Much of the sustained attention on pandemic preparedness has focused on the ethical justification for plans for the “crisis” phase of a surge when, despite augmentation efforts, the demand for life...

The authors use empirical research into the environmental practices of 31 manufacturing small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to show that ‚business performance’ and ‚regulation’ considerations drive behaviour. They suggest that this is inevitable, given the market-based decision-making frames that permeate and dominate the industry in which manufacturing SMEs operate. Since the environment is a pillar of corporate social responsibility (CSR), the findings have important implications for CSR policy, which promotes voluntary actions predicated on a business case. It is argued that (...) this approach will not alter the behaviour of manufacturing SMEs significantly because CSR practice will be regarded as an optional and costly ‚extra’ affecting core business activity. Consequently, the use and development of existing regulatory structures, providing minimum standards for many activities covered by CSR, remains the most effective means through which the behaviour of manufacturing SMEs will be changed in the short to medium-term. Another feature of the paper is the distinction made between ‚business performance’ and the ‚business case’ argument. Business performance emphasises cost reductions and efficiency whereas the business case accentuates the benefits to shareholders of good practices as their firms become more attractive to stakeholders and society. Manufacturing SMEs␣try to improve business performance because of the pressures placed on them by market-dominated decision-making frames. These frames do not encourage manufacturing SMEs to undertake voluntary actions for the benefit of wider stakeholders and society. (shrink)

I develop an account of naturalness in physics which demonstrates that naturalness assumptions are not restricted to narrow cases in high-energy physics but are a ubiquitous part of how interlevel relations are derived in physics. After exploring how and to what extent we might justify such assumptions on methodological grounds or through appeal to speculative future physics, I consider the apparent failure of naturalness in cosmology and in the Standard Model. I argue that any such naturalness failure threatens to undermine (...) the entire structure of our understanding of intertheoretic reduction, and so risks a much larger crisis in physics than is sometimes suggested; I briefly review some currently-popular strategies that might avoid that crisis. (shrink)

Is it rational to be moral? How do rationality and morality fit together with being human? These questions are at the heart of David Schmidtz's exploration of the connections between rationality and morality. This inquiry leads into both metaethics and rational choice theory, as Schmidtz develops conceptions of what it is to be moral and what it is to be rational. He defends a fairly expansive conception of rational choice, considering how ends as well as means can be rationally (...) chosen and explaining the role of self-imposed constraints in a rational life plan. His moral theory is dualistic, ranging over social structure as well as personal conduct and building both individual and collective rationality into its rules of recognition for morals. To the "why be moral" question, Schmidtz responds that being moral is rational, but he does not assume we have reasons to be rational. Instead, Schmidtz argues that being moral is rational in a particular way and that beings like us in situations like ours have reasons to be rational in just that way. This approach allows him to identify decisive reasons to be moral; at the same time, it explains why immorality is as prevalent as it is. This book thus offers a set of interesting and realistic conclusions about how morality fits into the lives of humanly rational agents operating in an institutional context like our own. (shrink)

I develop an account of how mathematized theories in physics represent physical systems, in response to the frequent claim that any such account must presuppose a non-mathematized, and usually linguistic, description of the system represented. The account I develop contains a circularity, in that representation is a mathematical relation between the models of a theory and the system as represented by some other model --- but I argue that this circularity is not vicious, in any case refers in linguistic accounts (...) of meaning and representation, and is simply a consequence of the fact that we have no unmediated, representation-independent access to the world. (shrink)

(1a) If Prince Albert Victor killed those people, he is Jack the Ripper (and Jack the Ripper killed those people). (1b) If Prince Albert Victor had killed those people, Jack the Ripper wouldn't have (and Prince Albert wouldn't have been Jack the Ripper).

In some logics, anything whatsoever follows from a contradiction; call these logics explosive. Paraconsistent logics are logics that are not explosive. Paraconsistent logics have a long and fruitful history, and no doubt a long and fruitful future. To give some sense of the situation, I’ll spend Section 1 exploring exactly what it takes for a logic to be paraconsistent. It will emerge that there is considerable open texture to the idea. In Section 2, I’ll give some examples of techniques for (...) developing paraconsistent logics. In Section 3, I’ll discuss what seem to me to be some promising applications of certain paraconsistent logics. In fact, however, I don’t think there’s all that much to the concept ‘paraconsistent’ itself; the collection of paraconsistent logics is far too heterogenous to be very productively dealt with under a single label. Perhaps that will emerge as we go. (shrink)

