Over the past 25 years, there has been growing recognition of the importance of studying the Ethical, Legal and Social Implications of genetic and genomic research. A large investment into ELSI research from the National Institutes of Health Human Genomic Project budget in 1990 stimulated the growth of this emerging field; ELSI research has continued to develop and is starting to emerge as a field in its own right. The evolving subject matter of ELSI research continues to raise new research (...) questions as well as prompt re-evaluation of earlier work and a growing number of scholars working in this area now identify themselves as ELSI scholars rather than with a particular discipline. Due to the international and interdisciplinary nature of ELSI research, scholars can often find themselves isolated from disciplinary or regionally situated support structures. We conducted a workshop with Early Career Researchers in Oxford, UK, and this paper discusses some of the particular challenges that were highlighted. While ELSI ECRs may face many of the universal challenges faced by ECRs, we argue that a number of challenges are either unique or exacerbated in the case of ELSI ECRs and discuss some of the reasons as to why this may be the case. We identify some of the most pressing issues for ELSI ECRs as: interdisciplinary angst and expertise, isolation from traditional support structures, limited resources and funding opportunities, and uncertainty regarding how research contributions will be measured. We discuss the potential opportunity to use web 2.0 technologies to transform academic support structures and address some of the challenges faced by ELSI ECRs, by helping to facilitate mentoring and support, access to resources and new accreditation metrics. As our field develops it is crucial for the ELSI community to continue looking forward to identify how emerging digital solutions can be used to facilitate the international and interdisciplinary research we perform, and to offer support for those embarking on, progressing through, and transitioning into an ELSI research career. (shrink)

College students from small, medium, and large institutions with either a modified or no honor code were presented with cheating scenarios and asked to rate how dishonest they perceived the behavior to be and the likelihood that they would report it. No main effects were found for institution size or type of honor code. Student–faculty ratio was not correlated with responses to the cheating scenarios. Students from modified honor code schools perceived more severe punishments for cheating and understood the reporting (...) process better than students from non–honor code schools. Implications for modified honor code systems are discussed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 121.4 (2000) 655-658 [Access article in PDF] RONALD MELLOR. The Roman Historians. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. x + 212 pp. Paper, $21.99. This is a textbook, the purpose of which is to provide "an introduction to the masterpieces of Roman historical and biographical writing" (ix). Although the question of the usefulness of these writings to the modern historian is not overlooked, the principal (...) concern is "to take Roman historical writing on its own terms" (196). Very little background is assumed, and no Latin (by "Roman" the title refers to works composed in Latin, regardless of subject matter: hence Nepos' Pelopidas is in, but Polybius, Diodorus, and Dio are out, except [End Page 655] as background or comparanda). The author is a distinguished Tacitean scholar, and his style is at once clear and attractive. His survey begins with the origins of Roman historiography, with special attention given to what can be known of the early annalists, to the contribution of the elder Cato, and especially to Cicero's verdict on the efforts of them all. Fine chapters on Sallust and Livy follow, and, naturally in view of the author's predilections, a long and adoring chapter on Tacitus. Ammianus Marcellinus also gets his due, in a chapter that is actually longer than Sallust's. A single chapter is devoted to Roman biography (Nepos, Tacitus once more, Suetonius and the Historia Augusta), another to autobiography (Caesar, Augustus' Res Gestae). An appraisal of the Roman achievement, and its influence, concludes the book. The strengths of Mellor's treatment of every author and every subject are many. He is keenly attentive to ancient expectations and the particular context of the central authors whose works he examines; he is especially good at fitting the purposes of a historian's writings to the historian's actual circumstances. He constantly reminds the reader of the differences between Roman and modern conceptions of historical writing. He appreciates the importance of style in appraising and understanding ancient historiography. And he makes frequent acute observations that will save instructors who use this book a good deal of time and explanation, as when he remarks of Tacitean characterization that, "since he could not easily explain ambiguities, they are expressed as contradictions" (104). In sum, then, the volume is intelligent, congenial, and will be very serviceable in courses dealing with Roman history or with historiography.It is inevitable, when anyone reviews a work of such scope, that there will be quibbles. Let me record a few of mine. Students are likely to be misled by the use of "plebeian" on p. 20. To say that, in 52 B.C., Clodius Pulcher was "Caesar's man," in contrast to Milo who by implication was Pompey's (31), is to get it wrong (cf. W. Jeffrey Tatum, The Patrician Tribune [Chapel Hill 1999] 214-15, 234-35). Since Caesar reached the senior magistracies at the earliest possible age, it is not clear to me that "his early career progressed slowly" (171). The view of Roman marriage represented on p. 69 is somewhat old-fashioned, and, along those lines, it is anachronistic to speak of "the bigamous marriage celebration of the empress Messalina" (90: Tacitus' Narcissus is accurate when at Ann. 11.30 he asks Claudius: an discidium... tuum nosti?). One does not often hear, these days, of the "clinical objectivity of Thucydides" (44). In discussing Sallust's attraction to Thucydides (43-45), it might have been helpful to discuss the (admittedly not uncomplicated) issue of Atticism in late-first-century Rome. I am less convinced than Mellor is that the speech of Sallust's Caesar constitutes the historian's "plea for common sense" (38) in the midst of the triumviral proscriptions; after all, Sallust wrote Cato's speech as well. It can hardly be true, if only in view of Pliny's keen interest in his friend's literary productivity, that Suetonius' Lives "is a book written by and for the equestrian" (152), nor do I think the description of the imperial equestrian order that is given on [End Page 656] that page... (shrink)

