This unique collection of essays has two main purposes. The first is to honour the pioneering work of Cora Diamond, one of the most important living moral philosophers and certainly the most important working in the tradition inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein. The second is to develop and deepen a picture of moral philosophy by carrying out new work in what Diamond has called the realistic spirit. The contributors in this book advance a first-order moral attitude that pays close (...) attention to actual moral life and experience. Their essays, inspired by Diamond's work, take up pressing challenges in Anglo-American moral philosophy, including Diamond's defence of the concept 'human being' in ethics, her defence of literature as a source of moral thought that does not require external sanction from philosophy, her challenge to the standard 'fact/value' dichotomy, and her exploration of non-argumentative forms of legitimate moral persuasion. There are also essays that apply this framework to new issues such as the nature of love, the connections of ethics to theology, and the implications of Wittgenstein's thought for political philosophy. Finally, the book features a new paper by Diamond in which she contests deep-rooted philosophical assumptions about language that severely limit what philosophers see as the possibilities in ethics. Morality in a Realistic Spirit offers a tribute to a great moral philosopher in the best way possible--by taking up the living ideas in her work and taking them in original and interesting directions. (shrink)

This article explores nonpathological fear in relation to nonhuman animal encounters in the wild. Critiquing a contemporary, philosophical romance with animal life, Craig turns to Cora Diamond to consider alternative styles of thinking and writing about animals and experiences that defy ready-made paradigms. Diamond diagnoses the tendency for philosophers to deflect from reality. The author follows Diamond in seeking methods to forestall or delay deflection in favor of an open-ended examination of the ways that fear, imagination, (...) and childhood memories inform the sense of oneself as an animal in relation to other animals. (shrink)

This article is about the relationship between philosophy and storytelling. It also ends up being about animals, communication, sympathy, and imagination. Many contemporary philosophers have written about the relationship between literature and philosophy , but, for two reasons, I will frame my remarks by referencing the American philosopher Cora Diamond. The first reason that I want to focus on Diamond is that she has argued for the importance of literature in the development and education of what she calls (...) “moral imagination.” Following Diamond’s lead, I hope to say a few things about the relationship between the stories we tell and hear and our .. (shrink)

In Recovering Hegel from the Critique of Leo Strauss, Sara MacDonald and Barry Craig provide a study unique in its focus on Leo Strauss’s reading of Hegel. While MacDonald and Craig find value in Strauss’s thought, they argue that his pessimism concerning modernity lies in a misunderstanding of both modernity’s greatest philosophical advocate, G.W.F. Hegel, and modernity’s virtues.

In the pages of philosophy journals debate rages these days between "political" and "comprehensive liberals," a debate inaugurated by John Rawls’s seminal 1985 paper entitled "Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical," from which the above quotation is drawn. As the quotation suggests, a political liberal is someone who believes that liberal justice should be defined and defended in terms that are independent of "comprehensive" philosophical and religious doctrines, that is, independent of doctrines that purport to describe, in some comprehensive way, (...) the sources of meaning, purpose, and worth in human life. A comprehensive liberal, by contrast, is someone who believes some such comprehensive doctrine must be invoked in defense of liberal justice. In this debate it is perhaps fair to say that political liberals have the more prestigious roll call, for in addition to Rawls, prominent political liberals include Thomas Nagel, Brian Barry, Ronald Dworkin, Charles Larmore, and Bruce Ackerman. (shrink)

In a recent article Martha Nussbaum identified three problems with the Stoic doctrine of respect for dignity: its exclusive focus on specifically human dignity, its indifference to the need for external goods, and its ineffectiveness as a moral motive. This article formulates a non-Stoic doctrine of respect for dignity that avoids these problems. I argue that this doctrine helps us to understand such moral phenomena as the dignity of nonhuman animals as well as the core human values of life, freedom, (...) and equality. I end by arguing that Nussbaum underestimates the mutual support between motives of respect and other moral motives such as compassion. (shrink)

In all likelihood, the Bush Administration’s aim is to continue abusive interrogation methods that on any reasonable definition amount to torture (methods such as waterboarding,” for example, in which a detainee is laid on his back and choked with water until he believes he is drowning). This new law, however, is both foolish and immoral: foolish, because torture won’t make Americans safer; and immoral, because torture is the grossest of affronts to human dignity.

