Satisfying one's obligations is an important part of being human. However, people's obligations can often prescribe contradictory behaviors. Moral obligations conflict, and so do obligations to different groups. We propose that a broader framework is needed to account for how people balance different social and moral obligations.

“Business,” wrote a professor of marketing in 1929, “is the work of the world, humanity's chiefest task.” On the doorstep of the Depression, Prof. George R. Collins was selling business, by which he meant the business economy, an economic order based on the systematic management of money. I do not intend to enter the volatile controversy between Collins and those like Aldous Huxley who accused business people of being venal and crass. Rather, I intend to trace one likely path by (...) which many in 1929 had come to regard business as a redemptive activity and the business person as a redeemer. (shrink)

This chapter explores the nature of moral rights by examining their formal structure, their status within morality, and rival theories concerning their content. Moral rights are construed as ones which legal systems ought to embody. As such, it is argued that consideration of the possibility of conflicts between rights and other moral values, and among rights themselves, serves to illuminate issues surrounding their content and moral status.

This study focuses on how Israeli Arab citizens perceive their media representations on Israeli television and why they consume television broadcasts even though they are marked mostly by negative representations. A new concept – “Communication Boundary Situation” – a development of Jaspers’ “Boundary Situation” theory, is the theoretical framework for the article. The empirical data was collected by conducting semi-structured in-depth interviews. The findings point to different attitudes among the interviewees towards their representation in various television genres, in particular, in (...) advertising as compared to satire and drama. The suggested theoretical framework and its empirical implementation might be useful in examining how various minorities perceive their media representations in other countries. (shrink)

Neil Levy (2011) argues that neuroethics as a new discipline distinct from bioethics provides methodological tools to evaluate the validity of our moral intuitions. This naturalistic claim that mor...

ḥeleḳ 1. A-Ṭ -- ḥeleḳ 2. Y-P -- ḥeleḳ 3. Ts-T.

There is an important distinction between a person's ’initial genetic endowment’ and his ’post‐conception inputs’ such as nutrition and education. From a left‐libertarian perspective that views persons as self‐owning, children have an enforceable claim that parents should provide adequate ’post‐conception’ inputs. Moreover, with the revolution in genetic science, it is now possible to effect genetic changes without altering identity. If so, children can, in principle, claim a right against ’genetic‐disablement’.

While logical theories of information attitudes, such as knowledge, certainty and belief, have flourished in the past two decades, formalization of other facets of rational behavior have lagged behind significantly. One intriguing line of research concerns the concept of intention. I will discuss one approach to tackling the notion within a logical framework, based on a database perspective.

This study investigates the cross-media repertoires of news consumption of young adults in today’s fragmented multi-media environment, and examines the interactions between those repertoires and the consumers’ civic engagement and political participation. By using a Q-sort method, the respondents were asked to sort a number of elicitation cards on a relational scalar grid, which allowed for subsequent statistical factor analysis of these qualitative data and the generation of a sub-typology of media consumption repertoires as well as the discursive practices of (...) the respondents. We also used a questionnaire which included questions about news consumption, political participation, and civic engagement. The findings revealed that most young adults used repertoires of digital and new media news consumption. The interviewees were highly conscious of their choices of news sources, and some young adults explicitly stated that they preferred to consume news from sources which reflected their own political views. In this study we were able to map news media repertoires of young adults in Israel and found that young adults do participate, and are largely involved, in activism and protests. (shrink)

:This paper argues that, inasmuch as exploitation is a form of injustice, exploitative acts need not be performed intentionally.

Intuition in medical and moral reasoning -- Moral intuitionism -- The place of Aristotelian phronesis in clinical reasoning -- Aristotle's practical syllogism: accounting for the individual through a theory of action and cognition -- Individual and statistical physiognomy: the art and science of making the invisible visible -- Clinical intuition versus statistical reasoning -- Contingency and correlation: the significance of modeling clinical reasoning on statistics -- Abduction: the intuitive support of clinical induction -- Conclusion: medical ethics beyond ontology.

The traditional Lockean account of a state's territorial rights construes them as arising from, and coextensive with, the property rights of whichever set of landowners mutually contract to form that state. The coherence of this individualistic account has recently been challenged by Cara Nine. I argue that the reasons offered in support of that incoherence charge are unpersuasive.

This book addresses the perennial question: What is justice?

