The author engages the enigmatic Green Man, a mythical figure of uncertain and even independent global arisings, to connect postindustrial people with their evolutionary origin and their kinship with all life. He traces the stream of ecologically oriented cultural critiques from Lynn White, Thomas Berry, Paul Shepard, and on through the school of Deep Ecologists, as they explore how modern humanity has alienated itself from the Earth. Green Man's spiritual path of sensory integration with our earthly habitat can help disenfranchised (...) earthlings return to their planetary home, relate to their biodiverse kin, and discover their own true nature. (shrink)

This chapter seeks to provide an understanding of philosophical ethics sufficient for reading other chapters and for appreciating the relevance of philosophical investigations for epidemiologic ethics. Some central concepts and methods of biomedical ethics are explained. In the section on Social Morality and Professional Morality, several questions about the nature of morality and moral responsibility are discussed. In the Section on Problems and Methods in Moral Philosophy, several problems and methods in moral philosophy are discussed, and, in the final section, (...) some ethical theories of importance for biomedical ethics are investigated. (shrink)

Natural law ethics centres on the idea that ethical norms derive from human nature. The field has seen a remarkable revival since the millennium, with new work in Aristotelian metaphysics complementing innovative applied work in bioethics, economics and political theory. Starting with three chapters on the history of natural law ethics, this volume moves on to various twentieth-century theoretical innovations in the tradition, and then to natural law as embedded in the three Abrahamic faiths. It closes with sections on applied (...) natural law ethics and the challenges and prospects for natural law ethics in the twenty-first century. Uniquely interdisciplinary and written without technical jargon, the book will be of great interest to students and researchers in philosophy, theology, political theory and economics. They will find this the go-to resource for cutting-edge thinking in natural law ethics. (shrink)

The literature regarding social and environmental sustainability of business focuses primarily on rationales for adopting sustainability strategies and operational practices in support of that goal. In contrast, we examine sustainability from a perspective that has received far less research attention—attitudes that inform managerial decision-making. We develop a conceptual model that identifies six elemental categories of attitudes that can be held independently or aggregated to yield a meta-attitude representing the legitimacy of sustainability. Our model distinguishes among three types of internally held (...) attitudes and externally perceived subjective norms: pragmatic, moral, and cognitive. We propose a refinement of Ajzen's (In: Kuhl J, Beckmann J (eds) Action control: from cognition to behavior, 1985; Organ Behav Hum Decis Process 50:179-211, 1991) Theory of planned behavior (TPB) that incorporates these sub-categories of personal attitudes and subjective norms. Practical implications are discussed including how organizations considering adopting sustainability programs might use the model as a conceptual tool to help achieve and assess program success. (shrink)

In a health service with limited resources we must make decisions about who to treat first. In this paper I develop a version of the restoration argument according to which those whose need for resources is a consequence of their voluntary choices should receive lower priority when it comes to health care. I then consider three possible problems for this argument based on those that have been raised against other theories of this type: that we don't know in a particular (...) case that the illness is self-inflicted, that it seems that all illness is self-inflicted in the sense used in my argument, and finally that this type of approach incorporates an unacceptable moralising element if it is to avoid giving those like fire-fighters a lower priority for treatment. I argue that the position outlined here has the resources to respond to each of these objections. (shrink)

The paper looks at how Tsong kha pa, mKhas grub, and Go rams pa understood the third and fourth lemmas in the tetralemma, “both A and B” and “neither A nor B,” respectively.

`Modern' philosophy in the West is said to have begun with Bacon and Descartes. Their methodological and metaphysical writings, in conjunction with the discoveries that marked the seventeenth-century scientific revolution, are supposed to have interred both Aristotelian and scholastic science and the philosophy that supported it. But did the new or `modern' philosophy effect a complete break with what preceded it? Were Bacon and Descartes untainted by scholastic influences? The theme of this book is that the new and traditional philosophies (...) have more in common than the orthodox account suggests. In two survey articles and thirteen essays on individual philosophers, the contributors show that the rise of modern philosophy was much more complicated and much more interesting than is usually thought. They consider not only metaphysics and the sciences but also claims of Machievelli, Hobbes and Spinoza to have invented `modern' ethics and politics. These two aspects of `modernity' in philosophy are connected for the first time. The book offers a broad view of the early modern philosophers, covering not only the much-studied major figures but also relatively neglected writers: Mersenne, Gassendi, White, and Sergeant. (shrink)

We develop the theory of cofinal types of ultrafilters over measurable cardinals and establish its connections to Galvin’s property. We generalize fundamental results from the countable to the uncountable, but often in surprisingly strengthened forms, and present models with varying structures of the cofinal types of ultrafilters over measurable cardinals.

Volume 20, Issue 9, September 2020, Page 29-31.

