Chapter I INTRODUCTION Individuals who were born in the nineteenth century and have lived through the cataclysmic events of the twentieth have been forced ...

On November 8, 1994, Oregon became the first state in the nation to legalize assisted suicide. Passage of Proposition 16 was a milestone in the campaign to make assisted suicide a legal option. The culmination of years of effort, the Oregon vote followed on the heels of failed referenda in California and Washington, and other unsuccessful attempts to enact state laws guaranteeing the right to suicide assistance. Indeed, in 1993, four states passed laws strengthening or clarifying their ban against assisted (...) suicide. No doubt, Proposition 16 is likely to renew the effort to legalize assisted suicide at the state level.The battle over assisted suicide is also unfolding in the courts. Litigation challenging Proposition 16 on the grounds that it violates the equal protection clause is ongoing in Oregon. More significantly, three cases, two in federal courts and one in Michigan state court, have been brought to establish assisted suicide as a constitutionally protected right. (shrink)

Infinite time register machines (ITRMs) are register machines which act on natural numbers and which are allowed to run for arbitrarily many ordinal steps. Successor steps are determined by standard register machine commands. At limit times register contents are defined by appropriate limit operations. In this paper, we examine the ITRMs introduced by the third and fourth author (Koepke and Miller in Logic and Theory of Algorithms LNCS, pp. 306–315, 2008), where a register content at a limit time is (...) set to the lim inf of previous register contents if that limit is finite; otherwise the register is reset to 0. The theory of these machines has several similarities to the infinite time Turing machines (ITTMs) of Hamkins and Lewis. The machines can decide all ${\Pi^1_1}$ sets, yet are strictly weaker than ITTMs. As in the ITTM situation, we introduce a notion of ITRM-clockable ordinals corresponding to the running times of computations. These form a transitive initial segment of the ordinals. Furthermore we prove a Lost Melody theorem: there is a real r such that there is a program P that halts on the empty input for all oracle contents and outputs 1 iff the oracle number is r, but no program can decide for every natural number n whether or not ${n \in r}$ with the empty oracle. In an earlier paper, the third author considered another type of machines where registers were not reset at infinite lim inf’s and he called them infinite time register machines. Because the resetting machines correspond much better to ITTMs we hold that in future the resetting register machines should be called ITRMs. (shrink)

The present reissue of Wallace's translation of Hegel's Philosophy of Mind includes the Zusatze or lecture-notes which, in the collected works, accompany the first section entitled "Subjective Mind" and which Wallace omitted from his translation. Professor J. N. Findlay has written a Foreword and this replaces Wallace's introductory essays.

Hegel is an immensely important yet difficult philosopher. His Philosophy of Mind is one of the main pillars of his thought. Michael Inwood, highly respected for his previous work on Hegel, presents this central work to the modern reader in an accurate new translation supported by a philosophically sophisticated editorial introduction and elucidating scholarly commentary.

Cell lines and cell samples from patients provide opportunities for studying the mechanisms of leukemic cellular differentiation and proliferation. Phorbol esters and 1,25 dihydroxy vitamin D3 can induce differentiation of myeloid leukemic cells to macrophages. Differentiation to granulocytes can be induced by several different compounds. Myeloid differentiation is associated closely with the alteration in expression of several oncogenes. These regulatory events may be associated with the extent of methylation, unfolding or association of chromatin to the nuclear matrix. Oncogene amplification, mutation, (...) or deletion can occur with malignant transformation. Future studies point to the development of specific pharmacological agents which can modify the neoplastic transformation. (shrink)

The Dushnik–Miller Theorem states that every infinite countable linear ordering has a nontrivial self-embedding. We examine computability-theoretical aspects of this classical theorem.

Varieties of Ethical Reflection brings together new cultural and religious perspectives—drawn from non-Western, primarily Asian, philosophical sources—to globalize the contemporary discussion of theoretical and applied ethics.

Like a number of other authors, Miller uses the term “emergent” interchangeably with “unpredictable” and employs it as a property term, i.e., in contexts of the form “Event E is emergent.” As we showed in our article, however, predictability and unpredictability as well as emergence are relations; they can be predicated of an event only relatively to some body of information. Thus, a lunar eclipse is predictable by means of information including data on the locations and speeds, at some (...) particular time, of the celestial bodies involved, and the laws of celestial mechanics plus certain principles of optics; it is unpredictable on the basis of, say, alone. Consequently, the phrase “Event E is unpredictable” is incomplete, and hence meaningless, in much the same sense as the expression “Straight line l is parallel.” Similar observations apply to the term “emergent,” which is frequently used to characterize events which, in a sense examined in detail in our article, are not explainable by a micro-structure theory. (shrink)

Arthur I. Miller is a master at capturing the intersection of creativity and intelligence. He did it with Einstein and Picasso, and now he does it with Pauli and Jung. Their shared obsession with the number 137 provides a window into their genius. --Walter Isaacson.