In the midst of international opportunities available to academics and students, plagiarism keeps plaguing the Indonesian higher education sector. This paper reports the findings from an Australian Alumni Reference Group activity which took place in Jakarta, Indonesia, in May 2013. An exploratory survey on plagiarism was conducted with Australian Award Alumni to capture their perceptions and opinions on the incidence of plagiarism and plagiarism prevention in higher education institutions in Indonesia. The survey was then followed up with a series of (...) focus group discussions with representatives of higher education institutions to discuss the issues further. The findings revealed that a pattern of plagiarism conduct can be identified for both students and faculty members. One issue found is that there is a perceived discrepancy of standards between the overseas and local graduate faculty members on what plagiarism is. The overseas graduates are perceived as ‘stricter’, and this creates reluctance from the overseas faculty members to speak up on the issue for fear of being judged harshly. Concerns over standards and consistency, especially in law enforcement, were discussed in efforts to prevent plagiarism in higher education institutions in Indonesia. (shrink)

Charles Travis presents a series of essays in which he has developed his distinctive view of the relation of thought to language. The key idea is "occasion-sensitivity": what it is for words to express a given concept is for them to be apt for contributing to any of many different conditions of correctness (notably truth conditions). Since words mean what they do by expressing a given concept, it follows that meaning does not determine truth conditions. This view ties thoughts (...) less tightly to the linguistic forms which express them than traditional views of the matter, and in two directions: a given linguistic form, meaning fixed, may express an indefinite variety of thoughts; one thought can be expressed in an indefinite number of syntactically and semantically distinct ways. Travis highlights the importance of this view for linguistic theory, and shows how it gives new form to a variety of traditional philosophical problems. (shrink)

A warm, personal guide to building a strong ethical and moral compass in the midst of today's confusing, scary, global problems. The moral challenges of today are unfamiliar in the history of philosophy. Climate change is the paradigm example of what Travis Rieder calls "The Puzzle" in the way your choices can seem at odds with what the planet urgently needs. How do we decide the right thing to do in the face of a massive collective challenge? Should you (...) drink water from a plastic bottle or not? Drive a Tesla? Or is that just what Elon and all the other corporations want you to think? What makes individual ethics difficult to think about in the case of catastrophic climate change makes ethics difficult to think about in many other contexts as well. The Puzzle, as he explains, is everywhere now. The chapters include a lively, meaningful tour of traditional moral reasoning looking at the contributions of Plato, Hegel, and Kant among others. But they could not grasp The Puzzle we now face. Old fashioned exercises like trolley problems involving sacrificing one person on this track for a bunch of people on the other don't address the huge consequential and complex crises our global community faces today. The tools most of us unthinkingly rely on when we try to do the right thing don't help when it comes to reasoning about individual responsibility for large collective problems. Expanding our suite of ethical concepts is now urgently required. Rieder defines exactly how to change our thinking, addressing mundane issues like bottled water to the biggies like whether to have children. This is a way to live a morally decent life in the scary, always complicated world we and our children live in. It's how to build your own Catastrophe Ethics. (shrink)

This book provides a novel interpretation of the ideas about language in Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. Travis places the "private language argument" in the context of wider themes in the Investigations, and thereby develops a picture of what it is for words to bear the meaning they do. He elaborates two versions of a private language argument, and shows the consequences of these for current trends in the philosophical theory of meaning.

