This study examines how one student teaching seminar employed collective critical observation and reflection of an experienced high school social studies teacher's pedagogy using a multimedia representation of teaching. Pre-service teachers watched this teacher implement two full class lessons and reflections on teaching about freedom of speech. This study's pre-service social studies teachers exhibited a developing ability, through collective observation, to critically reflect on their individual methodological and philosophical goals, social studies teaching and learning, and professional and curricular visions in (...) relation to their student teaching experiences and future practice. The study's findings offer implications for how pre-service social studies teachers critically reflect on their practice, while also developing knowledge of learners, subject matter, and teaching social studies. (shrink)

In the years since Enron corporate social responsibility, or “CSR,” has become a ubiquitous phenomenon in both research and business practice. CSR is used as an umbrella term to describe much of what is done in terms of ethics-related activities in firms around the globe to such an extent that some consider it a “tortured concept” (Godfrey and Hatch 2007, Journal of Business Ethics 70, 87–98). Addressing this skepticism, I argue in this article that the focus on CSR is (...) indeed problematic for three main reasons: (1) the term carries a lot of historical baggage – baggage that is not necessarily conducive to the clarity of the concept; (2) it is the object of increasing ethical instrumentalism; and (3) given the multiple ethical challenges that corporations face, and given the fact that the “social” responsibilities of business are but one set of corporate responsibilities, a suitable term would have to be more inclusive and integrative. I therefore suggests moving instead toward a sound definition of corporate integrity and aim in this article to develop a working definition by fleshing out “7 Cs” of integrity: commitment, conduct, content, context, consistency, coherence, and continuity. I then discuss how these 7 Cs impact our understanding of CSR or, more broadly, corporate responsibility in general. (shrink)

My office is in a medical building in suburban Washington, D.C. —in Bethesda, named for the Biblical healing pool. All of the offices of my building are occupied by medical specialists, representing the most sophisticated training in the application of the scientific method. Downstairs and of service to all of us is a pharmacy, looking for all the world like a research laboratory with its gleaming surface, meticulous cleanliness, micro-balances, records, reference books, and cash register. It is neatly stocked with (...) modern, physiologically-defined preparations of active, predictable drugs. Among the enzymes, hormones, antibiotics, and chemo therapeutics for neoplasm, are a few newly hatched, unfledged remedies, but most are dependable and thoroughly assayed. The intently busy, white-coated, unsentimental pharmacists serve a hard-headed group of practitioners and a neighborhood of upper-class, well-educated patients. It is disconcerting, then, to see the undersurface of this sophistication, the irrational shadows beneath the science. On the front counter of the pharmacy are displayed attractive colored advertisements and pleasantly seductive inducements to self-improvement through diet cults and foods, tranquilizers, energizers, protein supplements, happiness promisers, preparations to enhance sexuality, vitamins artfully combined, and many packeted stuffs of no rational or pretended use whatsoever. “Why,” I ask the gimlet-eyed pharmacist, “do you have this large display of ‘Il Wah Genuine Chinese Ginseng, the Miraculous Herb of Life’? Doesn't it violate your university training? Your integrity as a modernist?” “Oh,” says he, “ginseng makes you feel better! You have more energy. You can do more! Lots of athletes use it, and people who work too hard and feel exhausted. It's only $3.45 a package. The prescriptions you give me once in a while yield no profit, but I sell a lot of ginseng. I use it myself!” Bemused, I walk back to my office, wondering about the easy abandonment of rationality, and pull down a box of medicinals collected the year before at an open-air pharmacy in the riverside markets of Brazil. The box gives forth deliciously rich forest smells. The packets within contain barks, roots, seeds, all of purported medical value. Other packets have amulets, charms, and protectives. The colorful labels on some of the patent medicines invoke ancient saints and healers, and promise happiness, health, prosperity and power. The essential rationale for their use in indigenous medicine was illusive to me despite many conversations with indigenous healers, and many times I have gone through the hundreds of items trying to find the key to what Brazilian and North American people fundamentally want from a pharmacy. In both cultures, where does magic stop and science begin? Do shops in both countries vend talismans in the search for the enhanced life, and fetishes against death? How much of all drug use is ritual and inchoate expectation? How can we reduce the mystification and incrementally increase the rationality of our pharmacopeia? (shrink)

