The distinctive role played by William Eden in the penal reform debate of the late eighteenth century is examined and his emphasis on leniency in the exercise of punishment is identified. Eden is found to have introduced the notion of ‘public virtue’ into a rights theory paradigm and the implications of this development are explored. Eden's contribution to English penal theory is illustrated by a comparison of his position with those of other leading theorists of the period, and the extent (...) to which Eden's ideas affected English practices of punishment is assessed. (shrink)

This paper reports the introduction of electronic handsets, like those used on the television show 'Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?' into the teaching of philosophical logic. Logic lectures can provide quite a formidable challenge for many students, occasionally to the point of making them ill. Our rationale for introducing handsets was threefold: to get the students thinking and talking about the subject in a public environment; to make them feel secure enough to answer questions in the lectures because the (...) system enabled them to do this anonymously; and to build their confidence about their learning by their being able to see how they were progressing in relation to the rest of the students in the class. We have achieved all of these and more. Our experience has revealed that the use of handsets encourages a more dynamic form of student interaction in an environment - the lecture - that can, in the wrong hands, be utterly enervating, but they also provide an opportunity for the lecturer to respond to students' difficulties at the time when they really matter. In this paper, we discuss our case of rapid adoption, our grounds for judging it a success, and what that success seems to have depended on. (shrink)

This book is animated by a shared conviction that philosophy of religion needs to change: thirteen new essays suggest why and how. The first part of the volume explores possible changes to the focus of the field. The second part focuses on the standpoint from which philosophers of religion should approach their field. In the first part are chapters on how an emphasis on faith distorts attempts to engage non-western religious ideas; on how philosophers from different traditions might collaborate on (...) common interests; on why the common presupposition of ultimacy leads to error; on how new religious movements feed a naturalistic philosophy of religion; on why a focus on belief and a focus on practice are both mistaken; on why philosophy's deep axiological concern should set much of the field's agenda; and on how the field might contribute to religious evolution. The second part includes a qualitative analysis of the standpoint of fifty-one philosophers of religion, and also addresses issues about humility needed in continental philosophy of religion; about the implausibility of claiming that one's own worldview is uniquely rational; about the Moorean approach to religious epistemology; about a Spinozan middle way between 'insider' and 'outsider' perspectives; and about the unorthodox lessons we could learn from scriptures like the book of Job if we could get past the confessional turn in recent philosophy of religion.The goal of the volume is to identify new paths for philosophers of religion that are distinct from those travelled by theologians and other scholars of religion. (shrink)

Most academic papers on ethics in pandemics concentrate on the duties of healthcare professionals. This paper will consider non-professional healthcare workers: do they have a moral obligation to work during an influenza pandemic? If so, is this an obligation that outweighs others they might have, e.g., as parents, and should such an obligation be backed up by the coercive power of law? This paper considers whether non-professional healthcare workers—porters, domestic service workers, catering staff, clerks, IT support workers, etc.—have an obligation (...) to work during an influenza pandemic. It uses data collected as part of a study looking at the attitudes of healthcare workers to working during a pandemic to suggest the philosophical arguments explored. These include: being in a position to do good, the ethics of work, competing obligations to family members and in particular to children and the obligations of citizens in a state of national emergency. We also look at whether compulsory measures are justified to support a national health service during a health emergency. We conclude that even if they are, compulsion should not be restricted to non-professionals who happen to be working in the health service at the time. Rather, compulsion involving a larger pool of people with the relevant skills and abilities is more equitable. (shrink)

The phenomenon of contract cheating presents, potentially, a serious threat to the quality and standards of Higher Education around the world. There have been suggestions, cited below, to tackle the problem using legal means, but we find that current laws are not fit for this purpose. In this article we present a proposal for a specific new law to target contract cheating, which could be enacted in most jurisdictions.We test our proposed new law against a number of issues that would (...) need to be considered before any legal approach could be successful; would changing the legal status of contract cheating make it less likely to happen? Could this be achieved in a specific way? If so, who should actually be prosecuted and what offence are they committing? Would it actually address the causes of contract cheating? We suggest some answers to these questions, but then also identify a number of unintended potential consequences. We therefore additionally consider whether a legal approach is possible or even desirable.We conclude that a legal approach to contract cheating is possible, and, on balance, appropriate. Using UK law as an example, we offer a specific suggestion to lawmakers, around the world, for how this might be achieved, and conclude that the most successful approach would be to focus largely on a law targeting the providers of contract cheating, in particular commercial services. (shrink)