Recent work on Mary Shepherd has largely focused on her metaphysics, especially as a response to Berkeley and Hume. However, relatively little attention has thus far been paid to the epistemological aspects of Shepherd’s program. What little attention Shepherd’s epistemology has received has tended to cast her as providing an unsatisfactory response to the skeptical challenge issued by Hume. For example, Walter Ott and Jeremy Fantl have each suggested that Shepherd cannot avoid Hume’s inductive skepticism even if she is granted (...) her metaphysics. In this paper, I examine Shepherd’s epistemology and argue that her response to Hume is more successful than the current literature suggests. In particular, I argue that, if Shepherd is granted her metaphysics, she can answer Hume’s demand for a rational justification of ordinary inductive inferences via a deductively justified uniformity principle and an appeal to parsimony. (shrink)

There is a view abroad on which perceptual experience has representational content in this sense: in it something is represented to the perceiver as so. On the view, a perceptual experience has a face value at which it may be taken, or which may be rejected. This paper argues that that view is mistaken: there is nothing in perceptual experience which makes it so that in it anything is represented as so. In that sense, the senses are silent, or, in (...) Austin's term, dumb. Perceptual experience is not as such either veridical or delusive. It may mislead, but it does not take representation to accomplish that. (shrink)

A particularly important, pressing, philosophical question concerns whether Confederate monuments ought to be removed. More precisely, one may wonder whether a certain group, viz. the relevant government officials and members of the public who together can remove the Confederate monuments, are morally obligated to (of their own volition) remove them. Unfortunately, academic philosophers have largely ignored this question. This paper aims to help rectify this oversight by moral philosophers. In it, I argue that people have a moral obligation to remove (...) most, if not all, public Confederate monuments because of the unavoidable harm they inflict on undeserving persons. In the first section, I provide some relevant historical context. In the second section, I make my unique harm-based argument for the removal of Confederate monuments. In the third section, I consider and rebut five objections. (shrink)

What words mean plays a role in determining when they would be true; but not an exhaustive one. For that role leaves room for variation in truth conditions, with meanings fixed, from one speaking of words to another. What role meaning plays depends on what truth is; on what words, by virtue of meaning what they do are requied to have done (as spoken) in order to have said what is true. There is a deflationist position on what truth is: (...) the notion is exhausted by a given, specified, mass of 'platitudes', each to the effect that if words said (say) things to be thus, things must be that way. (The thought that thus-and-so is true iff thus-and-so.) These platitudes, and so deflationism, miss that aspect of truth that determines meaning's role. Truth requires words to have the uses which, given what they mean, they should have in the circumstances of their speaking. Through this link with use, when words would be true is a factor fixing what it is they said. (shrink)

Dispositionalism is the view that causal powers are among the irreducible properties of nature. It has long been among the core competing positions in the metaphysics of laws, but its potential implications for other key debates within metaphysics and the philosophy of science have remained under-explored. Travis Dumsday fills this major gap in the literature by establishing new connections between dispositionalism and such topics as substance ontology, ontic structural realism, material composition, emergentism, natural-kind essentialism, perdurantism, time travel, and spacetime (...) substantivalism. He also puts forward a novel view concerning the precise relationship between causal powers and the fundamental laws of nature. His rich and accessible study will appeal to readers interested in contemporary analytic metaphysics and philosophy of science. (shrink)

Nada Gligorov (2018), in this issue’s target article, covers a lot of ground concerning the science and ethics of pain management. I find substantial chunks of her argument compelling, including he...

Charles Travis presents a series of essays on philosophy of perception, inspired by the insights of Gottlob Frege. He engages with a range of contemporary thinkers, and explores key issues including how perception can make the world bear on what we do or think, and what sorts of capacities we draw on in representing something as (being) something.