This essay is a critical review of two recent collections, Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance, edited by Irene Diamond and Lee Quinby and Feminism as Critique: On the Politics of Gender, edited by Seyla Benhabib and Drucilla Cornell. While the collections differ in their manner of addressing the critical sources that have inspired them-the former relying upon a single theorist, the latter attempting to move through some of the philosophical history that constitutes our present theoretical terrain-both attempt to (...) think through and thus revisualize some of the categories of difference which we have inherited. Though the best essays from these collections are celebrated for demonstrating how "feminism as critique" can work to move us toward a clearer and more inclusive feminist theory, questions are raised about what the inattention to race in these volumes suggests about our own role in the construction of power and knowledge, and the erasures that help to secure them both. (shrink)

In recent years, several prominent biologists have pointed to the relatively new field of evolutionary developmental biology as evidence of an Extended Synthesis in evolutionary biology. More particularly, these biologists claim that theoretical and empirical EvoDevo research is extending the Modern Synthesis framework of evolutionary theory through investigation of evolutionarily important concepts that are not part of the framework developed during the 20th century. To describe the current changes in evolutionary biology as an Extended Synthesis, however, is incorrect. Through review (...) of Extended Synthesis arguments and analysis of the same biological concepts used to support these arguments, I argue that the foundation of the Modern Synthesis framework, theoretical population genetics, faces significant, perhaps insurmountable challenges from the concepts highlighted by EvoDevo research. As the foundation of the Modern Synthesis framework will require considerable remodeling—if possible—in light of the concepts emphasized by EvoDevo, it is incorrect to describe the ongoing changes in evolutionary biology as an Extended Synthesis. (shrink)

I am concerned in this paper with a range of phenomena, which, in the first four sections of the paper, I shall suggest by some examples. In the last three sections, I try to connect the topic thus indicated with the thought of Stanley Cavell. First example: a poem of Ted Hughes’s, from the mid-50s, called “Six Young Men.” […] What Hughes gives us is a case of what I want to call the difficulty of reality. That is a phrase (...) of John Updike’s, which I want to pick up for the phenomena with which I am concerned, experiences in which we take something in reality to be resistant to our thinking it, or possibly to be painful in its inexplicability, difficult in that way, or perhaps awesome and astonishing in its inexplicability. We take things so. And the things we take so may simply not, to others, present the kind of difficulty – of being hard or impossible or agonizing to get one’s mind round. (shrink)

In recent years, direct brain interventions have shown increased success in manipulating neurobiological processes often associated with moral reasoning and decision-making. As current DBIs are refined, and new technologies are developed, the state will have an interest in administering DBIs to criminal offenders for rehabilitative purposes. However, it is generally assumed that the state is not justified in directly intruding in an offender’s brain without valid consent. Thomas Douglas challenges this view. The state already forces criminal offenders to go to (...) jail without their consent. This represents a serious interference with an offender’s rights. If criminal offenders are already morally liable to incarceration, why is the state not also entitled to administer DBIs without consent for the purposes of rehabilitation? Douglas argument focuses on the right to ‘bodily integrity’. He argues that there is no compelling reason to believe that bodily rights that protect an offender from non-consensual DBIs are stronger than rights that protect an offender from incarceration. This paper will extend Douglas’ analysis. It will consider the more fundamental right to ‘mental integrity’. The right to mental integrity defends an inner sphere of liberty. It protects critical capacities necessary for the exercise of autonomous human agency—without which a vast majority of moral rights could not exist. Thus, the right to mental integrity is ultimately more important for a moral assessment of DBIs. The right strongly suggests that both presently, and in the future, there may be many cases in which the state is not entitled to administer DBIs to criminal offenders without valid consent. (shrink)

The_ Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy_ is the most ambitious international philosophy project in many years. Edited by Edward Craig and assisted by thirty specialist subject editors, the REP consists of ten volumes of the world's most eminent philosophers writing for the needs of students and teachers of philosophy internationally. The REP is a project on an unparalleled scale: Over 2000 entries ranging from 500 to 15,000 words in length - thematic, biographical and national 10 volumes consisting of over 5 (...) million words of text plus considerable bibliographic material A Chief Editor and thirty specialist Subject Editors from across the world Over 1200 authors from all over the world. The importance of the REP is not to be found just in the sheer size of the project but also in its breadth of subject matter. It covers: The core of most Anglo-American philosophy - the metaphysical, epistemological and logical questions The usual menu of ethics, political philosophy and the history of philosophy The philosophy of other cultures - from Chinese, Arabic and Jewish philosophy to the philosophy of Africa and Latin America The most impressive range of authors have been gathered together on this unique project: William Alston, Roderick Chisolm, Fred Dretske, Joel Feinberg, Sandra Harding, Larry Laudan, Martha Nussbaum, Richard Popkin, Richard Rorty, Alan Ryan, Gyatri Chakravorty Spivak, Stephen Stich, Patrick Suppes and Bernard Williams, to name just a few. Also available online: www.rep.routledge.com. (shrink)