Dan Korman and Dustin Locke argue that non-naturalists are rationally committed to withhold moral belief. A main principle in their argument, which they call EC*, can be read in either of two ways, which I call EC*-narrow and EC*-wide. I show that EC*-narrow is implausible. Then I show that, if Korman and Locke rely on EC*-wide to critique non-naturalism, then the critique fails. I explain how the availability of a view that I like to call moral occasionalism can be used (...) to respond on the non-naturalist’s behalf to the EC*-wide version of the argument. I also show how moral occasionalism is more useful for this purpose than an alternative third-factor account, namely David Enoch’s pre-established harmony view. (shrink)

The public forum has been connected to the functioning of democracy, expressive freedom, and the media's role in society. While the public forum's legal contours have been examined, the ethical foundation of the public forum has not. Relying on archival research, this article argues that ideas about the public forum can be traced to the pragmatism of Grenville Clark, who influenced ideas about the public forum through his work on the American Bar Association's Bill of Rights Committee.

Background -- Evaluating the worry -- Proposed justifications -- Human interests and human causes -- Our connection to our contribution -- The value of passive contributions -- Implications -- Objections and the potential for abuse.

According to the self-defense view, the moral justification of punishment is derived from the moral justification of an earlier threat of punishment for an offense. According to the forfeiture view, criminals can justly be punished because they have forfeited certain rights in virtue of their crimes. The paper defends three theses about these two views. (1) The self-defense view is false because the right to threaten retaliation is not independent of the right to carry out that threat. (2) A more (...) plausible account of the right to threaten says instead that the right to retaliate is primary to the right to threaten, and that the former right in turn arises because aggressors forfeit the right not to suffer retaliation. (3) The ?fair warning thesis,? according to which just punishment must be preceded by a threat, is less plausible than first appearances suggest and is therefore no serious obstacle to the view of threats described above. (shrink)

Anthropocentrism has been proposed as the underlying cause of modern society's environmental impact. Concomitantly, hunter-gatherers’ orientation towards nature is connected with minimal environmental change or conservation, and seen as validating the idea that ‘what people do about their ecology depends upon what they think about themselves in relation to things around them’ (White 1967: 1205). Here it is argued that the notion that orientation towards nature is instrumental in environmental impact in any generalisable way has little empirical support and, most (...) importantly, is under-theorised and conceptually flawed. Employing a strong structurationist approach, it is shown that the tendency to abstract particular values from their social and environmental context must be resisted and that a deeper conception of the ‘inner lives’ of agents is required. Such an approach is more expansive and engages with a range of other motives as well as the unintended environmental consequences of actions. (shrink)

