Old philosophical problems never die, but they can be reinterpreted. In this paper, I offer a reinterpretation of the problem of reconciling divine omniscience and human free will. Classical discussions of this problem concentrate on the nature of God and the concept of free will. The present discussion will focus attention on the concept of knowledge, drawing on developments in epistemology that resulted from the posing of a certain problem by Edmund Gettier in 1963.

Moral foundations theory (MFT) proposes the existence of innate psychological systems, which would have been subjected to selective forces over the course of evolution. One approach for evaluating MFT, therefore, is to consider the proposed psychological foundations in relation to the reconstructed Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness. This study draws upon ethnographic data on nomadic forager societies to evaluate MFT. Moral foundations theory receives support only regarding the Caring/harm and Fairness/cheating foundations but not regarding the proposed Loyalty/betrayal and Authority/subversion foundations. These (...) latter two proposed foundations would seem to reflect the historical classic assumptions of modernity, involving self-interest, competition, individualism, hierarchy, authority and so forth. Studying the ethical dimensions of nomadic forager societies can highlight our biases about the foundations of morality, some of which may be steeped in particularist Western political and social traditions. Some recent developments from cosmopolitanism are discussed as an alternative evolving worldview that parallels nomadic forager ethos. (shrink)

I. Beyond Utilitarianism In the summer of 1982, I published an article called “Missiles and Morals,” in which I argued on utilitarian grounds that nuclear deterrence in its present form is not morally justifiable. The argument of “Missiles and Morals” compared the most likely sort of nuclear war to develop under nuclear deterrence with the most likely sort of nuclear war to develop under American unilateral nuclear disaramament. For a variety of reasons, I claimed diat the number of casualties in (...) a two-sided nuclear war developing under DET would be at least fifteen times greater than the number of casualties in a one-sided nuclear attack developing under UND. If one assumes that human lives lost or saved is the principal criterion by which nuclear weapons policies should be measured, it follows that DET is morally superior to UND on utilitarian grounds only if the chance of a two-sided nuclear war under DET is more than fifteen times less dian the chance of a one-sided nuclear attack under UND. Since I did not believe that the chance of nuclear war under deterrence is fifteen times less than the chance of nuclear war under unilateral nuclear disarmament, I inferred diat utilitaranism failed to justify DET. Indeed, on utilitarian grounds, DET stood condemned. (shrink)

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A growing interest in and concern about the adequacy and fairness of modern peer-review practices in publication and funding are apparent across a wide range of scientific disciplines. Although questions about reliability, accountability, reviewer bias, and competence have been raised, there has been very little direct research on these variables.The present investigation was an attempt to study the peer-review process directly, in the natural setting of actual journal referee evaluations of submitted manuscripts. As test materials we selected 12 already published (...) research articles by investigators from prestigious and highly productive American psychology departments, one article from each of 12 highly regarded and widely read American psychology journals with high rejection rates (80%) and nonblind refereeing practices.With fictitious names and institutions substituted for the original ones (e.g., Tri-Valley Center for Human Potential), the altered manuscripts were formally resubmitted to the journals that had originally refereed and published them 18 to 32 months earlier. Of the sample of 38 editors and reviewers, only three (8%) detected the resubmissions. This result allowed nine of the 12 articles to continue through the review process to receive an actual evaluation: eight of the nine were rejected. Sixteen of the 18 referees (89%) recommended against publication and the editors concurred. The grounds for rejection were in many cases described as “serious methodological flaws.” A number of possible interpretations of these data are reviewed and evaluated. (shrink)

(1984). Showing Movement in Children's Pictures: a study of the effectiveness of some non‐mimetic representations of motion. Educational Studies: Vol. 10, No. 3, pp. 255-261.