This study examines the presence and roles of female directors of U.S. Fortune 500 firms, focusing on committee assignments and director background. Prior work from almost two decades ago concludes that there is a systematic bias against females in assignment to top board committees. Examining a recent data set with a logistic regression model that controls for director and firm characteristics, director resource-dependence roles and interaction between director gender and director characteristics, we find that female directors are less likely than (...) male directors to sit on executive committees and more likely than male directors to sit on public affairs committees. There is little if any evidence of systematic gender bias in director assignment to other board committees. We find some evidence that boards evaluate resource dependence differently for women than men. (shrink)

In order to determine whether a particular course of conduct is ethically permissible it is important to have a concept of what it means to be harmed. The dominant theory of harm is the counterfactual account, most famously proposed by Joel Feinberg. This determines whether harm is caused by comparing what actually happened in a given situation with the ‘counterfacts’ i.e. what would have occurred had the putatively harmful conduct not taken place. If a person's interests are worse off than (...) they otherwise would have been, then a person will be harmed. This definition has recently faced challenges from bioethicists such as John Harris, Guy Kahane and Julian Savulescu who, believing it to be severely flawed, have proposed their own alternative theories of the concept. In this article I will demonstrate that the shortcomings Harris, Kahane and Savulescu believe are present in Feinberg's theory are illusory and that it is their own accounts of harm that are fraught with logical errors. I maintain that the arguments presented to refute Feinberg's theory not only fail to achieve this goal and can be accommodated within the counterfactual account but that they actually undermine the theories presented by their respective authors. The final conclusion will be that these challenges are misconceived and fail to displace the counterfactual theory. (shrink)

This paper draws on data from the most recent Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Time Use Survey (TUS) (over 4,000 randomly selected households) to tease out the dimensions of the ‘second shift’. Predictions that as women entered the paid workforce men would contribute more to household labour have largely failed to eventuate. This underpins the view that women are working a second shift because they are shouldering a dual burden of paid and unpaid work. However, time use research seems to (...) show that when both paid and unpaid work is counted, male and female workloads are in total very similar. This has led to suggestions that a literal second shift is a myth; that it exists in the sense that women do more domestic work than men, but not in the sense that they work longer hours in total. Using a more accurate and telling measure of workload than previous research (paid and unpaid labour including multitasked activities), this paper explores the second shift and how it relates to family configuration, ethnicity and indicators of class and socioeconomic standing. It finds a clear disparity between the total workloads of mothers and fathers, much of which consists of simultaneous (secondary) activity, and some demographic differences in female (but not male) total workloads. It concludes that the view that the second shift is a myth is only sustainable by averaging social groups very broadly and by excluding multitasking from the measurement of total work activity. (shrink)

Some have thought that the process of the expansion of the universe can be used to define an absolute ‘cosmic time’ which then serves as the absolute time required by tensed theories of time. Indeed, this is the very reason why many tense theorists are happy to concede that special relativity is incompatible with the tense thesis, because they think that general relativity, which trumps special relativity, and on which modern cosmology rests, supplies the means of defining temporal becoming using (...) cosmic time. I argue that cosmic time is not up to the task, and that these tense theorists should rethink their strategy in dealing with the theories of relativity. Introduction The Mellor-Rees argument against tense theories Can expansion combat such wrinkles? Event and creation horizons Bursting the balloon. (shrink)

In this paper data from a Tanzanian horticultural population are used to assess whether mother’s kin network size predicts several measures of children’s health and well-being, and whether any kin effects are modified by household socioeconomic status. This hypothesis is further tested with a questionnaire on maternal attitudes towards kin. Results show small associations between measures of maternal kin network size and child mortality and children’s growth performance. Together these results suggest that kin positively influence child health, but the effects (...) are small and it is unlikely that the high prevalence of undernutrition observed in this setting is influenced by the availability of kin. (shrink)

