Positieve uitlokking van ethisch hacken. Een onderzoek naar responsible-disclosurebeleid In this contribution, the Dutch government’s acceptance of ethical hacking, by implementing a policy of responsible disclosure, is considered to be a beneficent development. Ethical hacking contributes to cybersecurity and is intrinsically desirable. The term positive incitement is proposed to describe the relatively new phenomenon of encouraging ethical hacking. Positive incitement will be analysed by making a comparison to the Dutch toleration policy regarding soft drugs, and to incitement by law enforcement. (...) Positive incitement should not change into negative incitement, which would result in a serious breach of the rights of ethical hackers. Furthermore, it is argued that the intrinsic value of ethical hacking can justify searching for vulnerabilities in systems of organisations who do not approve of this in advance. (shrink)

Using a new method, we examined whether incidental perception of need-rewarding (positive) objects unintentionally prepares motor action. Participants who varied in their level of need for water were presented with glasses of water (and control objects) that were accompanied by go and no-go cues that required a response (key-press) or withholding a response. Importantly, if need-rewarding objects unintentionally prepare action, presentation of no-go cues should lead to motor inhibition of these prepared motor impulses. Consistent with this hypothesis, results showed that (...) participants relatively high in need for water (and hence, who perceive water as a rewarding, positive object) were slower to react to a successive action probe after withholding a response during perception of water than during perception of the control object, suggesting motor inhibition of unintentionally prepared motor impulses. We propose that incidental perception of need-rewarding objects unintentionally potentiates preparation of motor action to these objects. (shrink)

This book is intended to help transform epistemology - the traditional study of knowledge - into a rigorous discipline by removing conceptual roadblocks and developing formal tools required for a fully naturalized epistemology. The evolutionary approach which Harms favours begins with the common observation that if our senses and reasoning were not reliable, then natural selection would have eliminated them long ago. The challenge for some time has been how to transform these informal musings about evolutionary epistemology into a (...) rigorous theoretical discipline capable of complementing current scientific studies of the evolution of cognition with a philosophically defensible account of meaning and justification. (shrink)

Expectation-based theories of language comprehension, in particular Surprisal Theory, go a long way in accounting for the behavioral correlates of word-by-word processing difficulty, such as reading times. An open question, however, is in which component of the Event-Related brain Potential signal Surprisal is reflected, and how these electrophysiological correlates relate to behavioral processing indices. Here, we address this question by instantiating an explicit neurocomputational model of incremental, word-by-word language comprehension that produces estimates of the N400 and the P600—the two most (...) salient ERP components for language processing—as well as estimates of “comprehension-centric” Surprisal for each word in a sentence. We derive model predictions for a recent experimental design that directly investigates “world-knowledge”-induced Surprisal. By relating these predictions to both empirical electrophysiological and behavioral results, we establish a close link between Surprisal, as indexed by reading times, and the P600 component of the ERP signal. The resultant model thus offers an integrated neurobehavioral account of processing difficulty in language comprehension. (shrink)

Moral norms are the rules of morality, those that people actually follow, and those that we feel people ought to follow, even when they don’t. Historically, the social sciences have been primarily concerned with describing the many forms that moral norms take in various cultures, with the emerging implication that moral norms are mere arbitrary products of culture. Philosophers, on the other hand, have been more concerned with trying to understand the nature and source of rules that all cultures ought (...) to follow, with relatively little regard for what people actually do. The tension between the two approaches has to do with whether there are any standards higher than the whims of culture in determining right and wrong. Typically, the social sciences say “no”, pointing at the diversity of moral beliefs. Most philosophers (along with people of moral conviction) feel that there must be some deeper source of morality than the trends and fads of culture. Unfortunately, the nature and source of such standards has remained something of a mystery. Recent work on the evolution of norms has changed this picture dramatically. (shrink)

Empirical research has discovered that experimental subjects in ultimatum bargaining situations generally fail to play the decision-theoretic optimum strategy, and instead play something between that strategy and a fair split. In evolutionary dynamics, fair division and nearly fair division strategies often go to fixation and weakly dominated strategies can do quite well. Computer simulations were done using three different ultimatum bargaining games as determinates of fitness. (1) No tendency toward the elimination of weakly dominated strategies was observed, with or without (...) mutation. (2) Strategies making fair demands had sizable basins of attraction. (3) In a system where five different demands can be made, demands closest to (approximately) 91% had the largest basins of attraction. (4) If the strategies have thresholds for acceptable demands, rather than individuated responses to each demand, the apparent optimum demand may be quite low: 64% for one set of trials. (shrink)

