which an agent acquires knowledge-how simply by accepting a speaker’s testimony. (...) Second, it is argued that this knowledge-how is genuinely testimonial. Next, Poston’s arguments against easy testimonial knowledge-how are considered and rejected. The implications of the argument differ for intellectualists and anti-intellectualists about knowledge-how. The intellectualist must reject widespread assumptions about the communicative preconditions for the acquisition of testimonial knowledge. The anti-intellectualist must find a way of accommodating the dependence of knowledge-how on speaker reliability. It is not clear how this can be done. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue for an embodied, embedded approach to predictive processing and thus align the framework with situated cognition. The recent popularity of theories conceiving of the brain as a predictive organ has given rise to two broad camps in the literature that I callfree energy enactivismandcognitivist predictive processing. The two approaches vary in scope and methodology. The scope ofcognitivist predictive processingis narrow and restricts cognition to brain processes and structures; it does not consider the body-beyond-brain and the (...) environment as constituents of cognitive processes.Free energy enactivism, on the other hand, includes all self-organizing systems that minimize free energy (including non-living systems) and thus does not offer any unique explanations for more complex cognitive phenomena that are unique to human cognition. Furthermore, because of its strong commitment to the mind-life continuity thesis, it does not provide an explanation of what distinguishes more sophisticated cognitive systems from simple systems. The account that I develop in this paper rejects both of these radical extremes. Instead, I propose a compromise that highlights the necessary components of predictive processing by making use of a mechanistic methodology of explanation. The starting point of the argument in this paper is that despite the interchangeable use of the terms, prediction error minimization and the free energy principle are not identical. But this distinction does not need to disrupt thestatus quoof the literature if we consider an alternative approach: Embodied, Embedded Predictive Processing (EEPP). EEPP accommodates the free energy principle, as argued for by free energy enactivism, but it also allows for mental representations in its explanation of cognition. Furthermore, EEPP explains how prediction error minimization is realized but, unlike cognitivist PP, it allocates a constitutive role to the body in cognition. Despite highlighting concerns regarding cognitivist PP, I do not wish to discredit the role of the neural domain or representations as free energy enactivism does. Neural structures and processes undeniably contribute to the minimization of prediction error but the role of the body is equally important. On my account, prediction error minimization and free energy minimization are deeply dependent on the body of an agent, such that the body-beyond-brain plays aconstitutiverole in cognitive processing. I suggest that the body plays three constitutive roles in prediction error minimization: The bodyregulatescognitive activity, ensuring that cognition and action are intricately linked. The body acts asdistributorin the sense that it carries some of the cognitive load by fulfilling the function of minimizing prediction error. Finally, the body serves toconstrainthe information that is processed by an agent. In fulfilling these three roles, the agent and environment enter into a bidirectional relation through influencing and modeling the structure of the other. This connects EEPP to the free energy principle because the whole embodied agent minimizes free energy in virtue of being a model of its econiche. This grants the body a constitutive role as part of the collection of mechanisms that minimize prediction error and free energy. The body can only fulfill its role when embedded in an environment, of which it is a model. In this sense, EEPP offers the most promising alternative to cognitivist predictive processing and free energy enactivism. (shrink)

This thesis integrates the epistemology of testimony with work on the epistemology, psychology, and metaphysics of language. Epistemologists of testimony typically ask what conditions must be met for an agent to gain testimonial justification or knowledge that p given that p has been asserted, and this assertion has been understood. Questions regarding the audience's ability to grasp communicated contents are largely ignored. This is a mistake. Work in the philosophy of language suggests that the determination and recovery of communicated contents (...) is far from straightforward, and can go wrong in many ways. This thesis investigates the epistemology of testimony in light of this work, with a special focus on miscommunication. The introduction provides a brief overview of some relevant work on testimony, the philosophy of language, and psychology, and argues that there is good reason to investigate the three. One obvious problem in this area is that if testimonial knowledge requires knowledge of what is said then the risk of miscommunication will block testimonial knowledge. Chapter two argues that testimonial knowledge does not require knowledge of what is said. The remaining four chapters discuss problems which do to arise from miscommunication. Chapters three and four focus on the epistemic uncertainty of communication with context sensitive terms. Chapter three argues that many beliefs formed on the basis of context sensitive testimony are unsafe and insensitive. Chapter four argues that speakers often have plausible deniability about the contents of their assertions. Chapters five and six explore types of miscommunication which arise as a result of background mental states affecting our linguistic understanding. Chapter five explores the social/ethical consequences of this, arguing that certain groups are disproportionately subject to harmful misinterpretation. Chapter six argues that testimonial anti-reductionists make the wrong predictions about a range of cases of cognitive penetration. (shrink)

