Tanabe Hajime développa sa philosophie dans la perspective d’une « ontologie sociale » à travers la « logique de l’espèce » et la « logique de l’Amour ». La première, développée de 1934 à 1941, vise la rationalisation de la société japonaise en temps de guerre, la seconde le salut de la société japonaise après la Seconde Guerre mondiale dans le cadre d’une philosophie de la religion. Le but de cet article est de mettre au jour le développement de la (...) logique de l’espèce vers la logique de l’Amour et de présenter l’histoire de l’ontologie sociale tanabéenne dans le cadre de la « métanoétique ». (shrink)

The complexity of chromium chemistry makes it an ideal example of how the Principle of Expediency, first articulated by sanitary pioneer Earle Phelps, can be used in a standard setting. Expediency, defined by Phelps as “the attempt to reduce the numerical measure of probable harm, or the logical measure of existing hazard, to the lowest level that is practicable and feasible within the limitations of financial resources and engineering skill”, can take on negative connotations unless subject to ethical guidance. In (...) this paper we argue that without ethical principles as a rubric for negotiating environmental regulations, communities run the risk of slipping from the Principle of Expediency as defined by Phelps to the alternative usage of expediency meaning that which does not reflect ethical consideration or concern beyond self-serving interest. Three ethical ideals—justice, mercy and humility—are suggested as values to be considered while resolving regulatory issues related to environmental protection. The Principle of Expediency serves as a working principle, but not as a rigid algorithm, for setting regulatory limits for environmental concentrations of waste products like chromium. (shrink)

In recent years an increasing quantity of UK legislation has introduced blended or ‘hybridised’ procedures that blur the previously clear demarcation between civil and criminal legal processes, typically on the grounds of normatively-motivated political expediency. This paper provides a critical perspective on instances of procedural hybridisation in order to illustrate that, first, the reliance upon civil law measures to remedy criminal law infractions can raise human rights issues and, second, that such instrumental criminal justice strategies deliberately circumvent the enhanced procedural (...) protections of the criminal law. By conceptualising the rule of law as a structural coupling between the political and legal systems, and due process rights as necessary and self-imposed limitations upon systemic operations, this paper employs a systems-theoretical approach to critique this balancing act between expediency and principle, and queries the circumstances under which legislation contravening the rule of law can be said to lack legitimacy. (shrink)

The current voluntary posthumous organ donation policy fails to provide sufficient organs to meet the demand. In these circumstances xenografts have been regarded as an expedient solution. The public perception seems to be that the only impediments to this technology are technical and biological. There are, however, important ethical issues raised by xenotransplantation that need to be considered as a matter of urgency. When the ethical issues raised by using non-human animals to provide replacement organs for human beings are considered (...) in a wider context and the possible alternatives to xenotransplantation are taken into account, a new dimension is added to the debate. In this broader context it is argued that a less ethically problematic solution is to adopt a presumed consent or opt-out organ procurement policy to regulate posthumous organ harvesting from humans. If there are still too few organs available, then the whole question of transplantation must be reassessed. (shrink)

John Stuart Mill is generally considered to be a utilitarian; indeed, he himself supposed that he was one. On one principle of division, there are sometimes said to be two kinds of utilitarian, hedonistic utilitarians and agathistic utilitarians. Both of these agree that what makes an act right is whether or not the consequences of performing it are good, or are supposed by the agent to be good, but the hedonistic utilitarian thinks that only pleasure is good, whereas the agathistic (...) utilitarian thinks that other things ate good as well. Commentators frequently complain that john Stuart Mill regarded himself as a hedonistic utilitarian, whereas in fact he was an agathistic one.On another principle of division, there are also two kinds of utilitarian, act utilitarians and rule utilitarians. An act utilitarian thinks that the rightness of an action depends upon the goodness of its consequences; a rule utilitarian thinks that the rightness of an act depends upon the consequence of the rule to which it conforms or fails to conform. (shrink)