Aus dem Inhalt: Epistemologie und Wissenschaftstheorie. Der metatheoretische Rahmen. Begründungsstrategien. Kohärenz. Einwände gegen eine Kohärenztheorie der Rechtfertigung. Metarechtfertigung. Wissenschaftliche Theorien. Wissenschaftliche Erklärungen. Erklärung als Vereinheitlichung.

Feeling moved or touched can be accompanied by tears, goosebumps, and sensations of warmth in the centre of the chest. The experience has been described frequently, but psychological science knows little about it. We propose that labelling one’s feeling as being moved or touched is a component of a social-relational emotion that we term kama muta. We hypothesise that it is caused by appraising an intensification of communal sharing relations. Here, we test this by investigating people’s moment-to-moment reports of feeling (...) moved and touched while watching six short videos. We compare these to six other sets of participants’ moment-to-moment responses watching the same videos: respectively, judgements of closeness, reports of weeping, goosebumps, warmth in the centre of the chest, happiness, and sadness. Our eighth time series is expert ratings of communal sharing. Time series analyses show strong and consistent cross-correlations of feeling moved and touched and closeness with each other and with each of the three physiological variables and expert-rated communal sharing – but distinctiveness from happiness and sadness. These results support our model. (shrink)

During the past ten years Integrative Social Contracts Theory (ISCT) has become part of the repertoire of specialized decision-oriented theories in the business ethics literature. The intention here is to (1)␣provide a brief overview of the structure and strengths of ISCT; (2) identify recurring themes in the extensive commentary on the theory including brief mention of how ISCT has been applied outside the business ethics literature; (3) describe where research appears to be headed; and (4) specify challenges faced by those (...) who seek to reform ISCT. Key themes in the critiquing literature relate to (a) the identification process for hypernorms; (b) justification of the recognition of hypernorms; (c) proposals for considering meso or meta norms; (d)␣clarification of the relationship between stakeholder concepts and ISCT; (e) problems with potentially unoccupied moral free space; (f) sources of ethical obligation within the ISCT framework; and (g) the potential role for concepts of stakeholder dialogue and engagement. (shrink)

As a way to address both ominous and ordinary threats of artificial intelligence, researchers have started proposing ways to stop an AI system before it has a chance to escape outside control and cause harm. A so-called “big red button” would enable human operators to interrupt or divert a system while preventing the system from learning that such an intervention is a threat. Though an emergency button for AI seems to make intuitive sense, that approach ultimately concentrates on the point (...) when a system has already “gone rogue” and seeks to obstruct interference. A better approach would be to make ongoing self-evaluation and testing an integral part of a system’s operation, diagnose how the system is in error and to prevent chaos and risk before they start. In this paper, we describe the demands that recent big red button proposals have not addressed, and we offer a preliminary model of an approach that could better meet them. We argue for an ethical core that consists of a scenario-generation mechanism and a simulation environment that are used to test a system’s decisions in simulated worlds, rather than the real world. This EC would be kept opaque to the system itself: through careful design of memory and the character of the scenario, the system’s algorithms would be prevented from learning about its operation and its function, and ultimately its presence. By monitoring and checking for deviant behavior, we conclude, a continual testing approach will be far more effective, responsive, and vigilant toward a system’s learning and action in the world than an emergency button which one might not get to push in time. (shrink)