Let us begin with a piece of intellectual history. The story begins in a period encapsulating the second world war – say the ‘40’s, give and take a bit. Around then, it began to be argued with force that an expression – e.g., an English one – while it well might mean something, does not say anything, and notably no one thing in particular. The principal behind the argument was surely J.L. Austin, though, I would claim, the same point was (...) argued in a somewhat different way by Wittgenstein. The intended point was not merely a grammatical one: we say of an expression that it means such and such, but not that it says such and such. Be that as it may, the main point was quite substantive: typically, an English expression is such that, with its meaning fixed, there are a variety of distinct things to be said in using it on some production of it or other. (shrink)

Authored by an acclaimed teacher of quantum physics and philosophy, this textbook pays special attention to the aspects that many courses sweep under the carpet. Traditional courses in quantum mechanics teach students how to use the quantum formalism to make calculations. But even the best students - indeed, especially the best students - emerge rather confused about what, exactly, the theory says is going on, physically, in microscopic systems. This supplementary textbook is designed to help such students understand that they (...) are not alone in their confusions (luminaries such as Albert Einstein, Erwin Schroedinger, and John Stewart Bell having shared them), to sharpen their understanding of the most important difficulties associated with interpreting quantum theory in a realistic manner, and to introduce them to the most promising attempts to formulate the theory in a way that is physically clear and coherent. The text is accessible to students with at least one semester of prior exposure to quantum (or "modern") physics and includes over a hundred engaging end-of-chapter "Projects" that make the book suitable for either a traditional classroom or for self-study. (shrink)

Thought's Footing is an enquiry into the relationship between the ways things are and the way we think and talk about them. It is also a study of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations: Charles Travis develops his account of certain key themes into a unified view of the work as a whole. The central question is: how does thought get its footing? How can the thought that things are a certain way be connected to things being that way?

Many of us in the modern world find ourselves implicated in massive, structural harms and injustices. We emit greenhouse gases, which—along with everyone else's emissions—are warming the planet. We buy products that result from bad labor practices. And many of us feel (appropriately, I think) some amount of guilt for our participation, but also find it difficult or impossible to fully extract ourselves from the problematic systems. I call this challenge of determining individual moral responsibility in the face of massive, (...) structural problems “catastrophe ethics.” In this Perspective commentary, I suggest that the ubiquity of catastrophe ethics cases in the modern world justifies adopting a position of moral humility, as we recognize that none of us is morally pure but, rather, we are each choosing our own version of impurity. (shrink)

A continuous Oxford tradition on knowledge runs from John Cook Wilson to John McDowell. A central idea is that knowledge is not a species of belief, or that, in McDowell's terms, it is not a hybrid state; that, moreover, it is a kind of taking in of what is there that precludes one's being, for all one can see, wrong. Cook Wilson and McDowell differ on what this means as to the scope of knowledge. J.L. Austin set out the requisite (...) foundations for McDowell to be right. McDowell has shown why the tradition, and his version of it, need to be right. But he does not accept Austin's innovation. That is a shame. For, despite McDowell's very great insightfulness, precisely that much separates him from a very powerful, and correct, view of what knowledge is. (shrink)

Peter Singer argues that we’re obligated to donate our entire expendable income to aid organizations. One premiss of his argument is "If it is in your power to prevent something bad from happening, without sacrificing anything nearly as important, it is wrong not to do so." Singer defends this by noting that commonsense morality requires us to save a child we find drowning in a shallow pond. I argue that Singer’s Drowning Child thought experiment doesn’t justify this premiss. I offer (...) my own Drowning Children thought experiment, which should reveal that commonsense morality entails that premiss two is actually false. (shrink)

