hen the Right Honorable and Reverend Francis Henry, earl of Bridgewater, died in February, 1829, he left £8,000 to support a series of books "on the power, wisdom and goodness of God, as manifested in the creation." William Buckland, England's first official academic geologist and later dean of Westminster, was invited to compose one of the nine Bridgewater Treatises. In it he discussed the most pressing problem of natural theology: if God is benevolent and the creation displays his "power, (...) wisdom and goodness," then why are we surrounded with pain, suffering, and apparently senseless cruelty in the animal world? (shrink)

Bringing together literary scholars, computer scientists, ethicists, philosophers of mind, and scholars from affiliated disciplines, this collection of essays offers important and timely insights into the pasts, presents, and, above all, possible futures of Artificial Intelligence. This book covers topics such as ethics and morality, identity and selfhood, and broader issues about AI, addressing questions about the individual, social, and existential impacts of such technologies. Through the works of science fiction authors such as Isaac Asimov, Stanislaw Lem, Ann Leckie, (...) Iain M. Banks, and Martha Wells, alongside key visual productions such as Ex Machina, Westworld, and Her, contributions illustrate how science fiction might inform potential futures as well as acting as a springboard to bring disciplinary knowledge to bear on significant developments of Artificial Intelligence. Addressing a broad, interdisciplinary audience, both expert and non-expert readers gain an in-depth understanding of the wide range of pressing issues to which Artificial Intelligence gives rise, and the ways in which science fiction narratives have been used to represent them. Using science fiction in this manner enables readers to see how even fictional worlds and imagined futures have very real impacts on how we understand these technologies. As such, readers are introduced to theoretical positions on Artificial Intelligence through fictional works as well as encouraged to reflect on the diverse aspects of Artificial Intelligence through its many philosophical, social, legal, scientific, and cultural ramifications. (shrink)

In matters such as affirmative action or home schooling, rights of ethnic and other minority groups often come into conflict with those of society in a culturally diverse population such as ours. But before considering the dilemmas posed by these issues, we must first ask such basic but important questions as what group rights are and how they intersect with the principles of democracy. This new collection brings together some of today's leading thinkers from the cutting edge of these debates, (...) taking in a broad range of issues confronting philosophers, sociologists, and political scientists. Contributors such as Carl Wellman, Carol Gould, and Rex Martin examine the nature of groups and the conflict between group rights and democracy and also consider case studies depicting current issues in cultural, ethnic, and religious rights. The first section, on the nature of groups, examines some of the perplexing alternatives in the formulation of a theory of group rights. These articles investigate the kinds of rights minorities might claim and ask when groups can be held responsible for the acts of some of their members. The second section addresses the treatment of groups in a democracy and the precarious balance between indifference toward minorities and capitulation to their demands. Here the contributors examine five principles for the sensitive treatment of minority and disadvantaged groups in a democratic society. A final section explores specific conflicts between subgroup and societal claims through case studies dealing with affirmative action, religious practice and the education of children, and the land rights of indigenous peoples. By drawing on the legal and political dilemmas related to these cases, the authors confront issues of core versus peripheral interests, of individual member versus subgroup rights, and of the possibilities for social openness raised in the preceding sections Written from varied perspectives, Groups and Group Rights offers stimulating reading for both students and professionals as it takes on some of the most pressing dilemmas confronting our society. (shrink)

Property rights of personal data have been advocated for some time. From the perspective of economics of law some argued that they could lower transaction costs for contracts involving personal data. This may be the case, but new transaction costs are introduced by propertization and the issue has not been settled. In this paper, I focus on a different and potentially more important aspect. In the actual situation, data collectors externalize costs and internalize benefits. An ownership regime that enables every (...) citizen to hold a personal data account, like a bank account, and that gives people ownership rights over secondary use of personal data could correct these misallocations. I hope to shed new light on the normative implications of the issue by offering normative justifications for property rights of personal data (Sections 2–4). Secondly, I present fundamental goals and building blocks of a property regime of personal data (Section 5) and, thirdly, I illustrate how income from personal data ownership could for instance contribute to financing pensions under proper regulation (Section 6). (shrink)

THE P R E F A C E, Giving fome ACCOUNT of the LIFE, WRITINGS, and CHARACTER of the AUTHOR. T"\R. FRANCIS HUTCHESON was born on the 8th of ...

Partant de son expérience préfectorale l’auteur envisage la production de l’ordre public sous trois aspects : l’adaptation aux spécificités locales ; l’anticipation, incluant notamment le renseignement, la prévention de la délinquance et l’organisation spécifique aux grands événements ; le recours à la force publique, en particulier dans le cas des manifestations, des émeutes et des prises d’otages. Il conclut en montrant que les différentes autorités concernées s’articulent selon un modèle français, qui protège les libertés sous le contrôle du juge administratif.