A poem encrypts, though not predictably, the effects it may have when at some future moment, in another context, it happens to be read and inscribed in a new situation, in ‘an interpretation that transforms the very thing it interprets’, as Jacques Derrida puts it in Specters of Marx. In Wallace Stevens's ‘The Man on the Dump’ (1942), we are told: ‘The dump is full/Of images’. The poem's movement is itself a complex temporal to and fro that aims to (...) repudiate and even annihilate these images. This renunciation leaves the man on the dump ‘The Latest Freed Man’, as the title of another Stevens poem puts it. Like Walter Benjamin's Angel of History, he has his back toward history and has rejected its images in ‘disgust’ in order to face toward a future that will, he hopes, be purified of ideology. Yet Stevens knows that more such images will come and will need in their turn to be rejected and junked, in an endless task of purification. In a now impossibly outdated way, Stevens nevertheless wanted the poet – that is, himself, the man on the dump – to be the begetter of a new ideology, or a new fiction that would, in a powerful speech act, replace all those outworn images on the dump. In the context of potentially catastrophic climate change (as the result of something like a global auto-immune disorder), the second part of the essay complements this commentary on the poem with a free reading; a performative reading, reading as work or as oeuvre that does something with words, for which Jacques Derrida calls. This reading sees Stevens's text as somehow the proleptic foretelling of a present situation. Such future chiming is also, it is argued, a sign to sign relation, an anticipatory allegory or prophecy, or, perhaps, a miniature apocalypse in the etymological sense of an enigmatic unveiling of what has not yet happened. (shrink)

Bridging the gap between the world of science and the realm of the spiritual, B. Alan Wallace introduces a natural theory of human consciousness that has its roots in contemporary physics and Buddhism. Wallace's "special theory of ontological relativity" suggests that mental phenomena are _conditioned_ by the brain, but do not _emerge_ from it. Rather, the entire natural world of mind and matter, subjects and objects, arises from a unitary dimension of reality that is more fundamental than these (...) dualities, as proposed by Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung. To test his hypothesis, Wallace employs the Buddhist meditative practice of _samatha_, refining one's attention and metacognition, to create a kind of telescope to examine the space of the mind. Drawing on the work of the physicist John Wheeler, he then proposes a more general theory in which the participatory nature of reality is envisioned as a self-excited circuit. In comparing these ideas to the Buddhist theory known as the Middle Way philosophy, Wallace explores further aspects of his "general theory of ontological relativity," which can be investigated by means of _vipasyana_, or insight, meditation. Wallace then focuses on the theme of symmetry in reference to quantum cosmology and the "problem of frozen time," relating these issues to the theory and practices of the Great Perfection school of Tibetan Buddhism. He concludes with a discussion of the general theme of complementarity as it relates to science and religion. The theories of relativity and quantum mechanics were major achievements in the physical sciences, and the theory of evolution has had an equally deep impact on the life sciences. However, rigorous scientific methods do not yet exist to observe mental phenomena, and naturalism has its limits for shedding light on the workings of the mind. A pioneer of modern consciousness research, Wallace offers a practical and revolutionary method for exploring the mind that combines the keenest insights of contemporary physicists and philosophers with the time-honored meditative traditions of Buddhism. (shrink)

David Miller has objected to the cosmopolitan argument that it is arbitrary and hence unfair to treat individuals differently on account of things for which they are not responsible. Such a view seems to require, implausibly, that individuals be treated identically even where (unchosen) needs differ. The objection is, however, inapplicable where the focus of cosmopolitan concern is arbitrary disadvantage rather than arbitrary treatment. This 'unfair disadvantage argument' supports a form of global luck egalitarianism. Miller also objects that (...) cosmopolitanism is unable to accommodate special obligations generated by national membership. Cosmopolitanism can, however, accommodate many special obligations to compatriots. Those which it cannot accommodate are only morally compelling if we assume what the objection claims to prove - that cosmopolitanism is mistaken. Cosmopolitanism construed as global luck egalitarianism is therefore able to withstand both of Miller's objections, and has significant independent appeal on account of the unfair disadvantage argument. (shrink)

