Using yet untapped resources from moral and political philosophy, this book seeks to answer the question of whether an all good God who is presumed to be all powerful is logically compatible with the degree and amount of moral and natural evil that exists in our world. It is widely held by theists and atheists alike that it may be logically impossible for an all good, all powerful God to create a world with moral agents like ourselves that does not (...) also have at least some moral evil in it. James P. Sterba focuses on the further question of whether God is logically compatible with the degree and amount of moral and natural evil that exists in our world. The negative answer he provides marks a new stage in the age-old debate about God's existence. (shrink)

BackgroundPlagiarism is common and threatens the integrity of the scientific literature. However, its detection is time consuming and difficult, presenting challenges to editors and publishers who are entrusted with ensuring the integrity of published literature.MethodsIn this study, the extent of plagiarism in manuscripts submitted to a major specialty medical journal was documented. We manually curated submitted manuscripts and deemed an article contained plagiarism if one sentence had 80 % of the words copied from another published paper. Commercial plagiarism detection software (...) was utilized and its use was optimized.ResultsIn 400 consecutively submitted manuscripts, 17 % of submissions contained unacceptable levels of plagiarized material with 82 % of plagiarized manuscripts submitted from countries where English was not an official language. Using the most commonly employed commercial plagiarism detection software, sensitivity and specificity were studied with regard to the generated plagiarism score. The cutoff score maximizing both sensitivity and specificity was 15 % (sensitivity 84.8 % and specificity 80.5 %).ConclusionsPlagiarism was a common occurrence among manuscripts submitted for publication to a major American specialty medical journal and most manuscripts with plagiarized material were submitted from countries in which English was not an official language. The use of commercial plagiarism detection software can be optimized by selecting a cutoff score that reflects desired sensitivity and specificity. (shrink)

"In this revisionist study, Young denies that Adams was a reactionary critic of democracy and instead contends that he was an idealistic, though often disappointed, advocate of representative government. Young focuses on Adams's belief that capitalist industrial development during the Gilded Age had debased American ideals and then turns to a careful study of Adams's famous contrast of the unity of medieval society with the fragmentation of modern technological society."--BOOK JACKET.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 7.2 (2002) 27-38 [Access article in PDF] On the Possibility of Grounding a Defense of Ecofeminist Philosophy James P. Sterba It is a pleasure to comment on Karen Warren's excellent book. 1 The book is a treasure trove of discussions in ecofeminist philosophy that I am sure people will be drawing upon for years to come. In the introduction to the book, Warren says (...) that her main goal is to present and defend a particular version of ecofeminist philosophy (xiii). In my brief comments, I want to consider how Warren understands that defense, consider how strong it is, and consider further how one might add to it to make it even stronger.As I was trying to figure out how best to understand Warren's defense of ecofeminist philosophy, I kept being reminded of Warren's conception of philosophy as quiltmaking. 2 According to this conception, in philosophizing we bring together a wide array of ideas like patches with some prima facie constraining conditions, and we don't quite know what will emerge until we put all the ideas or patches together. Well, I sort of felt that way about Warren's various remarks throughout the book on how she understands herself to be defending a particular version of ecofeminist philosophy. They were like various patches that needed to be brought together to illuminate her defense. Moreover, according to Warren's conception of philosophy as quiltmaking, we will sometimes need to repair or replace certain ideas or patches in our philosophical quilt patches that we [End Page 27] have come to recognize do not fit well with the rest of the quilt. Similarly, when I was trying to bring together Warren's various remarks on how she was defending a particular version of ecofeminist philosophy; some of her remarks did not seem to fit well with her overall purpose of defending ecofeminist philosophy. These remarks did not seem to belong to her own ecofeminist philosophy quilt, or at least they needed to be repaired to make a better fit. But, of course, this is just what one would expect given Warren's quiltmaking conception of doing philosophy; repairing and replacing patches in one's philosophical quilt is business as usual according to Warren's preferred way of doing philosophy. Or, as Warren herself puts it, correcting such mistakes is "simply a lovely and welcome part of the process of theorizing" (102).As her book makes abundantly clear, Warren is against both the domination of women and the domination of nature. Early in the book, she considers how we might defend her perspective against someone who was against the domination of women but not against the domination of nature, presumably because the person did not think that nonhuman nature deserved moral consideration (57). Warren's defense here is to appeal to the very definition of environmental ethics. Warren distinguishes environmental ethics, an ethics of the environment, from an ethics concerning the environment. An environmental ethics, by definition, Warren tells us, takes nonhuman nature to deserve moral consideration whereas an ethics concerning the environment does not. So for those committed to an environmental ethics, so defined, it is not an open question whether to be against the domination of nonhuman nature, or, presumably, the domination of women. They must be against both forms of domination. Now while this part of Warren's defense of ecofeminist philosophy does work to some extent, it is worth noting how close the premises are to the desired conclusion. The defense is directed at those who regard both women and nonhuman nature as deserving moral consideration. The conclusion that is drawn is that those same individuals should be against both the domination of women and against the domination of nonhuman nature.Later in the book, in another related philosophical patch, Warren considers whether she can provide an argument in defense of the moral considerability of nonhuman nature, and she claims that she cannot (74-76). This is because, she claims, the moral considerability of nonhuman nature is groundless.Here Warren compares her view... (shrink)

James P. Sterba offers something that philosophers have long sought: an argument showing that morality is rationally required. Furthermore he argues that morality requires substantial equality. Even libertarian perspectives, which would seem to require minimal enforcement of morality, are shown to lead to a requirement of equality.

