How often our actions go awry because our perceptions are at odds with reality! This book examines the legal issues that arise when we seek to avoid the untoward consequences of an action by claiming that our perception was flawed. We all make mistakes. Some have unfortunate consequences: we might overpay a debt or make an unfavourable contract, or we might be sued or accused of a crime as a result of our mistake. Claims to alleviation on the grounds of (...) mistake are likely to arise wherever the law prescribes a state of mind as a prerequisite for the application of a legal rule. This book asks when the fact that a person made a mistake should entitle them to alleviation. This may involve the intention to enter into a contract or a payment, in which case a person could seek its reversal, or it might involve the intent to commit a tort or crime, in which case they could seek forgiveness for the offence. Farnsworth defines 'alleviating' mistakes as those which entitle a person to relief from untoward consequences of their mistake.There is no general 'law of mistake', and despite their similarities, few discussions of mistake in one setting pause to consider mistakes in other contexts. The goals of fields as disparate as contracts and criminal law are very different: how do these differences affect the treatment of mistakes? Farnsworth sets out a new taxonomy of mistakes. His analysis reveals that over the past century, there has been a remarkable increase in the receptivity of courts and scholars to claims for both reversal and forgiveness- a waxing of alleviating mistakes. (shrink)

We extend the concept that life is an informational phenomenon, at every level of organisation, from molecules to the global ecological system. According to this thesis: living is information processing, in which memory is maintained by both molecular states and ecological states as well as the more obvious nucleic acid coding; this information processing has one overall function—to perpetuate itself; and the processing method is filtration of, and synthesis of, information at lower levels to appear at higher levels in complex (...) systems . We show how information patterns, are united by the creation of mutual context, generating persistent consequences, to result in ‘functional information’. This constructive process forms arbitrarily large complexes of information, the combined effects of which include the functions of life. Molecules and simple organisms have already been measured in terms of functional information content; we show how quantification may be extended to each level of organisation up to the ecological. In terms of a computer analogy, life is both the data and the program and its biochemical structure is the way the information is embodied. This idea supports the seamless integration of life at all scales with the physical universe. The innovation reported here is essentially to integrate these ideas, basing information on the ‘general definition’ of information, rather than simply the statistics of information, thereby explaining how functional information operates throughout life. (shrink)

The study explored the motivations behind Australian wool producers’ intentions regarding mulesing; a surgical procedure that will be voluntarily phased out after 2010, following retailer boycotts led by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Telephone interviews were conducted with 22 West Australian wool producers and consultants to elicit their behavioral, normative and control beliefs about mulesing and alternative methods of breech strike prevention. Results indicate that approximately half the interviewees intend to continue mulesing, despite attitudes toward the act of (...) mulesing being quite negative. This indicates that attitudes alone are unlikely to be good predictors of this goal directed behavior. Most respondents believed mulesing was more effective and involved less cost, time, and effort than the currently available alternatives to prevent breech strike. Further, they felt relatively little social pressure, as they believed few consumers were concerned about mulesing. However, they noted that if consumer sentiment changed they would likely change their practices. Thus, attitudes are likely to be only one of several factors influencing intentions to change farm practices to address societal concerns about animal welfare. Further, mulesing appears to be goal - directed behavior , suggesting that other factors depicted by the Model of Goal-directed Behavior (MGB; Perugini and Bagozzi In: Br J Soc Psychol, 40: 79–98, 2001 ) may be worth exploring in this context. Finally, these results provide insight into how policy makers may influence farmers to change practices in response to societal pressure for improving farm animal welfare. (shrink)

In this article, we analyze the intractability of the low-level radioactive waste debate in California through the construction and examination of policy frames and their associated policy narratives. Relying primarily on reports, formal comments, and written correspondence, we reconstruct three policy frames and explore their interaction in the public debate through the policy stories told by the actors. We analyze how policy actors using these policy frames appropriate available information, value scientific input, and respond to uncertainty in technical and regulatory (...) information to create policy stories. These policy frames and their associated policy narratives demonstrate how policy actors differ in their drivers for action, bases for trusting claims, and response to uncertainty. These differences lead to divergent characterizations of the risk of low-level radio-active waste disposal. This analysis provides insight into the dynamics of intractable policy controversies. (shrink)

