In ‘Why not NIMBY?’, Simon Feldman and Derek Turner mount a compelling case that NIMBY claims are not intrinsically morally unjustified, despite the fact that NIMBY-claimants...

We argue that the ecological research community should develop a plan for improving the ethical consistency and moral robustness of the field. We propose a particular ethics strategy—specifically, an ongoing process of collective ethical reflection that the community of ecological researchers, with the cooperation of applied ethicists and philosophers of biology, can use to address the needs we identify. We suggest a particular set of conceptual and analytic tools that, we argue, collectively have the resources to provide an empirically grounded (...) and conceptually complete foundation for an ethics strategy for ecological research. We illustrate our argument with information gathered from a survey of ecologists conducted at the 2013 meeting of the Canadian Society of Ecology and Evolution. (shrink)

In his talk about G.K.'s Weekly to the 1986 Toronto Conference, Father Brocard Sewell, O. Carm., spoke about Chesterton's tribute to Alderman Cedric Chivers. This tribute was written at the time of Cedric Chivers's death and was published in G.K.'s Weekly . Cedric Chivers was, for many years, the Major of Bath, a bookbinder, and one of the Directors of G.K.'s Weekly. He was one of Chesterton's close friends.

2011 Reprint of 1943 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. "St. Thomas Aquinas" is enriched by the author's unique ability to see the world through the saint's eyes, a fresh and animated view that shows us Aquinas as no other biography has. Acclaimed as the best book ever written on Aquinas by such outstanding Thomists as Jacques Maritain, Etienne Gilson, and Anton Pegis, this brilliant biography will completely capture the reader and leave him (...) desirous of reading Aquinas' own monumental work. (shrink)

In the debates surrounding the ethical dimensions of interventions in the human genome, much attention is paid to determining whether—and if so, how—market access to these technologies ought to be managed in order to maximize social benefit. There are those who advocate a “laissez-faire” free-market approach to the development and use of genetic and genomic interventions. We are sympathetic to this view insofar as we understand the workings of the market stimulus effect. We use the term “market stimulus effect” to (...) refer to the outcome of a set of mechanisms whereby early adoption of a new technology by wealthy consumers promotes the development of versions of this product that are cheaper to produce, or are simply .. (shrink)

This paper examines conceptual issues that arise in applications of Darwinian natural selection to cultural systems. I argue that many criticisms of cultural selectionist models have been based on an over-detailed reading of the analogy between biological and cultural units of selection. I identify five of the most powerful objections to cultural selection theory and argue that none cuts to its heart. Some objections are based on mistaken assumptions about the simplicity of the mechanisms of biological heredity. Other objections are (...) attributable, rather, to mistaken inferences from observations of biological subject matter to what is essential in natural selection. I argue that such features are idiosyncratic of biological systems, but not essential for natural selection. My arguments throughout are illustrated by examples from biological and cultural evolution, and counter-factual illustrations from the history of theoretical biology. Introduction Cultural Selection Theory First Objection: Lamarckianism Second Objection: Genotype–Phenotype Distinction Third Objection: Common Hereditary Architecture Fourth Objection: Biological Analogue for Cultural Units 6.1 Regarding strict analogues 6.2 Regarding the trait analogue 6.3 Regarding the virus analogue Fifth Objection: Environmental Interaction Conclusion CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)