Julia Annas offers a new account of virtue and happiness as central ethical ideas. She argues that exercising a virtue involves practical reasoning of the kind we find in someone exercising an everyday practical skill, such as farming, building, or playing the piano. This helps us to see virtue as part of an agent's happiness or flourishing.

The predominant view of moral virtue can be traced back to Aristotle. He believed that moral virtue must involve intellectual excellence. To have moral virtue one must have practical wisdom - the ability to deliberate well and to see what is morally relevant in a given context. Julia Driver challenges this classical theory of virtue, arguing that it fails to take into account virtues which do seem to involve ignorance or epistemic defect. Some 'virtues of ignorance' are counterexamples to (...) accounts of virtue which hold that moral virtue must involve practical wisdom. Modesty, for example, is generally considered to be a virtue even though the modest person may be making an inaccurate assessment of his or her accomplishments. Driver argues that we should abandon the highly intellectualist view of virtue and instead adopt a consequentialist perspective which holds that virtue is simply a character trait which systematically produces good consequences. (shrink)

How should thinkers cope with uncertainty? Julia Staffel breaks new ground in the study of rationality by answering this question and many others. She also explains how it is better to be less irrational, because less irrational degrees of belief are generally more accurate and better at guiding our actions.

This chapter concerns the nature of our obligations as individuals when it comes to our emissions-producing activities and climate change. The first half of the chapter argues that the popular ‘expected utility’ approach to this question faces a problematic dilemma: either it gives skeptical verdicts, saying that there are no such obligations, or it yields implausibly strong verdicts. The second half of the chapter diagnoses the problem. It is argued that the dilemma arises from a very general feature of the (...) view, and thus is shared by other views as well. The chapter then discusses what an account of our individual obligations needs to look like if it is to avoid the dilemma. Finally, the discussion is extended beyond climate change to other collective impact contexts. (shrink)

As an approach to public engagement, deliberation has the potential to pursue a range of goals identified by public participation theorists including the opportunity to substantively inform policy processes, increase the public’s knowledge and understanding of public issues and create or restore loss of public trust and confidence in public institutions. Baum and colleagues (2009) offer several important take-home messages for policy makers and public health leaders about the value of engaging with the public about ethically challenging, value-laden and resource (...) intensive policy issues such as pandemic response planning. (shrink)

I argue that in order to account for normative uncertainty, an expressivist theory of normative language and thought must accomplish two things: Firstly, it needs to find room in its framework for a gradable conative attitude, degrees of which can be interpreted as representing normative uncertainty. Secondly, it needs to defend appropriate rationality constraints pertaining to those graded attitudes. The first task – finding an appropriate graded attitude that can represent uncertainty – is not particularly problematic. I tackle the second (...) task by exploring whether we can devise expressivist versions of the standard arguments used to support rationality constraints on degrees of uncertainty, Dutch book arguments and accuracy-dominance arguments. I show that we can do so, but that the resulting arguments don’t support the same rationality constraints as the original versions of the arguments. (shrink)

This paper argues that a crucial skill needed to empathize with others cannot be trained by reading fiction: the skill of reading the evidence for the other person’s state of mind and, thus, empath...

An analysis of the evolution of the overlapping histories of human rights and development, and an exploration of the alternatives, through the lens of indigenous and other southern theories and epistemologies.

Jonathan Beever and Nicolae Morar’s (2016) article “The Porosity of Autonomy: Social and Biological Constitution of the Patient in Biomedicine” and its accompanying commentaries in the American Journal of Bioethics—though insightful, innovative, and provocative—overlook key interlocutors necessary for any discussion of whether the mid-twentieth-century biomedical principle of autonomy should be revised or revoked. The conversation sparked by “The Porosity of Autonomy” will remain both incomplete and politically untenable so long as there is no meaningful engagement with persons/communities who appeal to (...) the principle of patient autonomy in order to articulate and challenge the conditions of their oppression. (shrink)

Assessing maturity is one of the main ethical challenges for bioethics. It is even more complex when it comes to adolescents, as they are still in their maturing process. Three difficulties emerge: a conceptual difficulty as maturity is related to autonomy, competence and capacity; a methodological difficulty regarding which indicators should be used to assess it; and a practical difficulty in how to properly deal with it, as it is not easy to respect a maturity that only for a little (...) while now is being recognized and promoted. This paper begins by answering the question of why it is important to assess and promote maturity. Then, a chronology will be offered of the evolution of maturity attribution to minors as well as of the main variables that have been defined to asses it. Finally, some concepts will be clarified in order to develop an agglutinating proposal on indicators, requirements and conditioning factors of mature decision-making processes. (shrink)