This paper uses the friendship and collaboration of Edwin Ray Lankester , zoologist, and Herbert George Wells , novelist and journalist, to challenge the current interpretation of late Victorian concern over degeneration as essentially an intellectual movement with little influence in contemporary debates over social and political problems. Degeneration theory provided for Lankester and Wells the basis both for a personal bond and for an active programme of social and educational reform. I trace the construction of Lankester’s account (...) of degeneration, initially as empirical ‘fact’ and later as ideologically inflected theory, and the reciprocal relationship between this theory and his critique of the British university system. I use Wells’s Outline of history to illustrate the profound influence of Lankester’s degenerationist worldview on Wells’s scientific and socio-political thought. Lankester’s synthesis of his theory and his critique led the two men to reject eugenics as an unscientific and ideologically incompatible solution to the problem of national deterioration. Instead, they campaigned for the reform of scientific education as a means of keeping mankind from physical, intellectual and cultural degeneration. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: 1 2 3 4 Acknowledgment Notes.

For forty years, successive editions of Ethical Theory and Business have helped to define the field of business ethics. The 10th edition reflects the current, multidisciplinary nature of the field by explicitly embracing a variety of perspectives on business ethics, including philosophy, management, and legal studies. Chapters integrate theoretical readings, case studies, and summaries of key legal cases to guide students to a rich understanding of business ethics, corporate responsibility, and sustainability. The 10th edition has been entirely updated, ensuring that (...) students are exposed to key ethical questions in the current business environment. New chapters cover the ethics of IT, ethical markets, and ethical management and leadership. Coverage includes climate change, sustainability, international business ethics, sexual harassment, diversity, and LGBTQ discrimination. New case studies draw students directly into recent business ethics controversies, such as sexual harassment at Fox News, consumer fraud at Wells Fargo, and business practices at Uber. (shrink)

Within the community of philosophers who advocate a broadly realist picture of laws of nature, there remains a vexed question about truthmakers: What is it that makes statements of natural law true? One view has it that the laws of a world are true in virtue of the fact that there exist ultimate dispositions or powers at that world. Following Brian Ellis and Caroline Lierse, I call this view 'Dispositional Essentialism,' and I defend it against a recent attack from Stephen (...) Mumford who prefers the view according to which natural laws are a kind of 'brute fact'. (shrink)

More than two decades after his seminal paper ‘Subjective Well-Being’, Ed Diener wrote that he substituted happiness with well-being to obtain scientific credibility. Are the arguments echoed in positive psychology rigorous enough to justify this substitution? This article focuses on the historical examination of the word happiness, covering the lexical universes of ancient Greek, Latin, and English, seeking to identify the connections between them. We found that arguments for such substitution are sustained by a fragile appreciation of the semantic depth (...) of happiness. Although it favors quantification, the current understanding of well-being obliterates the plurality of the debate about happiness and the recognition of other ideals of life. Thus, we conclude that well-being and happiness are semantically close, but conceptually, metaphysically, and empirically distinct, demanding, as objects, particular investigations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.2 (2002) 120-137 [Access article in PDF] Discursive Mobility and Double Consciousness in S. Weir Mitchell and W.E.B. Du Bois 1 Susan Wells Here are two stories about double consciousness: they will become, eventually, stories about the public sphere: W. E. B. Du Bois formulating the theory of double consciousness, and S. Weir Mitchell presenting Mary Reynolds's case history, an instance of a mental disorder (...) known in the nineteenth century as double consciousness. I will begin with Du Bois's story, by far the most familiar to us: few texts are more central to contemporary rhetoric or cultural studies than the discussion of double consciousness in the opening pages of The Souls of Black Folk. 2 In the theory of double consciousness, Du Bois concentrated his contradictory experiences of scholarship, activism, social isolation, and active cosmopolitanism. Double consciousness was a methodological constraint that enabled Du Bois to build into the structure of The Souls of Black Folk a recognition that the complexity of African American life requires more than one perspective. And double consciousness was also a technique of writing, shaping the ironic and urgent voice of the book, by turns indignant and tender, eloquent and colloquial, a form of double address to both African American and Caucasian readers that allowed Du Bois to be two places at once. Double consciousness therefore controlled both the development and the presentation of The Souls of Black Folk, from the arc of its argument to its formal elements, includingDu Bois's famous use of chapter epigraphs to link canonic poetry with the melodies of the sorrow songs. Like the most relentlessly formal high modernist poem, the book continually enacts in its form not only its informing idea, but the circumstances of its composition and the constraints that shape its reading.The book's initial essay, "Of Our Spiritual Strivings," offers an analysis of double consciousness as it is shaped by three central categories of modernity: temporality, embodiment, and expertise. Double consciousness is located in time, in history; it is placed in a story of the epochal succession [End Page 120] of races, and in the specific history of slavery. Double consciousness emerges as strategically shaping African American responses to the problems of disenfranchisement, poverty, and the denial of civil rights after the suppression of Reconstruction. The historical sections of The Souls of Black Folk, therefore, do not simply rectify the facts, setting the record straight on Reconstruction or Afrocentric scholar and theorist Alexander Crumell. These local arguments all motivate an understanding of consciousness as temporally constituted, so that the work of previous generations can be effective only when it is appropriated in the present. Such appropriation is supported and mediated by the form of the book: Du Bois ends with an invocation to "God the Reader," who alone can ensure that "these crooked marks on a fragile leaf be not indeed THE END" (19).Double consciousness is also connected with embodiment, specifically the embodiment of African Americans, externalized and displaced in two images: blood, which I will discuss later in the essay, and the veil or caul that grants second sight. Like skin color, the caul is an inconsequential physical object invested with enormous symbolic power (8); it is a mark of origins that foretells the future. The "second sight" offered to the Negro is a vision of "two warring ideals," a vision that can barely be supported by "one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder"(9). At moments in The Souls of Black Folk, the veil is generalized, and becomes a physical barrier between the white world and the world of African American culture; the work of separating these worlds, of rendering them invisible to one another, is staged on the bodies of African Americans. The veil is usually seen as a separation between the races, something that has happened ("Feeling deeply and keenly the tendencies and opportunities of the age in which they live, their souls are bitter at the fate which drops the Veil... (shrink)