Emancipatory practice development (ePD) is a practitioner‐led research methodology which enables workplace transformation. Underpinned by the critical paradigm, ePD works through facilitation and workplace learning, with people in their local context on practice issues that are significant to them. Its purpose is to embed safe, person‐centred learning cultures which transform individuals and workplaces. In this article, we critically reflect on a year‐long ePD study in an acute care hospital ward. We explore the challenges of practice change within systems, building collective (...) strength with frontline collaborations and leadership to sustain new learning cultures. Our work advances practice development dialogue through working closely with the underpinning theories. Our critique analyses how ePD can enact and sustain change within a complex system. We argue that ePD works to strengthen safety cultures by challenging antidemocratic practices through communicative action. By opening communicative spaces, ePD enables staff to collectively deliberate and reach consensus. Their raised awareness supports staff to resist ways of working which conspire against safe patient care. Sustainability of practice change is fostered by the co‐operative democracies created within the frontline team and meso level enablement. We conclude that the democratising potential of ePDt generates staff agency at the frontline. (shrink)

The etiology of a perceptual belief can seemingly affect its epistemic status. There are cases in which perceptual beliefs seem to be unjustified because the perceptual experiences on which they are based are caused, in part, by wishful thinking, or irrational prior beliefs. It has been argued that this is problematic for many internalist views in the epistemology of perception, especially those which postulate immediate perceptual justification. Such views are unable to account for the impact of an experience’s etiology on (...) its justificational status, McGrath, Siegel, and Vahid ). Our understanding of what we have been told can also be affected by, for example, wishful thinking or irrational background beliefs. I argue that testimonial beliefs based on such states of understanding can thus be rendered unjustified. This is problematic not only for internalist immediate justification views of testimony, but also for some externalist views, such as the form of proper functionalism endorsed by Burge, and Graham. The testimonial version of the argument from etiology, unlike the perceptual variant, does not rest on the controversial hypothesis that perception is cognitively penetrable. Furthermore, there is a stronger case for the claim that testimonial justification can be undermined by etiological effects since, I argue, testimonial beliefs can be based on the background mental states which affect our understanding of what is said, and our states of understanding are rationally assessable. (shrink)

Our reasons for emotions such as sadness, anger, resentment, and guilt often remain long after we cease experiencing these emotions. This is puzzling. If the reasons for these emotions persist, why do the emotions not persist? Does this constitute a failure to properly respond to our reasons? In this paper we provide a solution to this puzzle. Our solution turns on the close connection between the rationality of emotion and the rationality of attention, together with the differing reasons to which (...) attention and emotion are properly responsive. (shrink)

In the article “Fifty Years of U.S. Mass Incarceration and What It Means for Bioethics,” Sean Valles provides an important reminder of the consequences of mass incarceration in the United States and identifies potential roles for bioethicists in addressing this system. My limited view—that of a physician who conducts court‐ordered investigations and monitoring of health services behind bars—is that the ongoing failure of most academic and professional organizations to be more effective in this much‐ignored area stems from the lack of (...) leaders and staff who have been directly impacted by mass incarceration. As conditions behind bars worsen, and a new war on drugs recoils the spring of mass incarceration, there is a pressing need to train, recruit, and promote people who know the realities of the criminal (and immigration) justice system and its impact on health and well‐being. This step can bring a more powerful engagement of bioethics regarding housing, employment, and health care and policing, as well as the numerous and harmful elements of jails, prisons, and detention settings. I provide examples of partners I learn from in this arena, as well as some discrete and technical areas for possible investigation. (shrink)