People with cognitive impairments often have difficulties formulating, understanding, or articulating decisions that others judge reasonable. The frequent response shifts decision-making authority to substitutes through advance directives of the person or guardianship orders from a court. The Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities defends supported decision-making as an alternative to such forms of supplanted decision-making. But supported decision-making raises both metaphysical questions—what is required for a decision to be the person’s own?—and epistemological questions: how do we know what (...) persons judge to be their good, when they have difficulty conceptualizing and articulating? It raises practical questions, too, such as protection against risks of exploitation. This article uses a non-discrimination account of legal personhood drawn from the CRPD to explore how common features of decisions employed by people without cognitive disabilities are important in supported decision-making too. These features include prostheses, guardrails, relationships, and social contexts. (shrink)

I argue for the principle of Anonymity, according to which two populations are equally good whenever they have the same anonymous distribution of wellbeing. I first show that, given transitivity of the at-least-as-good-as relation, Anonymity is entailed by the ``Non-Identity Principle'', according to which the consequence of bringing better rather than worse lives into existence is, all else equal, better. I then argue for the Non-Identity Principle on the basis that if it were false, it would follow that we fail (...) to improve the world when we make existing people better off, while at the same time replacing worse-off future people with different better-off future people. Since this is implausible, we should accept the Non-Identity Principle, and therefore Anonymity as well. (shrink)

This 1991 book is about the continuing influence of Hume's ideas on moral and political philosophy. In part, it is a critical exegesis of Hume's most impressive and challenging doctrines in Book III of the Treatise of Human Nature on such topics as morals, motivation, justice, and social institutions. However, the main thrust of the argument is to throw into relief the importance of that discussion for contemporary philosophy. While the author subjects most contemporary defences of Humean doctrines to intense (...) criticism, he also seeks to discover what versions of Hume's theories might still be defensible and viable. (shrink)

Managers often ask why their firm should have an ethics program, especially if no one has complained about unethical behavior. The pursuit of business ethics can cost money, they say. It can lose sales to less scrupulous competitors and can drain management time and energy. But as Harvard business professor Francis Aguilar points out, ethics scandals (such as over Beech-Nut's erzatz "apple juice" or Sears's padded car repair bills) can severely damage a firm, with punishing legal penalties, bad publicity, (...) and irreparably injured customer relations. Equally important if less obvious, unethical behavior can undermine a firm's organizational spirit. On the other hand, Aguilar argues, in a well run firm, ethical programs can actually enhance corporate performance, strengthening the company at every level and supercharging employee risk taking and innovation. In Managing Corporate Ethics, Aguilar shows managers how to create ethical programs within their organizations that not only discourage large-scale wrongdoing, but can contribute substantially to the achievement of corporate excellence. Aguilar's program is down-to-earth and comprehensive, and based on his extensive research on highly successful, ethical companies, both large and small. He recommends action on three fronts: first, get senior management to provide effective ethical leadership; second, set up an ethics program that promotes concern for the interests of people affected by the firm's operations and that provides safeguards against corrupting business pressures; and third, staff the company with ethical people and surround the organization with ethical advisors (including legal, financial, accounting, tax, and marketing consultants). To illuminate this three-step program, Aguilar incorporates the lessons learned in his in-depth study of ten prominent firms with proven successful ethics programs--among them Hewlett-Packard, Johnson & Johnson, Nucor Steel, Cray Research, ServiceMaster, and Texas Instruments. He examines Lincoln Electric's attention to compensation and job security to ensure quality products and to reduce the pressure or temptation to act unethically. He shows how General Mills, while pushing product line managers to compete aggressively, uses corporate staff units to guard against illegal or unacceptable claims (testing cake recipes, for example, to see if a product's quality fails under the less-than-perfect conditions of a normal kitchen). And he details how Armstrong World Industries uses pep talks, inspirational stories, role models, and ready access to management to promote ethical standards among employees. Throughout, Aguilar demonstrates convincingly that an ethical program pays dividends: that employees, suppliers, customers, and the community at large know when they are being treated in a positive and constructive manner, and are likely to respond in kind. Packed with real life examples of successful (and failed) ethical programs, Managing Corporate Ethics is a valuable roadmap to an often overlooked source of business success. (shrink)

This essay carefully examines the debate between Hegel and Wilhelm von Humboldt about the meaning of the Bhagavad Gîtâ, and more specifically about several verses in Gîtâ 6 regarding the radical emptying and purification of the mind. My aim is to propose a new and wider conversation, not possible in Hegel’s time but necessary in ours, between European scholars and peer Indian intellectuals in traditions familiar with the Gîtâ for centuries before any European knew of it at all. To exemplify (...) this new work, I attend to the reading of the same Gîtâ 6 passage by the famed philosopher and theologian Madhusûdana Sarasvatî. In this way, the European inquiry into the status of Indian thought and religion ceases to be an exclusively European endeavor, becoming instead a beneficial and mutually corrective crosscultural and interreligious conversation about texts and history, philosophy and theology. (shrink)