Although performance pressure has desirable consequences, there is evidence that it can produce unintended outcomes as employees tend to engage in dysfunctional and unethical behaviors to meet performance goals. Thus, the process through which employees think and behave unethically under performance pressure deserves more research attention. This study goes beyond the stress-appraisal perspective and investigates whether and when performance pressure influences individual work mindsets and behaviors from a moral reasoning perspective. Specifically, we contend that performance pressure is related to employee (...) expediency through moral decoupling. We further hypothesize dialectical thinking and moral identity to be the boundary conditions of the proposed relationships. Analyses of data from a field study in three waves provide support for most of the hypotheses. In particular, we find that moral decoupling accounts for additional variance after we control for the stress-appraisal effect of performance pressure on employee expediency. The study offers several contributions to the literature on performance pressure and unethical behavior. (shrink)

The notion that a false positive (false conviction) is worse than a false negative (false acquittal) is a deep-seated commitment in the theory of criminal law. Its most illustrious formulation, the so-called Blackstone’s ratio, affirms that “it is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer”. Are people’s evaluations of criminal statutes consitent with this tenet of the Western legal tradition? To answer this question, we conducted three experiments (total _N_ = 2492) investigating how people reason about (...) a particular class of offenses—proxy crimes—known to vary in their specificity and sensitivity in predicting actual crime. By manipulating the extent to which proxy crimes convict the innocent and acquit those guilty of a target offense, we uncovered evidence that attitudes toward proxy criminalization depend primarily on its propensity toward false positives, with false negatives exerting a substantially weaker effect. This tendency arose across multiple experimental conditions—whether we matched the rates of false positives and false negatives or their frequencies, whether information was presented visually or numerically, and whether decisions were made under time pressure or after a forced delay—and was unrelated to participants’ probability literacy or their professed views on the purpose of criminal punishment. Despite the observed inattentiveness to false negatives, when asked to justify their decisions, participants retrospectively supported their judgments by highlighting the proxy crime’s efficacy (or inefficacy) in combating crime. These results reveal a striking inconsistency: people favor criminal policies that protect the rights of the innocent, but report comparable concern for their expediency in fighting crime. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on the archetypal image of the necromancer: the black‐robed creator and master of the undead. The necromancer is often depicted as a mere cackling villain, using her power over death to forward her evil agenda. In this way, necromancy has been philosophically maligned. Although necromancers were traditionally considered to be evil in Dungeons Dragons (DD), the game came to accommodate the idea that necromancers, in theory, could be neutral, or even good‐aligned, with their powers used for the (...) greater good. The distaste for necromancy and its mindless minions is instead a relic of “pre‐theoretical intuition” a common‐sense belief that may not hold up to philosophical scrutiny. Films and TV series depict the walking dead as ravenous, brain‐eating monstrosities. Next to such depictions, the relatively harmless nature of Dungeons Dragons’ mindless undead is easy to overlook. (shrink)

This work on the theory of education was first published in 1839. The five writers had been chosen as the winners in a competition for an essay on the 'Expediency and Means of Elevating the Profession of the Educator in Society', organised by the Central Society of Education, founded in 1837 to promote state funding of education, at a time when the 'monitor' system, whereby older children taught younger ones, was seen as an effective method. The journalist John Lalor won (...) first prize with a wide-ranging consideration of all the aspects of education, comparing the status of teachers through history and across several countries, and championing their 'sacred mission'. The runners-up were the writer John A. Heraud, the Unitarian minister Edward Higginson, the lawyer and author James Simpson, and Mrs Sarah Porter, prolific writer on education and sister of the political economist David Ricardo. (shrink)

Guideline 20 of the updated International Ethics Guidelines for Health‐related Research Involving Humans (2016) by the Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences (CIOMS) provides guidance on research in disasters and disease outbreaks against the background of the need to generate knowledge quickly, overcome practical impediments to implementing such research, and the need to maintain public trust. The guideline recommends that research ethics committees could pre‐screen study protocols to expedite ethical reviews in a situation of crisis, that pre‐arrangements be made (...) regarding data sharing and biomedical sample sharing, and that sponsors and research ethics committees seek to minimize risk to researchers conducting research during a disaster. This paper critiques these recommendations against the background of the findings of a survey of public health officials and chairs of research ethics committees in the Caribbean during 2016, which sought to determine the best template for the expeditious ethical review of research proposals in emergency and epidemic situations in the Caribbean, and whose findings can serve as a model for other low‐ and middle‐income countries. (shrink)