In February 2022, the Court of Protection was faced with the question of whether a kidney transplant was in the best interests of William Verden. The case highlighted the legal, ethical and clinical complexities of treating potential kidney transplant patients with impaired decision-making. Above all, it exposed the potential risk of discrimination on the basis of disability when treatment decisions in relation to potential kidney recipients with impaired capacity are being made. In this paper, we draw on the Verden case (...) to (1) examine the role of the Court of Protection in cases relating to patients with impaired decision-making capacity who require a transplant, (2) to highlight the lack of empirical data on patients who have faced inequitable access to transplant and (3) highlight the shortcomings of the existing legal and regulatory framework in England and Wales guiding clinical decision making for patients in William’s position. We consequently argue that there is a clear need for action to ensure equitable access to transplant for those in William’s position. Furthermore, we suggest that there is a responsibility incumbent on policy makers and clinicians alike to develop a meaningful, and meaningfully operational, framework centred on preventing discrimination against potential organ recipients based on their decision-making capacity. (shrink)

The origin of the Samaritans re-examinedThe traditional approach to the study of the origins of the Samaritans as a group or a nation usually takes 2 Kings 17 to be a description of their origin. The aim of this article is to show that there is little or no evidence in 2 Kings 17 pointing in this direction. Several factors in history and in ancient literature make it almost impossible to come to any definite conclusion as to the origin of (...) the Samaritans as they are known to us in the New Testament. (shrink)

In this incisive and thought-provoking book, Francois Venter illuminates the issues arising from the fact that the current language of constitutional law is strongly premised on a particular worldview rooted in the history of the states around the North Atlantic Ocean. Highlighting how this terminological hegemony is being challenged from various directions, Venter explores the problem that all constitutional comparatists face: that they all must use the same words to express different meanings. Offering a compact but comprehensive constitutional (...) history, Venter investigates the ways in which the standard vocabulary does not fit comfortably in many contemporary constitutional orders, as well as examining how its cogency is increasingly being questioned. Chapters contextualize comparative constitutional methods to demonstrate how the language choices made by comparatists are shaped by their own perspectives, arguing that careful explanation of the meanings attached to constitutional terms is imperative in order to be persuasive or even understood. Tackling the foundational elements of the field, this book will be a critical read for constitutional scholars across the globe. It will also be of interest to high-level practitioners of constitutional law and political scientists for its investigation of terminology that is crucial to their work. (shrink)

Transmission views of testimony hold that a speaker's knowledge or justification can become the audience's knowledge or justification. We argue that transmission views are incompatible with the hypothesis that one's epistemic state, together with one's practical circumstances, determines what actions are rationally permissible for an agent. We argue that there are cases where, if the speaker's epistemic state were transmitted to the audience, then the audience would be warranted in acting in particular ways. Yet, the audience in these cases is (...) not so warranted, as their strength of justification does not come close to the speaker's. (shrink)

This paper introduces and argues for the hypothesis that judgments of testimonial worth are central to our practice of normatively appraising speech. It is argued that judgments of testimonial worth are central both to the judgement that an agent has lied, and to the acceptance of testimony. The hypothesis that, in lying, an agent necessarily displays poor testimonial worth, is shown to resolve a new puzzle about lying, and the recalcitrant problem raised by the existence of bald faced lies, and (...) selfless assertions. It is then shown that the notion of testimonial worth allows us to capture the distinction between taking a speaker at their word, and treating them as a mere indicator of the truth in a way other theories fail to do. (shrink)

Stipulation gives us a degree of control over meaning. By stipulating how I will use a term I am able to determine the meaning it will receive on future occasions of use. My stipulation will affect the truth conditional content of my future utterances. But the mechanisms of stipulation are mysterious. As Cappelen (2018) argues, meaning is typically determined in an inscrutable way by a myriad of external factors beyond our control. How does stipulation override these factors? And the powers (...) of stipulation are limited. Firstly, the power of stipulation is typically short-lived. Sec-ondly, some stipulations simply don’t get off the ground. What explains the limits of stipulation? I consider two related approaches to stipulation and argue that they are unable to capture stipulation’s metasemantic effects. I then provide an explanation of the metasemantic effects of stipulation: Stipulation determines meaning by determining the word use it is fitting to hold the speaker to. This account is able to capture the mechanisms and limits of stipulation, whilst also explaining why we should care about stip-ulative success. I close by briefly drawing out some lessons for conceptual engineering. -/- . (shrink)