Empirical research in the field of legal interpretation shows that, in many cases, analogy argumentation is complex rather than simple. Traditional analytical approaches to analogy argumentation do not explore that complexity. In most cases analogy argumentation is reconstructed as a simple form of argumentation that consists of two premises and a conclusion. This article focuses on the question of how to analyze and evaluate complex analogy argumentation. It is shown how the pragma-dialectical approach provides clues for analyzing complex analogy argumentation (...) and how the criteria for evaluating analogy argumentation can be used to reconstruct these types of complex analogy argumentation in Dutch case law. The critical questions in the argumentation scheme do not only serve as a tool for analyzing arguments justifying analogy argumentation, but are also helpful in analyzing arguments against a specific analogy argumentation. (shrink)

Moral norms are the rules of morality, those that people actually follow, and those that we feel people ought to follow, even when they don’t. Historically, the social sciences have been primarily concerned with describing the many forms that moral norms take in various cultures, with the emerging implication that moral norms are mere arbitrary products of culture. Philosophers, on the other hand, have been more concerned with trying to understand the nature and source of rules that all cultures ought (...) to follow, with relatively little regard for what people actually do. The tension between the two approaches has to do with whether there are any standards higher than the whims of culture in determining right and wrong. Typically, the social sciences say “no”, pointing at the diversity of moral beliefs. Most philosophers (along with people of moral conviction) feel that there must be some deeper source of morality than the trends and fads of culture. Unfortunately, the nature and source of such standards has remained something of a mystery. Recent work on the evolution of norms has changed this picture dramatically. (shrink)

Existing research demonstrates a positive connection between psychedelics and increased nature relatedness. Enhanced affective ties toward nature are widely framed as being built into the pharmakon itself, and the relevance of experiences remains little understood. This paper turns to neoshamanic ayahuasca ceremonies in Europe, exploring the way specialists and attendants refer to nature in speech and performance. I argue that ritual framings performed during these ceremonies provide fertile ground for affective ties to emerge through substance‐induced experiences. I trace such framings (...) by exploring how medicine and healers are being coded; how specific materialities are rendered meaningful; and how individual experiences are discussed at such retreats. I argue that even while participants prioritize individual healing, personal development, or the satisfaction of psychonautical curiosity, environmentalism appears to be anchored by the proceedings themselves. Thus, this paper opens up for analysis ceremonial substance use as a contact zone where coherence is produced intersubjectively. (shrink)

Evolving signaling systems can be said to induce partitions on the space of world states as they approach equilibrium. Formalizing this claim provides a general framework for understanding what it means for language to “cut nature at its seams”. In order to avoid taking our current best science as providing the adaptive target for all evolving systems, the state space of the world must be characterized exclusively in terms of the coincidence of stimuli and payoffs that drives the evolution of (...) cognitive complexity. Cognition exploits the reliable clustering of events in this space. Using this framework to analyze our ordinary concepts of truth and justification, it appears that while justification can be a simple matter of conforming to historically entrenched strategies, truth cannot be fully specified on the basis of the system’s causal history, but requires a robust clustering in the larger world state space. (shrink)

In August 2019, the fifth international congress of the 'International Association for the Study of the Philosophy of Edith Stein' (IASPES) took place at the University of Cologne. Of the 57 papers presented at this prominent conference prepared and chaired by the historian and theologian Harm Klueting, 54 were accepted for publication in revised versions. Professor Klueting was able to add three other contributions -- among them by the director of the Research Institute of the German Province of the Carmelites (...) at Bamberg, the historian and theologian Edeltraud Klueting, who acts as co-editor. The congress volume, published only a little more than a year after the congress despite significant constraints due to the Corona pandemic, contains 29 contributions in English, 21 in German, and seven in Spanish or French on the subjects 'Biographical questions', 'Edith Stein and thinkers of the past', 'Edith Stein and other contemporary thinkers', 'Anthropology -- Women and men', 'Philosophy -- phenomenology and Christian philosophy', 'Society and politics', 'Theology and spirituality', and 'Experiences with Edith Stein'. (shrink)