This study examines the use of a video news release in a specific story. Press coverage and editorial criticism in the case showed that journalists do not articulate sufficiently how the news owners' sway, through institutional controls, can lead to a hegemony of expedient action in the newsroom. Critical self-reflection by news workers will better enable journalists to ethically deliberate news choices that balance their responsibilities to owners, peers, and the public.

This chapter highlights how the encouragement of citizens' participation may in fact masquerade their rulers' attempt to create consensus for their ‘superior’ political project. It illustrates in ethnographic detail how rulers have symbolically used the public space, along with policies of urban regeneration, to win popular consensus and, thus, legitimise their position. The analysis addresses a central problem in the dynamics of democratic government, as it shows that lack of responsibility and superimposition of a political rhetoric on good governance eventually (...) leads to people's distrust of those in power. The case of Naples significantly points to the fact that, while people may be granted formal membership of society, rulers' pedagogic approaches and self-legitimisation do in fact deny fundamental citizenship rights, such as social and economic rights. (shrink)

Kevin Elliott observes that environmental protection efforts often benefit humans, not just because the natural environment is useful, but also because activities that result in environmental protections can also promote a range of other human values. Elliott argues that environmentalists could gain practical advantages by emphasizing these indirect benefits. He also insists that even for environmentalists who believe that nature ought to be protected for its own sake, deploying such arguments would not necessarily pose problems of integrity since more explicitly (...) non-anthropocentric arguments could be employed to complement the ones he favors. In this paper I push back on Elliott’s proposal, arguing that the practical benefits he promises are unlikely to materialize if environmentalists do not reign in their moralistic non-anthropocentrism in public discourse. In practice, environmentalists who understand the demands of integrity in the way Elliott describes will see in his proposal a thorny dilemma, forcing them to choose between their practical efficacy and their integrity as environmentalists. (shrink)

This study examines the use of a video news release in a specific story. Press coverage and editorial criticism in the case showed that journalists do not articulate sufficiently how the news owners' sway, through institutional controls, can lead to a hegemony of expedient action in the newsroom. Critical self-reflection by news workers will better enable journalists to ethically deliberate news choices that balance their responsibilities to owners, peers, and the public.

The article O.Horkusha, L.Fylypovych «Interfaith dialogue in contemporary Ukraine: expediency and efficiency of its implementation in the conditions of War» discusses the state of interfaith communication in Ukraine, available dialogue platforms, which were created spontaneously for a long time, and now they grow up to a certain network. There are 5 types of interfaith dialogs, their effectiveness is analyzed, based on the purpose of the dialogue, topics, language, methodological approaches, criteria for the rules of conduct and subjects invited to the (...) dialogue. The recommendations on the success of the interfaith dialogue in Ukraine in the conditions of war are given. (shrink)

Mahāyāna Buddhism is the major branch of Buddhism practiced in India, China, and East Asia. A signal characteristic of this form of Buddhism is its advocacy of the “doctrine of expedient means.” This doctrine, which makes its first official appearance in the third century of the Common Era in the Lotus Sūtra (hereafter “the Sūtra”), is supposed to account for the fact that Mahāyāna Buddhism expresses views about the nature of reality and the goals of Buddhist practice that are not (...) reflected in earlier scriptures. In its famous “Parable of the Burning House,” the Sūtra argues for the view that the earlier teachings were not aligned with the final truth; their limitations were required by natural and unavoidable .. (shrink)

In many institutions of higher learning, questions are being added to standardized student course evaluation forms to assess the instructor's racism, sexism, and sensitivity to multicultural issues. In this article, 1 review data from both an experimental simulation and actual course evaluation submissions to show that such information is subject to two basic psychological errors. The first is the fundamental attribution error, which reflects the students inability to separate the message from the messenger when dealing with individual difference data that (...) may contain conclusions that are politically unpopular (such as the evidence for race or sex differences). The second is the halo effect, where negative opinions about an unpopular instructor who does not teach well are likely to be generalized and result in the attribution of racist and sexist views to that individual. (shrink)