This essay argues that David Miller's criticisms of global egalitarianism do not undermine the view where it is stated in one of its stronger, luck egalitarian forms. The claim that global egalitarianism cannot specify a metric of justice which is broad enough to exclude spurious claims for redistribution, but precise enough to appropriately value different kinds of advantage, implicitly assumes that cultural understandings are the only legitimate way of identifying what counts as advantage. But that is an assumption always (...) or almost always rejected by global egalitarianism. The claim that global egalitarianism demands either too little redistribution, leaving the unborn and dissenters burdened with their societies' imprudent choices, or too much redistribution, creating perverse incentives by punishing prudent decisions, only presents a problem for global luck egalitarianism on the assumption that nations can legitimately inherit assets from earlier generations – again, an assumption very much at odds with global egalitarian assumptions. (shrink)

Patrick L. Miller - Archytas of Tarentum: Pythagorean, Philosopher, and Mathematician-King - Journal of the History of Philosophy 46:1 Journal of the History of Philosophy 46.1 165-166 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Patrick Lee Miller Duquesne University Carl Huffman, Archytas of Tarentum: Pythagorean, Philosopher, and Mathematician-King. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xv + 665. Cloth, $180.00. Archytas of Tarentum has in some ages been considered a major philosopher. He was one of the (...) three most important early Pythagoreans—along with Philolaus and Pythagoras himself—and so his reputation has risen and fallen with the popularity of this movement. When Pythagoreanism captivated some Romans at the end of the Republic, they championed him as a native talent; much later, some medieval Europeans inflated him into one of the great wise men of the ancient world. But Pythagoreanism has ebbed in recent centuries, and Archytas is now known only to specialists in ancient philosophy, and even then only by acquaintance from a few passages of Plato and.. (shrink)

William James and Wisconsin, by G.C. Sellery.--The distinctive philosophy of William James, by M.C. Otto.--William James, man and philosopher, by D.S. Miller.--William James and psychoanalysis, by Norman Cameron.--The William James centenary dinner: Introductory remarks, by C.A. Dykstra. William James and the world today, by John Dewey, read by Carl Boegholt. William James in the American tradition, by B.H. Bode.--The Sunday service: William James as religious thinker, by J.S. Bixler.

The question of whether chemical structure is reducible to Everettian Quantum Mechanics (EQM) should be of interest to philosophers of chemistry and philosophers of physics alike. Among the three realist interpretations of quantum mechanics, EQM resolves the measurement problem by claiming that measurements (now interpreted as instances of decoherence) have indeterminate outcomes absolutely speaking, but determinate outcomes relative to emergent worlds (Maudlin, 1995). Philosophers who wish to be sensitive to the practice of quantum chemistry (e.g. Scerri, 2016) should be interested (...) in EQM because Franklin and Seifert (2020) claim that resolving the measurement problem also resolves the reducibility of chemical structure, and EQM is the interpretation which involves no mathematical structure beyond that used by practicing scientists. Philosophers interested in the quantum interpretation debate should be interested in the reducibility of chemistry because chemical structure is precisely the kind of determinate three-dimensional fact which EQM should be able to ground if it is to be empirically coherent (see Allori, 2023). The prospects for reduction of chemical structure are poor if it cannot succeed in EQM; the prospects for EQM as a guide to ontology are poor if it cannot reduce chemical structure. -/- Unfortunately for proponents of chemical reduction and EQM, there are three serious barriers to the reduction of chemistry to EQM. The first concern is that quantum treatments of chemical structure rely on the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, which holds nuclear locations fixed while minimizing the energy of the electronic configuration (Hendry, 2022), but this approximation is not licensed by EQM. The Born-Oppenheimer approximation relies on nuclei and molecular orbitals being simultaneously present, but in the three-dimensional ontology following from the Everett interpretation these only emerge at different energy scales and are not simultaneously present (Miller, 2023). The second concern is that the emergent worlds of EQM are supposed to be decoherent at the macro-scale (A. Wilson, 2020), but the recent development of superchemistry suggests that chemical reactions can occur in coherent states (Zhang et al., 2023). The third concern is that emergent worlds are only pragmatic pseudo-processes (Wallace, 2012b), but this means EQM trades realist physics for mere instrumentalism about chemistry. Absent a commitment to chemical realism, reduction is an empty promise. The prospects for reduction of chemical structure to EQM are therefore poor. (shrink)