One‐third of all human deaths are due to poverty‐related causes, to malnutrition and to diseases that can be prevented or cured cheaply. Yet our politicians, academics, and mass media show little concern for how such poverty might be reduced. They are more interested in possible military interventions to stop human rights violations in developing countries, even though such interventions – at best – produce smaller benefits at greater cost. This Western priority may be rooted in self‐interest. But it engenders, and (...) is sustained by, a deeply flawed moral presentation of global economic cooperation. The new global economic order we impose aggravates global inequality and reproduces severe poverty on a massive scale. On any plausible understanding of our moral values, the prevention of such poverty is our foremost responsibility. (shrink)

Thomas Erne entfaltet im Anschluss an Schleiermachers Ästhetik das Verhältnis von Kunst und Religion. Dabei nimmt er über Schleiermacher hinaus auch die moderne, autonome Kunst in Blick. Im Dialog mit exemplarischen Kunstwerken der Gegenwart fragt er nach Transzendenzerfahrungen in der Gegenwartskunst, in der die Kunstwerke selbst zu,,autonomen Sinndomänen" werden. Der Band dokumentiert die Schleiermacher-Lecture 2019 an der Theologischen Fakultät der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Im Rahmen dieser Reihe sollen ausgewählte Aspekte von Schleiermachers Werk mit Fragen und Problemkonstellationen der Gegenwart in (...) Beziehung gesetzt werden. (shrink)

The General Account of Pleasure in Plato's Philebus THOMAS M. TUOZZO 1. INTRODUCTION DOES PLATO IN THE Philebus present a single general account of pleasure, applicable to all of the kinds of pleasure he discusses in that dialogue? Gosling and Taylor think not;' Dorothea Frede has recently reasserted a version of the contrary, traditional view. 2 The traditional view, I shall argue in this essay, is correct: the Philebus does contain a general account of pleasure applicable to all pleasures. (...) Nonetheless, Gosling and Taylor have pointed to a real difficulty with the traditional view, a difficulty that has never been adequately ad- dressed. To show how it can be overcome will involve showing that Plato's account of pleasure, and his analyses of other phenomena of moral psychol- ogy in the Philebus, are more complex and subtle than has often been realized. Gosling and Taylor offer two considerations in support of their view: Socrates insists against Protarchus that different pleasures can be "most oppo- site" to each other, which suggests that no single account can apply to them all,s and Socrates does not indicate how the most likely candidate for a general account of pleasure, one involving the restoration of a natural har- ,j. c. B. Gosling and C. C. W. Taylor, The Greeks on Pleasure , 14o: "It seems clear that in the Philebus Plato has no general formula to encapsulate the nature of pleasure .... " So, too, C. Hampton, Pleasure,.. (shrink)

Descriptions of Gettier cases can be interpreted in ways that are incompatible with the standard judgment that they are cases of justified true belief without knowledge. Timothy Williamson claims that this problem cannot be avoided by adding further stipulations to the case descriptions. To the contrary, we argue that there is a fairly simple way to amend the Ford case, a standard description of a Gettier case, in such a manner that all deviant interpretations are ruled out. This removes one (...) major objection to interpreting our judgments about Gettier cases as strict conditionals. (shrink)

The main objective of immunology is to establish why and when an immune response occurs, that is, to determine a criterion of immunogenicity. According to the consensus view, the proper criterion of immunogenicity lies in the discrimination between self and nonself. Here we challenge this consensus by suggesting a simpler and more comprehensive criterion, the criterion of continuity. Moreover, we show that this criterion may be considered as an interpretation of the immune 'self'. We conclude that immunologists can continue to (...) speak of the self, provided that they admit that the self/nonself discrimination is not an adequate criterion of immunogenicity. (shrink)

