ABSTRACT:Neuroethics, the study of the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying ethical decision-making, is a growing field of study. In this review, we identify and discuss four themes emerging from neuroethics research. First, ethical decision-making appears to be distinct from other types of decision-making processes. Second, ethical decision-making entails more than just conscious reasoning. Third, emotion plays a critical role in ethical decision-making, at least under certain circumstances. Lastly, normative approaches to morality have distinct, underlying neural mechanisms. On the basis of (...) these themes, we draw implications for research in business ethics and the practice of ethics training. (shrink)

This original new work takes a sharply focused look at Berkeley's ontology and provides a fuller understanding of the relationship between, on the one hand, Berkeley's nominalism and antiabstractionism and, on the other, his principal arguments for idealism and his attempts to square his idealism with common sense. Drawing heavily on detailed textual analysis, historical context, and careful examination of the work of other scholars, Muehlmann challenges, modifies, rejects, and exploits some well-established interpretations of Berkeley's philosophy.

Seeking a scientific basis for understanding and treating mental illness, and inspired by the work of Ivan Pavlov, American physiologists, psychiatrists and psychologists in the 1920s turned to nonhuman animals. This paper examines how new constructs such as “experimental neurosis” emerged as tools to enable psychiatric comparison across species. From 1923 to 1962, the Cornell “Behavior Farm” was a leading interdisciplinary research center pioneering novel techniques to experimentally study nonhuman psychopathology. Led by the psychobiologist Howard Liddell, work at the Behavior (...) Farm formed part of an ambitious program to develop new preventative and therapeutic techniques and bring psychiatry into closer relations with physiology and medicine. At the heart of Liddell’s activities were a range of nonhuman animals, including pigs, sheep, goats and dogs, each serving as a proxy for human patients. We examine how Pavlov’s conceptualization of ‘experimental neurosis’ was used by Liddell to facilitate comparison across species and communication between researchers and clinicians. Our close reading of his experimental system demonstrates how unexpected animal behaviors and emotions were transformed into experimental virtues. However, to successfully translate such behaviors from the animal laboratory into the field of human psychopathology, Liddell increasingly reached beyond, and, in effect, redefined, the Pavlovian method to make it compatible and compliant with an ethological approach to the animal laboratory. We show how the resultant Behavior Farm served as a productive “hybrid” place, containing elements of experiment and observation, laboratory and field. It was through the building of close and more naturalistic relationships with animals over extended periods of time, both normal and pathological, and within and outside of the experimental space, that Liddell could understand, manage, and make useful the myriad behavioral complexities that emerged from the life histories of experimental animals, the researchers who worked with them, and their shared relationships to the wider physical and social environments. (shrink)

In this paper I distinguish two kinds of predictivism, 'timeless' and 'historicized'. The former is the conventional understanding of predictivism. However, I argue that its defense in the works of John Worrall and Patrick Maher is wanting. Alternatively, I promote an historicized predictivism, and briefly defend such a predictivism at the end of the paper.

Pain management has improved in the past few decades. Opioid analgesics have become the mainstay in the treatment of cancer pain whilst inter-disciplinary pain management programmes are the generally accepted approach to chronic pain of non-malignant origin. Recently some pain specialists have advocated the use of opioids in the long-term management of non-cancer pain. This has raised some fundamental questions about the purpose of pain management. Is it best to opt for maximum pain relief and comfort, or should one emphasise (...) function and activity as higher priorities? Will the use of opioids create more autonomy for pain sufferers or will this add handicaps to lives which are already limited? Until more clinical outcome data are available we advocate caution in the use of opioid analgesia. Such caution can, and does, raise questions about the rights of the patient and the rights of the prescriber in a context where the facts do not point to a clear course of action. (shrink)

The principles of the 3Rs—replacement, refinement, and reduction—strongly shape discussion of methods for performing more humane animal research and the regulation of this contested area of technoscience. This special issue looks back to the origins of the 3Rs principles through five papers that explore how it is enacted and challenged in practice and that develop critical considerations about its future. Three themes connect the papers in this special issue. These are the multiplicity of roles enacted by those who use and (...) care for animals in research, the distribution of “feelings that matter” across species and spaces of laboratory animal practice, and the growing importance of “cultures of care” in animal research. (shrink)

The 3Rs, or the replacement, reduction, and refinement of animal research, are widely accepted as the best approach to maximizing high-quality science while ensuring the highest standard of ethical consideration is applied in regulating the use of animals in scientific procedures. This contrasts with the muted scientific interest in the 3Rs when they were first proposed in The Principles of Humane Experimental Technique. Indeed, the relative success of the 3Rs has done little to encourage engagement with their original text, which (...) remains little read and out of print. By adopting a historical perspective, this article argues that one explanation for this disjunction may be found in another, more celebrated, event of 1959: C. P. Snow’s Rede lecture on The Two Cultures. The moral outlook of The Principles of Humane Experimental Technique derived from an earlier ethos wherein humanistic and scientific values occupied a shared culture. While the synthetic style of The Principles has hindered its readership, this article concludes that there is value to recovering the notion that the humanities and social sciences can contribute to the improvement of animal research. (shrink)