Ramelli undertakes for the first time a systematic investigation of the possible knowledge of Christianity in a group of novels, all dated between the first and third century CE, and belonging to geographical areas in which Christianity was present at that time. She endeavors to point out the meaning that possible allusions had for the public addressed by those novels. . . . The results of her research are, in my opinion, of the highest interest. . . . Her work (...) seems to me to be most helpful and rich in outstanding results. --Marta Sordi, in Aevum 76 (2002) -/- The authors of the classical novels shared their world with Christians--some may have been Christians themselves--and one might expect to find references to Christianity in their works. In this learned and pioneering study, Ilaria Ramelli, an expert in both classical literature and early Christianity, brings to bear her profound knowledge of ancient history and a subtle feel for literary values, and identifies a wide range of possible allusions. Her book is a contribution not only to the study of the ancient novel but also to our understanding of the cross influences between religious cultures in the ancient world. --David Konstan Professor of Classics New York University -/- The book has important qualities. First of all, the author offers a very full synthesis of the results of earlier partial studies, including those by herself. A lot of work must have been invested in its preparation, which entailed studying a variety of areas, literary, historical, and theological . . . Secondly, she always takes a careful stand, and never allows herself to declare certain what is no more than plausible or even most probable; Lucian is the only author about whose direct knowledge of Christianity she is absolutely sure. And finally, the work includes a wealth of bibliographical references, both in the footnotes and in the sixty-eight pages of the bibliography. The book is a mine of information . . . Nowadays, both the literature of the novels and the early Church as an element of society are in the spotlight of scholarly interest. Those wishing to work on the points of contact between the two are well advised to use Ramelli as a guide. They will find the facts, well-balanced discussions, and an exhaustive bibliography. --Anton Hilhorst, in Ancient Narrative 3 (2003) -/- Ramelli demonstrates enormous meticulousness, learning, and a critical approach to the sources and bibliography . . . The documentation with which the author of this monograph corroborates all of her statements concerning possible parallels (between the ancient novels and Christianity) with respect to the contents or form . . . is absolutely exhaustive. We must also highlight the huge carefulness, erudition, and critical use of literature. --Antonio Artes Hernandez, in Myrtia 19 (2004). (shrink)

An overarching aim of education is the promotion of children's personal well-being. Liberal educationalists also support the promotion of children's personal autonomy as a central educational aim. On some views, such as John White's, these two goals—furthering well-being and cultivating autonomy—can come apart. Our primary aim in this paper is to argue for a species of a stronger view: assuming preferentism as our axiology, we suggest that there is an essential association between the autonomy of our springs of action, such (...) as desires and beliefs, on the one hand, and personal well-being, on the other. If we are right about this link, then we have at our disposal a partial (non-instrumental) validation of the liberal ideal of autonomy. (shrink)