In this chapter I analyse group flow: a state in which performers report intense interpersonal absorption with the music and each other. I compare group flow to individual flow, and argue that the same essential structure can be discerned. I argue that group flow does not justify an anti-representationalist enactivist interpretation. However, I claim that the cognitive task in which the music is produced is irreducibly collective.

Principlism is the approach promoted by Beauchamp and Childress for addressing the ethics of medical practice. Instead of evaluating clinical decisions by means of full-scale theories from moral philosophy, Beauchamp and Childress refer people to four principles—of autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and justice. Now it is one thing for principlism to be invoked in an academic literature dwelling on a stock topic of medical ethical writing: end-of-life decisions, for example. It is another when the topic lies further from the mainstream. In (...) such cases the cost of reaching for the familiar Beauchamp and Childress framework, with its formulaic set of concerns, may be to miss something morally important. After discussing an example of the sort of academic literature I have in mind, I propose to distinguish the uses of the formulaic from the uses of the more unapologetically theoretical in applied ethics, and to suggest that the latter can make up for some of the limitations of the former. This is not to say that the more theoretical literature has no limitations of its own, or that it should take the place of the formulaic. On the contrary, there is room in applied ethics and a use in applied ethics for both. But there is a sense in which there is a greater dependence of principlism on theory than the other way round, and at the end I try to spell out the significance of this fact. (shrink)

(2004). From an Exercise in Professional Etiquette to Society's Wish List? Review of American Medical Association, Code of Medical Ethics: Current Opinions with Annotations. The American Journal of Bioethics: Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 69-70. doi: 10.1162/152651604323097907.

Two dogmas lie at the heart of modern work on Aristotle's ethical theory. The first is that that theory is essentially secular or non-theistic. The second is that Aristotle's ethics assumes what Gr...

There has been no informed or honest debate in North America over the issue of liberalized euthanasia. Despite thousands of newspaper stories, scores of learned academic articles, a handful of closely analyzed legal decisions, and hours of broadcast news and talk show imagery, a full discussion is yet to begin.

In an article published in 2009 titled "How Do Mādhyamikas Think?" I tried to go some distance with Yasuo Deguchi, Jay Garfield, and Graham Priest (henceforth "DGP") in reading certain Buddhist texts as dialetheist.1 The dialetheism that I saw as plausible for the Prajñāpāramitā-sūtras and Nāgārjuna was not the full-blown robust variety of DGP (i.e., acceptance of the truth of some statement of the form p & ¬p) but a non-adjunctive variety, acceptance of p and acceptance of ¬p. In short, (...) the adjunctive move to p & ¬p is blocked.In the article, I focused on texts like the Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā-sūtra ("Diamond Cutter Suūtra") with its famous "signature formulae" along the lines of "x does not exist / x is not .. (shrink)

Uncertainty for policy makers is not new but the pressure to make decisions under conditions of uncertainty is perhaps greater than ever. The arrival of new scientific developments such as pharmacogenetics offers potentially great benefits . They have passionate supporters as well as doubters. The evidence is often extensive but unclear and policy makers may find themselves under pressure to make decisions before they feel that the evidence is compelling.The UK is particularly well placed to play a leading role in (...) the development of pharmacogenetics and is equally well placed to derive the benefits to both health and wealth that could flow from this. However, the uncertainties threaten to overwhelm the capacity of policy makers to act effectively. The uncertainties are both about the context within which the science and delivery of pharmacogentics is being developed and about the interests that could be served. This paper maps these uncertainties and concludes with some suggestions, drawing on deliberative democracy and futures thinking, as to how policy makers might manage the tensions and dilemmas they face by moving from an unstable, emergent policy arena to a more stable one. (shrink)

Hospital futility policies are ethically defensible, but they require the proper understanding of futility and should be embedded in a larger process for making decisions about limiting treatment.

It makes sense to ask from time to time where we are in the philosophical discussion. This article reviews the debate in the twentieth century. Michael Friedman has recently argued that the split between Continental and analytic philosophy is due to the inability, because of war, to carry forward a genuine debate begun by Heidegger and Carnap around the time of Heidegger's public controversy with Cassirer at Davos in 1929. I, however, argue that there was not even the beginning of (...) a genuine debate between Heidegger and Carnap. I argue further that the split between analytic and Continental philosophy originated earlier, in the analytic attack on idealism at the beginning of the century. And finally, I argue that the differences among analytic philosophy, Continental philosophy, and pragmatism, the third main current of twentieth-century philosophy, can be traced to differing reactions to Kant. (shrink)

In the summer of 1997 one could scarcely enter a bookstore in Beijing without encountering Wang Xiaobo's pensive and defiant look on the cover of dozens of books displayed at the entrance. Wang had suddenly died in the spring of that year at the age of forty-five. Born in Beijing in 1952 to a family of intellectuals, he remained attached to China's capital despite periods of separation, such as during the Cultural Revolution, when he was sent to Yunnan to "learn (...) from the peasants" and taught in a "people-run-school" in Shandong, and also during the 1980s, when he studied in the United States . Wang always returned to Beijing, in the late 1970s to study economy and business at the People's University and in the late 1980s to teach there. After retiring in 1993, he devoted his time to writing: poetry, novels, essays, non-fiction, and a movie script. (shrink)

(1994). Moral authority in law and criminal justice: Some reflections on Wilson's The Moral Sense. Criminal Justice Ethics: Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 44-53.

