Professor Flathman's main aim in this interesting paper is to set forth what we might call the “moderation thesis.” It holds that there may be occasions when the best thing to do, all things considered, is to violate a right – at least if the violation takes the form of what Flathman calls “civil encroachment” or “civil non-enforcement.” Moreover, it would be desirable, in a society whose practices include rights, for this belief to be generally accepted, so that those who (...) engaged with good reason in “civil encroachment” would receive the sympathetic support of the community. Let me begin by trying to explain the source of the problem to which this thesis is a response. As Flathman notes, rights have a discretionary character: if I have a right to do or to have something, it is up to me whether to do it or to have it. Having a right, I am entitled to make a choice. Since we cannot say, in advance, what choice I will make, we cannot say, in advance, what will be the state of the world after I make it. But since it seems plain that some states of the world are more desirable than others, it will always be possible that the consequences of my choice will be worse, on the whole, than the consequences of some other choice that I might have made but did not. To moderate rights is apparently to act in ways that redress or compensate for the undesirable results of their exercise. (shrink)

Nihilism, Nietzsche and the Doppelganger Problem Was Nietzsche a nihilist? Yes, because, like J. L. Mackie, he was an error-theorist about morality, including the elitist morality to which he himself subscribed. But he was variously a diagnostician, an opponent and a survivor of certain other kinds of nihilism. Schacht argues that Nietzsche cannot have been an error theorist, since meta-ethical nihilism is inconsistent with the moral commitment that Nietzsche displayed. Schacht’s exegetical argument parallels the substantive argument (advocated in recent years (...) by Wright and Blackburn) that Mackie’s error theory can’t be true because if it were, we would have to give up morality or give up moralizing. I answer this argument with a little bit of help from Nietzsche. I then pose a problem, the Doppelganger Problem, for the meta-ethical nihilism that I attribute to Mackie and Nietzsche. (If A is a moral proposition then not-A is a moral proposition: hence not all moral propositions can be false.) I solve the problem by reformulating the error theory and also deal with a variant of the problem, the Reinforced Doppelganger, glancing at a famous paper of Ronald Dworkin’s. Thus, whatever its demerits, the error theory, is not self-refuting, nor does it require us to give up morality. (shrink)

Numbers are symbols manipulated in accord with the axioms of arithmetic. They sometimes represent discrete and continuous quantities, but they are often simply names. Brains, including insect brains, represent the rational numbers with a fixed-point data type, consisting of a significand and an exponent, thereby conveying both magnitude and precision.

Human rights have become one of the most important moral concepts in global political life over the last 60 years. Charles Beitz, one of the world's leading philosophers, offers a compelling new examination of the idea of a human right.

