Darwinian Evolution and Classical Liberalism brings together a collection of new essays that examine the multifaceted ferment between Darwinian biology and classical liberalism.

Résumé éditeur : This book tells two intertwined stories, centered on twentieth-century moral philosophers Elizabeth Anscombe, Mary Midgley, Philippa Foot, and Iris Murdoch. The first is the story of four friends who came up to Oxford together just before WWII. It is the story of their lives, loves, and intellectual preoccupations; it is a story about women trying to find a place in a man's world of academic philosophy. The second story is about these friends' shared philosophical project and their (...) unintentional creation of a school of thought that challenged the dominant way of doing ethics. That dominant school of thought envisioned the world as empty, value-free matter, on which humans impose meaning. This outlook treated statements such as “this is good” as mere expressions of feeling or preference, reflecting no objective standards. It emphasized human freedom and demanded an unflinching recognition of the value-free world. The four friends diagnosed this moral philosophy as an impoverishing intellectual fad. This style of thought, they believed, obscured the realities of human nature and left people without the resources to make difficult moral choices or to confront evil. As an alternative, the women proposed a naturalistic ethics, reviving a line of thought running through Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas, and enriched by modern biologists like Jane Goodall and Charles Darwin. The women proposed that there are, in fact, moral truths, based in facts about the distinctive nature of the human animal and what that animal needs to thrive.". (shrink)

In this essay, I offer an interpretation of the ethical thought of Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch. The combined effect of their work was to revive a naturalistic account of ethical objectivity that had dominated the premodern world. I proceed narratively, explaining how each of the four came to make the contribution she did towards this implicit common project: in particular how these women came to see philosophical possibilities that their male contemporaries mostly did not.

We report on the development and initial validation of the Moralization of Everyday Life Scale, designed to measure variations in people's assignment of moral weight to commonplace behaviors. In Study 1, participants reported their judgments for a large number of potential moral infractions in everyday life; principal components analysis revealed 6 main dimensions of these judgments. In Study 2, scores on the 30-item MELS showed high reliability and distinctness from the Big 5 personality traits. In Study 3, scores on the (...) MELS were strongly correlated with scores on an early scale of moral judgments, suggesting convergent validity. (shrink)

It is erudite, broad-ranging, respectful of the actors involved, sympathetic, and nuanced. This is the first book of its kind."--Ronen Palan, University of Birmingham "I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book.

(2002). Privacy rights and public spaces: CCTV and the problem of the “unobservable observer”. Criminal Justice Ethics: Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 21-27. doi: 10.1080/0731129X.2002.9992113.

The financial services sector has the potential to be an important driver for improved corporate social and environmental responsibility through its control over corporate financing. But, so far, only ad hoc policy initiatives have arisen in the European Union and other countries. Because the financial services sector is where wholesale decisions regarding future development, and thus pressures on the environment, arise, the reform of investment and banking services to promote long term investment and better consideration of environmental impacts may be (...) an effective way to promote sustainable development. Reforms such as corporate environmental reporting requirements and lender liability for borrowers’ environmental harm, are some of the ways by which an institutional framework for mobilising financial organizations as instruments of environmental regulation could be constructed. (shrink)

Upon first glance, readers might not think there is much new to be found in the most recent book from Wesley Wildman. After all, seven of the nine chapters contained between its covers began as essays previously published. However, this volume is also the sixth of six in his Religious Philosophy series, so clearly the author is making something of its contents. Indeed, there is much that is worthwhile to be found within. Taken together with the new material, this collection (...) of essays immediately reveals the depths of Wildman's pragmatic commitments. The chapters do not build upon one another like links in a chain or floors in a building from the foundation to the executive suites.... (shrink)