Advocates, activists, and academics have criticized pharmaceutical intellectual property ("pharma IP") rights as obstacles to access to medicines for the global poor. These criticisms of pharma IP holders are frequently exceptionalist: they focus on pharma IP holders while ignoring whether others also bear obligations to assist patients in need. These others include holders of other lucrative IP rights, such as music copyrights or technology patents; firms, such as energy companies and banks, that do not rely on IP; and wealthy private (...) individuals. Their resources could be used to aid patients by providing direct medical assistance, funding prizes or biomedical research, or purchasing pharmaceutical patents and granting rights to the disadvantaged. -/- After identifying this exceptionalism, this Article evaluates several arguments in its defense. These are that pharma IP holders are unique in (1) owning what poor patients need, (2) being in special proximity to these patients, (3) being able to assist at low cost to themselves, (4) having a professional duty to help these patients, or (5) being implicated by their past conduct in these patients' plight. It concludes that none of these arguments are compelling: while IP holders have a duty to help, this duty is not fundamentally different from the duties others owe. -/- Even though this project criticizes exceptionalism, it does not absolve pharma IP holders of duties to help the sick. Rather, it argues that spreading the costs of aiding patients in need across a greater number of market actors, via publicly funded "pull" programs like prizes and patent buyouts or "push" programs like grants, would be preferable. So would allowing pharmaceutical firms to seek contribution from others who are able to help. However, if others cannot be held to account, imposing burdens on pharma IP holders can be justified in order to promote global health: treating wealthy firms arbitrarily is preferable to ignoring the urgent needs of the global poor. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that there are strong reasons for preserving the concept of race in both medical and sociological contexts. While I argue that there are important reasons to conceive of race as picking out distinctions among populations that are both legitimate and important, the notion of race that I advocate in this paper differs in fundamental ways from traditional folk notions of race. As a result, I believe that the folk understanding of race needs either to be (...) revised or eliminated altogether. (shrink)

This article investigates the Neo-Confucian discourse on war, premised on the “Chinese versus barbarian” binary, and its impact on the Neo-Confucian scholar-officials of 17th-century Chosŏn Korea. It shows that Korean Neo-Confucians suffered invasions from the Jurchens, who they regarded as “barbarians,” and that the political debate on how to respond to the “barbarians” drove the advocates of the pro-peace argument to reimagine Chosŏn’s statehood. The article consists of three parts. First, it reconstructs the philosophical foundations of the mainstream Neo-Confucian discourse (...) on the war with the “barbarians” with reference to Zhu Xi. Second, it discusses the strong impact of the Neo-Confucian paradigm of war on the orthodox Korean Neo-Confucians of the 17th century. Third, it examines how Ch’oe Myŏng-kil, one of the rare champions of the pro-peace argument at the time, justified making peace with the Jurchens through the judicious use of “the expedient.”. (shrink)

