The proliferation of digital data and internet-based research technologies is transforming the research landscape, and researchers and research ethics communities are struggling to respond to the ethical issues being raised. This paper discusses the findings from a collaborative project that explored emerging ethical issues associated with the expanding use of digital data for research. The project involved consulting with researchers from a broad range of disciplinary fields. These discussions identified five key sets of issues and informed the development of guidelines (...) orientated to meet the needs of researchers and ethics committee members. We argue that establishing common approaches to assessing ethical risks of research involving digital data will promote consistency in the ethical standards for research, enable the smooth functioning of ethics committees, and sustain public confidence in research. We conclude with recommendations for the development of educational resources for ethics committees, data management guidelines and further public education. (shrink)

Motive and Rightness is the first book-length attempt to answer the question, Does the motive of an action ever make a difference in whether that action is morally right or wrong? Steven Sverdlik argues that the answer is yes. His book examines the major theories now being discussed by moral philosophers to see if they can provide a plausible account of the relevance of motives to rightness and wrongness. Sverdlik argues that consequentialism gives a better account of these matters (...) than Kantianism or certain important forms of virtue ethics. In carrying out the investigation Sverdlik presents an analysis of the nature of motives, and he considers their relations to normative judgments and intentions. A chapter is devoted to analyzing the extent to which motives are 'available' to rational agents, and the importance of feelings and unconscious motives. Historical figures such as Kant, Bentham, Mill and Ross are discussed, as well as contemporary writers like Korsgaard, Herman, Hurka, Slote and Hursthouse. Motive and Rightness is unusual in its interweaving of ethical theory, both historical and contemporary, with moral psychology, action theory, and psychology. (shrink)

Baruch de Spinoza (1632-1677)--often recognized as the first modern Jewish thinker--was also a founder of modern liberal political philosophy. This book is the first to connect systematically these two aspects of Spinoza's legacy. Steven B. Smith shows that Spinoza was a politically engaged theorist who both advocated and embodied a new conception of the emancipated individual, a thinker who decisively influenced such diverse movements as the Enlightenment, liberalism, and political Zionism. Focusing on Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise, Smith argues that Spinoza (...) was the first thinker of note to make the civil status of Jews and Judaism (what later became known as the Jewish Question) an essential ingredient of modern political thought. Before Marx or Freud, Smith notes, Spinoza recast Judaism to include the liberal values of autonomy and emancipation from tradition. Smith examines the circumstances of Spinoza's excommunication from the Jewish community of Amsterdam, his skeptical assault on the authority of Scripture, his transformation of Mosaic prophecy into a progressive philosophy of history, his use of the language of natural right and the social contract to defend democratic political institutions, and his comprehensive comparison of the ancient Hebrew commonwealth and the modern commercial republic. According to Smith, Spinoza's Treatise represents a classic defense of religious toleration and intellectual freedom, showing them to be necessary foundations for political stability and liberal regimes. In this study Smith examines Spinoza's solution to the Jewish Question and asks whether a Judaism, so conceived, can long survive. (shrink)

This book develops the idea that meaningfulness is specified as a relation between an acknowledged appeal and an adopted attitude. In the Axial Age classics and again in modern refoundings of philosophy and theology, ideals of a fully commanding supreme appeal and a fully adequate orientation to the world in cognizance of that appeal--a sovereign attitude--are intellectually and spiritually central. Some of the most fundamental challenges of pluralism stem from differences in appeal and attitude ideals.

ABSTRACTSerene Khader and Rosa Terlazzo have each recently proposed theories of adaptive preferences which purport to both respect persons’ agency and provide an effective political tool. While Khader and Terlazzo thus share a similar goal, they take fundamentally different paths in its pursuit: Khader offers a perfectionist account of APs and Terlazzo an autonomy-based theory. In this paper, I argue first that if it is to adequately respect persons’ agency, a theory of APs should in some way include autonomy considerations. (...) If it is to provide an effective political tool, however, our theory should not be entirely autonomy-based, but include a condition addressing a preference’s compatibility with basic flourishing. The suggestion is thus that it is worth considering the possibility of a ‘mixed,’ rather than exclusively perfectionist or exclusively autonomy-based, theory of APs. I outline two such theories. The first, I argue, does quite well with respect to the political efficacy aim of AP theoriz... (shrink)

Describes the life and accomplishments of the nineteenth-century author best known for his work "Walden" and his dedication to expanding the philosophy of ...

In this dissertation I argue that the concept of a moral right is best explicated by means of the concept of morally legitimate coercion. This thesis, which I call the enforceability thesis, says that to have a right is to have a claim such that one would be justified in pursuing a course of action up to and including harm should the claim be dissatisfied. I contend that this thesis, if it is true, explains much about our intuitions concerning moral (...) rights, accounts for the historical importance of rights-talk in the context of events such as revolutions and political reforms, and explains why rights are a necessary part of the moral vocabulary. If rights do not set out conditions under which coercion is morally appropriate, then they do nothing that other moral concepts could not do. ;Drawing on the work of H. L. A. Hart, John Rawls, and others, I argue that the philosophical strength and practical efficacy of rights on the enforceability thesis is best realized when rights are treated as action-guiding principles set within a framework of moral decision making under reflective equilibrium. Using the process of reflective equilibrium as a backdrop, I argue that rights can have sufficient normative force to play an important role in moral and political theory without being either impracticably stringent or subject to so many exceptions that they lose their efficacy. ;With this background in place I next set out and argue for a view of human rights which, because human rights turn out to be best understood as rights to primary goods, I call the theory of primary rights. The account I give of primary rights emphasizes their justificatory place in arguments for coercion, their importance to the moral integrity of the individual, and the practical applicability of the overarching theory of rights developed in this dissertation. (shrink)

Three leading Jewish philosophers explore what it means to participate in post modern Jewish philosophy. They contemplate where Judaism has been, the relevance of age-old Biblical traditions, and the direction in which Judaism is headed in the 21st century.