Evolutionary theory offers the possibility of building an epistemology that requires neither a theory of truth nor a definition of knowledge, thus bypassing some of the more notable difficulties with standard approaches to epistemology. Following a critique of one of the most popular approaches to thinking about cultural evolution I argue for a frequentist approach to evolutionary epistemology, and that cultural transmission should be understood as coordinated phenotypic variability within groups of closely related organisms. I construct a formal system which (...) allows the analysis of the evolution of networks of multiple interacting populations. Of particular epistemological interest is the relationship between genetic evolution and the evolution of cultural entities. The information-theoretic notion of "mutual information" is employed to quantify the transfer of information from the environment as it determines genetic fitnesses into the distribution of acquired traits Two simple models are constructed and analyzed. A two-level model of the navigation of a colony of bacteria demonstrates how selection on inherited traits affects the acquisition of information on the level of transient behavioral traits. A three-level model of bumblebee foraging shows how information about the environment is caught up in distributions of acquired foraging preferences--a bee-analog of human cognitive states. The Appendix contains an analytic proof of information gain under selection. (shrink)

Conventional wisdom has it that evolution makes a sham of morality, even if morality is an adaptation. I disagree. I argue that our best current adaptationist theory of meaning offers objective truth conditionsfor signaling systems of all sorts. The objectivity is, however, relative to species – specifically to the adaptive history of the signaling system in question. While evolution may not provide the kind of species independent objective standards that (e.g.) Kantians desire, this should be enough for the practical work (...) of justifying our confidence in the objectivity of moral standards. If you believe morality is an adaptation, you should be a moral realist. (shrink)

The evolution of economic altruism is one of the most vigorous areas of study at the intersection of biology, economics, and philosophy. The basic problem is easily understood. Biological organisms, be they people or paramecia, have ample opportunity to confer benefits on others at relatively low cost to themselves. If conferring such benefits becomes common, the overall productivity of the population in which it occurs is increased. Presumably, there is no advantage to refusing such benefits, but it is also the (...) case that there is considerable advantage to pursuing a strategy according to which such benefits are accepted, but not conferred. In populations where individuals interact at random with others and when individuals play pure strategies (i.e., they always confer or do not confer benefits), the inevitable outcome is that altruistic behavior is driven to extinction. (Axelrod 1984) Nonetheless, there is ample evidence that self-sacrificing behavior is common in nature. (Sober and Wilson 1998) Consequently, individuals must not be interacting at random. The pressing question is then: what patterns of non-random interaction are responsible for the prevalence of altruistic behavior, and more theoretically, what sorts of plausible mechanisms exist that could generate the right kind of non- 1 The research reported here was supported by Canada ????? grant # ????? and the Centre for Applied Ethics at the University of British Columbia. (shrink)

The concept of information tempts us as a theoretical primitive, partly because of the respectability lent to it by highly successful applications of Shannon’s information theory, partly because of its broad range of applicability in various domains, partly because of its neutrality with respect to what basic sorts of things there are. This versatility, however, is the very reason why information cannot be the theoretical primitive we might like it to be. “Information,” as it is variously used, is systematically ambiguous (...) between whether it involves continuous or discrete quantities, causal or noncausal relationships, and intrinsic or relational properties. Many uses can be firmly grounded in existing theory, however. Continuous quantities of information involving probabilities can be related to information theory proper. Information defined relative to systems of rules or conventions can be understood relative to the theory of meaning . A number of causal notions may possibly be located relative to standard notions in physics. Precise specification of these distinct properties involved in the common notion of information can allow us to map the relationships between them. Consequently, while information is not in itself the kind of single thing that can play a significant unifying role, analyzing its ambiguities may facilitate headway toward that goal. (shrink)

Telenomic Agency: Towards a proper functions theory of normativity (pdf) is a recent paper on the biological basis of normativity. This paper attempts to show that the notion of biological function/malfunction has more to offer our understanding of genuine agency than is usually acknowledged. It is suggested that moral and rational normativity attach to signals in very specific biological regulatory systems, and that the complexity of these systems accounts for much of the phenomenological richness of agency, as well as showing (...) the error in standard counterexamples. If this is correct, it turns out that the incommensurability between "is" and "ought" may be due to the requirements of the systems within which descriptive and overtly normative language have their biologically normative roles, rather than to any incompleteness in naturalistic accounts. One consequence is that moral language can have objective (and naturalistically specifiable) truth conditions, without special moral facts and without reducibility to naturalistic description. (shrink)