From Han Yu’s yuan Dao 原道 (retracing the Dao) to Ouyang Xiu’s lun ben 论本 (discussing the root), the conflicts arising from Confucianists’ rejection of Buddhism were focused on one point, namely, the examination of zhongxin suo shou 中心所守 (something kept in mind). The attitude towards the distinction between mind and trace, and the proper approach to erase the gap between emptiness and being, as well as that between the expedient and the true, became the major concerns unavoidable for various (...) thinkers to integrate the two teachings and to propel academic development. To understand by mind and to blame for matter were of crucial methodological significance for transcendence in both Confucianism and Buddhism. The arguments of Confucian scholars like Zhang Zai and the Cheng brothers on the identity of mind and trace and the unity of void and solid are mutually manifested. The same mind with the same principle means mind is principle. The common axis of Confucianism and Buddhism exists in the emphasis on mind beyond trace. The unification of mind and trace or the accordance of body and function has actually become the cardinal foundation for the possible mergence of the Three Teachings. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to see whether Robinson and Kajiyama’s critiques of Nāgārjuna’s discourse of catuṣkoṭi, as contradicting formal logic, while following a dialectical formula is plausible. According to them, the 3rd koṭi is a violation of the law of non-contradiction, while the 4th koṭi, a violation of the law of excluded middle. Yet, since catuṣkoṭi can be interpreted as containing different perspectives in its expression of each koṭi, the critique of violating the law of non-contradiction fails. Further, (...) should a proper presupposition be added, the problem of excluded middle is resolved. Owing to the presence of this premise postulated as a real entity possessing intrinsic nature, it becomes perfectly valid, irrespective of all-out refutation of every option, In this context, catuṣkoṭi can be seen as an ‘expedient’, representing different views of separate schools or perspectives without violating the principle of formal logic, nor postulating any hierarchical dialectics elevating into the higher grades among these koṭis. Likewise, catuṣkoṭi in Nāgārjuna can be viewed as revealing the absurdity of postulating any identity or precondition for causal relations in perceiving intrinsic substance. (shrink)

The popular expedient of identifying noncognitivism with the claim that moral judgments are neither true nor false leaves open the question of what kind of thing a moral judgment is—an indeterminacy that has led to decades of confusion as to what the noncognitivist is more precisely committed to. Sometimes noncognitivism is presented as a claim about mental states (“Moral judgments are not beliefs”), sometimes as a claim about meaning (“X is morally good” means no more than “X: hurray!”), sometimes as (...) a claim about speech acts (“Moral judgments are not assertions”). Focus on the last two possibilities. The former calls for a translation schema from a propositional surface grammar to a non-propositional deep structure. Such schemata from the noncognitivist are familiar to students of metaethics. (Cf. A.J. Ayer’s claim that in saying “You acted wrongly in stealing that money” one is “not saying anything more than … ‘You stole that money,’ [but] in a peculiar tone of horror.”) It is less widely realized that the noncognitivist is not obliged to offer any such translation schema, for she might instead plump for the last option, of formulating noncognitivism as a theory not of meaning but of use. Perhaps the moral cognitivist is correct about the meaning of moral sentences (there is a wide range of possibilities here) but wrong about the way people use moral sentences: perhaps people do not assert moral sentences, perhaps the nature of acceptance of a moral claim is not belief. (shrink)

The expediency of teaching ethics of faith in secondary schools is now a subject for discussion by the broader sections of Ukrainian society. It is about what the outlook of the citizen of our country will be, how his / her self-consciousness will be formed and within which cultural paradigm self-identification will be achieved.

The author critiques the expedient application of market valuation principles by the transnational corporations and other large firms in the Indian pharmaceutical industry on a number of issues like patents, pricing, irrational drugs, clinical trials, etc. He contends that ethics in business is chiseled and etched within the confines of particular social structures of accumulation. An ascendant neo-liberal social structure of accumulation has basically shaped these firms' sharp opposition to the Indian Patents Act, 1970, government administered pricing, etc. The author (...) contends that the practice of neo-liberal economics is strongly associated with a "one dimensional" ethics that privileges market valuation principles over all others. This seems to inevitably generate a social counter-movement that struggles for social protections. He critiques neo-liberal business practices from a perspective that derives from the work of the economic anthropologist Karl Polanyi. Before the present phase of liberalization in India, markets were "managed", but without a "welfare state" in place. Moving toward deregulation of the markets without a welfare state in place is unethical. Keeping the debilities of the institutional framework of public policy in mind, the author adopts a Polanyian perspective that places its trust and hope in the growing social legitimacy of the counter-movement in opposition to both neo-liberal business practices and the degenerate behavior of state agencies. (shrink)