This addition—hence the title Mantissa—to the rich vein of information about Constantine Samuel Rafinesque is in fact a supplement to Charles Boewe's own revised and enlarged edition of Thomas J. Fitzpatrick's book Rafinesque .The details of the peripatetic life of Rafinesque, one of America's most original yet undisciplined naturalists, are too well known to bear repeating here. Suffice it to say that because of the vicissitudes of his life—his perpetual wandering between and within Europe and frontier America, his impecunious (...) circumstances that forced him to find different ways of making a living—finding and identifying his publications is a bibliographer's nightmare. Even now, more than 160 years after his death and with the benefit of serious studies by Fitzpatrick and Boewe, as well as by Richard E. Call and Elmer D. Merrill, among others, we can only approximate the number of his publications, including both original titles and republications. Probably we will never have a complete list of Rafinesque's publications because he published regularly in newspapers, broadsides, sales catalogues, privately printed journals, and other ephemera that are infrequently archived. Even his own references to “published” works cannot be trusted as, to him, this term included papers that he sent to journals but were never published. On the other hand, Rafinesque complained to one correspondent that he never knew whether some of these manuscripts were ever published or he learned only years later that they had been. The total number has been estimated at about a thousand, but, as Boewe points out, this number is based on Fitzpatrick's faulty numbering system in which each version of a paper or volume of a multivolume work was given a number. Thus Fitzpatrick's system, continued by Boewe, represents serial numbers, not individual titles. Rafinesque's own estimate was 220, a number Boewe now thinks is a reasonable guess.The Mantissa is an important addition to Rafinesquiana. It lists twenty hitherto‐unrecorded publications by Rafinesque, thirty‐three new translations or reprints, and more than two hundred newly listed secondary references. For the first time we have a list of every manuscript letter written by Rafinesque that is known to exist, and Boewe provides a documented discussion of Rafinesque publications still remaining to be discovered. Several titles known to me, however, are missing from Mantissa, but Boewe's book represents a learned guide for the next scholar willing to take up the challenge and carry on the search. The newly listed manuscript letters will doubtless be particularly helpful in providing leads to undiscovered publications and other facets of Rafinesque's still not completely understood life. Among his correspondents were fellow naturalists such as John James Audubon, Joseph Banks, Benjamin Barton, Charles Bonaparte, Alexandre Brongniart, Augustin de Candolle, Georges Cuvier, Amos Eaton, Asa Gray, William Jackson Hooker, Muhlenberg, Ord, Paolo Savi, James Edward Smith, William Swainson, and John Torrey, as well as prominent leaders of the day, including John Adams, De Witt Clinton, Eleuthère Irénée du Pont, George IV, Thomas Jefferson, and Joel Roberts Poinsett. A total of 346 letters are listed.More important, Boewe has given us the benefit of his many years of scholarly searching and thinking about Rafinesque in his discussions entitled “Hints about Unlisted Titles,” “Letters as a Source of Leads,” and “Hints in Publications.” We learn, for example, that Rafinesque signed some of his papers simply as “Constantine” or “Linneus.” The Mantissa makes it abundantly clear why arriving at a complete account of Rafinesque's writings is an elusive goal, but Boewe shows us that the attempt still offers an exciting trail to follow. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Update on Waiving Informed Consent in Emergency ResearchCharles R. McCarthyMadam: The closing statement of my article on Waiving Informed Consent in Emergency Research published in the June 1995 issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal was: "No doubt we shall hear more of this issue."Indeed, we have heard much more on this issue. (1) In May 1995, after my article had already gone to press, the Food and (...) Drug Administration (FDA) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) jointly published a report on the Public Forum on Informed Consent in Clinical Research Conducted in Emergency Circumstances. (2) On July 26, 1995, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) published in the Federal Register a Notice of Action Related to Emergency Research Activity (60 FR 38353-54). This action constituted a waiver of the requirement to obtain prior informed consent from subjects, as required by the Department's Regulations for the Protection of Human Subjects (45 CFR 46), for one specific NIH-funded project under strictly defined circumstances. (3) On September 21, 1995, FDA published a proposed rule to amend its current informed consent regulations (21 CFR 50) to permit harmonization of federal policies on emergency research and to reduce confusion as to when such research can proceed without obtaining prior informed consent from research subjects. The proposed regulation provides a narrow exception to the requirement for obtaining and documenting informed consent from each human research subject.The HHS waiver (a harbinger of a proposed amendment to its regulations) and the FDA proposed rule are intended to be harmonized so that an Institutional Review Board (IRB) in compliance with one set of regulations relative to the waiver of informed consent will be, ipso facto, in compliance with the other set of regulations.In brief: The FDA proposed amendments will allow an IRB to waive informed consent in emergency situations when:1. The human subjects are in a life threatening condition;2. Obtaining informed consent is not feasible because: (i) the subjects will not be able to provide consent because of their medical condition, (ii) the intervention must be administered before consent from legally authorized representatives is feasible, (iii) there is no reasonable way to identify prospectively the individuals likely to become eligible for the research because the emergence of the condition to be studied cannot be predicted reliably in particular individuals; [End Page 385]3. The opportunity to participate is in the interest of the subjects because: (i) a life threatening situation necessitates intervention, (ii) the risk of the intervention is reasonable in the light of what is known about the medical condition and the patient, the risks and benefits of current therapy, if any, and what is known about the risks and benefits of the proposed intervention or activity;4. The research could not practicably be carried out without the waiver;5. Additional protection of the rights and welfare of the subjects will be provided including, at least: (i) consultation (which may include consultation carried out by the IRB itself) with representatives of the communities from which the subjects will be drawn, (ii) public disclosure prior to commencement of the study sufficient to describe the study and its risks and benefits, (iii) public disclosure of sufficient information following completion of the study to apprise the community and researchers of the study and its results, and (iv) the establishment of an independent data and safety monitoring board;6. The IRB has reviewed and approved an informed consent document for use with subjects or legal representatives in situations in which obtaining such consent may be feasible for some subjects.The preamble to the proposed amendments to the regulations and the amendments themselves contain much more information than is presented here. Readers are therefore encouraged to study the proposals carefully. The public comment period ended November 6, and the FDA is expected to issue a final rule in 1996.Charles R. McCarthyKennedy Institute of Ethics Georgetown University Washington, DCCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