This paper proposes a third meditation-category—automatic self-transcending— to extend the dichotomy of focused attention and open monitoring proposed by Lutz. Automaticself-transcending includes techniques designed to transcend their own activity. This contrasts with focused attention, which keeps attention focused on an object; and open monitoring, which keeps attention involved in the monitoring process. Each category was assigned EEG bands, based on reported brain patterns during mental tasks, and meditations were categorized based on their reported EEG. Focused attention, characterized by beta/gamma activity, (...) included meditations from Tibetan Buddhist, Buddhist, and Chinese traditions. Open monitoring, characterized by theta activity, included meditations from Buddhist, Chinese, and Vedic traditions. Automaticself-transcending, characterized by alpha1 activity, included meditations from Vedic and Chinese traditions. Between categories, the included meditations differed in focus, subject/object relation, and procedures. These findings shed light on the common mistake of averaging meditations together to determine mechanisms or clinical effects. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Augustine's Intellectual Conversion: The Journey from Platonism to ChristianityTravis E. AblesBrian Dobell. Augustine's Intellectual Conversion: The Journey from Platonism to Christianity. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. xvii + 250. Cloth, $82.00.The question of Augustine's Platonism is famously vexed. Since Peter Brown, the standard reading holds that Augustine did not move beyond the Neoplatonism of his early dialogues until he studied the writings of the apostle Paul (...) in the mid-390s CE, after which his distinctive theology begins to emerge. In this book, Brian Dobell's basic claim is that, whatever the validity of the "volitional conversion" of book 8, Augustine is not truly converted to orthodox Christianity until he discards the Photinian (adoptionist) Christology he admits to in Confessions [hereafter conf.] 7.19.25, and discards the Platonic ascent as a means to contemplative union with God, both of which take place with the reading of Paul. But the book is equally motivated by a concern to defend the historicity of conf.; Dobell claims it is perfectly reliable, once we understand the latter half of book 7 not as a few months in 386, but as a compressed narrative spanning Augustine's entire development until his true conversion to Christianity around 395. [End Page 137]Dobell develops this argument by isolating Augustine's twofold way of salvation in the writings of the late 380s. First is the "way of authority," in which Augustine's putative Photinian Christology portrays Christ as a kind of "poor man's Plato, sent to provide a path to salvation for the uneducated masses" (96). The human Jesus is "assumed" by God and is as "a man of outstanding wisdom" (73) but is not the incarnate Son. Dobell analyzes the homo assumptus/susceptus language of the early writings, arguing that Augustine does not truly hold an orthodox Christology until 396, concordant with the development of his theology of operative grace. The second, much longer section of the book concerns the "way of reason," the intellectualist path of salvation expressed in Augustine's early obsession with the liberal disciplines. Dobell dissects the Platonic ascents of conf. 7, adducing verbal and conceptual parallels from texts ca. 387–390 (De immortalitate animae, De ordine, De libero arbitrio, De vera religione) showing how Augustine's métaphysique des degrés d'être, a concept Dobell borrows from Olivier Du Roy, provides both a means of articulating these ascents and an answer to the problem of evil. But by De doctrina christiana, Augustine has decisively rejected the Platonic ascent and the liberal disciplines, and it simply remains for his Christology to come in line for the "intellectual conversion" to be complete.Dobell's book is a significant addition to the current debate. His knowledge of the first decade or so of Augustine's literary output is impressive, and his familiarity with the secondary literature is considerable, though not encyclopedic—he misses the work of J. Patout Burns, which complicates the Pauline thesis through consideration of the anti-Donatist literature. Dobell offers magisterial and invaluable discussions of famously fraught topics such as Augustine's indecisiveness about the preexistence of the soul, or the volitional solution to the problem of evil. There are some problems with Dobell's argument, though. While his main thesis that conf. 7.9.13ff. is a kind of précis of almost a decade of intellectual development deserves serious consideration, and is an elegant solution to debates about the historicity of Augustine's narrative in conf., the supporting arguments Dobell employs are less persuasive. A major portion of his book revolves around the contention that Augustine's early, heretical Photinian Christology extends much longer than modern scholarship has realized, that Augustine rectifies this Christology in conjunction with a Pauline soteriology of grace, and that all of this has to happen before Augustine's conversion is complete. If we suspend the question of normativity inherent in deciding Augustine's "orthodoxy" (particularly prior to Chalcedon), Dobell still does not succeed in showing that the early "pedagogical" homo assumptus Christology is, in fact, adoptionist; indeed, his evidence is often rather weak (for a tacit admission, see 73). On the flip... (shrink)

This article considers Utopia’s unethical practices alongside The City of God’s understanding of the earthly polity’s relationship to eschatology. In Augustine’s view, within the earthly city every person could potentially become a friend of the heavenly city in time, and the existing political situation must always be rendered partial and incomplete against the telos of eternity. These convictions stand in conspicuous contrast with Utopia. The Utopian system is in important ways founded on institutionalized practices which not only exclude non-Utopians (or (...) ex-Utopians), but also habituate them to vice. Examining Utopia alongside The City of God illuminates how this ethical problem in Utopia is not just a matter of individual practices or institutions, but rather derives from a more fundamental metaphysical and theological outlook. Not only is Utopia invested in a Utopian/non-utopian distinction; more significantly, this distinction has a tacit eschatological role, since Utopian thinking implies that degradation of one’s capacity for virtue decreases one’s potential to be saved. (shrink)

Charles Travis; IX*—On Constraints of Generality, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 94, Issue 1, 1 June 1994, Pages 165–188, https://doi.org/10.10.