Many recent evolutionary psychology and human behavioral ecology studies have tested hypotheses by examining correlations between variables measured at a group level (e.g., state, country, continent). In such analyses, variables collected for each aggregation are often taken to be representative of the individuals present within them, and relationships between such variables are presumed to reflect individual-level processes. There are multiple reasons to exercise caution when doing so, including: (1) the ecological fallacy, whereby relationships observed at the aggregate level do not (...) accurately represent individual-level processes; (2) non-independence of data points, which violates assumptions of the inferential techniques used in null hypothesis testing; and (3) cross-cultural non-equivalence of measurement (differences in construct validity between groups). We provide examples of how each of these gives rise to problems in the context of testing evolutionary hypotheses about human behavior, and we offer some suggestions for future research. (shrink)

Re-analysis of the data provided in the target article reveals a lack of evidence for a strong, universal relationship between parasite stress and the variables relating to sociality. Furthermore, even if associations between these variables do exist, the analyses presented here do not provide evidence for Fincher & Thornhill's (F&T's) proposed causal mechanism.

T. M. Scanlon has cited the value of friendship in arguing against a ‘teleological’ view of value which says that value inheres only in states of affairs and demands only that we promote it. This article argues that, whatever the teleological view's final merits, the case against it cannot be made on the basis of friendship. The view can capture Scanlon's claims about friendship if it holds, as it can consistently with its basic ideas, that (i) friendship is a higher-level (...) good consisting in appropriate attitudes to other goods and evils in a friend's life, (ii) these goods and evils have agent-relative value, i.e. more value than similar states of strangers, and (iii) the attitudes constituting friendship have less value than their objects. Given these independently plausible claims, the teleological view can agree with Scanlon that, e.g., it is wrong to betray a friend in order to promote more friendships among other people. (Published Online August 21 2006). (shrink)

In this paper I show that Rawls’s contract apparatus in A Theory of Justice depends on a particular presumption that is in conflict with the goal of conserving environmental resources. He presumes that parties in the original position want as many resources as possible. I challenge Rawls’s approach by introducing a rational alternative to maximising. The strategy of satisficing merely goes for what is good enough. However, it seems that under conditions of scarcity Rawls’s maximising strategy is the only rational (...) alternative. I therefore scrutinise the common account of scarcity. I distinguish between absolute and relative scarcity in order to show that scarcity is influenced by our decisions. If we would not accept the claim to as much as possible without further legitimisation, like Rawls does, then scarcity might not be as severe a problem. Finally, I reject Rawls’s proposed solution for dealing with problems of sustainability, namely his idea of the just savings principle. I conclude that Rawlsian Justice as Fairness is bad for the environment. (shrink)

Semantic theories account for the literal, conventional meanings of linguistic expressions, and they tend to do so by assigning them one or more semantic values: extensions, intensions, and characters. Lest semantics should be a cul-de-sac, at least some of these values must be interpretable from the outside. The semantic values, are supposed to figure in accounts of preconditions of utterances and their communicative effects, contributing aspects of their literal meaning. The semantic values are assigned to expressions, not to surface strings. (...) The disambiguation of surface strings usually shows in the part-whole structure of the underlying expressions. The semantically relevant parts of an expression need not be determined according to its surface structure. Rather, there is a specific level of syntactic analysis—sometimes called Logical Form —that defines the syntactic input to semantic analysis. The compositional treatment of an expression may call for otherwise unmotivated structuring. (shrink)

One component of a viable account of scientific inquiry is a defensible conception of scientific problems. This paper specifies some logical and conceptual requirements that an acceptable account of scientific problems must meet as well as indicating some features that a study of scientific inquiry indicates scientific problems have. On the basis of these requirements and features, three standard empiricist models of problems are examined and found wanting. Finally a constraint inclusion-model of scientific problems is proposed.