In this revised edition of his 1979 classic Political Theory and International Relations, Charles Beitz rejects two highly influential conceptions of international theory as empirically inaccurate and theoretically misleading. In one, international relations is a Hobbesian state of nature in which moral judgments are entirely inappropriate, and in the other, states are analogous to persons in domestic society in having rights of autonomy that insulate them from external moral assessment and political interference. Beitz postulates that a theory of international (...) politics should include a revised principle of state autonomy based on the justice of a state’s domestic institutions, and a principle of international distributive justice to establish a fair division of resources and wealth among persons situated in diverse national societies. (shrink)

We present a probabilistic extension to active path analyses of token causation (Halpern & Pearl 2001, forthcoming; Hitchcock 2001). The extension uses the generalized notion of intervention presented in (Korb et al. 2004): we allow an intervention to set any probability distribution over the intervention variables, not just a single value. The resulting account can handle a wide range of examples. We do not claim the account is complete --- only that it fills an obvious gap in previous active-path approaches. (...) It still succumbs to recent counterexamples by Hiddleston (2005), because it does not explicitly consider causal processes. We claim three benefits: a detailed comparison of three active-path approaches, a probabilistic extension for each, and an algorithmic formulation. (shrink)

Proponents of the view that social structures are ontologically distinct from the people in whose actions they are immanent have assumed that structures can stand in causal relations to individual practices. Were causality to be no more than Humean concomitance correlations between structure and practices would be unproblematic. But two prominent advocates of the ontological account of structures, Bhaskar and Giddens, have also espoused a powers theory of causality. According to that theory causation is brought about by the activity of (...) particulars, in the social psychological case, individuals of some sort. Consistence would demand that structure be those individuals. But neither Giddens nor Bhaskar wish to reify structure to the extent that would fit it for a role as a powerful particular. If only human beings can be powerful particulars in these contexts, the only way that structures can be real must be as properties of conversational interactions. Human action is social just in so far as people direct themselves to engage well in joint activities with others. (shrink)

Classifying species as ‘native’ or ‘alien’ carries prescriptive force in the valuation and management of ‘nature’. But the classification itself and its application are contested, raising philosophical and geographical questions about place, space, rights, identity and belonging. This paper discusses leading critiques of the native/alien paradigm, including its conceptual fluidity, dichotomous rigidity and ethical difficulties, as well as the incendiary charge of xenophobia. It argues that valorizing ‘native nature’ as inherently the ‘best nature’ is not only obsolete but impracticable in (...) the Anthropocene, and that the preeminence of biogeographic origins should be replaced with a pragmatic focus on species’ behavior. (shrink)

Philosophical attention to problems about global justice is flourishing in a way it has not in any time in memory. This paper considers some reasons for the rise of interest in the subject and reflects on some dilemmas about the meaning of the idea of the cosmopolitan in reasoning about social institutions, concentrating on the two principal dimensions of global justice, the economic and the political.