Hefty and serious—that is how this book feels when you pick it up. That was my subjective aesthetic experience anyway. Aesthetic judgment is, after all, one key to assessing our thoughts and perceptions. More on that soon, as you might expect.Hefty and serious also describes the questions with which the volume grapples: Is there, or can there be, a clear American Aesthetics, not merely aesthetics practiced by Americans? What would that look like? How would such a process affect the minds (...) and actions of Americans?The answers? It's complicated.The twenty essays in this volume trace the possibility of an American Aesthetics from foundational ideas of the past to the contemporary landscape. The goal is not only articulating an aesthetics that is distinctively American—aesthetics as a method for examining the arts and the artful—but also the possibility of aesthetics as a dynamic tool for pursuing a flourishing life within our hyper-capitalist, consumerist culture.Constant amongst the scholars gathered here is the assertion that aesthetics is not an abstract academic pursuit interesting only to the privileged and interested few but rather that aesthetics is the key element in the human pursuit of meaning and purpose in our lives. Aristotle would approve!Speaking of ancestors, the scholars here trace the work of grandparents such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Pierce, and William James, and parents such as the pragmatist John Dewey and the process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. (Whitehead is from the UK but “American” in that he died in the US after a long career at Harvard and wrote his magnum opus, Process and Reality, in the US.) From these ancestors, the scholars gathered in this volume see a path forward: Art as conscious experience, as Dewey posited, and/or art as committed immersion in the process, as Whitehead claimed.Whitehead's process approach—process aesthetics—reminds us that each moment of our experience in this at once mundane and amazing world is an occasion of beauty and a telos—each moment is in the larger process of reality quite literally our last.William James attempted to map how we might free ourselves from the everyday and from everyday-ness: “We are stuffed with abstract conceptions, and glib verbalities and verbosities and in the culture of these higher functions the peculiar sources of joy connected with our simpler functions often dry up” (109). Yet, according to James, there is hope due to the fact that we human beings seek art and do art first and foremost because we enjoy it.Enjoyment was not the angle from which John Dewey approached the subject. According to Dewey our aesthetic reactions and interactions create the experience of art (and life) that re-accesses “an underlying harmony... that we vaguely remember” (112). For pragmatists, noticing a “thing” is entering a relationship with that thing, what David Strong terms in his essay, “correlational coexistence” (371).From these building blocks the scholars assembled propose ways to change US culture from one prone to ask, “What does it do?” into one in which it is increasingly possible to ask, “What does it mean?” This would be a fundamental shift in the dominant paradigms in US culture.How to get there? Randall E. Auxier offers a concise definition of “bad”—bad is something that is “lifeless and too much indebted to the actual.” My attempts at singing fall into that category, as do many American experiences conceived in the mode of what they do, not what they mean.That works of art escape or repel descriptions of their constitutive elements has proven to be a persistent philosophical conundrum through the centuries, as has the question of whether human feelings create an object or an object creates feelings, or both/and—Dewey's interaction of “organism and environment.” From whichever philosophical direction we approach this crux, aesthetic thinking can lead us to recognize and experience the inwardness of what we view as things—objects—and this examination can realign our personal axiology—our personal valuation of reality—the “ten thousand things” of ancient Chinese philosophy.Several authors cite Suzanne Langer's theory of symbol, broadening the scope of “art” well beyond Art with a capital A into the aesthetic and the ritualistic.The scholars gathered here are optimistic that aesthetic examination can create more of those rare moments (moments art can reliably create) in which our very being adjusts to the reality of existence, and we feel exhilarated and a part of the whole process of existence. We call this “nirvana” or “enlightenment.”That is another thing that feels hefty about this volume: the persistent optimism among the scholars that psychic wholeness and human flourishing are possible for more Americans. Robert S. Corrington terms this the “selving process,” roughly what Carl Jung termed “individuation.” This collection adds up to much more than the sum of its parts, as one idea inflected in a particular way by one author sparks off the same idea approached from a different perspective in another. This collection contains scholars on the cutting edge of process theology, pragmatism, aesthetics, and religion, many of whom are adept at crossing the traditional fences between academic fields. The US needs an American Aesthetics. As American poet William Carlos Williams wrote,It is difficultto get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lackof what is found there. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Classical Art: A Life History DAVID CAST This is a wonderful book, rich in its purposes, wide in its range and, thanks to the author’s home institution, Christ’s College, Cambridge, lavishly illustrated with images of objects, many familiar, some less so. And it is written with an elegance and clarity that belies the depths of scholarship in its history. The first letter of the subtitle suggests the (...) tenor of Vout’s account, that since every age has conjured up a different idea of the classical, what is here is yet one more such history, a modest if particular account of what was and is still there in the records made of the Greek and Roman past. The basic metaphor Vout uses to define the focus of this history is that of conversation, whether such conversing is seen to exist between the objects themselves or between the past and the present, between those objects that have outgrown their intended functions to become part of a canon that has dictated taste over the ages, as she puts it, shaping culture and culture’s questions. Thus conversation is here, plus also what Vout is not afraid, when necessary, to call the misappropriations and translocations of the Greek and Roman objects she takes note of. Yet another contribution she adds to the idea of the classical comes from what she calls, perhaps a little awkwardly, the long durée approach to its subjects, seen first when these objects were produced, then as they survived Christianity and the fall of Rome and Byzantium, the French Revolution, modernism and fascism, to live Caroline Vout, Classical Art: A Life History from Antiquity to the Present, Princeton University Press, 2018. xi + 376 pages; 80 color + 132 b/w illustrations. $39.50. ISBN 9780691177038; E-book ISBN9781400890279. arion 27.1 spring/summer 2019 on in galleries and auction rooms, making the heart soar and the blood boil, as Vout claims, even today. It is a complex story she has to tell, difficult yet valuable, and its method is nicely exemplified by the first example considered, the two statues, known as the Tyrannicides, dated to 477–476 BCE, and located now in the National Archaeological Museum in Naples, attributed on the museum caption to the sculptors Kritios and Nesiotes, and dated to 477–476 BCE. The details here are crucial for, on investigation, it is clear these are not the statues that were erected in the Athenian agora to honor the men, Harmodius and Aristogeiton, who, by tradition, had killed the tyrant’s brother Hipparchus. Yet even this second group, as she notes, had been a stand-in, since the first piece to honor these men, made by the sculptor Antenor, had been stolen by the Persians in the sack of Athens in 480–479 BCE. Nor is this group here the actual second group but rather a copy, made by an unknown copyist working under the Roman Empire. What we have here are what might be called pretenders—yet ones, despite doubts about their authenticity, that have long been taken to mark a particular moment in the formal history of Greek art, the advent of the so-called Severe style in Athens and the birth of the classical moment of sculpture. Any full account of these statues depends then on a rich history, plus a range of other events; the existence of ancient casts of the Tyrannicides during the Roman Empire, marking out such statues as art, rather than having still their first meaning; the prior history in the Renaissance of the acquisition of ancient sculpture as a sign of power; the sight of the figure of Aristogeiton, then in the Palazzo Farnese in Rome, by Johann Joachim Winckelmann; the building up of these statues from fragments of other statues; in 1859 the identification of these figures as the Tyrannicides; and finally a reading of classical texts, those of Pausanias, Pliny and Lucian, that spoke, even if in contradictory ways, of all the actors here, Antenor, Kritios and Aristogeiton. To which should be added the recent accounts of these pieces, provided by schol172 classical art: a life history ars of classical art like Brunilde Ridgway, R. T... (shrink)