I thank Professor Fulford for giving me an opportunity to comment on Bracken and Thomas’s essay. Unfortunately, this requires accepting the authors’ focus on discourses rather than deeds, on what psychiatrists say and how they say it rather than on what psychiatrists do and how they justify it. This I cannot do in good conscience. Nevertheless, out of respect to Professor Fulford and the journal Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology, as well as a sense of professional obligation, I offer herewith (...) my brief comments. Bracken and Thomas are not the first persons to compare my work with Foucault’s, nor the first to comment on my writing style. In 2001, a pseudonymous blogger posted this comment (still .. (shrink)

Qualitative Coalitional Games are a variant of coalitional games in which an agent's desires are represented as goals that are either satisfied or unsatisfied, and each choice available to a coalition is a set of goals, which would be jointly satisfied if the coalition made that choice. A coalition in a QCG will typically form in order to bring about a set of goals that will satisfy all members of the coalition. Our goal in this paper is to develop and (...) study logics for reasoning about QCGs. We begin by introducing a logic for reasoning about “static” QCGs, where participants play a single game, and we then introduce and study Temporal QCGs , i.e., games in which a sequence of QCGs is played. In order to represent and reason about such games, we introduce a linear time temporal logic of QCGs, called ℒ. We give a complete axiomatisation of ℒ, use it to investigate the properties of TQCGs, identify its expressive power, establish its complexity, characterise classes of TQGCs with formulas from our logical language, and use it to formulate several solution concepts for TQCGs. (shrink)

Two forms or rather perspectives of observations appear alongside practice theories: The first perspective can be called the „theatre perspective“: practice here is observed as a regular, spatiotemporally ordered, socially structured, and therefore recognizable historical form of „practical doings and sayings“, in which participants are understood as mere carriers of practices and their bodies as the raw material for processes of formation. In the other perspective, understood as the perspective of the participants themselves, practices come into view as ongoing, conflictual, (...) and contingent accomplishments, in which participants occur as intelligently collaborating contributors with so called „lived bodies“. These bodies are affectable, sites of experience, and media of a sensitivity that allow an embodied self to orientate itself (with)in a practice. This paper proposes a methodological mediation of both perspectives by taking into account both a sociological analysis of discipline, formation, or adjustment, and the reflexive sensing in action, which can be modeled phenomenologically. Thus, a „lived-body-in-accomplishment“ comes into view that serves the material basis of subjectivation procceses, i. e. the (self-)formation of a constitutionally conditioned (political) agency. (shrink)

Le relatif silence de Bergson au sujet de la figure de Hegel n’empêche pas G. Deleuze de structurer son approche du bergsonisme autour d’un axe résolument anti-hégélien. Notre étude vise à prendre à rebours cette démarche et à dégager un rapport moins antagonique entre bergsonisme et hégélianisme en investiguant en amont de sa reconstruction deleuzienne. Le lieu où la pensée de Bergson diverge le plus profondément de celle de son prédécesseur allemand ne peut à notre avis être identifiéque sur la (...) base d’un accord plus fondamental entre les deux philosophes. Il s’agira ainsi de circonscrire ce terrain d’entente à partir de leur refus commun et assumé du « scepticisme » métaphysique kantien. Il s’avérera que Bergson et Hegel participent d’une tentative similaire pour composer avec la fluidité du réel et qu’ils se heurtent tous deux aux mêmes difficultés pour dire l’absolu sans trahir la vie qui lui est propre. (shrink)

Commercial food health branding is a challenging branch of marketing because it might, at the same time, promote healthy living and be commercially viable. However, the power to influence individuals’ health behavior and overall health status makes it crucial for marketing professionals to take into account the ethical dimensions of health branding: this article presents a conceptual analysis of potential ethical problems in health branding. The analysis focuses on ethical concerns related to the application of three health brand elements (functional (...) claims, process claims, and health symbols) as well as a number of general concerns that apply to health branding as such. Being a pioneering analysis, this article advances the academic understanding of health branding and provides practitioners with knowledge of important concerns to take into account when marketing health brands. (shrink)

Knobe reports that subjects' judgments of whether an agent did something intentionally vary depending on whether the outcome in question was seen by them as good or as bad. He concludes that subjects' moral views affect their judgments about intentional action. This conclusion appears to follow only if different meanings of “intention” are overlooked.