Personification has received little philosophical attention, but Daniel Nolan has recently argued that it has important ramifications for the relationship between fictional representation and possibility. Nolan argues that personification involves the representation of metaphysically impossible identities, which is problematic for anyone who denies that fictions can have impossible content. We develop an account of personification which illuminates how personification enhances engagement with fiction, without need of impossible content. Rather than representing an identity, personification is something that is done with representations—a (...) matter of use rather than content—and involves only a comparison of possibilities. We illustrate our account using the personification of death in the film Meet Joe Black, and show that there are no grounds for taking it to be fictionally true that there is a metaphysically impossible identity between Death and death. (shrink)

According to appraisal theory, emotions result from an individual's meaning analysis of the implications of his/her circumstances for personal well-being, and individual differences in emotion arise when individuals appraise similar situations differently. Relational models of appraisal attempt to describe the situational and dispositional antecedents of appraisals, and should allow one to predict such individual differences. In this article, we review three examples of our efforts toward developing relational appraisal models. In two, we start with a particular appraisal component, motivational relevance (...) and problem-focused coping potential (Smith & Lazarus, 1990), respectively, and describe and test the relational model proposed for that component. In the third, as a precursor to developing a true relational model, we examine another appraisal component, emotion-focused coping potential, from a more dispositional perspective. We conclude by considering both the potential value of relational appraisal models, and future directions in the development of these models. (shrink)

As medical technology advances and severely injured or ill people can be kept alive and functioning long beyond what was previously medically possible, the debate surrounding the ethics of end-of-life care and quality-of-life issues has grown more urgent. In this lucid and vigorous book, Craig Paterson discusses assisted suicide and euthanasia from a fully fledged but non-dogmatic secular natural law perspective. He rehabilitates and revitalises the natural law approach to moral reasoning by developing a pluralistic account of just why (...) we are required by practical rationality to respect and not violate key demands generated by the primary goods of persons, especially human life. Important issues that shape the moral quality of an action are explained and analysed: intention/foresight; action/omission; action/consequences; killing/letting die; innocence/non-innocence; person/non-person. Paterson defends the central normative proposition that ’it is always a serious moral wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human person, whether self or another, notwithstanding any further appeal to consequences or motive’. (shrink)

How do ethical investment funds choose their ethical criteria? How intelligent is this process from an ethical point of view? This paper reports on his field work carried out as part of the Bath University ‘Morals and Money’ Project. After completing this research, Dr. Craig Mackenzie left academia to become ethics development officer at Friends Provident. He can be contacted at 15 Old Bailey, London, EC4M 7AP; [email protected].

Although the AAMC requires annual reporting of medical humanities teaching, most literature is based on single-school case reports and studies using information reported on schools’ websites. This study sought to discover what medical humanities is offered in North American allopathic and osteopathic undergraduate medical schools. An 18-question, semi-structured survey was distributed to all 146 member schools of the American Association of Medical Colleges and the American Association of Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine. The survey sought information on required and elective humanities (...) content, hours of humanities instruction, types of disciplines, participation rates, and humanities administrative structure. The survey was completed by 134 schools. 70.8% of schools offered required and 80.6% offered electives in humanities. Global health and writing were the most common disciplines. Schools required 43.9 mean and 30 median hours in humanities. In the first two years, most humanities are integrated into other course work; most electives are offered as stand-alone classes. 50.0% of schools report only 0-25% of students participating in humanities electives. Presence of a certificate, concentration or arts journal increased likelihood of humanities content but decreased mean hours. Schools with a medical humanities MA had a higher number of required humanities hours. Medical humanities content in undergraduate curriculum is lower than is indicated in the AAMC annual report. Schools with a formal structure have a greater humanities presence in the curriculum and are taken by more students. (shrink)

ABSTRACT It is well attested that Francis Bacon considered his History of Winds to be an exemplar, but what lessons should be taken from its example have been subject to debate. Instead of looking at this work as a mere model for the fusion of natural history and natural philosophy, it is also possible to see Bacon as trying to provide tentative solutions to outstanding questions regarding the wind, a topic that was deeply scrutinized during the early modern period. An (...) examination of Bacon’s provisional concluding rules reveals deep correspondences with earlier works, such as José de Acosta’s Natural and Moral History of the Indies, that revised classical understandings of the wind based on experience, experiments, and accounts of travels beyond Europe. Understanding the History of Winds as a genuine attempt to solve outstanding questions about the wind uncovers its debt to earlier traditions, including those related to Renaissance natural history, and shows it’s influence in relation to specific theories of the wind beyond its call for methodological reform. (shrink)