Does utterance understanding require reliable (i.e. non-lucky) recovery of the speaker’s intended proposition? There are good reasons to answer in the affirmative: the role of understanding in supporting testimonial knowledge seemingly requires such reliability. Moreover, there seem to be communicative analogues of Gettier cases in which luck precludes the audience’s understanding an utterance despite recovering the intended proposition. Yet, there are some major problems with the view that understanding requires such reliability. Firstly, there are a number of cases in which (...) understanding seems to occur in a lucky way. In light of these cases I argue that we need to narrow down the precise sense in which understanding precludes luck – the anti-luck condition attached to linguistic understanding is importantly different to anti-luck conditions typically applied to knowledge. Secondly, Megan Hyska has recently argued that, assuming understanding precludes luck, we get a communicative analogue of the value problem for knowledge. i.e. why is it better to meet the other conditions for understanding in a reliable way than in a lucky way? It is natural to assume that we can simply port over our favoured responses to the epistemic value problem in response to Hyska’s challenge. I argue that, due to the difference between epistemic and communicative luck (discussed in response to the first problem), this cannot be done. The epistemic and communicative value problems will require different solutions. I close by sketching the beginnings of an alternative answer to the value problem for communication. (shrink)

What are the objects of speaker meaning? The traditional answer is: propositions. The traditional answer faces an important challenge: if propositions are the objects of speaker meaning then there must be specific propositions that speakers intend their audiences to recover. Yet, speakers typically exhibit a degree of indifference regarding how they are interpreted, and cannot rationally intend for their audiences to recover specific propositions. Therefore, propositions are not the objects of speaker meaning (Buchanan 2010; MacFarlane 2020a; 2020b; and Abreu Zavaleta (...) 2021). In this paper I do two things. Firstly, I outline a collective analogue of this challenge that undermines the most prominent responses to the original challenge. Secondly, I provide a new solution: typical utterances are backed by a cluster of partial communicative intentions. This response resolves both individual and collective variants of the problem and allows us to retain the traditional propositional view of speaker meaning. (shrink)

According to the Counterfactual Comparative Account of harm and benefit, an event is overall harmful for a subject to the extent that this subject would have been better off if it had not occurred. In this paper we present a challenge for the Counterfactual Comparative Account. We argue that if physical processes are chancy in the manner suggested by our best physical theories, then CCA faces a dilemma: If it is developed in line with the standard approach to counterfactuals, then (...) it delivers that the value of any event for a subject is indeterminate to the extreme, ranging from terribly harmful to highly beneficial. This problem can only be avoided by developing CCA in line with theories of counterfactuals that allow us to ignore a-typical scenarios. Doing this generates a different problem: when the actual world is itself a-typical we will sometimes get the result that the counterfactual nonoccurrence of an actual benefit is itself a benefit. An account of overall harm bearing either of these two implications is deficient. Given the general aspiration to account for deprivational harms and the dominance of the Counterfactual Comparative Account in this respect, theorists of harm and benefit face a deadlock. (shrink)

Schleiermacher’s approach to the doctrine of God has attracted interest in contemporary theological scholarship. The article tries to map the major features of his God-construal and a number of perspectives are highlighted. Attention is given to the general sentiments of his project, the history of interpretation, the question of a primary referent for ‘God’ and the centrality of causation, the role of structure in his Glaubenslehre and finally the attribute tradition and the doctrine of the Trinity. The second part of (...) the article engages Schleiermacher’s interpretation from the developments in especially the Trinitarian Renaissance since the last part of the 20th century. A number of critical divergences are identified, for example, the preference given to plurality, greater appreciation for the immanent Trinity, a Trinitarian approach to the attributes and an expansive notion of the ‘practical’ implications of the Trinity. Critical questions about ‘Schleiermacher’s God’ are raised in the conclusion. (shrink)

The last few years have seen dramatic progress in the development of HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP). These developments have been met by ethical concerns. HIV interventions are often thought to be ethically difficult. In a context which includes disagreements over human rights, controversies over testing policies, and questions about sexual morality and individual responsibility, PrEP has been seen as an ethically complex intervention. We argue that this is mistaken, and that in fact, PrEP does not raise new ethical concerns. Some (...) of the questions posed by PrEP are not specific to HIV prophylaxis, but simply standard public health considerations about resource allocation and striking a balance between individual benefit and public good. We consider sexual disinhibition in the context of private prescriptions, and conclude that only unjustified AIDS-exceptionalism or inappropriate moralism about sex supports thinking that PrEP raises new ethical problems. This negative conclusion is significant in a context where supposed ethical concerns about PrEP have been raised, and in the context of HIV exceptionalism. (shrink)