Stories about near-death experiences draw much attention from the general public and are extensively discussed by medical doctors and neuroscientists. However, though eschatology belongs to their core business, only few theologians participate in the debate. This article proposes a theological interpretation of NDEs as ‘private revelations’. I first give a critical analysis of the development of the modern, allegedly ‘scientific’, concept of NDE. This concept changes concrete personal testimonies into statistical data that are used as scientific evidence for the existence (...) of an immortal soul. Next, the main criticisms against this concept from neurosciences, study of mysticism and philosophy of mind are discussed. Finally, I argue that ‘private revelation’ is a useful model for a theological understanding of NDEs and that an analogy from Thomas Aquinas’ view on prophetic dreams can help to account for the specific circumstance of imminent death. The interpretation I propose can do justice to the impression NDEs make on people, but can also accept and meet some of the most important criticisms raised against the modern concept of NDEs. (shrink)

In this paper I investigate the similarities betweenthe dialectical procedure in the pragma-dialecticaltheory and dialectical procedures in AI and Law. I dothis by focusing on one specific type of reasoning inlaw: analogy argumentation. I will argue that analogyargumentation is not only a heuristic forfinding new premises, but also a part of thejustification of legal decisions. The relevantcriteria for the evaluation of analogy argumentationare not to be found at the logical level of inference,but at the procedural level of the discussion. I (...) willproceed as follows. I start with an outline ofPrakken's theory of argumentation frameworks andprocedural models. Then, I will discuss Peczenik'sanalysis of analogy argumentation and try to combineit with the descriptive-normative research ofMacCormick and Summers. Finally, I propose asystematization of the criteria for the evaluation ofanalogy argumentation within the framework of apragma-dialectical notion of an argumentation scheme. (shrink)

Specialist Sport Programs are an underexamined activity that combines the best features of two different contexts for adolescent development: a sporting program and a secondary school. A mixed-methods study was conducted to determine the influence of participation in SSPs on the educational outcomes of lower secondary students in Western Australia. The results demonstrated a significant improvement in specialist students' mean grade for Mathematics over the course of a year, while their mean grade for all other subjects, and their level of (...) engagement with school, remained stable over the same period of time. Semi-structured interviews were also conducted with key stakeholders. Overall, the participants felt that SSPs had a positive influence on students' engagement with school, and that this engagement had a positive impact on their academic achievement. Taken together, the results of this research suggest that there is a role for SSPs in promoting positive educational outcomes for lower secondary students attending public schools located in low SES areas. (shrink)

Information about the environment is captured in human biological systems on a variety of interacting levels – in distributions of genes, linguistic particulars, concepts, methods, theories, preferences, and overt behaviors. I investigate some of the basic principles which govern such a hierarchy by constructing a comparatively simple three-level selection model of bee foraging preferences and behaviors. The information-theoretic notion of ''''mutual information'''' is employed as a measure of efficiency in tracking a changing environment, and its appropriateness in epistemological applications is (...) discussed at some length. In particular, information accumulated in mid-level preference distributions exhibits suggestive properties for the purposes of naturalistic epistemology. It also appears that the novelty of scientific objects and representations and the rapidity of scientific change relative to genetic change need present no obstacle to the use of such models in explanations of scientific progress and the reliability of scientific judgement. (shrink)

Research on abusive supervision is imbalanced in two ways. First, with most research attention focused on the destructive consequences of abusive supervision, there has been relatively little work on subordinate-related predictors of perceptions of abusive supervision. Second, with most research on abusive supervision centered on its main effects and the moderating effects of supervisor-related factors, there is little understanding of how subordinate factors can moderate the main effects of perceptions of abusive supervision on workplace outcomes. The current study aims to (...) advance knowledge of the roles of subordinates in the formation of and reactions to perceptions of abusive supervision. Specifically, based on victim precipitation theory, the authors examined subordinates’ personality traits and self-reports of task performance as antecedents of perceptions of abusive supervision. The results show that subordinates high in neuroticism or low in conscientiousness had high levels of perceived abusive supervision partially through their self-reported deleterious job performance. In addition, the authors investigated the moderating effect of subordinates’ personality on the relationship between perceptions of abusive supervision and subordinates’ interpersonal deviance. Consistent with trait activation theory, subordinates low in both agreeableness and extraversion were more likely to engage in deviant behaviors in response to perceptions of abusive supervision than subordinates high in either or both agreeableness and extraversion. (shrink)