Drawing upon the experiences and insights of a diverse group of notable contributors, this volume is perhaps the most complete study available on clergy ethics. The topics discussed include the separation of church and state, clergy professionalization, ethical pastoral care, and many more.

A provocative, insightful explanation for why it is that belief—not religion—keeps us in a perilous state of willful ignorance In The Religious Case Against Belief , James Carse identifies the twenty-first century’s most forbidding villain: belief. In distinguishing religions from belief systems, Carse works to reveal how belief—with its restriction on thought and encouragement of hostility—has corrupted religion and spawned violence the world over. Galileo, Martin Luther, Abraham Lincoln, and Jesus Christ—using their stories Carse creates his own brand of (...) parable and establishes a new vocabulary with which to study conflict in the modern world. The Religious Case Against Belief introduces three kinds of ignorance: ordinary ignorance (a mundane lack of knowledge, such as ignorance of tomorrow’s weather or the reason why your stove is malfunctioning), willful ignorance (an intentional avoidance of accessible knowledge), and finally higher ignorance (a learned understanding that no matter how many truths we may accumulate, our knowledge falls infinitely short of the truth). While ordinary ignorance is common to all people, Carse associates the strongest manifestation of willful ignorance with the most fervent (and dangerous) of believers. He points to the historic conflict between Martin Luther and Holy Roman Emperor Charles V both to reveal this seemingly religious collision as a clash of belief and to identify belief ’s inherently destructive characteristics. From Luther to the contemporary Christian right, we learn that believers construct identity by erecting boundaries and by fostering aggression between the believer and the other. This is why belief systems choose—at great cost—to remain locked in bloody conflict rather than to engage in dialogue, recognizing the great deal they have in common. This is willful ignorance. In fierce contrast to willful ignorance, higher ignorance is an acquired state enhanced by religion. Those traveling the path to higher ignorance recognize faith teachings (such as the Bible) as poetry intended to promote contemplation, interpretation, and a sense of wonder. For evidence of religion’s deeply embedded rejection of singular truth and its acceptance of diverse dialogue, Carse looks to the many faces of Jesus presented in the books of the Bible and elsewhere. Uncontaminated by belief systems, religion rejects the imagined boundaries that falsely divide people and ideas, working to expand horizons. The Religious Case Against Belief exposes a world in which religion and belief have become erroneously (and terrifyingly) conflated. In strengthening their association with powerful belief systems, religions have departed from their essential purpose as agencies of higher ignorance. Carse uses his wideranging understanding of religion to find a viable and vital path away from what he calls the Age of Faith II and toward open-ended global dialogue. Far from abstract philosophical musing, The Religious Case Against Belief is required reading for our age. (shrink)

One of the standard principles of rationality guiding traditional accounts of belief change is the principle of minimal change: a reasoner's belief corpus should be modified in a minimal fashion when assimilating new information. This rationality principle has stood belief change in good stead. However, it does not deal properly with all belief change scenarios. We introduce a novel account of belief change motivated by one of Grice's maxims of conversational implicature: the reasoner's belief corpus is modified in a minimal (...) fashion to assimilate exactly the new information. In this form of belief change, when the reasoner revises by new information p ∨ q their belief corpus is modified so that p∨q is believed but stronger propositions like p∧q are not, no matter what beliefs are in the reasoner's initial corpus. We term this conservative belief change since the revised belief corpus is a conservative extension of the original belief corpus given the new information. (shrink)

Charles Darwin questions whether conflicts between species palpably captured by the conflict between Ichneumonidae and the caterpillars on which they prey could be compatible with the existence of an all-good, all-powerful God. He also questioned whether the suffering of millions of lower animals throughout our almost endless prehistory could be compatible with an all-good, all-powerful God. In this paper, I show that these two problems of natural evil that Darwin raised in his work can be resolved so as to present (...) no objection to theism once it is recognized what the moral principles are that should govern our relationship to the natural world and analogously should govern God’s relationship to the natural world. (shrink)

This paper describes an approach for reasoning in a dynamic domain with nondeterministic actions in which an agent’s beliefs correspond to the simplest, or most plausible, course of events consistent with the agent’s observations and beliefs. The account is based on an epistemic extension of the situation calculus, a first-order theory of reasoning about action that accommodates sensing actions. In particular, the account is based on a qualitative theory of nondeterminism. Our position is that for commonsense reasoning, the world is (...) most usefully regarded as deterministic, and that nondeterminism is an epistemic phenomenon, arising from an agent’s limited awareness and perception. The account offers several advantages: an agent has a set of categorical beliefs, yet can deal with equally-likely outcomes or with outcomes of differing plausibility. The agent maintains as its set of contingent beliefs the most plausible, or simplest, picture of the world, consistent with its beliefs and actions it believes it executed; yet it may modify these in light of later information. (shrink)

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What will it take for business to improve lives? Many think we need a theoretically sound meta-narrative to articulate the proper place for business in our lives. Important as that is, this meta-narrative will only come to life when everyone articulates his and her personal narrative, shares it with others, and ultimately fine-tunes it into a personal theory-in-use, one that guides everyday decision-making. Hoping that the Humanistic Management Association willsoon find room on its webpage for those of us in business (...) and business education to share our values and beliefs with each other, I thought I would start usoff by sharing mine here. (shrink)