This book is based upon a lecture series that took place between September 2013 and May 2014 to inaugurate the new Canadian Museum for Human Rights. It brings together some of the most influential contemporary thinkers on the theory and practice of human rights.

The New Semantics (NS) introduced by Kripke and Putnam is often thought to block antiphysicalist arguments that involve an inference from an explanatory gap to a failure of supervenience. But this “NS Rebuttal” depends upon two assumptions that are shown to be dubious. First, it assumes that mental-kind terms are among the kinds of terms to which NS analysis is properly applied. However, there are important differences in this regard between the behavior of notions like ‘pain’ and notions like ‘water’, (...) as Kripke himself has argued. Second, even on the assumption that NS analysis is appropriate to mental-kind terms, it is further assumed that this would block the anti-physicalist premise that an abiding and principled explanatory gap would entail a failure of metaphysical supervenience. But the paradigm examples of NS analysis show nothing of the sort. What they show is that there are a posteriori necessities (e.g., “water contains hydrogen”) that cannot be inferred from the sense of natural kind terms. But they do not show that such necessities cannot be derived from an adequate scientific understanding of the phenomena in question. Indeed, such derivations are often available with kinds like water, but seem unavailable with mental kinds like ‘pain’ and ‘belief’. (shrink)

Collects twenty five classic articles in visual perception, the articles span a century and include examples from disciplines that contribute to our current understanding of vision. Discussion questions and further reading suggestions follow.

This article examines the popular journalistic discourses on the terroristic actions and ideological beliefs of Brenton Tarrant as a way to illuminate the problematic ways in which the notions of radicalization and extremism of rightism are framed. I argue that the journalistic discourses implicitly frame radicalization and extremism as isolated standalone phenomena in terms of their ideas and ideological proponents. This framing is problematic because it stimulates a practical solution of suppression and a moral reaction of condemnation that serve to (...) inadvertently fuel the growth of radicalization towards extremist attitudes and violence. Therefore, through my elaboration, I aim to lead the discussion towards a reframing of radicalization and extremism as not only standalone phenomena but also inherently interactive social processes. Such reframing carries important educational implications. I conclude that the educational role in the face of problematic discourses on radical rightism is to ensure that the classroom understands radicalization as a shared and interactive social process rather than as only an individual outcome. It is through such understanding that the educational approaches can then optimally resist radicalization and extremism through the acknowledgement of the social importance of inclusive dialogues. (shrink)

This paper presents three theses on the kind of human kinds represented by masculinity and femininity: (1) Genders are taken to be generic realities, (2) complementary kinds of a kind, and (3) normative and valid organizations of intention in community. Analogies are considered between gender and temperament, culture, race, age, and sexual orientation.

This essay exhibits and explains a range of claims, each of which is central to Fichte’s “theory of science” (Wissenschaftslehre) and all of which importantly anticipate existentialism. The claims in question are the following: (1) The nature of selfhood or subjectivity is an issue of fundamental philosophical importance. (2) The self is not a thinking substance or knowing subject; it is a self-conscious project of self-actualization. (3) Qua self-conscious project, the being of the self is an ongoing interrelating of freedom (...) and finitude. (4) Qua project of self-actualization, the self is not a causally conditioned object but a self-transparently self-realizing activity. (5) This activity involves a striving for the self’s actuality. (6) Knowing is an activity founded upon and steered by that striving. (7) Qua striving for _the self’s_ actuality, the self’s activity harbors an orientation toward authenticity. (8) Qua striving for the self’s _actuality_, this activity aims for a humanly unreachable goal. (shrink)

Following societal and policy pressures for responsible innovation, innovators are more and more expected to consider the broader socio-ethical context of their work, and more importantly, to integrate such considerations into their daily practices. This may require the involvement of ‘outsiders’ in innovation trajectories, including e.g. societal and governmental actors. However, methods on how to functionally organize such integration in light of responsible innovation have only recently started to emerge. We present an approach to do just that, in which we (...) first develop value profiles of the involved actors, and second, design a workshop setting that allows innovators to develop design requirements in collaboration with representatives of parties that are not usually involved in such innovation design practices. Using a case study in automated vehicle development, we positively demonstrate the possibility and utility of our approach. We stress that in this study we wish to demonstrate the functionality of our developed method, and did not search for scientifically valid outcomes regarding this technical field. (shrink)

A response to Kenneth Schmitz's "Created Receptivity and the Philosophy of the Concrete" The Thomist vol. 61 no. 3 p. 339.

This article illustrates some implications of the view that data, theory and methods should be treated as a matched set. They are inseparable companions, equally essential parts of processes of scholarly research and dissemination. When we focus on one of these dimensions, the others are always implicit. When focus on all of them, our work is more complete, consistent and defensible. This contribution to this special issue highlights the value of focusing more explicitly on the inter-relations between all four levels (...) of scholarly work. (shrink)