Este ensayo presenta una panorámica general y un análisis de la visión que sustenta el empleo de los métodos cualitativos, incluyéndose su aplicación a la investigación en Administración. Bajo los planteamientos de un monismo metodológico, la aportación de conclusiones no generalizables y de subjetividad inherente de tales métodos se considera limitada; mientras que para los adherentes al constructivismo y al pluralismo, es de gran valía en la exploración de la profundidad de los fenómenos de estas disciplinas. En sí, prevalece en (...) el medio una falta de consensos incluso con respecto a qué son los métodos cualitativos y qué son las técnicas cualitativas de investigación, derivada del uso indistinto que dan algunos autores a esos términos; lo que aunado a la cantidad y diversidad de métodos cualitativos crea dificultades para comprender qué es en realidad la investigación cualitativa.This essay presents a general outlook and an analysis of the rationale behind the use of qualitative methods, including their being applied in research in Management. According to the views of methodological monism, the contribution of the conclusions which these methods yield, which are essentially subjective and not susceptible of being generalized, is considered too limited; while for advocates of constructivism and pluralism they are valuable in probing the depth of the phenomena of these disciplines. In fact, a lack of consensus prevails in these areas even in connection with what are qualitative methods and what are qualitative research techniques, associated to an indistinct use of these terms by some authors; which together with the number and diversity of qualitative methods makes it difficult to understand what actually is qualitative research. (shrink)

Philosophers spend a lot of time worrying about rules. We worry about how one ought to live, about the rules of justification for beliefs and actions, about what it would be like if the rules of reason were rigorously followed, about what the rules are for scientific enquiry, about which rules govern the meaning of signs and the intentions of agents, and so on. Sometimes, we argue that there are no such rules as most of us want to believe there (...) are, rules which apply to all of us collectively and to each of us individually, which are beyond our ability to change, and whose violation is in some simple sense wrong. To this we often respond that without such rules we are all made somehow less, that our normative deliberations are a sham, or even that the whole business of living becomes somehow pointless. (shrink)

This paper examines how expertise is treated as a separable domain of epistemics by looking at simulated intensive care shift-handovers between resident physicians. In these handovers, medical information about a patient is transferred from an outgoing physician to an incoming physician. These handovers contain different interactional activities, such as discussing the patient identifiers, giving a clinical impression, and discussing tasks and focus points. We found that with respect to knowledge about the patient, the OPs display an orientation to a knowledge (...) imbalance, but with respect to procedures, reasoning, and activities, they display an orientation to a knowledge balance. We use ‘expertise’ to refer to this latter type of knowledge. ‘Expertise’ differs from, and adds to, how knowledge is often treated in epistemics in that it is concerned with professional competence or ‘knowing how’. In terms of epistemics, the participants in the handovers orient to a steep epistemic or knowledge gradient when it concerns the patient, while simultaneously displaying an orientation to a horizontal expertise gradient. (shrink)

Girls have much lower mathematics self-efficacy than boys, a likely contributor to the underrepresentation of women in STEM. To help explain this gender confidence gap, we examined predictors of mathematics self-efficacy in a sample of 1,007 9th graders aged 13–18 years (54.2% girls). Participants completed a standardized math test, after which they rated three indices of mastery: an affective component (state self-esteem), a meta-cognitive component (self-enhancement), and their prior math grade. Despite having similar grades, girls reported lower mathematics self-efficacy and (...) state self-esteem, and were less likely than boys to self-enhance in terms of performance. Multilevel multiple-group regression analyses showed that the affective mastery component explained girls’ self-efficacy while cognitive self-enhancement explained boys’. Yet, a chi-square test showed that both constructs were equally relevant in the prediction of girls’ and boys’ self-efficacy. Measures of interpersonal sources of self-efficacy were not predictive of self-efficacy after taking the other dimensions into account. Results suggest that boys are advantaged in their development of mathematics self-efficacy beliefs, partly due to more positive feelings and more cognitive self-enhancement following test situations. (shrink)

Ten years ago, researchers using event-related brain potentials to study language comprehension were puzzled by what looked like a Semantic Illusion: Semantically anomalous, but structurally well-formed sentences did not affect the N400 component—traditionally taken to reflect semantic integration—but instead produced a P600 effect, which is generally linked to syntactic processing. This finding led to a considerable amount of debate, and a number of complex processing models have been proposed as an explanation. What these models have in common is that they (...) postulate two or more separate processing streams, in order to reconcile the Semantic Illusion and other semantically induced P600 effects with the traditional interpretations of the N400 and the P600. Recently, however, these multi-stream models have been called into question, and a simpler single-stream model has been proposed. According to this alternative model, the N400 component reflects the retrieval of word meaning from semantic memory, and the P600 component indexes the integration of this meaning into the unfolding utterance interpretation. In the present paper, we provide support for this “Retrieval–Integration ” account by instantiating it as a neurocomputational model. This neurocomputational model is the first to successfully simulate the N400 and P600 amplitude in language comprehension, and simulations with this model provide a proof of concept of the single-stream RI account of semantically induced patterns of N400 and P600 modulations. (shrink)

