Child sexual exploitation and abuse has grave implications for the mental health and wellbeing of children and young people. It has been linked to a wide range of difficulties which may extend into adulthood. School-based prevention programs that aim to raise awareness are popular, however, have historically lacked robust and consistent evaluation. The purpose of the present study was therefore to explore young people’s experiences of attending a school-based theater-in-education program, and the impact this had on their awareness and understanding (...) of CSEA. Four focus groups of between four to six participants each were conducted with young people from two co-educational State schools in the United Kingdom. The approach of Template Analysis was used to analyze the data, and revealed a number of themes related to the superordinate themes of “Information and Detail Delivered” and “Format and Timing.” The results suggest that participants gained new awareness and understanding of aspects related to CSEA, including other forms of exploitation, as well as how to avoid harm and what to do “if bad things happen.” Participants further reported that the theater performance/live element of the program was particularly impactful, feeling that this was delivered to them at the right time, but suggesting that younger people would also benefit from the important messages. In addition, areas for improvement were identified in terms of the delivery of the program, and the issue of victim blaming. Findings are discussed with a view to practical implications and directions for future research. (shrink)

The eight pieces constituting this Meeting Report are summaries of presentations made during a panel session at the 2011 Association for Practical and Professional Ethics (APPE) annual meeting held between March 3rd and 6th in Cincinnati. Lisa Newton organized the session and served as chair. The panel of eight consisted both of pioneers in the field and more recent arrivals. It covered a range of topics from how the field has developed to where it should be going, from identification of (...) issues needing further study to problems of training the next generation of engineers and engineering-ethics scholars. (shrink)

"A valuable collection both for original source material as well as historical formulations of current problems."-- The Review of Metaphysics "Much more than a mere collection of papers . . . a valuable addition to the literature."-- Mathematics of Computation An anthology of fundamental papers on undecidability and unsolvability by major figures in the field, this classic reference opens with Godel's landmark 1931 paper demonstrating that systems of logic cannot admit proofs of all true assertions of arithmetic. Subsequent papers by (...) Godel, Church, Turing, and Post single out the class of recursive functions as computable by finite algorithms. Additional papers by Church, Turing, and Post cover unsolvable problems from the theory of abstract computing machines, mathematical logic, and algebra, and material by Kleene and Post includes initiation of the classification theory of unsolvable problems. Suitable for graduate and undergraduate courses. 1965 ed. (shrink)

Molly Farneth’s Hegel’s Social Ethics hearkens back to the tradition of Josiah Royce, which has continued in the work of Richard Bernstein and Jeffrey Stout. At the same time, it reflects the impact of three decades of interpretive work which has offered an alternative to the 19th and early 20th century reading of Hegel as a metaphysical systematizer. In this new reading he was from the beginning a social critic and political theorist who looked to lay the groundwork for post‐Enlightenment (...) vision of the social world as evolving toward one of social cooperation based on mutual recognition. Farneth has developed this reading of Hegel into one of powerful resources for democratic pluralism. (shrink)

Based on his theory of animalrights, Regan concludes that humans are morallyobligated to consume a vegetarian or vegandiet. When it was pointed out to him that evena vegan diet results in the loss of manyanimals of the field, he said that while thatmay be true, we are still obligated to consumea vegetarian/vegan diet because in total itwould cause the least harm to animals (LeastHarm Principle, or LHP) as compared to currentagriculture. But is that conclusion valid? Isit possible that some other (...) agriculturalproduction alternatives may result in leastharm to animals? An examination of thisquestion shows that the LHP may actually bebetter served using food production systemsthat include both plant-based agriculture and aforage-ruminant-based agriculture as comparedto a strict plant-based (vegan) system. Perhapswe are morally obligated to consume a dietcontaining both plants and ruminant(particularly cattle) animal products. (shrink)