There is a widespread belief that for their own safety and for the protection of wildlife, cats should be permanently kept indoors. Against this view, I argue that cat guardians have a duty to provide their feline companions with outdoor access. The argument is based on a sophisticated hedonistic account of animal well-being that acknowledges that the performance of species-normal ethological behavior is especially pleasurable. Territorial behavior, which requires outdoor access, is a feline-normal ethological behavior, so when a cat is (...) permanently confined to the indoors, her ability to flourish is impaired. Since cat guardians have a duty not to impair the well-being of their cats, the impairment of cat flourishing via confinement signifies a moral failing. Although some cats assume significant risks and sometimes kill wild animals when roaming outdoors, these important considerations do not imply that all cats should be deprived of the opportunity to access the outdoors. Indeed, they do not, by themselves, imply that any cat should be permanently kept indoors. (shrink)

This is an ideal introduction to moral philosophy for beginning students and general readers, dealing with the philosophical theories which often lie behind everyday opinions and inviting the reader to examine those theories thoroughly. Using numerous examples and diagrams, Professor Bond guides the reader through the key problems of theoretical ethics seeking to outline a substantial view of morality in universal practical reason, he concludes in an attempt to show that a viable universal morality can only relate to the thriving, (...) flourishing or well-being of individuals in a community. (shrink)

Three different concepts of matter are identified: matter as what a thing is immediately made of, matter as stuff of a certain kind, and matter in the (dubious) sense of material ‘substratum’. The doctrine of hylomorphism, which regards every individual concrete thing as being ‘combination’ of matter and form, is challenged. Instead it is urged that we do well to identify an individual concrete thing with its own particular ‘substantial form’. The notions of form and matter, far from being correlative, (...) are relatively independent. There is nothing absurd in the notion of form without matter. Matter provides neither a principle of individuation nor a criterion of identity for individual concrete things: their form alone provides both. Finally, a substance ontology which admits also the existence of particular qualities, or tropes, is to be preferred both to a substance ontology which denies the existence of tropes and to a pure trope ontology. (shrink)

Ancient moral philosophers, especially Aristotle and his followers, typically shared the assumption that ethics is primarily concerned with how to achieve the final end for human beings, a life of “happiness” or “human flourishing.” This final end was not a subjective condition, such as contentment or the satisfaction of our preferences, but a life that could be objectively determined to be appropriate to our nature as human beings. Character traits were treated as moral virtues because they contributed well toward this (...) ideal life, either as means to it or as constitutive aspects of it. Traits that tended to prevent a “happy” life were considered vices, even if they contributed to a life that was pleasant and what a person most wanted. The idea of “happiness” was central, then, in philosophical efforts to specify what we ought to do, what sort of persons we should try to become, and what sort of life a wise person would hope for. (shrink)

The responses to the questions of why? when?, how?, where?, and in what ways? business ethics should be taught in the BusinessEthics classroom inundate the scholarly literature. Yet, to date, despite some very interesting ideas, with respect to the answers givento the above question, not only has nothing even close to consensus been reached, but this particular area of pedagogy is instagnation—authors still challenge both the very idea of teaching business ethics as well as the practical value of such courses (...) for ourstudents once they graduate to the corporate world.In this paper I will suggest that the reason for this lack of pedagogical progress is that there has been a serious oversight regarding the most important teaching question of all: Who? I will show that the pedagogical issue of whom should be teaching Business Ethics has been largely ignored, skirted or answered incorrectly. I will then boldly argue that the only necessary condition for successful courses inBusiness Ethics is that they be taught by experts in ethics, i.e., Ph.D.s in philosophy. (shrink)

An examination of the philosophical issues surrounding prudential value: what it is for something to be good for a person; and well-being: what it is for someone's life to go well. It critically analyzes competing approaches, and proposes a new subjective account that addresses key weaknesses of existing theories.

The strong weak truth table (sw) reducibility was suggested by Downey, Hirschfeldt, and LaForte as a measure of relative randomness, alternative to the Solovay reducibility. It also occurs naturally in proofs in classical computability theory as well as in the recent work of Soare, Nabutovsky, and Weinberger on applications of computability to differential geometry. We study the sw-degrees of c.e. reals and construct a c.e. real which has no random c.e. real (i.e., Ω number) sw-above it.