In his essay, Philosophical Reflections on Experimenting with Human Subjects, Hans Jonas contends that except in cases of widespread medical emergencies, people do not have a moral or social obligation to volunteer to be subjects in medical experiments. He further argues that any appeal for volunteer subjects in medical experiments should whenever possible give priority to those who can identify with the project and offer a strong sense of commitment to its goals. The first of these claims is given support (...) against some recent criticisms, but argument is offered to show that the second claim not only does little to enhance the stature of the standard requirement of free and informed consent but may even weaken the moral validity of the consent. (shrink)

TO DEFEND THE CONCEPT OF MIRACLES FROM ATTACKS SUCH AS THOSE RAISED BY NOWELL-SMITH, CERTAIN PHILOSOPHERS HAVE APPEALED TO ACTION THEORY AND ARGUED THAT THE THEIST’S EXPLANATION OF MIRACLES IS LIKE THE EXPLANATION OF AN ACTION AND NOT LIKE THE EXPLANATION OF A CAUSED EVENT. THIS ARTICLE SHOWS THAT NOWELL-SMITH’S OBJECTIONS CANNOT BE AVOIDED IN THIS WAY AND THAT BELIEF IN MIRACLES ONLY ACCENTS THE THEIST’S PROBLEM OF EXPLAINING GOD’S RELATION TO THE WORLD.

What are the most fundamental features of the world? Do minds stand outside the natural order? Is a unified picture of mental and physical reality possible? The Mind in Nature provides a staunchly realist account of the world as a unified system incorporating both the mental and the physical.

The development of a compositional model shows the incoherence of such notions as levels of being and both bottom-up and top-down causality. The mathematization of nature through the partial considerations of physics qua quantities is seen to lead to Pythagoreanism, if what is not included in the partial consideration is denied. An ontology of only probabilities, if not Pythagoreanism, is equivalent to a world of primitive dispositionalities. Problems are found with each. There is a need for properties as well as (...) quantities and these properties must be qualitative as well as dispositional. So there is a need for physical qualia (qualities) for the depiction of the intrinsic character of the finest interstices of nature. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) continues to gain attention atop the corporate agenda and is by now an important component of the dialogue between companies and their stakeholders. Nevertheless, there is still little guidance as to how companies can implement CSR activity in order to maximize returns to CSR investment. Theorists have identified many company-favoring outcomes of CSR; yet there is a dearth of research on the psychological mechanisms that drive stakeholder responses to CSR activity. Borrowing from the literatures on meansend (...) chains and relationship marketing, we propose a conceptual model that explains how CSR provides individual stakeholders with numerous benefits (functional, psychosocial, and values) and how the type and extent to which a stakeholder derives these benefits from CSR initiatives influences the quality of the relationship between the stakeholder and the company. The paper discusses the implications of these insights and highlights a number of areas for future research. (shrink)

IT IS SHOWN IN DETAIL THAT RECENT ACCOUNTS FAIL TO DISTINGUISH BETWEEN INTENTIONALITY AND MERELY CAUSALLY DISPOSITIONAL STATES OF INORGANIC PHYSICAL OBJECTS—A QUICK ROAD TO PANPSYCHISM. THE CLEAR NEED TO MAKE SUCH A DISTINCTION GIVES DIRECTION FOR FUTURE WORK. A BEGINNING IS MADE TOWARD PROVIDING SUCH AN ACCOUNT.

The _Second Treatise_ is one of the most important political treatises ever written and one of the most far-reaching in its influence. In his provocative 15-page introduction to this edition, the late eminent political theorist C. B. Macpherson examines Locke's arguments for limited, conditional government, private property, and right of revolution and suggests reasons for the appeal of these arguments in Locke's time and since.

This paper examines the effects of employees’ sense that they work for a purpose-driven company on their workplace sustainability behaviors. Conceptualizing corporate purpose as an overarching, relevant, shared ethical vision of why a company exists and where it needs to go, we argue that it is particularly suited for driving employee sustainability behaviors, which are more ethically complex than the types of employee ethical behaviors typically examined by prior research. Through four studies, two involving the actual employees of construction companies, (...) we demonstrate that purpose drives the sustainability behaviors of employees by causing them to take psychological ownership of sustainability. In addition, we show that the sustainability-enhancing effect of purpose is stronger when employees perceive that they have higher autonomy in enacting their sustainability actions and for those employees for whom being moral is more central to their sense of self. (shrink)

While considerable attention has been given to the harm done to consumers by marketing, less attention has been given to the harm done by consumers as an indirect effect of marketing activities, particularly in regard to supply chains. The recent development of dramatically expanded global supply chains has resulted in social and environmental problems upstream that are attributable at least in part to downstream marketers and consumers. Marketers have responded mainly by using corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication to counter the (...) critique of CSR practice, but these claims of ethical corporate behavior often lack credibility and can result in a backlash against brands. The article argues that more adequate attention to the harmful upstream effects of downstream marketing and consumption decisions requires greater attention to stakeholder marketing and marketer efforts to help create responsible consumers. It concludes by identifying implications for further research in this important emergent area of marketing ethics. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to set out some of the ontologies amongst which some forms of anti-realism must select. This provides the appropriate setting for presenting an alternative realist ontology. The argument is that the choice between the varieties of anti-realism and realism is inevitably a choice between ontologies.