The impact of Beccaria's On Crimes and Punishments on English discussions of punishment in the twenty-five years following its publication is assessed, with attention being paid to Beccaria's combination of contractarian and early utilitarian thinking. It is argued that Beccaria's influence was particularly striking in England in that he stimulated two disparate strands of reform thinking. The first being exemplified in the work of William Eden, and taking the form of a contractarian, humanitarian version, which owed something to William Blackstone, (...) but was ultimately quite distinct. The second represented in Jeremy Bentham's theory of punishment with its emphasis overwhelmingly on utilitarian calculation. (shrink)

Many strategies have been proposed to address the supply of bespoke essays and other assignments by companies often described as ‘Essay Mills’ with the act of supply and use being invariably described as ‘contract cheating’. These proposals increasingly refer to the law as a solution in common with other action. In this article, the lead author revisits work undertaken in 2016 as a result of recent legal and extra-legal developments to assess whether the UK Fraud Act (2006) might now be (...) used to tackle some of the activities of the companies involved, by comparing their common practises, and their Terms and Conditions, with the Act. It was previously found that all sites have disclaimers regarding the use of their products but there were some obvious contradictions in the activities of the sites which undermined those disclaimers, for example plagiarism-free guarantees for the work. In this article, we ask and consider the question whether this is still the case having regard to the impact of a change in the law by the UK supreme court and recent action of the UK Advertising Standards Authority. We also consider whether a call for a new offence to be created which specifically targets the undesirable behaviours of these companies is still justified. (shrink)

This paper discusses the views of 17 healthcare practitioners involved with transplantation on the ethics of live liver donations . Donations between emotionally related donor and recipients increased the acceptability of an LLD compared with those between strangers. Most healthcare professionals disapproved of altruistic stranger donations, considering them to entail an unacceptable degree of risk taking. Participants tended to emphasise the need to balance the harms of proceeding against those of not proceeding, rather than calculating the harm-to-benefits ratio of donor (...) versus recipient. Participants’ views suggested that a complex process of negotiation is required, which respects the autonomy of donor, recipient and HCP. Although they considered that, of the three, donor autonomy is of primary importance, they also placed considerable weight on their own autonomy. Our participants suggest that their opinions about acceptable risk taking were more objective than those of the recipient or donor and were therefore given greater weight. However, it was clear that more subjective values were also influential. Processes used in live kidney donation were thought to be a good model for LLD, but our participants stressed that there is a danger that patients may underestimate the risks involved in LLD if it is too closely associated with LKD. (shrink)

Medical student learning is dependent on an unwritten agreement between patients and the medical profession, in which students “practise” upon real patients in order that, when they are doctors, those same patients will benefit from the doctors’ skills. Given the increasing propensity for patients to refuse to take part in such learning, there is a danger that doctors will qualify without being truly competent. As patients, we must all ask ourselves, when asked to take part in medical teaching: if this (...) student/trainee doesn’t learn now, on me and under supervision, how will the person be truly competent next time, when this is for real, and the patient might be me or my loved one?We argue that a new and more explicit agreement is needed, in which the default should be that all patients are willing to help in the education of medical students, while we ensure that all such students are already competent in simulation before first practising upon real patients. (shrink)

This paper pr o vides an o v e r vi e w of the themes presented in Bentha m ' s w ork Scotch Reform -a n e w w ork being prepared for pu b lication from Bentha m ' s manuscripts b y Oxford Un i v ersity Press as pa r t of the Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham. Attention is focused on the relationship bet w een the system of l e g al procedure proposed (...) and the under l ying principle of utili t y . T w o issues are highlighte d , the nature of Bentha m ' s anti-nomian thesis for c i vil cou r ts and the parad o x of requiring restraint on the judicial control of c i vil procedure, w hilst simultaneous l y rem o ving all r ules of action and all o wing increased judicial discretion. (shrink)