In February 1993, Judge Charles R. Richey of the United States District Court issued a summary judgment in the case of Animal Legal Defense Fund, et al. v. The Secretary of Agriculture, et al. The decision, which was in favor of the Animal Legal Defense Fund, requires the U.S. Department of Agriculture to withdraw its current regulations governing exercise for dogs and the psychological well-being of nonhuman primates used for biomedical research and to issue new regulations containing only minimum, (...) measurable standards. Both plaintiffs and defendants contended that they were seeking the best interests of the laboratory animals. The issue at stake is whether animals are better protected if the government establishes limited minimal standards or is allowed to require institutions to provide additional standards, which will be judged on the basis of their effectiveness in maintaining healthy animals. The Court avoided this dispute, however, by placing primary emphasis on applying the Administrative Procedures Act and stating that it was merely interpreting the "plain meaning" of the Animal Welfare Act, as amended. In this article, arguments are presented for interpreting the law in a far more flexible way than Judge Richey did. The conclusion is also reached that there were no winners in the Animal Legal Defense Fund case and that the real losers are the laboratory animals. (shrink)

Are conspiracy theorists epistemically vicious? That is the conventional wisdom. It has distinguished supporters, including Quassim Cassam, Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule. For me, a trait is an epistemic virtue if leads to the discovery of salient truths and the avoidance of pernicious falsehoods, and an epistemic vice the contrary. As such epistemic virtues and vices are role‐relative, context‐relative and end‐relative. I argue that that it is not necessarily or even usually vicious to be a conspiracy theorist, even if we (...) restrict the conspiracies in question to conspiracies on the part of Western government agencies, the reason being that many such theories are now known to be true. Finally I contend that the policy suggested by some polemicists of systematic skepticism towards conspiracy theories would be intellectually suicidal and hence vicious. (shrink)

Shannon's theory lays the foundation for understanding the flow of information from world into brain: There must be a set of possible messages. Brain structure determines what they are. Many messages convey quantitative facts. It is impossible to consider how neural tissue processes these numbers without first considering how it encodes them.

Today's international community may well view covert action and democracy as mutually exclusive policies. This article examines the practice of covert action in American foreign policy in light of events of the mid-1970s and 1980s, focusing on the scandalous misuse of executive authority and lack of accountability associated with covert means. Often manipulative and sometimes anonymous, covert operations raise critical morality concerns in a democratic society. Whether "any form of accountability is likely to be sufficient to bring the unauthorized use (...) of executive power under control" is the crucial issue to be addressed when examining the practicality of covert actions by the executive branch. (shrink)

Five faculty members in the College of Business at Northern Illinois University received a grant from the James S. Kemper Foundation to integrate ethics into the graduate business curriculum. This was the second phase of a comprehensive program to integrate ethics into the business curriculum. Each faculty member taught a required course in the MBA program. The faculty members represented each of the five functional departments in the College of Business.This paper describes the ethics content, materials, and approaches that were (...) used to cover ethics by each of the five faculty members. Hopefully, this description will help other faculty and universities integrate ethics more effectively into the business curriculum. (shrink)

This case is another in a series intended to highlight the new questions emerging from advances in mapping the human genome and the application of genetic findings to clinical practice. The National Human Genome Research Institute, a component of the National Institutes of Health, by law is directed to designate a portion of its annual budget to furthering understanding of the ethical, legal, and social questions emerging from research on the human genome. As part of the effort, the Institute supports (...) research by scientists and scholars around the nation with the aim of clarifying and resolving the tough ethical and research choices facing this endeavor. But recently it has launched an intramural program, which is expected to take a catalytic role in grappling with the array of issues the researchers face in carrying out investigations in human genetics. (shrink)

Abstractftz is one of the ‘pair rule’ segmentation genes of Drosophila melanogaster, and is an important component of the segmentation process in the fruit fly. We discuss the transcriptional mechanism which causes ftz to be expressed in a seven stripe pattern during embryogenesis.

This book is comprised of essays previously published in Philosophy & Public Affairs and also an extended excerpt from Michael Walzer's Just and Unjust Wars.