We argued in earlier work that South Africa's democratic transition accomplished more than abolishing formal apartheid and replacing it with civil and political democracy. The transition also established a platform for “transformative constitutionalism,” an aspiration and generous constitutional framework for South Africa to embark on a postliberal path toward becoming an egalitarian social and economic democracy. Manifestly, the promised social and economic transformation remains largely unfulfilled. Many South Africans blame the constitutional settlement for this failure of delivery, seeing it as (...) a weak compromise with the old regime that restricts socio-economic transformation. We reject this view and assign blame for the failure of the transformative project squarely on the politics and policies of ANC governments in power over three decades. The transformative project was not blocked by the constitutional settlement; it was never attempted. The ANC brought mostly conventional, liberal democratic goals to the transition negotiations. It embraced neoliberalism before the 1996 Constitution was drafted, indeed before the 1994 elections brought the ANC to power. Ironically, during the Final Constitution drafting process (1994-1996), ANC negotiators moved left under the inspiration of and pressure from the Mass Democratic Movement (MDM). The 1996 text is transformative in aspiration and in its toolbox of innovative legal technologies, but the ANC never took it seriously as a guide to policy. If South African politics ever realigns, future activists will find in the 1996 text a storehouse of legal values and tools meant to nourish radical social and economic change. (shrink)

This article explores various analytical issues involved in conceptualizing the interrelationships of gender, class, race and ethnicity and other social divisions. It compares the debate on these issues that took place in Britain in the 1980s and around the 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism. It examines issues such as the relative helpfulness of additive or mutually constitutive models of intersectional social divisions; the different analytical levels at which social divisions need to be studied, their ontological base and their relations (...) to each other. The final section of the article attempts critically to assess a specific intersectional methodological approach for engaging in aid and human rights work in the South. (shrink)

The problem of the will has long been viewed as central to Heidegger's later thought. In the first book to focus on this problem, Bret W. Davis clarifies key issues from the philosopher's later period--particularly his critique of the culmination of the history of metaphysics in the technological "will to will" and the possibility of Gelassenheit or "releasement" from this willful way of being in the world--but also shows that the question of will is at the very heart of (...) Heidegger's thinking, a pivotal issue in his path from Being and Time (1926) to "Time and Being" (1962). Moreover, the book demonstrates why popular critical interpretations of Heidegger's relation to the will are untenable, how his so-called "turn" is not a simple "turnaround" from voluntarism to passivism. Davis explains why the later Heidegger's key notions of "non-willing" and " Gelassenheit " do not imply a mere abandonment of human action; rather, they are signposts in a search for an other way of being, a "higher activity" beyond the horizon of the will. While elucidating this search, his work also provides a critical look at the ambiguities, tensions, and inconsistencies of Heidegger's project, and does so in a way that allows us to follow the inner logic of the philosopher's struggles. As meticulous as it is bold, this comprehensive reinterpretation will change the way we think about Heidegger's politics and about the thrust of his philosophy as a whole. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Ethics and Research Topics What We Know Responses.

Philosopher Davis argues that Christian belief in the resurrection is rational on historical, philosophical, and theological grounds. Each of the book's ten chapters takes up a different aspect of the Christian concept of bodily resurrection and subsequently deals with such matters as perservation of personal identity and soul-body dualism, issues in biblical scholarship, and the reliability of New Testament accounts.

Many people profess to believe that acting morally, or as we ought to act, involves the self-conscious acceptance of some (quite specific) constraints or rules that place limits both on the pursuit of our own interests and on our pursuit of the general good. Though these people do not regard the furtherance of our own interests or the pursuit of the general good as ignoble ends, or ones that we are morally required to eschew, they believe that neither can be (...) regarded as providing us with morally sufficient reason to take action. Those who hold such a view believe that there are certain sorts of acts that are wrong in themselves, and thus morally unacceptable means to the pursuit of any ends, even ends that are morally admirable, or morally obligatory. (How strong the prohibition is against performing such acts is a matter that will be taken up later.) Philosophers call such ethical views ‘deontological’ (from the Greek deon , ‘duty’), and contrast them to views that are ‘teleological’ in structure (from telos , Greek for ‘goal’). Those who hold teleological views reject the view that there are special kinds of acts that are right or wrong in themselves. For teleologists, the rightness or wrongness of our acts is determined by a comparative assessment of their consequences. [...] The focus of this essay is on deontological theories. (shrink)