In standard times, approximately 20% of children and youth experience significant emotional, behavioral, or social challenges. During COVID-19, however, over half of parents have reported mental health symptoms in their children. Specifically, depressive symptoms, anxiety, contamination obsessions, family well-being challenges, and behavioral concerns have emerged globally for children during the pandemic. Without treatment or prevention, such concerns may hinder positive development, personal life trajectory, academic success, and inhibit children from meeting their potential. A school-based resiliency program for children for children (...) was developed, and the goal of this study was to collaborate with stakeholders to translate it into an online-live hybrid. Our team developed a methodology to do this based on Knowledge Translation-Integration, which incorporates stakeholder engagement throughout the entire research to action process. KTI aims to ensure that programs are acceptable, sustainable, feasible, and credible. Through collaboration with parents and school board members, qualitative themes of concerns, recommendations and validation were established, aiding in meaningful online-live translation. Even though the original program was developed for intellectually gifted children, who are at greater risk for mental health concerns, stakeholders suggested using the program for both gifted and non-gifted children, given the universal applicability of the tools, particularly during this pandemic time period when mental health promotion is most relevant. An online-live approach would allow students studying at home and those studying in the classroom to participate in the program. Broader implications of this study include critical recommendations for the development of both online-live school programs in general, as well as social-emotional literacy programs for children. (shrink)

A large part of the current debate among virtue ethicists focuses on the role played by phronesis, or wise practical reasoning, in virtuous action. The paradigmatic case of an action expressing phronesis is one where an agent explicitly reflects and deliberates on all practical options in a given situation and eventually makes a wise choice. Habitual actions, by contrast, are typically performed automatically, that is, in the absence of preceding deliberation. Thus they would seem to fall outside of the primary (...) focus of the current virtue ethical debate. By contrast, Bill Pollard has recently suggested that all properly virtuous actions must be performed habitually and therefore automatically, i.e. in the absence of moral deliberation. In this paper, Pollard’s suggestion is interpreted as the thesis that habitual automaticity is constitutive of virtue or moral excellence. By constructing an argument in favor of it and discussing several objections, the paper ultimately seeks to defend a qualified version of this thesis. (shrink)

Leibniz holds that created substances do not causally interact with each other but that there is causal activity within each such creature. Every created substance constantly changes internally, and each of these changes is caused by the substance itself or by its prior states. Leibniz describes this kind of intra-substance causation both in terms of final causation and in terms of efficient causation. How exactly this works, however, is highly controversial. I will identify what I take to be the major (...) interpretive issues surrounding Leibniz's views on causation and examine several influential interpretations of these views. In ‘Leibniz on Causation – Part 2’ I will then take a closer look at final causation. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungDer Artikel greift die Überlegung auf, dass sich die Bioethik auch deshalb der empirischen Forschung zuwenden solle, um ihre Anwendbarkeit und Kontextsensitivität zu erhöhen. Am Beispiel der Norm, dass Schmerzen zu lindern seien, und mit Hilfe eines allgemeinen Modells ethischer Urteilsbildung werden verschiedene Bedeutungen der Anwendung und der Kontextsensitivität unterschieden und es wird untersucht, welche Rolle deskriptive Annahmen hierbei jeweils spielen können. Es wird die These vertreten, dass Kontextsensitivität in den meisten ihrer Bedeutungen von fundamentalethischen Grundannahmen unabhängig ist und dass (...) deskriptive Annahmen einen Prozess der Spezifikation ethischer Urteilsbildung auslösen, der in dieser Form nicht von der ethischen Begründung von Normen und Werten aus initiiert und antizipiert werden kann, jedoch zu seinem (zumindest vorübergehenden) handlungsorientierenden Abschluss auf diese zurückverwiesen ist. (shrink)

Music is an inescapable part of social, cultural and political life, and has played a powerful role in mobilising support for popular movements demanding social justice. The impact of David Bowie, Prince and Bob Dylan, for example, on diversity awareness and legislative reform relating to sexuality, gender and racial equality respectively is still felt; with the latter receiving a Nobel Prize in 2016 for ‘having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition’. The influence of these composers and (...) performers reached far beyond the concert hall. Conversely, musical propaganda has been a common feature of many dictatorships, most notably Nazism’s Adolf Hitler and Communism’s Joseph Stalin, and is still instrumental in the election campaigns of political parties. US President Donald Trump’s winning retro classic rock campaign playlist conveyed an idealised version of the past which aligned with the tastes and interests of his core constituency, and evoked feelings of nationalistic pride and patriotism. The eclectic selection of upbeat music effectively masked the underlying capitalist initiatives, corporate greed and allegations of financial impropriety that characterised both the Democrat and Republican campaigns. Although unable to impart meaning with the same level of precision as language, music has a potentially broader semantic capacity due to its greater elasticity. It constitutes a common language which has the ability to create a community of people that sings, speaks, reasons, votes and even feels the same way. Accordingly, this article explores the symbiotic relationship between music and law, identity politics and social justice, via the lens of musical semiosis. (shrink)

