Global Engineering Ethics introduces the fundamentals of ethics in a context specific to engineering without privileging any one national or cultural conception of ethics. Numerous case studies from around the world help the reader to see clearly the relevance of design, safety, and professionalism to engineers. Engineering increasingly takes place in global contexts, with industrial and research teams operating across national and cultural borders. This adds a layer of complexity to already challenging ethical issues. This book is essential reading for (...) anyone wanting to understand or communicate the ethics of engineering, including students, academics, and researchers, and is indispensable for those involved in international and cross-cultural environments. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with aspects of responsibility in Norwegian public health nursing. Public health nursing is an expansive profession with diffuse boundaries. The Norwegian public health nurse does not perform ‘hands on’ nursing, but focuses on the prevention of illness, injury, or disability, and the promotion of health. What is the essence of ethical responsibility in public health nursing? The aim of this article is to explore the phenomenon based on the ethics of responsibility as reflected upon by the (...) philosopher Emanuel Levinas (1906–1995). From an ethical point of view, responsibility is about our duty towards the Other, a duty we have not always chosen, are prepared for, or can fully explain; but it is nevertheless a demand we have to live with. Interviews with five experienced Norwegian nurses provide the empirical base for reflection and interpretation. The nurses share stories from their practice. In interpreting the nurses’ stories, the following themes emerge: personal responsibility; boundaries; temporality; worry, fear, and uncertainty; and a sense of satisfaction. As the themes are developed further, it becomes apparent that, despite their diversity, they are all interrelated aspects of ethical responsibility. Responsibility for the Other cannot be avoided, ignored, or transferred. The nurses’ responsibility is personal and infinite. Levinasian ethics can help nurses understand the importance of accepting that being a responsive carer can involve not only contentment in the predictable, but also the fear, worry, and uncertainty of the unpredictable. (shrink)

Sociology and Animals : Beginnings -- Animals and Biology as Destiny -- Animals, Social Inequalities and Oppression -- Animals, Crime and Abuse -- Town and Country : Animals, Space and Place -- Consumption of the Animal -- Animals, Leisure and Culture -- Animal Experiments and Animal Rights -- Conclusion: Sociology for Other Animals.

This article considers how Spatial Big Data is situated and produced through embodied spatial experiences as data processes appear and act in small moments on mobile phone applications and other digital spatial technologies. Locating Spatial Big Data in the historical and geographical contexts of Sydney and Hong Kong, it traces how situated knowledges mediate and moderate the rising potency of discourses of cartographic reason and data logics as colonial cartographic imaginations expressed in land divisions and urban planning continue on, in (...) a world that increasingly values models of calculability, interoperability and authority. It draws on ethnographic material gathered through walking interviews in both cities, and in doing so, it argues that by using ethnographic ‘moments’, it is possible to decentre the focus on data processes to consider the critical potential of a politics of everyday experiences that produce and reflect the structures of data logics. Through these ethnographic moments, this article examines how mobile technologies are complicit in the production of Spatial Big Data, and the impact this has on the increasing regimentation and surveillance of modes of being and expression via mobile media. At the same time, it will argue that while spatial calculability has expanded from cartographic reason into data logics, the epistemological universality of Spatial Big Data is constantly being resisted – in moments of experimentation, failure, intuition, memory and desire, the ghosts of the incalculable epistemes, experiences and people, forgotten by the emphasis on calculation, continue to speak. (shrink)