Healthcare workers are often assumed to have a duty to work, even if faced with personal risk. This is particularly so for professionals. However, the health service also depends on non-professionals, such as porters, cooks and cleaners. The duty to work is currently under scrutiny because of the ongoing challenge of responding to pandemic influenza, where an effective response depends on most uninfected HCWs continuing to work, despite personal risk. This paper reports findings of a survey of HCWs conducted across (...) three National Health Service trusts in the West Midlands, UK, to establish whether HCWs’ likelihood of working during a pandemic is associated with views about the duty to work. The sense that HCWs felt that they had a duty to work despite personal risk emerged strongly regardless of professional status. Besides a strong sense that everyone should pull together, all kinds of HCWs recognised a duty to work even in difficult circumstances, which correlated strongly with their stated likelihood of working. This suggests that HCWs’ decisions about whether or not they are prepared to work during a pandemic are closely linked to their sense of duty. However, respondents’ sense of the duty to work may conflict with their sense of duty to family, as well as other factors such as a perceived lack of reciprocity from their employers. Interestingly, nearly 25% of doctors did not consider that they had a duty to work where doing so would pose risks to themselves or their families. (shrink)

In Darwin’s Black Box, Michael J. Behe argues that, because certain biochemical systems are both irreducibly complex and very complex, it is extremely unlikely that they evolved gradually by Darwinian mechanisms, and so extremely likely that they were intelligently designed. I begin this paper by explaining Behe’s argument and defending it against the very common but clearly mistaken charge that it is just a rehash of William Paley’s design argument. Then I critically discuss a number of more serious objections to (...) the argument. I conclude that, while Behe successfully rules out some Darwinian paths to the biochemical systems he discusses, others remain open. Thus, his argument against Darwinian gradualism (and ipso facto his argument for intelligent design) is at best incomplete. (shrink)

This paper summarizes J.L. Schellenberg’s trilogy on the philosophy of religion. In the first book, Prolegomena to a Philosophy of Religion, Schellenberg analyzes basic concepts in the philosophy of religion. In the second, The Wisdom to Doubt, he rejects theism but defends skepticism about both naturalism and a very general religious position that he calls “ultimism.” And in the third book, The Will to Imagine, Schellenberg argues that rationality requires ultimistic faith.

Reviews the book, The psychology of human possibility and constraint by J. Martin and J. Sugarman . This wide-ranging, compact, dense, yet very readable little book presents many of the key elements of a badly needed, more credible philosophy of social science for academic and professional psychologists. The book gives no specific examples of theories or research findings that might illustrate what is meant by a better kind of "knowledge" or "theory" in psychology, so the reader is left somewhat high (...) and dry concerning this question. Perhaps it is simply the case that these questions about what might be the best kind of social and psychological inquiry and what sense to make of the plethora of theories and findings to date, are difficult, murky, and on the frontier of a hermeneutic reenvisioning of psychology. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Introduces an issue of Topoi on the topic, "Is theism a theory?" The issue contains articles by William J. Wainwright, D. Z. Phillips, William P. Alston, Stephen J. Wykstra, Stephen Maitzen, and James F. Sennett.

My colleagues and I in Birmingham are always on the lookout for an undergraduate textbook for our medical students, which was why I agreed to review this book. By and large it is pitched at an undergraduate audience and covers many of the areas that one might expect to find in a UK undergraduate medical course (consent, making decisions for the incompetent, end-of-life issues, beginning-of-life issues, research, transplantation and medical genetics). It also has a chapter on managed care, which is (...) less relevant to a UK audience but is interesting none the less. (The case study for the chapter on James Adams who, it is alleged, lost both his hands and feet as a …. (shrink)

We only see Mars from Earth's perspective in the first season of The Expanse, but Season 2 changes that by introducing Gunnery Sergeant Bobbie Draper, a Martian Congressional Republic Navy (MCRN) marine. Mars as seen by Martians resembles our Mars: ruddy, rocky, dusty, inhospitable, and cold. This chapter focuses on Draper and the Mars Congressional Republic (MCR). What is striking about the culture of the MCR is how naturally it flows from contemporary visions of space exploration, especially those (...) from the Apollo era forward. For somewhat more specific examples, the chapter considers the “Statement of Philosophy” of the National Space Society, another well‐known space advocacy organization in the US. The MCR's commitment to terraforming Mars demonstrates that its future depends “upon the progress of science and technology.”. (shrink)