This paper proposes a novel research program to assess methods of teaching engineering ethics, a program that would allow ordinary instructors, with little effort, to turn ordinary assessment tools (graded exams, homework assignments, and so on) into publishable research, whether the course in question is a stand-alone course in professional ethics or a technical course in which some professional ethics has been inserted. The paper has three parts. The first briefly distinguishes the subject of this research from the main line (...) of research in ethics education. The main line is concerned with assessing improvement in ethical judgment (or moral development). In contrast, the research discussed here is concerned with assessing improvement in ethical sensitivity and ethical knowledge. The second part of this paper describes work already done that provides a model for what is proposed, the use of ratios between scores on course-specific pre- and post-tests to provide a measure allowing assessment across courses, programs, and even institutions.While the use of pre- and post-tests is not new, the use of their ratios across courses, programs, and institutions to do assessment is new. The third part of this paper sketches the research program itself—or, rather, a framework for answering a family of research questions. (shrink)

In this paper, I attempt to establish connections between the pragmatist philosophical tradition and the later philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. I argue that among these connections is the affinity between John Dewey’s account of the development of group morality as articulated in his early work and Wittgenstein’s admittedly vague concept, ‘form of life.’ I argue that this affinity is evident in that both are dependent on inter-subjective experience. Moreover, both Dewey’s account of the development of group morality and Wittgenstein’s concept (...) of form of life suggests an intimate relationship between the individual and the community. I argue further that both Dewey’s account of group morality and Wittgenstein’s form of life concept hold that there is a significant influence of inherited norms, conventions, traditions, etc., on the development of the individual and her conduct in a variety of social interactions. I go on to raise and address potential and anticipated criticisms. In this section I take what I consider to be the most penetrating of the potential criticisms of the arguments presented in this paper: that Dewey and Wittgenstein direct their analyses at different issues (the former directs his analysis toward group moral development and social issues, while the latter directs his toward linguistic activity and its grounding social context), that Dewey focuses much of his attention on moral agency, whereas Wittgenstein is more concerned with what might be called epistemological issues, and finally that my treatment of the form of life concept is incomplete in that I spend a roughly proportionate amount of time discussing related concepts: language games, meaning as use, and, to a lesser extent, rule- following. I respond to these criticisms in turn by arguing that a careful reading of these aspects of each philosopher’s work circumvents such criticisms. The goal of this paper is to contribute to the growing literature on connections between Wittgenstein’s philosophy and the Pragmatist tradition. The subject matter might also be a contribution to the history of philosophy and possibly have implications for epistemology. There is also the hope that in establishing commonalities between the philosophies of Wittgenstein and Dewey one can provide an interpretation of some of the more vague concepts in Wittgenstein’s philosophy, prompting further discussion on these concepts. Finally, this research might pave the way for further research into connections among different aspects of Dewey’s and Wittgenstein’s philosophies. This paper is a first step toward a study of a much larger scope and should not be taken as conclusive. (shrink)

An incoherent visualization is when aspects of different senses of a word are present in the same visualization. We describe and implement a new model of creating contextual coherence in the visual imagination called Coherencer, based on the SOILIE model of imagination. We show that Coherencer is able to generate scene descriptions that are more coherent than SOILIE's original approach as well as a parallel connectionist algorithm that is considered competitive in the literature on general coherence. We also show that (...) co-occurrence probabilities are a better association representation than holographic vectors and that better models of coherence improve the resulting output independent of the association type that is used. Theoretically, we show that Coherencer is consistent with other models of cognitive generation. In particular, Coherencer is a similar, but more cognitively plausible model than the C3 model of concept combination created by Costello and Keane. We show that Coherencer is also consistent with both the modal schematic indices of perceptual symbol systems theory and the amodal contextual constraints of Thagard's theory of coherence. Finally, we describe how Coherencer is consistent with contemporary research on the hippocampus, and we show evidence that the process of making a visualization coherent is serial. (shrink)