The definition of 'Englishness' has become the subject of considerable debate, and in this important contribution tto Ideas in Context Julia Stapleton looks at the work of one of the most wide-ranging and influential theorists of the English nation, Ernest Barker. The first holder of the Chair of Political Science at Cambridge, Barker wrote prolifically on the history of political thought and contemporary political theory, and his writings are notable for fusing three of the dominant strands of late-nineteenth and (...) early-twentieth century political thought, Whiggism, Idealism and Pluralism. Infused with a strong cultural sense of nationhood, Barker's writings influenced a broad non-academic audience, and their subsequent neglect graphically demonstrates the fate of a certain vision of Liberal England in the generation after World War One. With, however, the erosion of a particular sense of Englishness, Barker's ideas have begun to assume renewed resonance. (shrink)

This précis gives a brief summary of the key points of Julia Staffel’s book Unsettled Thoughts.

In the twenty-first century, 70.6 percent of Americans self-identify as Christians,1 58 percent of them still segregate themselves by race on Sunday mornings, and white Protestants make up the majority of this 58 percent.2 These facts belie the claim, popularized after Barack Obama's 2008 presidential election, that America is living in a postracial society3 And yet, the role played by religion in white people's lived experiences of race, racism, and white class privilege in the United States tends to be neglected (...) by philosophers and religious studies scholars, except perhaps when considering white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.4 Contemporary philosophy is secular in a way that generally excludes and... (shrink)

Epicurus' answers to the problem of how we can be free agents in his atomic world do not seem at first to cohere. I examine all of them, including a notorious papyrus fragment.

Jacques Derrida’s philosophy greatly disrupted traditional Western metaphysics by questioning our understanding of the relationship between language and reality. This paper examines how Derrida deconstructs logocentric and phonocentric perspectives that have influenced Western thought, focusing on his analyses of Plato’s Cratylus and Phaedrus, as well as Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics. For Derrida, the meaning in language is always shifting, suggesting that absolute truths, as traditionally conceived in Platonic metaphysics, are inherently unstable. His concept of différance illustrates the (...) fluid nature of meaning and the limitations of language. In his critique of “Plato’s Pharmacy,” he explores the inclusive potential of writing, which contrasts with Plato’s preference for speech and dialectics. While Plato is concerned with texts reaching readers he deems “inappropriate” for not fully grasping their meaning, Derrida views access to texts as positive and equitable. He argues that writing removes hierarchical barriers of interpretation, empowering readers and promoting inclusivity and diverse voices. Through this approach, he not only reshapes Western philosophical thinking but also encourages continuous questioning of the truths we often take for granted, expanding philosophy’s relevance to social and political aspects of everyday life. Derrida believes that philosophy should be accessible to all and not limited to privileged academic circles. He critiques elitism and advocates for philosophy to adapt to new social demands, challenging outdated rhetorical models and institutional authority. Derrida’s deconstruction encourages us to consider perspectives beyond our own backgrounds and experiences. By breaking down barriers that limit which voices are acknowledged and valued, we support more open and equitable intellectual and social systems. (shrink)

Given the unprecedented scope and stakes of contemporary environmental crisis, ethicists have raised critical questions about whether traditional religious texts can speak in a meaningful way to climate change and other environmental risks in the anthropocene. Building on the ethical urgency of the environmental justice movement, this essay offers a feminist reading of Jewish narratives from the Babylonian Talmud that centers attention on issues of power, privilege, and social inequality in the midst of disaster. Talmudic tales of the destruction of (...) Jerusalem critique the moral oblivion of wealthy residents who failed to act in response to crisis. Articulating a Jewish feminist reconstituative ethics, the author uses these tales to trace the ethical costs of epistemologies of ignorance—the complex strategies and social processes through which privileged communities cultivate ignorance of environmental suffering, maintain social distance from environmental risk, and disown moral culpability for environmental injustice. (shrink)

Using fractal analyses to study events allows us to capture the scale-independence of those events, that is, no matter at which level we study a phenomenon, we should get roughly the same results because events exhibit similar structure across scales. This is demonstrably true in mathematical fractals but is less assured in behavioral fractals. The current research directly tests the scale-independence hypothesis in the behavioral domain by exploring the fractal structure of aggression, a social phenomenon comprising events that span temporal (...) scales from minutes of face-to-face arguments to centuries of international armed conflicts. Using publicly available data, we examined the temporal fractal structure of four scales of aggression: wars, riots, violent crimes, and body movement during arguments. Our results lend mixed support to the scale-independence hypothesis and provide insight into the self-organization of human interactions. (shrink)