Culp (1994) provides a defense for a form of experimental reasoning entitled 'robustness'. Her strategy is to examine a recent episode in experimental microbiology--the case of the mistaken discovery of a bacterial organelle called a 'mesosome'--with an eye to showing how experimenters effectively used robust experimental reasoning (or could have used robust reasoning) to refute the existence of the mesosome. My plan is to criticize Culp's assessment of the mesosome episode and to cast doubt on the epistemic significance of robustness. (...) In turn, I present a different account of the experimental reasoning microbiologists used in arriving at the conclusion that mesosomes are artifacts. I call this form of reasoning 'reliable process reasoning', and close the paper with a brief discussion of how experimental microbiologists justify the claim that an experimental process is reliable. (shrink)

Frequent lateral genetic transfer undermines the existence of a unique “tree of life” that relates all organisms. Vertical inheritance is nonetheless of vital interest in the study of microbial evolution, and knowing the “tree of cells” can yield insights into ecological continuity, the rates of change of different cellular characters, and the evolutionary plasticity of genomes. Notwithstanding within-species recombination, the relationships most frequently recovered from genomic data at shallow to moderate taxonomic depths are likely to reflect cellular inheritance. At the (...) same time, it is clear that several types of ‘average signals’ from whole genomes can be highly misleading, and the existence of a central tendency must not be taken as prima facie evidence of vertical descent. Phylogenetic networks offer an attractive solution, since they can be formulated in ways that mitigate the misleading aspects of hybrid evolutionary signals in genomes. But the connections in a network typically show genetic relatedness without distinguishing between vertical and lateral inheritance of genetic material. The solution may lie in a compromise between strict tree-thinking and network paradigms: build a phylogenetic network, but identify the set of connections in the network that are potentially due to vertical descent. Even if a single tree cannot be unambiguously identified, choosing a subnetwork of putative vertical connections can still lead to drastic reductions in the set of candidate vertical hypotheses. (shrink)

The ontological status of sport: Weiss, P. Records and the man. Schacht, R. L. On Weiss on records, athletic activity, and the athlete. Fraleigh, W. P. On Weiss on records and on the significance of athletic records. Stone, R. E. Assumptions about the nature of movement. Suits, B. The elements of sport. Kretchmar, S. Ontological possibilities: sport as play. Morgan, W. An existential phenomenological analysis of sport as a religious experience. Fraleigh, W. P. The moving "I." Fraleigh, W. P. Some (...) meanings of the human experience of freedom and necessity in sport. Keenan, F. W. The concept of doing.--The ethical status of sport: Keating, J. W. The ethics of competition and its relation to some moral problems in ahtletics. Sadler, W. A., Jr. A contextual approach to an understanding of competition: a response to Keating's philosophy of athletics. Osterhoudt, R. G. On Keating on the competitive motif in athletics and playful activity. Suits, B. The grasshopper: a thesis concerning the moral idea of man. Broekhoff, J. Sport and ethics in the context of culture. Zeigler, E. F. The pragmatic (experimentalistic) ethic as it relates to sport and physical education. Roberts, T. J. and Galasso, P. J. The fiction of morally indifferent acts in sport. Osterhoudt, R. G. The Kantian ethic as a principle of moral conduct in sport and athletics. Thomas, C. E. Do you "wanna" bet: an examination of player betting and the integrity of the sporting event.--The aesthetic status of sport: Kuntz, P. G. The aesthetics of sport. Keenan, F. W. The athletic contest as a "tragic" form of art. Osterhoudt, R. G. An Hegelian interpretation of art, sport, and athletics. (shrink)