This title gathers together essays on deception, self-deception, and the intersections of the two phenomena, from the leading thinkers on the subject.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Borges Forgets NietzscheClancy MartinHow little moral would the world appear without forgetfulness! A poet could say that God has placed forgetfulness as a doorkeeper on the threshold of human dignity.—Nietzsche, Human, All-Too-HumanIn his short story "Funes, the Memorious," Jorges Luis Borges writes of his singular nineteen-year-old hero, Funes: "He was, let us not forget, almost incapable of general, platonic ideas. It was not only difficult for him to understand (...) that the generic term dog embraced so many unlike specimens of differing sizes and differing forms; he was disturbed by the fact that a dog at three-fourteen (seen in profile) should have the same name as the dog at three-fifteen (seen in front)." And he goes on to say that "... he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract. In the overly replete world of Funes there were nothing but details, almost contiguous details" (pp. 42–43).1 About a century earlier, in 1872, in a passage from his famous unpublished essay "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense," Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: "Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another, so it is certain that the concept "leaf" is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects... Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things... We obtain the concept, as we do the form, by overlooking what is individual and actual; whereas nature is acquainted with no forms and no concepts, and likewise with no species, but only with an X which remains inaccessible and undefinable for us."2 [End Page 265]From this and other passages, mostly in "On Truth and Lies," Nietzsche scholars have derived Nietzsche's much-debated (or so-called, depending on who you talk to) "theory of perspectivism." This is the idea that, roughly speaking, "truths" about the world are at best truths uttered from the perspective of some knower, who inevitably brings to world (and thus, to those truths) a particular way of looking at things, of seeing some details and excluding others, of valuing some aspects of the world more than others, etc.I will not be addressing the well-known problems of Nietzsche's theory of perspectivism (if indeed he had such a truth-theory).3 What interests me here is something most scholars have ignored about Nietzsche's perspectivism,4 and what Borges tries to illuminate in his strange little fable: the importance of forgetting to thinking and the difficulties memory may present to one who would think about "truth" as something more than "an impossible idiom in which each individual object, each stone, each bird and branch [has] an individual name" (p. 42). For Nietzsche, and for Borges writing under Nietzsche's influence, the human facts about forgetting and remembering illustrate that our epistemological projects are much more psychological than some philosophers would like to admit. Once we acknowledge the deeply psychological character of those projects, we see that they may not be "truth" projects at all, but rather psychologically valuable (perhaps even necessary) projects of strategic falsification.IThe "absent-minded" narrator of Borges's story tells us that he is adding his own tale to a collection of testimonials to Funes, as part of the project "that all those who knew him should write something about him" (pp. 35–36). Thus the play of words in the title: "Funes" is "memorious" not just because of the accident that results in his amazing and infallible memory, but also because this text is part of a larger memorial. A relationship between memory and knowing from a particular perspective is introduced immediately: Funes will be known and remembered through the gathering of many individual memorials to him. None of these testimonies will be "objective" or "impartial": all of them will necessarily preserve the perspective of the particular individual who is recalling Funes. As the narrator of our memorial confesses, his own efforts will be impoverished by "the deplorable fact of my being an Argentinian... when the theme is a Uruguayan" (p. 35). [End Page 266]Our narrator offers three... (shrink)

This article describes the development and teaching of a course on global engineering ethics in Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China. It outlines course objectives, methods, and contents, and instructor experience and plans for future development. This is done with the goal of helping educators to plan standalone courses and/or integrated modules on global engineering and technology ethics, which address challenges arising from the increasingly cross-cultural and international environments of contemporary technology and engineering practice. These efforts are motivated by the global (...) environments of engineering, as well as recent research in empirical moral psychology. Although this course was developed and taught in China, as a course on global engineering ethics taught to students from throughout the world, its approach could be beneficial elsewhere. (shrink)

_Jet aircraft produce large quantities of greenhouse gases when in operation, so one way for an agent to reduce her individual greenhouse gas emissions is by reducing the extent to which she flies. Some groups have encouraged agents to give up on flying for life by committing to a “travel pledge”. I argue here that, for many agents, it is morally impermissible to commit to a lifelong travel pledge, because in doing so, they would prevent themselves from receiving what they (...) deserve. Most agents who commit to such a pledge exercise a great deal of virtue, and therefore deserve to have their lives go better, while also making a significant sacrifice, thus ensuring that their lives go worse. Because a single person’s travel pledge cannot make a significant difference to the progress of climate change, the morally desirable effects of such a pledge are outweighed by the morally undesirable effects on desert.__ _ _Keywords_: climate change; flight; travel; desert; altruism. (shrink)

Primary issues raised by the commentaries on the target article relate to (1) the need to differentiate distinct but overlapping aspects of fluid cognition, and (2) the implications that this differentiation may hold for conceptions of general intelligence. In response, I outline several issues facing researchers concerned with differentiation of human cognitive abilities and suggest that a revised and expanded theory of intelligence is needed to accommodate an increasingly diverse and varied empirical base. (Published Online April 5 2006).