Environmental, social and ethical issues have become increasingly important for businesses due to changed customer expectations, more regulation and stakeholder pressure, amongst others. This led to the development of concepts such as sustainability management, corporate social responsibility, stakeholder management and business ethics. Though mostly developed in isolation, scholars have increasingly worked on their integration. This editorial sheds light on overlaps between these concepts. We find that sustainability management and CSR have become more integrated and are increasingly grounded in an “embedded (...) view“ in which business and society is part of the natural environment. In contrast, business ethics has not been integrated to the same extent, expect for the subfield of environmental ethics. After this general overview, we introduce the individual contributions to the special issue which are advancing the conceptual and empirical foundation of sustainability management, CSR, and business ethics. (shrink)

Non-Identity arguments have a pervasive but sometimes counter-intuitive grip on certain key areas in ethics. As a result, there has been limited success in supporting the alternative view that our choices concerning future generations can be considered harmful on any sort of person-affecting principle. However, as the Non-Identity Problem relies overtly on certain metaphysical assumptions, plausible alternatives to these foundations can substantially undermine the Non-Identity argument itself. In this paper, I show how the pervasive force and nature of Non-Identity arguments (...) rely upon a specific adoption of a theory of modality and identity and how adopting an alternative account of modality can be used to reject many conclusions formed through Non-Identity type arguments. By using Lewis’s counterpart-theoretic account to understand ways we might have been, I outline the basis of a modal account of harm that incorporates a person-affecting aspect. This, in turn, has significant implications for ethical decision-making in areas such as reproductive choice and the welfare of future generations. (shrink)

BackgroundIn about one in 10,000 cases, a published article is retracted. This very often means that the results it reports are flawed. Several authors have voiced concerns about the presence of retracted research in the memory of science. In particular, a retracted result is propagated by citing it. In the published literature, many instances are given of retracted articles that are cited both before and after their retraction. Even worse is the possibility that these articles in turn are cited in (...) such a way that the retracted result is propagated further.MethodsWe have conducted a case study to find out how a retracted article is cited and whether retracted results are propagated through indirect citations. We have constructed the entire citation network for this case.ResultsWe show that directly citing articles is an important source of propagation of retracted research results. In contrast, in our case study, indirect citations do not contribute to the propagation of the retracted result.ConclusionsWhile admitting the limitations of a study involving a single case, we think there are reasons for the non-contribution of indirect citations that hold beyond our case study. (shrink)

The terms 'transcendence' and 'immanence' are often used casually and as self-evident. The spatial imagery contained in their meaning determines the way they are understood and used: as opposites, like 'there' and 'here'. As a consequence, the two concepts are seen as mutually exclusive when applied to God's being and to his activity and presence in our world and in our history. This view on the relationship between God and world is characteristic not only of deism and pantheism, but also (...) of theism. However, in the view of Thomas Aquinas, such an opposition cannot adequately capture the central tenets of the Christian faith. This book explores Aquinas' thought on transcendence and immanence in his discussions of creation, analogy, the Trinity, grace and Christ, and offers interpretations in which God's transcendence and his immanence do not exclude but imply one another. >br/>The papers contained in this volume were originally presented at the third international conference of the Thomas Instituut at Utrecht in 2005. (shrink)

During the last two decades virtue ethics has become the focal point of renewed ethical and theological interest. To lead a good life, it proves useful to watch those who have mastered the art of living. The conviction that living is an art is at the heart of virtue ethics. Living a good life requires exercise, and is a question of acquiring a virtuous character rather than of complying with external ethical and legal rules. This renaissance partly builds on Thomas (...) Aquinas. He in turn recovered Aristotelian, Ciceronian and Augustinian thought on virtue ethics. The interpretation and development of virtues and vices form the core of his authorship, as the 'secunda pars' of his 'Summa Theologiae' readily displays. And yet, the most important virtues for him are not the moral ones, such as Justice, Temperance, Prudence and Fortitude, but those virtues that are both infused by and aimed at God: Faith, Hope and Love. These are virtues that the philosophers of antiquity were not aware of. To account for them, Aquinas had to adapt the classical understanding of virtues. For Aquinas, the moral virtues come to full fruition only when they are embedded in a life before God, a life lived exercising the God given theological virtues. By ignoring Faith, Hope and Love, the present discussion of virtue ethics not only ignores those virtues that were for Aquinas of utmost importance, but also fails to arrive at a complete understanding of his view of the moral virtues. (shrink)