Unemployment is not just an economic category but is constituted by governmentality, most evidently by the increase of interventions into the lives of the unemployed through Active Labour Market Policies. Furthermore, the International Labour Organization definition of unemployment as being without work, available for work and seeking work is a shifting classification which categorises unemployment on multiple temporal horizons, with the passive element of being without work increasingly superseded by the emphasis on seeking work. Through biographical interviews with unemployed in (...) Ireland, spanning from 2012-2018, we trace this transformation of temporality empirically and conclude that governmentality constitutes multiple, contradictory, indefinite forms of time. Particularly, we offer an imaginative reading of two overlapping temporalities: Kairos, waiting, enduring, suffering nothingness in anticipation of transformation by getting a job, and Cronos, not cyclical time, but the devouring of time, where the days and leisure of the unemployed people are deliberately consumed by job-seeking. Ironically, states implement ALMPs in the kairotic hope of transforming their economy, yet these policies do little but make the experience of unemployment even harder to endure. (shrink)

The digital game Dog's Life (Frontier Developments, 2003) attempts, by means of its “Smellovision” feature, to communicate something of the alterity of canine perception: the greater field of view, the lower visual perspective, the dichromatic colour vision, as well as the spectacularly impressive sense of smell. At the same time, it encourages players to identify with the game's protagonist: you “are” Jake, digging up bones, marking territory and chasing chickens, as you make your way through the developing narrative. In this (...) essay I argue that Dog's Life effectively comprises an “anti-environment” of the sort described by McLuhan, which altercasts players as dogs and thereby prompts them to notice conventional, anthroponormative assumptions regarding the pre-eminence of human modes of perception. By insisting on an experience both of alterity and identity, the digital game medium here combats clichéd notions of animality and subjectivity, whilst requiring players to reconsider the complex and uneven nature of interspecific, interpersonal control. (shrink)

This article presents an example of the contributions the field of science and religion could offer to educational theory. Building on a narrative analysis of Philip Hefner's proposal to use “created co-creator” as central metaphor for theological anthropology, the importance of culture is brought to the fore. Education should support a needed revitalization of our cultural heritage, and thus enable humanity to (re-)connect with the global ecological network and with the divine as grounding source of this network. In the concluding (...) reflections of this article, the possibility of a secular interpretation of “created co-creator,” in which “God” is reduced to “evolution,” is assessed. (shrink)

What God creates is perfectly stable and never needs to be corrected or improved upon. Although God might have created any order, the one he actually creates is willed immutably. Human beings are supposed to try and suit their theoretical understanding and their practical choices to this order: when they succeed, they confine their theoretical judgments to what is intellectually evident rather than to what the senses make plausible, and they confine their practical choices to what reason permits or recommends?not (...) to the promptings of appetite. This lessens the conflict between the human judgment and the human will, and undoes the subordina tion of the judgment to sensory impulse, leaving a judgment that grasps the true and a will that chooses the good to the fullest extent possible for human beings. Subjects who develop a judgment and a will along these lines are supposed to enjoy an ideally stable knowledge and contentment. It is this ideal of stability of mind, inherited from Descartes's theory of God's nature, that I want to suggest is suspect when transferred to human beings. (shrink)

I shall consider the preferred design of micro-lending (microfinance) institutions in the poorest parts of the world, and also in richer jurisdictions where welfare state provision is shrinking. The institutions needed in these different contexts are, unsurprisingly, different, and part of their design involves interacting with institutions that are not primarily designed to reduce poverty. I shall assume that design considerations also extend to exploiting opportunities thrown up by globally significant recent events: the world banking and financial crisis has altered (...) the image of large mainstream retail and investment banks. The fact that they had a large share of the responsibility for the crisis has prompted many developed country governments to impose punitive taxes on them: some of the proceeds could well be used to support financial services for the poor. Again, some tax incentives could be used to promote certain kinds of partnerships between developed country banks and Southern micro-lending institutions. (shrink)

In this chapter, I begin by taking issue with Rorty over what is involved in the idea of the world's intrinsic nature; then I ask whether it really is advisable to dispense with higher entities and, in Rorty's phrase 'dedivinize culture." I shall suggest that Rorty caricatures the ideas he seeks to discredit and that, in particular, he gives us no very compelling reason to dispense with the idea of the world's intrinsic nature. Turning from the bad onld divinity-worshipping philosophy, (...) science and poetry to their dedivinized successors, I shall suggest that Rorty is without the resources to explain why they are better than what they replace. (shrink)