Artificial Intelligence and Music Ecosystem highlights the opportunities and rewards associated with the application of AI in the creative arts. Featuring an array of voices, including interviews with Jacques Attali, Holly Herndon and Scott Cohen, this book offers interdisciplinary approaches to pressing ethical and technical questions associated with AI. Considering the perspectives of developers, students and artists, as well as the wider themes of law, ethics and philosophy, Artificial Intelligence and Music Ecosystem is an essential introduction for anyone interested in (...) the impact of AI on music, including those studying and working in the creative arts. (shrink)

A review of Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Badiou and Deleuze Read Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 224 pp.

According to an influential family of views, agents are virtuous when and because they possess the correct attitudes towards the actual good and bad. But there are multiple ways of conceptualizing the actual good and bad, and attitudes towards some conceptualizations of the good and bad seem to be irrelevant to moral character. It is deceptively difficult to provide a theoretical rationale for distinguishing between those conceptualizations of the good and bad that seem to be relevant and those that do (...) not: I argue that a previous attempt to provide such a rationale fails, as do a number of seemingly promising alternatives. This problem merits further attention not only because it shows that certain theoretical accounts of character are incomplete, but because it is likely to interfere with our ability to evaluate certain real-world agents, who care about the actual good conceptualized in certain ways but not in others. Since a generalized version of the problem of conceptualization also affects other “intrinsic” accounts of virtue and vice, I argue that we must either solve this problem or abandon such accounts. (shrink)

This paper will analyze the effects advanced industrial societies have on individual and social development through the eyes of Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man and the moral consequences of such artificial stagnation through Adorno’s lectures on The Problems of Moral Philosophy. Because such an investigation necessarily brings us into the realm of social psychology, we will turn to the social psychological tradition at the heart of American pragmatism, a target for critical theorists who are often antagonistic to the entire tradition. We will (...) endeavor to advance two alternate readings of the work of C.S. Peirce, arguing that although one type of pragmatism may be justly attacked by critical theorists, there is another, I argue, more critical manifestation of pragmatic human development, that requires the type of autonomy-infused, open-ended development that Marcuse champions. Moreover, I will argue that Peirce’s seminal essay “The Fixation of Belief” anticipated many of Marcuse’s critiques of advanced industrial societies by nearly ninety years. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Not Fade Away The Present Time of Things Past Memory as Presently Constructed Constantly being Imbued with New, Present Meanings.

Dignified care is a central issue in the nursing care of older adults. Nurses are expected to treat older adults with dignity, and older adults wish to be treated in a dignified manner. Researchers have recommended investigating the concept of dignity based on specific contexts and population groups. This meta-synthesis study aims to explore the understandings of dignity from the perspective of older adults in the Nordic countries. Synthesising findings from qualitative studies on older adults’ experiences of dignity has provided (...) important insight into what can be essential for dignified care in a Nordic context. The importance of visibility and recognition for the experience of dignity is an overarching theme in all the studies. The participants’ descriptions mostly implicated an existence dominated by a lack of recognition. The older adults do not feel valued as people or for their contribution to society and strive to tone down their illnesses in an attempt to become more visible and acknowledged as people. Toning down their illnesses and masking their needs can protect their independence. At the same time, becoming less visible can leave them without a voice. The metaphorical phrase protected and exposed by a cloak of invisibility is used to express the authors’ overall interpretation of the findings. Lack of recognition and being socially invisible is a genuine threat to older adults’ dignity. (shrink)

We present a hierarchical integrated model of self-regulation in which executive function is the cognitive component of the model, together with emotional, behavioral, physiological, and genetic components. These five components in the model are reciprocally and recursively related. The model is supported by empirical evidence, primarily from a single longitudinal study with good measurement at each level of the model. We also find that the model is consistent with current thinking on related topics such as cybernetic theory, the theory of (...) allostasis and allostatic load, and the theory of skill development in harsh and unpredictable environments, referred to as “hidden talents.” Next, we present literature that the integrative processes are susceptible to environmental adversity, poverty-related risk in particular, while positive social interactions with caregivers would promote self-regulatory processes or mitigate the adverse effect of early risk on the processes. A hierarchical integrative model of self-regulation advances our understanding of self-regulatory processes. Future research may consider broader social contexts of the integrative self-regulation system, such as neighborhood/community contexts and structural racism. This can be an integral step to provide children with equitable opportunities to thrive, even among children living in socioeconomically and psychosocially disadvantaged environments. (shrink)