The first edition of The Mismeasure of Man appeared in 1981 and was quickly praised in the popular press as a definitive refutation of 100 years of scientific work on race, brain-size and intelligence. It sold 125,000 copies, was translated into 10 languages, and became required reading for undergraduate and even graduate classes in anthropology, psychology, and sociology. The second edition is not truly revised, but rather only expanded, as the author claims the book needed no updating as any new (...) research would only be plagued with the same philosophical errors revealed in the first edition. Thus it continues a political polemic, whose author engages in character assassination of long deceased scientists whose work he misrepresents despite published refutations, while studiously witholding from his readers fifteen years of new research that contradicts every major scientific argument he puts forth. Specific attention in this review are given to the following topics: the relationship between brain size and IQ, the importance of the scientific contributions of Sir Francis Galton, S. G. Morton, H. H. Goddard, and Sir Cyril Burt, the role of early IQ testers in determining U.S. immigration policy, The Bell Curve controversy and the reality of g, race /sex/social class differences in brain size and IQ, Cesare Lombroso and the genetic basis of criminal behavior, between-group heritabilities, inter-racial adoption studies, and IQ why evolutionary theory predicts group differences, and the extent to which Gould's political ideology has affected his scientific work. (shrink)

L'amour a inspiré les chants les plus déchirants, les meilleurs romans et les pires, des comédies irrésistibles, des tragédies bouleversantes. Il est possible d'y ajouter quelques considérations philosophiques. Des préliminaires, seulement. Non à l'amour (le philosophe n'a là-dessus aucune expertise), mais à son concept (c'est son domaine, dit-on). L'amour n'est ni l'amitié, ni le désir, ni la passion. C'est la fusion improbable de ces tendances opposées. Car les composantes de l'amour ne jouent pas collectif, tel est le drame, et la (...) grandeur, de l'amour. C'est parce qu'il est de nature hétérogène, donc instable, qu'il est le moteur tout-puissant de tant d'histoires, grandioses ou banales, dans les littératures universelles et dans nos vies ordinaires. (shrink)

Against the position of professor rex martin ("the review of metaphysics," xxv, December 1971) it is argued that there is a conceptual link between disobedience and destruction of authority, As socrates argues; that socrates does not take obedience to law to be an absolute principle of action; that socrates in the two dialogues about his trial does not contradict himself on the question of obedience to the court; that socrates' argument from piety does not undermine his arguments from injury and (...) agreement. (shrink)

Fair Governance: The Enforcement of Morals is a study of legal interference with individual preferences and will canvass the interdisciplinary literature in economics, psychology, philosophy, and law. It discusses the particular conditions necessary for the state to legally interfere with our freedom of choice, whether it be to either satisfy our individual pursuit of happiness or to prevent us from making immoral choices. Relatively few philosophers know much of the parallel literature on this central problem of ethics; while many legal (...) scholars are acquainted with the psychological literature on judgment biases, they are frequently unfamiliar with the philosophical literature on perfectionism. Francis H. Buckley carefully links these two notions of state power with recent empirical literature on judgment biases and happiness studies and surveys the literature, arguing for a nuanced form of social perfectionism, one which seeks to promote the kind of liberal nationalism found in the United States. (shrink)

This title was first published in 2002: Kolnai's later work in moral philosophy is well-known, and interest in it continues to grow, but his dissertation, Ethical Value and Reality, has received little attention - although Kolnai himself said that it contains the germs of nearly all his subsequent thought. This first English translation of the dissertation and of two related papers from the same period will enable the English-speaking reader to explore Kolnai's ethical work as a whole. In Ethical Value (...) and Reality Kolnai proposes a 'completion' of phenomenological value-ethics which takes account of 'the embeddedness of ethical values in reality'. Kolnai explores moral psychology and offers important perspectives on political activity in its moral dimensions, on the relation between morality and religion, and on the relation between the moral point of view and the psycho-therapeutic. Dunlop's comprehensive introduction to the translation provides the reader with assistance in understanding the text, setting it in its contemporary context, and relating it to Kolnai's subsequent writings. (shrink)

In 1970, exactly fifty years ago, I took entrance examinations in Hebrew and Greek to begin studies at the Pontifical Biblical Institute, Rome. I have shared in various ministries since then, sometimes in positions that distracted from my academic interests. Nevertheless, I have been a privileged 'insider' to the development of critical studies of the New Testament over the past fifty years. Given my history, the title of this essay shamelessly plagiarises Geoffrey Blainey's delightful recollections of his early years, 'Before (...) I Forget'. (shrink)

Since April 1996, the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC), in collaboration with the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) in the Executive Office of the President, has been leading the development of a government-wide Federal policy for research misconduct. The author is a Senior Policy Analyst in the Office of Science and Technology Policy and a participant in this process. This paper places the NSTC/OSTP effort in historical context, outlines the process by which the policy will be finalized, (...) and discusses the principal issues raised during the policy development process. (shrink)

COMMUNICATION 1. Every philosophy presupposes a theory of communication and conversely every theory of communication implies a philosophy. ...

In this paper Skeptical Theism is described, applied and defended. Furthermore, William Rowe’s position of Friendly Atheism is described and a version of Friendly Theism suggested. It is shown that Skeptical Theism can be defended against two common arguments and that skeptical theists might be able to adopt the position of Friendly Theism.