This book focuses on the significance of the body in contemporary feminist scholarship. Whether the body is treated as biological bedrock or subversive metaphor, it is implicated in the cultural and historical construction of sexual difference as well as asymmetrical power relations. The contributors to this volume examine the role of the body as socially shaped and historically colonized territory and as the focus of individual womenÆs struggles for autonomy and self-determination. They also analyze its centrality to the feminist critique (...) of male-stream science as dualistic, distanced, and decontextualized. While the body has become a "hot item" in contemporary social theory and research, the renewed interest has received a mixed reaction from feminists. The body may be back, but the "new" body theory often proves to be just as disembodied as it ever was. The body revival seems to be less an attempt to re-embody masculinist science than just another expression of the same condition that evoked the feminist critique in the first place: a flight from femininity and everything that is associated with it in Western culture. Drawing on insights from contemporary feminist theories of gender and power, this book offers a timely critical appraisal of the recent "body revival." Embodied Practices not only sets an agenda for research about the body, but for an embodied perspective on the body as well. It will be a valuable and thought-provoking resource for students of womenÆs studies, social theory, cultural studies, and medical sociology. (shrink)

The Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS) task force was assembled by the American Psychological Association (APA) to guide policy on the role of psychologists in interrogations at foreign detention centers for the purpose of U.S. national security. The task force met briefly in 2005, and its report was quickly accepted by the APA Board of Directors and deemed consistent with the APA Ethics Code by the APA Ethics Committee. This rapid acceptance was unusual for a number of reasons but (...) primarily because of the APA's long-standing tradition of taking great care in developing ethical policies that protected anyone who might be impacted by the work of psychologists. Many psychological and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), as well as reputable journalists, believed the risk of harm associated with psychologist participation in interrogations at these detention centers was not adequately addressed by the report. The present critique analyzes the assumptions of the PENS report and its interpretations of the APA Ethics Code. We demonstrate that it presents only one (and not particularly representative) side of a complex set of ethical issues. We conclude with a discussion of more appropriate psychological contributions to national security and world peace that better respect and preserve human rights. (shrink)

The Archaeology of the Soul is a testimony to the extraordinary scope of Seth Benardete's thought. Some essays concern particular authors or texts; others range more broadly and are thematic. Some deal explicitly with philosophy; others deal with epic, lyric, and tragic poetry. Some of these authors are Greek, some Roman, and still others are contemporaries writing about antiquity. All of these essays, however, are informed by an underlying vision, which is a reflection of Benardete's life-long engagement with one thinker (...) in particular -Plato. The Platonic dialogue presented Benardete with the most vivid case of that periagoge, or turn-around, that he found to be the sign of all philosophic thinking and that is the signature as well of his own interpretations not only of Plato but also of other thinkers. The core of The Archaeology of the Soul consists of a set of essays Benardete produced in his last years; the collection provides at the same time an entry into that world through some of Benardete's earliest articles on Plato and on Greek poetry. Benardete's earlier path of close textual analysis always reflected his intimate philosophic dialogue with the thinker in whose work he was immersed; later, he drew on resources of erudition acquired over a lifetime to present a broader picture, on a theme like the dialectics of eros or freedom and necessity. In his late work Benardete was not only engaged in putting together in more general form material he had worked out earlier; he was still on the trail of new discoveries, above all, by extending his Platonic understanding of philosophy to pre- and post-Platonic thinkers. He had become increasingly aware that the discovery of philosophy through the "Socratic turn" was really the rediscovery of an understanding already present in some form in the Greek poets and that awareness guided his last years of study of the pre-Socratic philosophers. According to the standard view of the history of Greek philosophy, the Socratic turn, with its focus on "the human things," marks a point of radical change in philosophy's history. Benardete's late studies led him to the conclusion that the kind of pivotal reorientation thought to be Socratic is in fact the mark of what it means to think philosophically, and Heraclitus or Parmenides is a genuine philosophic thinker precisely to the extent that a Socratic turn can be found in some form within his own thought. At the same time that he was pursuing a track backward, from Plato to the poets and pre-Socratic philosophers, Benardete was also proceeding on a forward path, from Plato to the Latin writers, who adopt the Platonic way of thinking with full understanding of what it means to be "post-Platonic." As the essays collected in this volume demonstrate, the Platonic notion of a "second sailing" gave Benardete a key to the relation between Greek and Latin thought - and with that to a comprehensive under-standing of antiquity-as it did to the relation between poetry and philosophy as such. Ronna Burger teaches philosophy at Tulane University; she is the author of The Phaedo: A Platonic Labyrinth from St. Augustine's Press and Aristotle's Dialogue with Socrates: On the Nicomachean Ethics. Michael Davis teaches philosophy at Sarah Lawrence College; he authored Wonderlust: Ruminations on Liberal Education, The Poetry of Philosophy: On Aristotle's Poetics and, with Seth Benardete, translated Aristotle - On Poetics, both from St. Augustine's Press. Burger and Davis collaborated on editing Seth Benardete's Achilles and Hector: The Homeric Hero. (shrink)