In this paper I criticize the standard argument for deontological egalitarianism, understood as the thesis that there is a moral claim to have an equal share of well-being or whatever other good counts. That argument is based on the idea that equals should be treated equally. I connect the debate over egalitarianism with that over comparative justice. A common theme is a general skepticism against comparative claims. I argue (i) that there can be no claim to equality based simply on (...) the fact of equal worth as that fact itself does not have any value for the supposed claim holder; and (ii) intuitions that suggest otherwise can be explained away without appealing to comparative claims. (shrink)

Investigation into the history of the Talmud was sparked by the Karaite rebellion against the authority of the Talmud at the beginning of the eighth century. The most influential work of Talmudic chronology is the Iggeret de-Rav Sherira Gaon , composed in 986, which sought to explain how the Mishnah and the Talmud were compiled, and demonstrate the unbroken chain of the tradition. Maimonides gives a summary of the history of the tradition in his Commentary to the Mishnah. Although Maimonides' (...) reconstruction is an artificial one, with no attempt to verify sources or test their reliability, he stated that the Babylonian Talmud was compiled about one hundred years after the Jerusalem Talmud; in cases of disagreement, therefore, the rulings of the Babylonian Talmud were the ones adopted by the post-Talmudic Halakhah. The French glossators, or Tosafists, argued that a law in the Talmud could be changed when the original circumstances in which it was promulgated were no longer evident. More objective, critical historical accounts have been given by more modern scholars, particularly Yon Tov Lippmann Heller, Jeheil Heilprin, and Hayyim Joseph David Agulai. (shrink)

Plato and Aristotle on the vocation of the philosopher -- Halevi's Kuzari as a platonic dialogue -- Maimonides and the imagination -- Elia del Medigo, Averroes and Averroism -- Paduan Averroism reconsidered -- Philosophy and mysticism -- Maimonides and Spinoza on good and evil -- A note on natural right, nature and reason in Spinoza -- Spinoza and Luzzatto : philosophy and religion -- On the interpretation of Maimonides: the cases of Samuel David Luzzatto and Ahad Haxam -- (...) Harry a. Wolfson as interpreter of medieval thought -- On the limitations of human knowledge. (shrink)

There is an extensive ethical debate regarding the justifiability of doctors nudging towards healthy behaviour and better health-related choices. One line of argument in favour of nudging is based on empirical findings, according to which a healthy majority among the public support nudges. In this paper, we show, based on an experiment we conducted, that, in health-related choices, people’s ethical attitudes to nudging are strongly affected by the point of view from which the nudge is considered. Significant differences have been (...) found between doctors’ ethical attitude to clinical nudging and that of patients. We show how these differences weaken the argument for nudging from public support. Moreover, our findings raise concerns regarding doctors’ ability to nudge ethically according to their own standards, as they may underestimate the degree of harm medical nudges can cause to informed consent, doctor–patient trust and other important ethically relevant features of health-related choices. (shrink)

David Bridges; What’s the use of Meetings?, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 9, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 7–25, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.

This chapter contains sections titled: Avicenna's philosophical achievements: Aristotle and beyond Beyond philosophical articulation: glimpses of wisdom Imprints upon philosophical tradition Concluding remarks.

Social and regional inequality remained of secondary importance in the 2017 House of Representatives election, especially in comparison to national security and constitutional reform. Still, the election victory of the coalition between the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and Kōmeitō was also due to its ability to shape the debate concerning Japan’s political-economic model of growth and inequality. Abenomics and regional revitalization were the dominating policies, which opposition parties criticized without having a real counter-model. A more detailed analysis shows, however, that (...) Abenomics has not yet fulfilled its promise of shared growth, and that the governing coalition’s discursive control over the political-economic agenda has significantly weakened. This creates opportunities for opposition parties in the future. (shrink)

Urbanization in Early and Medieval China: Gazetteers for the City of Suzhou. Translated and introduced by Olivia Milburn. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015. Pp. xx + 360. $50 ; $30.

This chapter contains sections titled: Religious Questions and Metaphysical Questions God of the Philosophers The Kind of Belief that Matters Philosophical Foundations What Metaphysical Reasoning Can Do Belief and Experience Notes.