Eric Miller's affordable, elegant translation of Nemesis divina by Carolus Linnaeus reveals a little-known side of the great natural historian. A classic of Swedish literature that influenced luminaries such as August Strindberg, Nemesis divina was composed over years, apparently for the edification of Linnaeus's wayward son Carl. A surprising field-guide to theodicy, the book explores the occult operation of a Theologia experimentalis, an "empirical theology," in the lives of men and women. Many of these people were known to (...) Linnaeus himself. Eric Miller, an award-winning poet and scholar, set Linnaeus's fascinating and eloquent work in a broad literary and philosophical context, linking it to matters as diverse as New England Transcendentalism, the subculture of Black Metal, the Icelandic sagas and contemporary Swedish poetry. Nemesis divina will intrigue students of literature, religion, science, and philosophy alike. (shrink)

Hegel is an immensely important yet difficult philosopher. His Philosophy of Mind is one of the main pillars of his thought. Michael Inwood, highly respected for his previous work on Hegel, presents this central work to the modern reader in an accurate new translation supported by a philosophically sophisticated editorial introduction.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Taoism, Teaching, and Learning: A Nature-Based Approach to Education by John P. Miller, with Xiang Li and Tian RuanJing Dang (bio)Taoism, Teaching, and Learning: A Nature-Based Approach to Education. By John P. Miller, with Xiang Li and Tian Ruan. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022. Pp. 134, Paperback $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4875-4095-1.John Miller’s Taoism, Teaching, and Learning: A Nature-Based Approach to Education (hereafter Taoism, Teaching, and (...) Learning) develops a nature-based account of modern education grounded in Daoism (or Taoism), a school of thought often misunderstood in the West. Daoism has historically been categorized both as a religion (dao jiao 道教) and as a philosophy (dao jia zhe xue 道家哲學); in many cases the spiritual and mystical side of Daoism impresses itself on the reader at the expense of its scientific and philosophical side--as happened with the European missionaries who first exported Daoism to the West. Yet Daoism, especially in relation to pedagogy, cuts across this philosophical/mystical distinction. Happily, Miller and his students, Xiang Li and Tian Ruan, betray no such tendency to pigeon-hole Daoism into one or the other of these categories. The authors adopt a connected and holistic concept of Daoism, which they use to inform and justify their approach to modern education. As such, in the eight chapters of this book, we can see a natural and sensible connection between a holistic Daoism--spiritual, mystical and philosophical--and modern philosophical and educational theories, including Montessori’s cosmic education, Steiner Education, holistic education, and the pedagogical practices of meditation and mindfulness.Miller’s modus operandi is to apply Daoist concepts to contemporary (especially Western) educational issues, both theoretically and practically. In terms of the Daoist belief in the interconnectedness of all things, Miller questions modern subject divisions. When we divide education into geometry, mathematics and so on, we fragment the natural oneness of knowledge and reality as the Daoists would have it. Instead, Miller advocates faith in nature and looks to curricula that reflect the wholeness of nature, such as “cosmic education” and “holistic education” (Chapters 2 and 6). Through such education “we see the relationship between the physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of life” (p. 27), and feel the support from the invisible and unproven world.Miller makes excellent use of the Daoist concepts of yin (陰) and yang [End Page 1] (陽), which signify the complementary balance and interplay between opposites. He uses the yinyang paradigm to explore the need for balance in a wide range of interesting and important pedagogical situations; for instance, group collaboration versus individual competition, knowledge versus imagination, intuition versus reason, qualitative versus quantitative, etc. (Chapter 5). He also implements yinyang to unpack the model of creative thinking laid down by Graham Wallace (pp. 66 -70); here, yin and yang are applied to a process within the individual. As we move from confusion to enlightenment, we enact within ourselves a dance between our yin and yang factors.Under the heading “Self-Cultivation” (Chapter 3), Miller attempts to evaluate a number of pedagogical strategies with broad ties to Daoism; namely, “silence,” “contemplation,” “calmness,” “sincerity,” “non-violence and embracing the feminine,” and “humility”. These are informed by Miller’s own personal experience of teaching and applying meditation at the University of Toronto. This provides a useful connection between the spiritual and philosophical dao 道, the mystical and the practical. More generally, these strategies recall Daoist wuwei 無爲 (non-coercive or spontaneous action) and ziran 自然 (spontaneity), which Miller subsequently applies to teaching and mindfulness in Chapter 4 (more on which below).Whereas Miller’s contribution is more theoretical, the two chapters written by his students showcase concrete examples of Daoist pedagogy in the classroom. Li’s chapter (Chapter 1) details a class of high school students learning from nature. Here we find a student club centered around a garden, where the students are allowed to wander in the direction of their interests, rather than imbibing the lessons of the teacher according to a top-down lesson plan. Ruan’s chapter (Chapter 7) looks to the various ways play can be utilized in kindergartens for children’s holistic development, including their social, intellectual, spiritual, physical... (shrink)