: Because I reject the notion that physical characteristics constitute cultural membership, I argue that, even if the claim were persuasive that deafness is a culture rather than a disability, there is no reason to fault hearing parents who choose cochlear implants for their deaf children.

In this paper, I defend the agent/patient distinction against critics who argue that causal interactions are symmetrical. Specifically, I argue that there is a widespread type of causal interaction between distinct entities, resulting in a type of ontological asymmetry that provides principled grounds for distinguishing agents from patients. The type of interaction where the asymmetry is found is when one of the entities undergoes a change in kind, structure, powers, or intrinsic properties as a result of the interaction while the (...) other does not. Interactions of this type are widespread in molecular biology and chemistry. I focus specifically on (i) the actions of enzymes on substrates and (ii) water molecules breaking the bonds of polarized molecules. Finally, I respond to objections by laying out and to a limited extent defending three commitments of my account: emergent entities and powers, realism about chemical kinds or structures, and the assumption of the agent/patient distinction in functional attributions in biology. (shrink)

Ethics and Humanity pays to tribute to Jonathan Glover, a pioneering figure whose thought and personal influence have had a significant impact on applied ...

In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in the work of Emmanuel Levinas, widely recognized as one of the most important yet difficult philosophers of the 20th century. In this much-needed introduction, Davis unpacks the concepts at the centre of Levinas's thought - alterity, the Other, the Face, infinity - concepts which have previously presented readers with major problems of interpretation. Davis traces the development of Levinas's thought over six decades, describing the context in which (...) he worked, and the impact of his writings. He argues that Levinas's work remains tied to the ontological tradition with which he wants to break, and demonstrates how his later writing tries to overcome this dependency by its increasingly disruptive, sometimes opaque, textual practice. He discusses Levinas's theological writings and his relationship to Judaism, as well as the reception of his work by contemporary thinkers, arguing that the influence of his work has led to a growing interest in ethical issues among poststructuralist and postmodernist thinkers in recent years. Comprehensive and clearly written, this book will be essential reading for students and researchers in continental philosophy, French studies, literary theory and theology. (shrink)

Conflicts of interest pose special problems for the professions. Even the appearance of a conflict of interest can undermine essential trust between professional and public. This volume is a comprehensive and accessible guide to the ramifications and problems associated with important issue. It contains fifteen new essays by noted scholars and covers topics in law, medicine, journalism, engineering, financial services, and others.

Chimpanzee behaviour with mirrors makes it plausible that they can recognise themselves as themselves in mirrors, and so have a 'self-concept'. I defend this claim, and argue that roughly similar behaviour in pigeons, as reported, does not in fact make it equally plausible that they also have this mental capacity. But for all that it is genuine, chimpanzee self-consciousness may differ significantly from ours. I describe one possibility I believe consistent with the data, even if not very plausible: that the (...) chimpanzee is aware of itself only as a material being, and not as a subject of any psychological states. As I try to make clear, this possibility exists even if the chimpanzee has psychological states, and is aware of some of them. (shrink)