Faces are complex stimuli that can be described via intuitive facial features like the eyes, nose, and mouth, “configural” features like the distances between facial landmarks, and features that correspond to computations performed in the early visual system (e.g. oriented edges). With regard to this latter category of descriptors, adult face recognition relies disproportionately on information in specific spatial frequency and orientation bands: Many recognition tasks are performed more accurately when adults have access to mid-range spatial frequencies (8-16 cycles/face) and (...) horizontal orientations (Dakin & Watt, 2009). In the current study, we examined how this information bias develops in middle childhood. We recruited children between the ages of 5-10 years old to participate in a simple categorization task that required them to label images according to whether they depicted a face or a house. Critically, children were presented with face and house images comprised either of primarily horizontal orientation energy, primarily vertical orientation energy, or both horizontal and vertical orientation energy. We predicted that any bias favoring horizontal information over vertical should be more evident in faces than in houses, and also that older children would be more likely to show such a bias than younger children. We designed our categorization task to be sufficiently easy that children would perform at near-ceiling accuracy levels, but with variation in response times that would reflect how they rely on different orientations as a function of age and object category. We found that horizontal bias for face detection (but not house detection) correlated significantly with age, suggesting an emergent category-specific bias for horizontal orientation energy that develops during middle childhood. These results thus suggest that the tuning of high-level recognition to specific low-level visual features takes take place over several years of visual development. (shrink)

Discusses three concepts crucial to an understanding of the nature of religion: anxiety, guilt, and freedom. The various essays examine these from the viewpoint of several different religious traditions, movements and thinkers. Contents: Editor's Preface. Donald Gard: A Personal Perspective. Part I. Guiltless Morality; The Family of Changing Woman: Nature and Women in Navaho Thought; The Sacraments as "Fear-provoking" and "Awe-inspiring" Rites in the Greek Fathers; The Doctrine of Karma; Two Concepts of Predestination in Current Islamic Thought. Part II. The (...) Spirit of Medieval Penitents; The Evolution of Freedom as Catholicity in Catholic Ethics; Agape and the Liberation Movements. Part III. Calvin's Idea of Freedom in the Ethics of Schleiermacher and Barth; Creativity and Freedom in the Thought of Martin Buber; The Liberating Visions of C. G. Jung; 'The World's Most Perverse Habit'; Appendix: Study Questions. (shrink)

Although research findings have always been subject to abuse, scientific advances and recent events have increased concern about the perils of some biomedical knowledge. The Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs addresses this potential in its guidelines for physician–researchers. The guidelines do not advance many novel ideas or provide substantive guidance for PRs. Advocacy for professionalism, weighing costs and benefits, and balanced oversight are uncontroversial and have been proposed before. The difficult task is to define what they require, and here (...) the guidelines are vague. We discuss critically two issues that deserve careful attention. (shrink)

This essay is a reading of Aristotle’s account in Meteorology I.14 of changes in local environmental conditions and its significance for Aristotle’s understanding of nature and change more generally. That account shows how local environments are complex bodies, and so change through habituation: the sedimentation of patterns of activity through repeated activity/change. In turn, this shows how the regularity of what is by nature is a matter of the relative stability of habits in the face of unceasing generation and destruction. (...) Strikingly, Aristotle then turns to the consequences of that account for human beings’ ability to comprehend changes in the environmental conditions of their activities. (shrink)

Regulation must target the financial sector, which often funds and profits from environmentally unsustainable development. In an era of global financial markets, the financial sector has a crucial impact on the state of the environment. The long-standing movement for ethically and socially responsible investment (SRI) has recently begun to advocate environmental standards for financiers. While this movement is gaining more adherents, it has increasingly justified responsible financing as a path to be prosperous, rather than virtuous. This trend partly owes to (...) how financial institutions view their legal responsibilities. The business case motivations that now predominantly drive SRI are not sufficient to make the financial sector a means to sustainable development. Some modest legal reforms to improve the quality and extent of SRI have yet to make a tangible difference. A more ambitious strategy to promote SRI for environmental sustainability is possible, based on reforming the fiduciary duties of financial institutions. Such duties, tied to concrete performance standards, could make financiers invest in more ethically responsible ways. Other collateral reforms to financial markets, including improved corporate environmental reporting, are required to promote sustainability. (shrink)

Throughout his theological career Stanley Hauerwas has struggled to maintain a demarcation between liberal and Christian ethics. Is such a separation theologically defensible? In an effort to deconstruct Hauerwas’s hostility to liberalism through Hauerwasian categories, the following article examines areas of resemblance between liberal and Hauerwasian ethics. Through a comparative reading of the liberalisms of J. S. Mill (1806–1873) and E. M. Forster (1879–1970), the following argument retrieves a neglected form of liberal politics which in many respects conforms to the (...) structure of Hauerwas’s radical description of Christian discipleship. Instead of understanding the Church as an isolated colony embattled against non-Christian culture, Mill and Forster challenge Hauerwas to consider the liberal polity as both the child and responsibility of the Church. (shrink)