Findlay and Miller have performed another signal service for English-speaking students of Hegel. This time they have made available the Zusätze to Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind contained in Ludwig Boumann’s 1845 edition of the Philosophie des Geistes. The Geistesphilosophie was written by Hegel as the third main division of the great triad: Logic, Nature, Spirit, which comprises his Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse. The 1830 version of the Enzyklopädie was the last of the three editions that Hegel lived (...) to see through the press, and of its three main divisions the Geistesphilosophie obtained the greatest increment over the second edition. While the 1830 text had been translated by William Wallace in 1894, the Zusätze offered in the Boumann edition have never before been available in English. Hence the reason for the Wallace-Miller translation now before us. In the present work, Wallace’s 1894 rendering of Hegel’s own text is supplemented by A. V. Miller’s new translation of the Zusätze and the whole served up with an appetite-whetting Foreword by J. N. Findlay. (shrink)

Hypocrisy is a ubiquitous feature of moral and political life, and accusations of hypocrisy a ubiquitous feature of moral and political discourse. Yet it has been curiously under-theorized in analytic philosophy. Fortunately, the last decade has seen a boomlet of articles that address hypocrisy in order to explain and justify conditions on the so-called “standing” to blame (Wallace 2010; Friedman 2013; Bell 2013; Todd 2017; Herstein 2017; Roadevin 2018; Fritz and Miller 2018). Nevertheless, much of this more recent (...) literature does not adequately address the question, “what is hypocrisy?” In this paper, I develop and defend an account of hypocrisy as vicious, value-expressing inconsistency. I show how this account solves some traditional and some novel philosophical puzzles concerning hypocrisy and affords a deeper understanding of the features of hypocrisy emphasized by other prominent accounts. (shrink)

Eric Miller's affordable, elegant translation of Nemesis divina by Carolus Linnaeus reveals a little-known side of the great natural historian. A classic of Swedish literature that influenced luminaries such as August Strindberg, Nemesis divina was composed over years, apparently for the edification of Linnaeus's wayward son Carl. A surprising field-guide to theodicy, the book explores the occult operation of a Theologia experimentalis, an "empirical theology," in the lives of men and women. Many of these people were known to (...) Linnaeus himself. Eric Miller, an award-winning poet and scholar, set Linnaeus's fascinating and eloquent work in a broad literary and philosophical context, linking it to matters as diverse as New England Transcendentalism, the subculture of Black Metal, the Icelandic sagas and contemporary Swedish poetry. Nemesis divina will intrigue students of literature, religion, science, and philosophy alike. (shrink)

This chapter outlines the main ideas of my book National responsibility and global justice. It begins with two widely held but conflicting intuitions about what global justice might mean on the one hand, and what it means to be a member of a national community on the other. The first intuition tells us that global inequalities of the magnitude that currently exist are radically unjust, while the second intuition tells us that inequalities are both unavoidable and fair once national responsibility (...) is allowed to operate. This conflict might be resolved either by adopting a cosmopolitan theory of justice (which leaves no room for national responsibility) or by adopting a ?political? theory of justice (which denies that questions of distributive justice can arise beyond the walls of the sovereign state). Since neither resolution is satisfactory, the chapter defends the idea of national responsibility and proposes a new theory of global justice, whose main elements are the protection of basic human rights worldwide, and fair terms of interaction between independent political communities. (shrink)

It is common to defend the Homeostatic Property Cluster ( HPC ) view as a third way between conventionalism and essentialism about natural kinds ( Boyd , 1989, 1991, 1997, 1999; Griffiths , 1997, 1999; Keil , 2003; Kornblith , 1993; Wilson , 1999, 2005; Wilson , Barker , & Brigandt , forthcoming ). According to the HPC view, property clusters are not merely conventionally clustered together; the co-occurrence of properties in the cluster is sustained by a similarity generating ( (...) or homeostatic ) mechanism . I argue that conventional elements are involved partly but ineliminably in deciding which mechanisms define kinds , for deciding when two mechanisms are mechanisms of the same type, and for deciding where one particular mechanism ends and another begins. This intrusion of conventional perspective into the idea of a mechanism raises doubts as to whether the HPC view is sufficiently free of conventional elements to serve as an objective arbiter in scientific disputes about what the kinds of the special sciences should be. (shrink)