In A Metaphysics for Freedom, Helen Steward argues that agents settle things when they act, and that in order for agents to settle things, the universe must be indeterministic. Steward suggests a ‘weak’ account of settling, on which settling is compatible with determinism, but she rightly claims that this weak account is unacceptable. In this paper, I argue that the weak account of settling is not the best account of settling available to the compatibilist. In the first part of this (...) paper, I present a ‘strong’ compatibilist account of settling, and argue that this account avoids the problems faced by the weak account. In the second part of this paper, I argue against Steward's claim that compatibilist accounts of settling must depend on the truth of causal theories of action. (shrink)

In 2008, the European Community adopted a Proposal to revise the EC Directive on nonhuman animal experiments, with the aim of improving the welfare of the nonhuman animals used in experiments. An Impact Assessment, which gauges the likely economic and scientific effects of future changes, as well as the effects on nonhuman animal welfare, informs the Proposal. By using a discourse analytical approach, this paper examines the Directive, the Impact Assessment and the Proposal to reflect critically upon assumptions about the (...) morality of nonhuman animal experiments. Because nonhuman animal welfare is so prominent in the Proposal, it appears that the EC position advances beyond human self-interest as the sole motivator for such experiments, to ethical questions about the welfare of nonhuman animals . In examining this contention, this paper concludes that, even given concerns about nonhuman animal welfare, nonhuman animal experimentation in the EC is firmly grounded in a morality that focuses on human benefit goals rather than on the wider moral issues associated with the means of achieving such goals. (shrink)

This chapter explores critically ethical concerns arising from forms of suffering to which domesticated nonhuman animals are subjected in scientific instruction and research and within the industrial-factory-farm-food complex, as well as other contexts. Consideration is given to the views of Arthur Schopenhauer on suffering, René Descartes’s designation of ontological differences between human and non-human animals, and Donna Haraway’s reconfiguration of the relationship between human and nonhuman animals in scientific laboratory settings. Proceeding from a discussion of David Benatar’s “antinatalist” views the (...) focus of analysis is on the forms of suffering imposed on domesticated nonhuman animals by humans. In response to ethical concerns raised about the suffering inflicted on nonhuman animals in the course of scientific research, scientists have sought a “solution” in the form of genetically engineered nonhuman animals whose responses to painful stimuli are presented as modulated to reduce pain. This reductive conceptualization of suffering reduces the complexity of suffering to physical sensation alone and does not engage with the ethical issues involved. Drawing on the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Albert Schweitzer the chapter concludes that an ethical solution to the complex issues explored lies in refraining from exposing nonhuman animals to pain and suffering. (shrink)

This target article considers the relation of fluid cognitive functioning to general intelligence. A neurobiological model differentiating working memory/executive function cognitive processes of the prefrontal cortex from aspects of psychometrically defined general intelligence is presented. Work examining the rise in mean intelligence-test performance between normative cohorts, the neuropsychology and neuroscience of cognitive function in typically and atypically developing human populations, and stress, brain development, and corticolimbic connectivity in human and nonhuman animal models is reviewed and found to provide evidence of (...) mechanisms through which early experience affects the development of an aspect of cognition closely related to, but distinct from, general intelligence. Particular emphasis is placed on the role of emotion in fluid cognition and on research indicating fluid cognitive deficits associated with early hippocampal pathology and with dysregulation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis stress-response system. Findings are seen to be consistent with the idea of an independent fluid cognitive construct and to assist with the interpretation of findings from the study of early compensatory education for children facing psychosocial adversity and from behavior genetic research on intelligence. It is concluded that ongoing development of neurobiologically grounded measures of fluid cognitive skills appropriate for young children will play a key role in understanding early mental development and the adaptive success to which it is related, particularly for young children facing social and economic disadvantage. Specifically, in the evaluation of the efficacy of compensatory education efforts such as Head Start and the readiness for school of children from diverse backgrounds, it is important to distinguish fluid cognition from psychometrically defined general intelligence. (Published Online April 5 2006) Key Words: cognition; cognition-emotion reciprocity; developmental disorders; emotion; fluid cognition; Flynn effect; general intelligence; limbic system; neuroscience; phenylketonuria; prefrontal cortex; psychometrics; schizophrenia. (shrink)

A retrocausal interpretation of quantum mechanics is examined and is applied to the problem of measuring an optical qubit before the qubit is actually created. Although the predictions of the retrocausal interpretation are the same as for the conventional causal picture, it provides a new perspective which should give a useful way of understanding some quantum mechanical processes.