Since Bennett, Draper, and Frith published a paper in this journal in 2000 considering the possible criminalisation of HIV transmission, an important legal development has taken place. February 2001 saw the first successful United Kingdom prosecution for the sexual transmission of disease for over a century, when Stephen Kelly was convicted in Glasgow of recklessly injuring his former girlfriend by infecting her with HIV. Whether English criminal law can apply criminal penalties in such a case, however, still remains uncertain.This (...) paper, in addition to providing some background to the Kelly case, briefly explores the current possibilities for prosecution under English law. It then proceeds to outline and comment on the issues relevant to criminalisation, responding in part to points made by Bennett, Draper, and Frith and also by Bird and Leigh Brown in a recent article in the British Medical Journal. (shrink)

The papers of Burley and Harris, and Draper and Chadwick, in this issue, raise a problem: what should doctors do when patients request an option which is not the best available? This commentary argues that doctors have a duty to offer that option which will result in the individual affected by that choice enjoying the highest level of wellbeing. Doctors can deviate from this duty and submaximise--bring about an outcome that is less than the best--only if there are good (...) reasons to do so. The desire to have a child which is genetically related provides little, if any, reason to submaximise. The implication for cloning, preimplantation diagnosis and embryo transfer is that doctors should only produce a clone or transfer embryos expected to enjoy a level of wellbeing which is less than that enjoyed by other children the couple could have, if there is a good reason to employ that technology. This paper sketches what might constitute a good reason to submaximise. (shrink)

We prove linear and polynomial growth properties of sets and functions that are existentially definable in the ordered group of integers with divisibility. We determine the laws of addition with order and divisibility.

Regulated secretory proteins are stored within specialized vesicles known as secretory granules. It is not known how proteins are sorted into these organelles. Regulated proteins may possess targeting signals which interact with specific sorting receptors in the lumen of the trans‐Golgi network (TGN) prior to their aggregation to form the characteristic dense‐core of the granule. Alternatively, sorting may occur as the result of specific aggregation of regulated proteins in the TGN. Aggregates may be directed to secretory granules by interaction of (...) a targeting signal on the surface with a sorting receptor. Novel targeting signals which confer on regulated proteins a tendency to aggregate under certain conditions, and in so doing cause them to be incorporated into secretory granules, have been implicated. Specific targeting signals may also play a role in directing membrane proteins to secretory granules. (shrink)

This exploratory study assessed the use of functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) to examine hemodynamic response patterns during sentence processing. Four groups of participants: monolingual English children, bilingual Chinese-English children, bilingual Chinese-English adults and monolingual English adults were given an agent selection syntactic processing task. Bilingual child participants were classified as simultaneous or sequential bilinguals to examine the impact of first language, age of second-language acquisition (AoL2A), and the length of second language experience on behavioral performance and cortical activation. Participants (...) were asked to select the agent of four types of sentences: subject-verb-object (SVO), passive (PAS), subject-extracted relative clause (SR), and object-extracted relative clause (OR) adopted from the “Whatdunit” task by Montgomery et al. (2016). Semantic cues were removed by using inanimate nouns for agents and patients, which constrained participants to make decisions based on syntactic knowledge. Behavioral results showed greater accuracy for canonical SVO and SR sentence types than for noncanonical OR and PAS sentence types, which aligns with prior studies. Neuroimaging results revealed greater hemodynamic responses to relative clauses (i.e., SR and OR sentences) than to simple sentences (SVO and PAS), especially for Chinese-English bilinguals suggesting first-language transfer influencing sentence processing in English. The effects AoL2A and the length of second language experience showed no significant differences between simultaneous and sequential bilinguals or between bilingual adults and children for identifying the correct agent in each sentence. However, neuroimaging results demonstrated greater hemodynamic responses in right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and left inferior parietal lobule (IPL) in simultaneous bilinguals compared to sequential bilinguals and greater hemodynamic responses in left and right DLPFC and left IPL among bilingual adults. Different behavioral and neural hemodynamic response patterns afford new insights into the effects of syntactic knowledge on sentence processing. (shrink)