To address growing concerns about academic integrity, college students (n?=?758) at honor system and non-honor system institutions were presented with eight scenarios to determine the influence of an honor system on their perceptions of and responses to academic dishonesty. Main effects for honor code status emerged. Students from traditional honor system schools considered the behaviors to be more dishonest, and were more likely to respond that they would report the incident when compared to students attending modified and non-honor system institutions. (...) Findings suggest traditional honor systems, with specific rules and regulations in place, are more effective at cultivating academic integrity among students; modified honor systems may not be as effective as previous research suggests. (shrink)

The main thrust of the present work is to show why truth and truth bearers lie essentially beyond the descriptive reach of semantics, and to outline a theory of ...

I consider how complex logical operations might self-assemble in a signalling-game context via composition of simpler underlying dispositions. On the one hand, agents may take advantage of pre-evolved dispositions; on the other hand, they may co-evolve dispositions as they simultaneously learn to combine them to display more complex behaviour. In either case, the evolution of complex logical operations can be more efficient than evolving such capacities from scratch. Showing how complex phenomena like these might evolve provides an additional path to (...) the possibility of evolving more or less rich notions of compositionality. This helps provide another facet of the evolutionary story of how sufficiently rich, human-level cognitive or linguistic capacities may arise from simpler precursors. 1Signalling and Self-assembly2Simple Unary Logic Games3Composing Unary Functions for Binary Inputs 3.1Utilizing pre-evolved dispositions3.2Co-evolving logical dispositions3.3Learning appropriate outputs3.4Taking account of the full state-space of unary games3.5Role-free composition4Discussion 4.1Efficacy and efficiency of learning complex dispositions4.2Other binary operations4.3To infinity and beyond5Conclusion. (shrink)

This paper reviews and develops the concept of “contextuality” whose profound significance—or lack thereof—was clarified especially by Detlef Dürr and his collaborators. In particular, we explore, in the context of a simple toy model of a measurement procedure described using Bohmian mechanics, the dependence of measurement outcomes on the (continuously variable) strength of the coupling between the system and measuring apparatus. This provides a revealing illustration of the fact that the outcomes of experiments may, and in general do, depend on (...) details of the experiment other than simply the Hermitian operator which (as it is often misleadingly said) is “measured” in the experiment. (shrink)