Many recent discussions of psychopaths have centered on the question of whether they can express ill-will when they act, a capacity which is generally taken to be required for moral blameworthiness. However, the debate over ill-will currently stands at an impasse; the participants are in substantial agreement as to which attitudes psychopaths can express, but disagree as to which attitudes count as ill-will. I argue that this impasse reflects an underlying, implicit disagreement as to which features of actions are wrong-making. (...) By uncovering this implicit disagreement and addressing it head-on, we should be able to break the impasse. (shrink)

Por que debo hacer el bien? Por que tengo que cumplir el deber? Por que es malo hacer el mal? Por que no puedo sacudirme todo con un que mas da? de indiferencia? Estas preguntas y otras analogas estan en el fondo de esta obra. El autor ha investigado una reinterpretacion de la etica de la recta razon a luz de la filosofia del valor y en dialogo con la filosofia anglo-sajona de las virtudes. La obra se centra en dos (...) autores: Joseph de Finance y Giuseppe Abba. Propone cuatro etapas que debe recorrer una etica tomista que pretenda ser autenticamente filosofica: la presentacion fenomenologica de la experiencia moral, y la fundamentacion critica, metafisica y psicologica de esta experiencia. (shrink)

What does it mean to be an ethical professional? A professional career can be so demanding that it permeates every aspect of a person's life and personality. In light of this fact, it is especially important for students who are planning to enter a chosen profession to understand its moral status, moral virtues, and possible moral pitfalls, so that they will be equipped to deal with the inevitable moral quandaries that they will encounter as professionals. The most up-to-date professional ethics (...) reader available, Ethics Across the Professions analyzes the complex ethical issues that arise in such fields as engineering, finance, healthcare, journalism, and law. Featuring a wide array of both classic and contemporary sources, it ranges from works by Aristotle and Kant to selections by Michael Bayles, Sissela Bok, Paul Ekman, and Thomas Nagel. Organized topically, the anthology covers what it means to be a professional, outlines several ethical models, and addresses key issues including deception in professional life, privacy, loyalty, social welfare, conflicts of interest, and self-regulation. The book includes detailed chapter introductions, several practical case studies at the end of each chapter, and provocative discussion questions on issues like "whistle-blowing," the Iraq War, educating illegal immigrant children, and advertisements for pharmaceutical companies. Edited by three renowned ethicists, Ethics Across the Professions is especially suited for introductory professional ethics courses taught in philosophy departments as well as in nursing schools, business schools, and other professional programs. (shrink)

The most up-to-date reader with cases in professional ethics available.What does it mean to be an ethical professional? A professional career can be so demanding that it permeates every aspect of a person's life and personality. In light of this fact, it is especially important for students who are planning to enter a chosen profession to understand its moral status,moral virtues, and possible moral pitfalls, so that they will be equipped to deal with the inevitable moral quandaries that they will (...) encounter as professionals.The most up-to-date professional ethics reader available, Ethics Across the Professions analyzes the complex ethical issues that arise in such fields as engineering, finance, healthcare, journalism, and law. Featuring a wide array of both classic and contemporary sources, it ranges from works byAristotle and Kant to selections by Michael Bayles, Sissela Bok, Paul Ekman, and Thomas Nagel. Organized topically, the anthology covers what it means to be a professional, outlines several ethical models, and addresses key issues including deception in professional life, privacy, loyalty, socialwelfare, conflicts of interest, and self-regulation. The book includes detailed chapter introductions, several practical case studies at the end of each chapter, and provocative discussion questions on issues like "whistle-blowing," the Iraq War, educating illegal immigrant children, andadvertisements for pharmaceutical companies. Edited by three renowned ethicists, Ethics Across the Professions is especially suited for introductory professional ethics courses taught in philosophy departments as well as in nursing schools, business schools, and other professional programs. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Miguel de Unamuno (1865–1936, Spanish‐Basque) Lev Shestov (1866–1938, Russian) Karl Barth (1886–1968, Swiss) Martin Buber (1878–1965, Austrian and Israeli).