The author deems it expedient to single out the specific framework of the following reflections. A considerable portion of human beings who live, move, work and create around us, at least most of those who regard themselves as active members of the human society, view the realm that results from their own aspirations, requirements and preferences, hence the world we can describe as the “teleological world”, as more important than the actual world around them. Nothing is changed in this finding (...) even by the fact that such a teleological world is just an alternative to the world which people know, in which they live, where they pursue their activities and experience their destiny. Moreover, they are convinced – often succumbing to an illusion – that this teleological world is or can be better and more perfect, that it can help them make their wishes and requirements come true and meet their goals. Also many personal and especially social problems are caused by a discordance in the interpretation of what is or what should be the objective of our action, by the profound differences in the notion of what is or what should be a desirable or required state or, generally speaking, by the conflicts of different teleological worlds. The system of notions, objectives and visions of what we call a “teleological world” is not only a product of our own knowledge but is invariably influenced by the system of values or rather by specific integration of values and knowledge. (shrink)

Les documents officiels de l’Eglise catholique font grand usage de la Bible. La manière dont le texte scripturaire fonctionne dans les documents du magistère dépend de la théologie opératoire sous-jacente. Cet article examine les changements survenus dans la manière dont l’Eglise comprend et utilise l’Ecriture dans les documents du magistère, plus précisément dans des textes concernant la doctrine sociale de l’Église. Des exemples choisis dans les documents officiels permettent de reconnaître en gros trois paradigmes dans l’interprétation de l’Ecriture: 1) la (...) Bible comme recueil de propositions doctrinales; 2) la Bible comme archives des actions salvifiques de Dieu dans l’histoire: 3) la Bible comme vision d’une communion plénière avec Dieu et le prochain. Les deux derniers paradigmes se trouvent en germe dans le document Dei Verbum de Vatican II, tandis que le premier, qui avait été dominant dans les documents antérieurs à ce concile, a fait sa réapparition après la période de Vatican II. On montre que la compréhension de la Bible comme collection de propositions doctrinales accorde peu d’attention aux contextes historique et littéraire, tandis que les deux autres modèles s’y montrent plus sensibles, mettant l’accent sur la transformation et la communion plutôt que sur l’information. (shrink)

Since the financial crisis first erupted in the summer of 2007, the US Federal Reserve has sought to contain negative spillovers into the real economy by dramatically loosening monetary policy. Initially, this was done by lowering its key lending rates, but as the crisis has worsened, and rates have approached closer to zero, it has resorted to expanding its balance sheet in a historically unprecedented fashion. The Fed’s total assets have more than doubled to nearly $2 trillion since the summer (...) of 2007.Much of the debate surrounding the wisdom of this extraordinary increase in the production of money has revolved around its expediency–in other words, will it actually work to rescue the economy? Very little has been said, at least explicitly, about whether it is the morally right thing to do.This paper seeks to fill this gap by providing a moral analysis of the Fed’s response to the financial crisis. For this purpose, we apply Aristotelian virtue theory, Lockean natural rights philosophy, Kantian deontology, and Benthamite utilitarianism. The idea is that if a consensus, or a strong majority, can be reached from differing philosophic assumptions and starting points, then the resulting judgment ought to be compelling for all neutral observers. On the basis that the Fed’s efforts are likely to result in a marked rise in inflation, we argue that every one of these four moral theories ultimately renders a negative judgment. As such, we conclude that the Fed is pursuing an immoral course. (shrink)

Pour resituer l’analogie théologique dans sa constellation propre, cette étude explore les divers arguments dans lesquels Thomas d’Aquin recourt à Rm 1, 19-20a et/ou à Sg 13, 5. Le passage du visible aux invisibilia Dei est un moment (rationnel) qui a un ressort noétique interne, un fondement externe dans l’expressivité du créé, des vertus et des limites au sein d’une économie de la manifestation de Dieu par le sensible. La connaissance de Dieu par les sages des nations est orientée vers (...) une pédagogie salvifique de la foi, avec ses secours propres : la Loi, l’Incarnation et l’Évangile. L’exégèse et les usages de Rm 1, 19-20 demeurent toujours soumis à la thèse de Rm 1, 16 au sujet de « la puissance de la grâce évangélique ». La connaissance naturelle de Dieu, altérée par une faute envers Dieu, ne diminue en rien la nécessité de la grâce pour être sauvé. (shrink)