THIS PAPER ARGUES, AGAINST A. O. LOVEJOY AND WITH R. B.\nPERRY, THAT JAMES' THEORY OF MEANING DOES NOT CONFUSE\nCONSEQUENCES OF BELIEVING AND CONSEQUENCES OF THE\nSTATEMENTS BELIEVED. RATHER, I ARGUE THAT JAMES HOLDS THAT\nTHE MEANING OF A SYNTHETIC STATEMENT IS TO BE FOUND IN ITS\nPERCEPTUAL CONSEQUENCES WHILE CONSEQUENCES OF BELIEVING ARE\nRELEVANT TO 'JUSTIFYING' OVERBELIEFS; THAT IS, TO\nJUSTIFYING MEANINGFUL STATEMENTS FOR WHICH THE EVIDENCE IS\nINSUFFICIENT TO PROVIDE A RATIONAL, NON-PASSIONAL\nJUSTIFICATION. ALTHOUGH THIS THEORY OF MEANING APPEARS\nANTI-METAPHYSICAL, JAMES DOES NOT USE IT TO RULE (...) OUT\nMETAPHYSICS BECAUSE HE BELIEVES, ALONG WITH COMMON SENSE,\nTHAT METAPHYSICAL DOCTRINES ARE MEANINGFUL; THUS, THE\nQUESTION IS WHAT METAPHYSICAL DOCTRINES MEAN AND NOT\nWHETHER THEY ARE MEANINGFUL. ALTHOUGH JAMES IS OFTEN\nMISLEADING IN TALKING ABOUT MEANING, I ARGUE THAT THIS\nINTERPRETATION IS SUPPORTED BY HIS NUMEROUS DISCUSSIONS OF\nMETAPHYSICS. PAUL HENLE'S ATTEMPT TO PROVIDE A FAVORABLE\nINTERPRETATION OF JAMES WITHIN LOVEJOY'S FRAMEWORK, IS ALSO\nSHOWN TO BE INCOHERENT. (shrink)

This chapter examines various Islamic perspectives on natural theology, and briefly outlines the reasons why the philosophy of Ibn Rusdh does not represent a definition of natural theology in Islam. It then discusses varieties of natural theology and Islam; Kalām texts and revelation; al-Ghazālī's criticism of philosophers; Nizām al-Dīn al-Nīsābūrī's views on the reasoned study of nature; natural theology and religious obligations; Sharī'a and natural law; and reactions to Darwin in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Near East.

The author presents a discussion of existentialistic themes as they are found in sartrean literature and scholarly writings. (staff).

Theoretical explication of a growing body of empirical data on consciousness-related anomalous phenomena is unlikely to be achieved in terms of known physical processes. Rather, it will first be necessary to formulate the basic role of consciousness in the definition of reality before such anomalous experience can adequately be represented. This paper takes the position that reality is constituted only in the interaction of consciousness with its environment, and therefore that any scheme of conceptual organization developed to represent that reality (...) must reflect the processes of consciousness as well as those of its environment. In this spirit, the concepts and formalisms of elementary quantum mechanics, as originally proposed to explain anomalous atomic-scale physical phenomena, are appropriated via metaphor to represent the general characteristics of consciousness interacting with any environment. More specifically, if consciousness is represented by a quantum mechanical wave function, and its environment by an appropriate potential profile, Schrödinger wave mechanics defines eigenfunctions and eigenvalues that can be associated with the cognitive and emotional experiences of that consciousness in that environment. To articulate this metaphor it is necessary to associate certain aspects of the formalism, such as the coordinate system, the quantum numbers, and even the metric itself, with various impressionistic descriptors of consciousness, such as its intensity, perspective, approach/avoidance attitude, balance between cognitive and emotional activity, and receptive/assertive disposition. With these established, a number of the generic features of quantum mechanics, such as the wave/particle duality, and the uncertainty, indistinguishability, and exclusion principles, display metaphoric relevance to familiar individual and collective experiences. Similarly, such traditional quantum theoretic exercises as the central force field and atomic structure, covalent molecular bonds, barrier penetration, and quantum statistical collective behavior become useful analogies for representation of a variety of consciousness experiences, both normal and anomalous, and for the design of experiments to study these systematically. (shrink)

This book demonstrates that the state-contingent approach provides the best way to think about all problems in the economics of uncertainty, including problems...

Chemistry laboratories, as buildings, have been surprisingly little studied by historians of science; interest has been focused on them more as sites of specific scientific activity, with particular emphasis on the personalities who worked within them. This has overshadowed aspects of laboratories such as their specification, design, construction, fitting-out, adaptation, replacement, status as civic and academic structures, and so on. Systematic study of them would be aided by an agreed taxonomy of laboratory types, according to their purpose, and a scheme (...) is proposed here. Practically no pre-1800 chemical laboratories survive, and there are very few dating from earlier than 1900, at least in their original state. Encouragingly, there have been several recent archaeological excavations which have turned up interesting evidence of early examples from various cultures. Little interest has been shown in the preservation of laboratories as significant architectural or historical structures, certainly when compared with other building types. The paper closes by considering those English laboratories which enjoy some level of legal protection but questioning the criteria adopted in deciding the programme of preservation. (shrink)

Aggleton & Brown have built a convincing case that hippocampus-related circuits may be involved in thalamic amnesia. It remains to be established, however, that their model represents a distinct neurological system, that the distinction between recall and familiarity captures the roles of these pathways in episodic memory, or that there are no other systems that contribute to the signs of amnesia associated with thalamic disease.