What is it about evil that we find so compelling? From our obsession with serial killers to violence in pop culture, we seem inescapably drawn to the stories of monstrous acts and the aberrant people who commit them. But evil, Dr. Julia Shaw argues, is largely subjective. What one may consider normal, like sex before marriage, eating meat, or working on Wall Street, others find abhorrent. And if evil is only in the eye of the beholder, can it be (...) said to exist at all? In [this book], Shaw uses an engrossing mix of science, popular culture, and real-life examples to break down timely and provocative issues. How similar is your brain to a psychopath's? How many people have murder fantasies? Can artificial intelligence be evil? Do your sexual proclivities make you a bad person? Who becomes a terrorist? If you could travel back in time, would you kill baby Hitler? In asking these questions, Shaw urges readers to discover empathy and to rethink and reshape what it means to be bad. [This book] is a wide-ranging exploration into a fascinating, darkly compelling subject from a wickedly smart and talented writer."--Dust jacket. (shrink)

Metaphysics, traditionally conceived, has often been defined as the inquiry into what lies beyond or is independent of experience, but which nonetheless pertains to the fundamental structure of reality. Thus understood, metaphysics produces claims that are not empirically testable. The 20th century logical empiricists famously—and ferociously—criticised metaphysics on these grounds as being devoid of cognitive content. Despite logical empiricism’s seminal role in the genesis and propagation of the analytic tradition in academic philosophy, metaphysics has made a remarkable comeback during the (...) second half of the 20th century. Contemporary analytic metaphysicians unabashedly refer to intuitions, conceptual analysis, and other genuinely philosophical, speculative methods in their search for insights into the fundamental nature of reality. Or so it seems. (shrink)

In this commentary we describe the interplay between 1) contemporary popular and professional understandings of “risk” and “normality” in health and healthcare, and 2) the promotion by state and market forces of individual self-regulation of health. We draw upon the work of critical theorists who have described the relationship between risk, fear, and the notion of “normal” in health discourse to argue that these factors act, primarily via the popular media, to shape the discourse on, and overuse of, diagnostic tests (...) in Canada. (shrink)

This research investigates various firm motives for practicing corporate social responsibility (CSR). More precisely, it examines whether a firm's primary motive for undertaking CSR is related to the type of actions performed. Such exploratory research is overdue following more than 40 years of scholarly contention on the financial rewards of doing (and looking) good. By uncovering and measuring specific aspects of CSR, I offer an initial understanding of interactions within firm CSR operations. Theory on types of CSR have surfaced, yet (...) empirical studies are few. In this research, I address this disparity by using original quantitative measures of both motive and type. The outcomes of this investigation challenge certain extant notions of CSR, while introducing a measure of objectivity in some long‐standing debates among scholars and corporate stakeholders. (shrink)

This article compares and contrasts the representation of epiphany and inspired divination in Greek literature. Narrative provides a way to compare epiphanic and oracular tales, and to investigate the cognitive processes at their cores. Both oracular tales and epiphanic tales not only contain similar themes, topoi, and narrative structures, but also revolve around common problems of cognition and human knowledge of the supernatural. This suggests that oracular tales constitute a form of epiphanic tale. Cognitive analysis ultimately reveals that epiphanic and (...) oracular tales accentuate different aspects of the same challenges individuals face when trying to make sense of the supernatural. (shrink)

Last year I published an autobiographical text in the form of interviews with a young psychologist entitled Je me voyage. The title’s neologism gives a nod to my foreign status in the French language which has largely determined my psychosexual positioning in research and in writing; the psychic experience has been central to my life’s trajectory In my familial context, culture constituted a world that made life liveable —and I experienced life, due to the importance accorded to language, as survival, (...) as an intimate resistance and an inherent creativity in social time. (shrink)

Love lies at the very heart of the Christian faith and its conception of both God and the human being. Nevertheless, the growing field of theological anthropology has yet to fully avail itself of philosophy’s and theology’s renewed attention to the theme of love. The Introduction to this special issue proposes the phrase ‘in the image of Love’ as an invitation to examine the relation between theological anthropology and love throughout the history of Christian thought. Guided by this motif, the (...) issue’s contributors consider ten historical thinkers on love and the human in relation to their philosophical conversation partners at the time. The volume thus has a genealogical dimension, delving into often forgotten layers beneath our current, late modern view of the human/love. It thereby assists future theological anthropological discussions in the much-needed task of both integrating the crucial theme of love and formulating more historically grounded perspectives. This special issue also reveals the ways in which theologians have attempted to respond to the challenge posed by the modern subject while retaining the idea that the human creature is called by Love and called to Love, and provides an alternative to Nygren’s opposition of agape and eros. (shrink)