This article addresses the long-standing problem of how to understand Mill’s famous harm principle in light of his failure to specify what counts as “harm” in On Liberty. I argue that standard accounts restricting “harm” to only certain negative consequences fail to do justice to the text, and that this fact forces us to rethink Mill’s defense of individual liberty. I then offer a new account of that defense in which “harm” is understood in an expansive sense, despite apparent problems (...) for such a view. (shrink)

It is often said that while we have a strong reason not to create someone who will be badly off, we have no strong reason for creating someone who will be well off. In this paper I argue that this asymmetry is incompatible with a plausible principle of independence of irrelevant alternatives, and that a more general asymmetry between harming and benefiting is difficult to defend. I then argue that, contrary to what many have claimed, it is possible to harm (...) or benefit someone by bringing her into existence. (shrink)

The justification for restrictive state intervention (RSI) such as criminal punishment or state reversal of parental decisions is called a limiting, or intervention (Buchanan and Brock 1989, 10), p...

Many think that it would be wrong to defend an individual from attack if he competently and explicitly refuses defensive intervention. In this paper, I consider the extent to which the preferences of victims affect the permissibility of defending groups or aggregates. These cases are interesting and difficult because there is no straightforward sense in which a group can univocally consent to or refuse defensive intervention in the same way that an individual can. Among those who have considered this question, (...) the dominant view is that that consent imposes only an extremely weak constraint on defending groups. I argue that this is mistaken and defend a much more robust requirement. Indeed, on the account that I develop there are cases in which the refusal of a single member of a victim is enough to make it impermissible to defend a much larger group. At the heart of my account is the idea that consent functions as an internal component of the broader requirement that defensive harms be proportionate: if a victim validly refuses defensive intervention, the fact that defence will benefit him cannot be used to justify harming innocents as the lesser-evil. An important implication of this view is that what constitutes sufficient consent from the members of a victim group will vary on a case-by-case basis. (shrink)

Two experiments examined similarities and differences in the effects of consciously and unconsciously perceived rewards on the active maintenance of goal-relevant information. Participants could gain high and low monetary rewards for performance on a word span task. The reward value was presented supraliminally or subliminally at different stages during the task. In Experiment 1, rewards were presented before participants processed the target words. Enhanced performance was found in response to higher rewards, regardless whether they were presented supraliminally or subliminally. In (...) Experiment 2, rewards were presented after participants processed the target words, i.e., during maintenance. Performance increased in response to relatively high rewards when they were presented subliminally, but decreased when they were presented supraliminally. We conclude that both consciously and unconsciously perceived rewards boost resources supporting the maintenance of task-relevant information. Conscious processing of rewards can, however, heavily interfere with an ongoing maintenance process and impair performance. (shrink)

Robert Sparrow argues that genome editing is unlikely to be person-affecting for the foreseeable future and, as a result, will neither benefit nor harm edited individuals. We regard Sparrow’...

Across a variety of situations, people strongly condemn plagiarizers who steal credit for ideas, even when the theft in question does not appear to harm anyone. Why would people react negatively to relatively harmless acts of plagiarism? In six experiments, we predict and find that these negative reactions are driven by people's aversion toward agents who attempt to falsely improve their reputations. In Studies 1–3, participants condemn plagiarism cases that they agree are harmless. This effect is mediated by the extent (...) to which participants perceive the plagiarizer to have falsely benefitted from plagiarizing. In Studies 4–5, we demonstrate that this effect is not explained solely by participants’ negative response to lies or violations of permission. In Study 6, participants condemn a plagiarism case in which the idea's original author actually benefits, providing the strongest evidence that people condemn plagiarism for reasons beyond perceived harm. We discuss how this work connects to broader questions of intellectual property and impression management. (shrink)

untangled and ordered in a theoretical framework focusing on evaluations doing no harm, tackling bad and doing good. Divided into four parts a diverse group of subject experts present a practical look at ethics, utilizing practical experience to analyze how ethics have been applied in evaluations, and how new approaches can shape the future of ethics. The chapters collectively create a common understanding of the potential role of ethics to infuse policy decisions and stakeholder initiatives with evaluations that provide better (...) insight and potential solutions for problems, going beyond "what works" to what needs to be done and what would help. The methodological scope ranges from working in contexts of fragility, conflict and violence, to participatory and decolonised approaches, including the ethical imperatives posed by global crises such as climate change, inequity and exploitative international relations. Ethics for Evaluation presents evaluators, commissioners of evaluation, policy makers and practitioners with inspiration for an ethical perspective on how evaluation can contribute towards solving problems. It presents a solid foundation for inclusive terminology and ethics guidance that would be the heart of a global exercise in professionalization of ethical evaluation practice. (shrink)