This is a short reply to Dan Demetriou's "Ashes of Our Fathers: Racist Monuments and the Tribal Right." Both are included in Oxford University Press's Ethics, Left and Right: The Moral Issues That Divide Us.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Iago’s Roman Ancestors JAMES TATUM Othello is that rare thing: a tragedy of literary types who half suspect they are playing in a comedy. —D. S. Stewart, 1967 In memoriam Bill Cook1 Shakespeare’s Othello is a drama created for a world where everyone was bound by “service,” a formal connection to someone else superior, in a hierarchy that linked all persons in court, theater, and society through unavoidable (...) obligation. Service could range from the lightest kind of tie, to indentured servitude. This meaning of “service” reflects its origin in Norman French, from the Latin word for slavery, servitium. It is Iago’s sense of the word in his comment to his dupe Roderigo: “Why, there’s no remedy, ’tis the curse of service.” The perceived color of Othello poses a perennial challenge which producers and directors in the United States have to consider every time Othello is performed. Jim Crow did not officially end in most parts of the former Confederacy until the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s; and even then such legacies of slavery and segregation as color prejudice remain a challenge, alive if now not entirely well, and they haunt many a production. It is this more recent history that inspired Patrick Stewart’s “photo-negative” production of Othello in Washington, DC in 1997, in which the English actor himself played Othello while the rest of the cast were black. Given recent and not so recent history, it is important to realize that there actually is a slave hard at work throughout Othello, from opening scene to last: not Othello himself, but his “ancient” or ensign, Iago. arion 27.1 spring/summer 2019 the slave-playwright of shakespeare’s OTHELLO Lodovico: O, thou Othello, that was once so good, Fallen in the practice of a damnèd slave, What shall be said to thee? Othello, 5.2.289–91 the plot of Shakespeare’s Othello comes from the story “Disdemona and the Moorish Captain” in Giraldi Cinthio’s The Hundred Tales (1565), but the theatrical tradition he used to adapt it for the stage was not other tragedies. He went back to a classical theater he had used to write one of his earliest successes, The Comedy of Errors, one he knew as well as any other through his study of it in Latin grammar school and afterwards: Roman comedy. What resulted was something of a puzzle to his later critics. Since the 17th century some of Shakespeare’s readers have alternately complained or marveled at the way Othello has the fast pace and structure of a farce. This accounts for its exceptional power as a tragedy when it is intelligently performed; the double catastrophe of Othello’s murder of Desdemona and his own suicide come more quickly and more violently, for example, than the endings of Macbeth, King Lear, or Hamlet. All of Othello’s characters are cast in the stereotypical roles first created in Menander and other playwrights of Greek New Comedy, and then passed on to later European vernacular theater through Plautus and Terence’s adaptations. In performance, Shakespeare’s Iago is at once a reprise of his earlier stage villains and a reincarnation of the servus callidus or clever slave playwright of Plautus. It is as if Zero Mostel’s Pseudolus in Sondheim’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum were playing Richard III. Iago creates what he regards as a comedy, from its opening scene before Brabantio’s house to its catastrophic end in Cyprus, and to the bafflement of Christian interpreters and others, he seems incapable of recognizing the enormity of his evil. Unlike his resourceful Roman ancestors, who think up ingenious plots to help their less clever owners 78 iago’s roman ancestors in their love affairs, Iago’s scenario is demonic, designed to destroy his master Othello, not save him. As I’ve suggested, one comedy in particular may have played an important role in the making of Othello: Plautus’ Amphitryon, with its story of Jupiter’s adulterous affair with Alcmena, the wife of the heroic king Amphitryon of Thebes. To aid him in his schemes Jupiter calls on his son the trickster... (shrink)

In his tripartite theory of corporate responsibility, Kenneth Goodpaster argues for the inclusion of “Comprehensive Moral Thinking (CMT)” as the third part alongside shareholder and stakeholder thinking. CMT requires managers sometimes to act for reasons of dignity or a just community, against what shareholder and stakeholder thinking recommend. To address concerns about the demandingness of CMT, Goodpaster argues that the responsibilities it imposes are significant but qualified or conditional: they require only that managers make efforts to address problems of dignity (...) and justice, especially in cooperation with other willing firms. If extreme efforts are required or if other firms are unwilling to cooperate, managers can be justified in deciding in favor of shareholder or stakeholder values, even when dignity or justice is at stake. I raise two problems for the appeal to qualified responsibility—an extensional problem about the inability of the account to yield the correct judgment in important cases and an internal problem about the coherence of the account when qualified responsibility is included. I conclude by considering the prospects of a theory that includes CMT but rejects qualified responsibility. (shrink)

This chapter examines ethnic differences in responses to alcohol. Specifically, it discusses the subjective effects of alcohol on Asians, Native Americans, and Jews. Recent studies have shown that genetic variations in the enzymes that metabolize alcohol lead to individual differences in the subjective effects of alcohol, typically in the form of increased sensitivity to its effects. It is also recognized that these gene variations are associated with lower rates of alcohol consumption and alcohol use disorders, and possibly other substance use (...) and substance use disorders. Causes of decreased intensity or more pleasurable effects associated with alcohol or other drug use in ethnic groups, whether such variations exist, and to what extent they are genetically and environmentally influenced, remain currently unanswered questions. (shrink)

T. M. Scanlon’s contractualist account of morality is articulated alongside and built upon groundbreaking work on moral motivation. According to Scanlon, the central challenge of providing an account of moral motivation is navigating “Prichard’s Dilemma,” which requires that an account be both helpfully explanatory and morally relevant. Scanlon’s own solution is that one has a reason to act rightly because doing so is an aspect of living with others on terms they could accept. There is much to like about this (...) account, and so, in this paper, I begin with many of Scanlon’s assumptions. I then argue that Scanlon’s own account of moral motivation fails to navigate Prichard’s Dilemma, as does another solution that I derive from his broader view. I then close by suggesting that an account of moral motivation must be “complex,” involving different reasons to satisfy the competing desiderata of Prichard’s Dilemma. (shrink)