Nursing research in China is at an early stage of development and little is known about the practices of Chinese nurse researchers. This interview study carried out at a university in central China explores the informed consent practices of Chinese nurse researchers and the cultural considerations of using a western technique. Nine semistructured interviews were conducted in English with assistance and simultaneous translation from a Chinese nurse with research experience. The interviews were analyzed by one western and two Chinese researchers (...) and major themes were identified. All participants endorsed informed consent as ethically required. Differences were noted between some of the informed consent practices typically recommended in the USA and those identified in this study, such as: recruitment using local and government officials, recruiting directly from medical records without special permission, family consultation in consent and consent control, and not revealing randomization to intervention groups receiving different treatments. (shrink)

This paper argues that there is a conflict between divine omniscience and the human right to privacy. The right to privacy derives from the right to moral autonomy, which human persons possess even against a divine being. It follows that if God exists and persists in knowing all things, his knowledge is a non-justifiable violation of a human right. On the other hand, if God exists and restricts his knowing in deference to human privacy, it follows that he cannot fulfill (...) the traditional function of being the perfect and final judge of all things. (shrink)

Free choice of provider is heralded as a right of autonomy, but the goals of autonomy are better served in today's health care environment when there is informed choice of the care delivery system. The principle of liberty is distinguished from respect for auton omy. Free choice of provider would be demanded only by liberty, except that allocation of health care resources does not meet criteria for the application of liberty. Patients attempting to choose the best practitioner do not have (...) data to support the decision. If data were available, access to these superior practitioners would become an allocation problem. A mythology of the wise practitioner fosters the concept of provider choice as a personal judgement about clinical knowledge. The emerging trends of collaborative care, standardization of practice guidelines and diversity of delivery systems among reimbursers create a situation where a patient's autonomy to choose goals for treatment is respected through the choice of delivery sys tem. (shrink)

Erich Frank is chiefly known for two works. In Plato und die sogenannten Pythagoreer, 1923, Frank published the results of research to determine who the Pythagoreans actually were and what part they played in Plato's conception of nature. In 1945 he published Philosophical Understanding and Religious Truth. It had been the hope of his friends that Frank would present a more comprehensive and systematic exposition of his thought. Frank's sudden death in 1948 put an end to this hope. In Knowledge, (...) Will and Belief Ludwig Edelstein has collected together twenty of Frank's papers and has appended an account of Frank's life and work. Until 1939 Frank was professor at Marburg. After that he was attached to universities in the United States. Half of the papers in this collection are in English, the others are in German. Readers in the English speaking world will find Frank's German quite readable. Half of the papers have not hitherto been published; of those which have been, many are hidden in unfamiliar journals. (shrink)

Criticism of nuclear weapons policies often misses the target through ignorance of the policies that are actually in effect. This essay recounts the development of American nuclear weapons policies, together with a history of the criticisms of these policies presented by nuclear strategists and moral philosophers.

This essay considers and rejects the hypothesis of Fackenheim, Wiesel and others that the Jewish Holocaust contains some qualitatively or quantitatively distinct moral evil. The Holocaust was not qualitatively distinct because the intentions and vices of the mass murderer are qualitatively indistinguishable from the intentions and vices of the common murderer. The Holocaust was not quantitatively distinct either because the sum of the evils of the Holocaust is quantitatively indistinguishable from six million randomly selected individual murders or because the notion (...) of a ‘sum’ of moral evils is conceptually incoherent. (shrink)

The current dominant paradigm of mental disorder is that psychopathology is a deviation from normal physiological functioning of the brain. This paradigm is closely allied to the identity theory of mind in philosophy, which holds that mental phenomena are identical with the physical state of the brain. The assumptions of the biological model have policy implications, regardless of the utility or ‘truth’ of the paradigm, which should be made explicit for the assessment of ethics in mental health policy formulation. The (...) nature of mental phenomena has been debated throughout history, without consensus. Several critiques of the biological model are offered to encourage enquiring scepticism. The policy implications discussed are political conservatism, broadened rationales for forced treatment, utility in managed care, and the use of medical necessity criteria to allocate treatment. (shrink)