It is common in attempts to extend the theory of evolution to culture to generalize from the causal basis of biological evolution, so that evolutionary theory becomes the theory of copying processes. Generalizing from the formal dynamics of evolution allows greater leeway in what kinds of things cultural entities can be, if they are to evolve. By understanding the phenomenon of cultural transmission in terms of coordinated phenotypic variability, we can have a theory of cultural evolution which allows us to (...) avoid the various difficulties with the elaboration of informational entities such as the cultural replicator, or meme. Such an account is a boon to the project of evolutionary epistemology since it confirms the presumption in favor of the general adaptiveness of culture, illuminating rather than obscuring the inherent intimacy of our relationship to (e.g.) our ideas. (shrink)

In Responding to Global Poverty, Christian Barry and Gerhard Øverland argue that, while exploitation is morally problematic, responsibilities not to exploit are characteristically less stringent than responsibilities not to harm. They even suggest that exploiters’ responsibilities to assist the exploited may be weaker than the responsibilities of culpable bystanders who are able to help the poor but fail to do so We think Barry and Øverland underestimate the prospects of the exploitation argument. In our paper, we suggest that exploitation can (...) plausibly be understood as a kind of harm. If exploitation harms, then it requires special justification and can generate stringent responsibilities not to exploit that have a different ground than those generated by morally culpable failures to assist. This suggests an important way to rehabilitate arguments for poverty relief on the basis of a duty not to harm, and that there is more interesting territory to explore than Barry and Øverland’s arguments suggest. (shrink)

There is strong evidence suggesting that harm reduction policies are able to reduce the adverse health and social consequences of drug use. However, in this article I will compare two different countries to demonstrate that some social aspects lead to the adoption or rejection of harm reduction policies. In this case, countries where drugs are seen as a security concern are less likely to adopt these harm reduction policies. For that purpose, I will compare Colombia and Uruguay’s political, normative, and (...) social aspects, which are considered drivers in the adoption of harm reduction policies, as well as how those factors influence the treatments available for substance abuse disorders. (shrink)

While standard forms of discrimination are widely considered morally wrong, philosophers disagree about what makes them so. Two accounts have risen to prominence in this debate: One stressing how wrongful discrimination disrespects the discriminatee, the other how the harms involved make discrimination wrong. While these accounts are based on carefully constructed thought experiments, proponents of both sides see their positions as in line with and, in part, supported by the folk theory of the moral wrongness of discrimination. This article (...) presents a vignette-based experiment to test empirically what, in the eyes of “folks”, makes discrimination wrong. Interestingly, we find that, according to folks, both disrespect and harm make discrimination wrong. Our findings offer some support for a pluralistic account of the wrongness of discrimination over both monist respect-based and monist harm-based accounts. (shrink)

One important issue in moral psychology concerns the proper characterisation of the folk understanding of the relationship between harmful transgressions and moral transgressions. Psychologist Elliot Turiel and associates have claimed with a broad range of supporting evidence that harmful transgressions are understood as transgressions that are authority independent and general in scope which, according to them, characterises these transgressions as moral transgressions. Recently many researchers questioned the position advocated by the Turiel tradition with some new evidence. We entered this debate (...) proposing an original, deflationary view in which perceptions of basic-rights violation and injustice are fundamental for the folk understanding of harmful transgressions as moral transgressions in Turiel's sense. In this article we elaborate and refine our deflationary view, while reviewing the debate, addressing various criticisms raised against our perspective, showing how our perspective explains the existent evidence, and suggesting new lines of inquiry. (shrink)

In legal decisions standpoints can be supported by formal and also by substantive interpretative arguments. Formal arguments consist of reasons the weight or force of which is essentially dependent on the authoritativeness that the reasons may also have: In this connection one may think of linguistic and systemic arguments. On the other hand, substantive arguments are not backed up by authority, but consist of a direct invocation of moral, political, economic, or other social considerations. Formal arguments can be analyzed as (...) exclusionary reasons: The authoritative character excludes—in principle—substantial counterarguments. Formal arguments are sometimes used to conceal value judgements based on substantial arguments. This paper deals with reconstructing problems regarding this strategic use of formal arguments in legal decisions, with a focus on linguistic argumentation. (shrink)