Philosophers and psychologists discuss new collaborative work in moral philosophy that draws on evolutionary psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience. For much of the twentieth century, philosophy and science went their separate ways. In moral philosophy, fear of the so-called naturalistic fallacy kept moral philosophers from incorporating developments in biology and psychology. Since the 1990s, however, many philosophers have drawn on recent advances in cognitive psychology, brain science, and evolutionary psychology to inform their work. This collaborative trend is especially strong in (...) moral philosophy, and these volumes bring together some of the most innovative work by both philosophers and psychologists in this emerging interdisciplinary field. The contributors to volume 1 discuss recent work on the evolution of moral beliefs, attitudes, and emotions. Each chapter includes an essay, comments on the essay by other scholars, and a reply by the author of the original essay. Topics include a version of naturalism that avoids supposed fallacies, distinct neurocomputational systems for deontic reasoning, the evolutionary psychology of moral sentiments regarding incest, the sexual selection of moral virtues, the evolution of symbolic thought, and arguments both for and against innate morality. Taken together, the chapters demonstrate the value for both philosophy and psychology of collaborative efforts to understand the many complex aspects of morality. Contributors William Casebeer, Leda Cosmides, Oliver Curry, Michael Dietrich, Catherine Driscoll, Susan Dwyer, Owen Flanagan, Jerry Fodor, Gilbert Harman, Richard Joyce, Debra Lieberman, Ron Mallon, John Mikhail, Geoffrey Miller, Jesse Prinz, Peter Railton, Michael Ruse, Hagop Sarkissian, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Chandra Sekhar Sripada, Valerie Tiberius, John Tooby, Peter Tse, Kathleen Wallace, Arthur Wolf, David Wong. (shrink)

The essay considers the relevance of Daoism to thinking about the place of human beings in the world in the light of global climate change.

Ellen Furlong and Laurie Santos helpfully summarize a number of fascinating studies of certain influences on both human and monkey behavior. As someone who works primarily in philosophy, I am not in a position to dispute the details of the studies themselves. But in this brief commentary I do want to raise some questions about the inferences Furlong and Santos make on the basis of those studies. In general, I worry that they may be overreaching beyond what their own data (...) suggests. (shrink)

Conventional medical ethics and the law draw a bright line distinguishing the permitted practice of withdrawing life-sustaining treatment from the forbidden practice of active euthanasia by means of a lethal injection. When clinicians justifiably withdraw life-sustaining treatment, they allow patients to die but do not cause, intend, or have moral responsibility for, the patient's death. In contrast, physicians unjustifiably kill patients whenever they intentionally administer a lethal dose of medication. We argue that the differential moral assessment of these two practices (...) is based on a series of moral fictions – motivated false beliefs that erroneously characterize withdrawing life-sustaining treatment in order to bring accepted end-of-life practices in line with the prevailing moral norm that doctors must never kill patients. When these moral fictions are exposed, it becomes apparent that conventional medical ethics relating to end-of-life decisions is radically mistaken. (shrink)

There is a need to provide an appropriate normative conception of the modern university: a conception which identifies its unifying purposes and values and, thereby, gives direction to institutional role occupants, governments, public policymakers and other would-be institutional designers. Such a conception could admit differences between modern universities; differences, for example, between so-called universities of technology and other universities. Indeed, it is preferable to frame the issue at the level of higher education or university systems rather than at the level (...) of individual universities. According to the teleological normative theory of social institutions, social institutions are organizations or systems of organizations that provide collective goods by means of joint activity; universities are no exception. So what are the fundamental collective good that universities of technology, or the larger systems of which they are a part, ought to be providing and how are they travelling in this regard? This is the question addressed in this paper. (shrink)

One of the liveliest areas in moral psychology in recent years has been research on the extent to which conscious reasoning leads to the formation of moral judgments. The goal of this chapter is to review and briefly assess three of the leading positions today on this topic - traditional rationalism, social intuitionism, and morphological rationalism - each of which has significant implications for moral epistemology.