CHARLES LESLIE STEVENSON, Associate Professor of Philosophy in the University of Michigan, though an American, has an important place in the evolution of British ethics in this century. It was in Mind that his first papers on ethics were published in 1937-8. They had considerable influence in Britain in promoting the emotive-persuasive theory of moral language. The author of the theory that much of philosophy and ethics is persuasive rhetoric, was himself a plausible illustration of his own theory. His breeziness (...) of style seemed to sweep difficulties out of the way. His papers had an unconventionality which appealed all the more to the younger generation of philosophers because it shocked the older. He seemed to discredit critics by not appearing able to understand the archaic language they were talking. The ideas of these early papers were taken up into a book, Ethics and Language published in 1944. The book is more ponderous and indeed somewhat pedantic. In it, Stevenson’s ideas lose in freshness what they gain in professorial gravity. But the impressive size of the book, the number and variety of the examples of moral argument which it discussed, the apparently wide range of the treatment, made the book for some time a sort of bible of emotivism. The book was also important as the first major study of ethics based on the neo-Wittgensteinian slogan that moral philosophy is the analysis of moral language. (shrink)

Berit Brogaard and Joe Salerno (Counterfactuals and Context, ANALYSIS 68 (2008): 39-46) argue that the standard Stalnaker-Lewis counterexamples to hypothetical syllogism, strengthening the antecedent, and contraposition trade on a failure to hold fixed the context in which truth values are determined for the premises and conclusion in each counterexample. I argue that no contextual fallacy is committed in the standard counterexamples, and I offer a different view of what it is for a fact to be held fixed by a counterfactual (...) antecedent. On my view, for a fact to be held fixed is an epistemological matter, not a semantic matter. (shrink)

This essay corrects an error in the presentation of the Paradox of the Knowledge-Plus Knower, which is the variant of Kaplan and Montague’s Knower Paradox presented in C. Cross 2001: ‘The Paradox of the Knower without Epistemic Closure,’ MIND, 110, pp. 319–33. The correction adds a universally quantified transitivity principle for derivability as an additional assumption leading to paradox. This correction does not affect the status of the Knowledge-Plus paradox as a rebuttal to an argument against epistemic closure, since the (...) quantified transitivity principle is true in the standard model of arithmetic and therefore innocuous. (shrink)

The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, published in 1988, offers a balanced and comprehensive account of philosophical thought from the middle of the fourteenth century to the emergence of modern philosophy. This was the first volume in English to synthesise for a wider audience the substantial and sophisticated research now available. The volume is organised by branch of philosophy rather than by individual philosopher or school, and the intention has been to present the internal development of different aspects of the (...) subject in their own historical context. The structure also naturally emphasises the international nature of philosophy in the Renaissance. (shrink)

'Why did the window break when it was hit by the stone? Because the window is brittle and the stone is hard; hardness and brittleness are powers, dispositional properties or dispositions.' Dispositions are essential to our understanding of the world. This book is a record of the debate on the nature of dispositions between three distinguished philosophers - D. M. Armstrong, C. B. Martin and U. T. Place - who have been thinking about dispositions all their working lives. Their distinctive (...) accounts cover many of the issues surrounding dispositions such as the nature of mind, matter, universals, existence, laws of nature and causation. Dispositions illuminates this central topic in analytic philosophy and at the same time highlights deeper concerns of metaphysics. (shrink)

The paper interprets Peirce's philosophy as a critical revival of Kant's idea of transcendental philosophy. The paper adopts, clarifies and extends the Peirce interpretation of the German philosopher K O Apel. In so doing, it shows Peirce to have articulated insights into meaning, knowledge and truth still of relevance today and to have identified important problems to which he proposed novel and still instructive solutions. (edited).

In answering the question, “How is the concept of a person possible?”, Strawson lays great stress upon a particular class of predicate.He says, “They are predicates, roughly, which involve doing something, which clearly imply intention or a state of mind or at least consciousness in general, and which indicate a characteristic pattern, or range of patterns, of bodily movement, while not indicating at all precisely any very definite sensation or experience …. Such predicates have the interesting characteristic of many P-predicates, (...) that one does not, in general, ascribe them to oneself on the strength of observation, whereas one does ascribe them to others on the strength of observations. But, in the case of these predicates, one feels minimal reluctance to concede that what is ascribed in these two different ways is the same. This is because of the marked dominance of a fairly definite pattern of bodily movement in what they describe, and the marked absence of any distinctive experience. (shrink)

More than four years ago I ventured to put forward some ideas about the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. The publication, within the last year or two, of a number of important books of Wittgensteiniana has seemed to offer a good occasion for reviewing this earlier essay. The present article proposes to assess these books and, in the light of them to reconsider the writer’s earlier interpretation of Wittgenstein, as well as to embark on a more ambitious study of Wittgenstein’s later (...) thought. I shall begin with some general remarks about the books in question. (shrink)