This article examines responses to the controversial picketing and media‐savvy provocations of the Westboro Baptist Church (WBC). Since WBC’s conduct is widely perceived as cruel, people often respond with anger and animosity, which reinforce WBC’s self‐representation as a persecuted church. Conversely, I have engaged Westboro Baptists in interviews that function as “bridging conversations.” This methodology centers on critical‐empathic listening, comparative religious ethics, and a disciplined restraint from expressing moral judgment. I argue that this response is supported by the data and (...) understandings obtained, metapragmatic commentary, my rapport with churchgoers, and evidence of their empathy. In conclusion, I gauge the methodology’s risks and consider its expansion, for example, with undergraduates who have joined our conversations. In an era of polarized discourse, nonjudgmental listening is a counter‐intuitive response that troubles entrenched binaries, including the public fashioning of WBC as a dehumanized enemy. (shrink)

Leibniz’s interest in the Talmud and in Jewish philosophy and theology in general, is well established in the scholarly literature. In this paper, we suggest a short comparative study of Leibniz’s concept of the monad and the Talmudic idea of “Malchut.” Our study is based, specifically, on a tractate of the Talmud titled Yoma. This tractate is mainly focused on the Jewish Atonement Day, in which Jews are judged by God for their sins in the previous year. In particular, in (...) pages 38a-b of Yoma, the Talmud reads: “By your name they shall call you, and in your place they shall seat you, and from your own they shall give you; No person may touch that which is prepared for another, and one Malchut does not touch another even to the extent of a hairbreadth.” The Talmud suggests here that even though we somehow influence one another’s life, one cannot directly affect others’ predetermined place in the world or interfere in the individual paths prepared for others. In this paper, we aim to indicate the similarities between such Talmudic notions and Leibniz’s ideas in the Monadology – such as the ideas that monads have “no windows” and that a pre-established harmony is set among all monads by God – as a ground for future research. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose a game semantics for the (associative) Lambek calculus . Compared to the implicational fragment of intuitionistic propositional calculus, the semantics deals with two features of the logic: absence of structural rules, as well as directionality of implication. We investigate the impact of these variations of the logic on its game semantics.

The Culture of the Copy is an unprecedented attempt to make sense of our Western fascination with replicas, duplicates, and twins. In a work that is breathtaking in both its synthetic and critical achievements, Hillel Schwartz charts the repercussions of our entanglement with copies of all kinds, whose presence alternately sustains and overwhelms us. Through intriguing, and at times humorous, historical analysis and case studies in contemporary culture, Schwartz investigates most varieties of simulacra, including counterfeits, decoys, mannequins, ditto marks, (...) portraits, genetic cloning, war games, camouflage, instant replays, digital imaging, parrots, photocopies, wax museums, apes, art forgeries, not to mention the very notion of the Real McCoy. At the same time Schwartz works through a range of modernist, feminist, and postmodern theories about copies and mechanical reproduction, posing the following compelling question: How is it that the ethical dilemmas at the heart of so many fields of endeavor have become inseparable from our pursuit of copies—of the natural world, or our own creations, indeed our very selves? The Culture of the Copy is a stunning, innovative blend of microsociology, cultural history, and philosophical reflection that will fascinate anyone concerned with problems of authenticity, identity, and originality. (shrink)

It is suggested that taking into account considerations that traditionally fall within the scope of computer science in general, and artificial intelligence in particular, sheds new light on the subject of causation. It is argued that adopting causal notions con be viewed as filling a computational need: They allow reasoning with incomplete information, facilitate economical representations, and afford relatively efficient methods for reasoning about those representations. Specifically, it is proposed that causal reasoning is intimately bound to nonmonotonic reasoning. An account (...) of causation is offered that relies upon this connection, and compares this proposal to previous accounts within philosophy and artificial intelligence. (shrink)

During the Renaissance, the su was regarded primarily as a source of light which gave form to all things*; during the Enlightenment, paradoxically, the sun was regarded primarily as a source of heat. Paracelsian chemistry of the 1500s introduced salt as a third principle which embodied the other two, mercury and sulphur; salt was that universal mediating presence which represented earth. By the late 1700s salt was no longer a metaphysical principle but an acid-base compound, and volatile salts aroused most (...) interest. These changes in scientific perceptions of sun and salt ran parallel to one another: beginning as transcendent sources of form, sun and salt came to be considered manipulable sources of energy. Our r-;odern approach to energy derives from a period during which Europeans gradually lost their belief in the creative agency of two essentials to human life. (shrink)