Who wants to be a hero? -- Everyone can help -- A best friend to all -- Locked up! -- Keeping a promise -- Dream big -- Say cheese! -- In the wild -- How you can help.

Healthcare institutions have been making increasing efforts to standardize consultation methodology and to accredit both bioethics training programs and the consultants accordingly. The focus has traditionally been on the ethics consultation as the relevant unit of ethics intervention. Outcome measures are studied in relation to consultations, and the hidden assumption is that consultations are the preferred or best way to address day-to-day ethical dilemmas. Reflecting on the data from an internal quality improvement survey and the literature, we argue that having (...) general ethics education as a key function of ethics services may be more important in meeting the contemporaneous needs of acute care settings. An expanded and varied ethics education, with attention to the time constraints of healthcare workers’ schedules, was a key recommendation brought forward by survey respondents. Promoting ethical reflection and creating a culture of ethics may serve to prevent ethical dilemmas or mitigate their effects. (shrink)

The Repugnant Conclusion served an important purpose in catalyzing and inspiring the pioneering stage of population ethics research. We believe, however, that the Repugnant Conclusion now receives too much focus. Avoiding the Repugnant Conclusion should no longer be the central goal driving population ethics research, despite its importance to the fundamental accomplishments of the existing literature.

Peter Abelard (1079–1142 ce) was the most wide‐ranging philosopher of the twelfth century. He quickly established himself as a leading teacher of logic in and near Paris shortly after 1100. After his affair with Heloise, and his subsequent castration, Abelard became a monk, but he returned to teaching in the Paris schools until 1140, when his work was condemned by a Church Council at Sens. His logical writings were based around discussion of the “Old Logic”: Porphyry's Isagoge, aristotle'S Categories and (...) On Interpretation and boethius'S textbook on topical inference. They comprise a freestanding Dialectica (“Logic”; probably c.1116), a set of commentaries (known as the Logica [Ingredientibus], c. 1119) and a later (c. 1125) commentary on the Isagoge (Logica Nostrorum Petititoni Sociorum or Glossulae). In a work Abelard called his Theologia, issued in three main versions (between 1120 and c.1134), he attempted a logical analysis of trinitarian relations and explored the philosophical problems surrounding God's claims to omnipotence and omniscience. The Collationes (“Debates,” also known as “Dialogue between a Christian, a Philosopher and a Jew”; probably c.1130) present a rational investigation into the nature of the highest good, in which the Christian and the Philosopher (who seems to be modeled on a philosopher of pagan antiquity) are remarkably in agreement. The unfinished Scito teipsum (“Know thyself,” also known as the “Ethics”; c.1138) analyses moral action. (shrink)

It is taken as obvious that there is a conflict between objective temporal passage and relativistic physics. The traditional formulation of temporal passage is the movement of a universe-wide set of simultaneous events known as the NOW; the Special Theory of Relativity implies that there is no NOW and therefore no temporal passage. The vast majority of those who accept the B-theory blockworld—the metaphysics of time most friendly to relativistic physics—deny that time passes. I argue that this denial is a (...) mistake. Contrary to overwhelmingly popular opinion, temporal passage does not need a NOW. To show this, I defend a relational understanding of temporal becoming, that I call B-coming, in which an event y B-comes with respect to x iff R xy. Temporal passage is then the difference in what has B-come at one point in a thing’s history with respect to what has B-come at an earlier point in that thing’s history. Appealing to this kind of relation is a strategy that is well-known but has been widely dismissed. This dismissal is premature; I show that the essential elements of temporal passage do not necessarily require a NOW. There can be passage without presentness. (shrink)

The main aim of this book is to introduce the topic of limited awareness, and changes in awareness, to those interested in the philosophy of decision-making and uncertain reasoning.

Richard Rudner famously argues that the communication of scientific advice to policy makers involves ethical value judgments. His argument has, however, been rightly criticized. This article revives Rudner’s conclusion, by strengthening both his lines of argument: we generalize his initial assumption regarding the form in which scientists must communicate their results and complete his ‘backup’ argument by appealing to the difference between private and public decisions. Our conclusion that science advisors must, for deep-seated pragmatic reasons, make value judgments is further (...) bolstered by reflections on how the scientific contribution to policy is far less straightforward than the Rudner-style model suggests. (shrink)

We argue that concerns about double-counting—using the same evidence both to calibrate or tune climate models and also to confirm or verify that the models are adequate—deserve more careful scrutiny in climate modelling circles. It is widely held that double-counting is bad and that separate data must be used for calibration and confirmation. We show that this is far from obviously true, and that climate scientists may be confusing their targets. Our analysis turns on a Bayesian/relative-likelihood approach to incremental confirmation. (...) According to this approach, double-counting is entirely proper. We go on to discuss plausible difficulties with calibrating climate models, and we distinguish more and less ambitious notions of confirmation. Strong claims of confirmation may not, in many cases, be warranted, but it would be a mistake to regard double-counting as the culprit. 1 Introduction2 Remarks about Models and Adequacy-for-Purpose3 Evidence for Calibration Can Also Yield Comparative Confirmation3.1 Double-counting I3.2 Double-counting II4 Climate Science Examples: Comparative Confirmation in Practice4.1 Confirmation due to better and worse best fits4.2 Confirmation due to more and less plausible forcings values5 Old Evidence6 Doubts about the Relevance of Past Data7 Non-comparative Confirmation and Catch-Alls8 Climate Science Example: Non-comparative Confirmation and Catch-Alls in Practice9 Concluding Remarks. (shrink)

The Bayesian maxim for rational learning could be described as conservative change from one probabilistic belief or credence function to another in response to newinformation. Roughly: ‘Hold fixed any credences that are not directly affected by the learning experience.’ This is precisely articulated for the case when we learn that some proposition that we had previously entertained is indeed true (the rule of conditionalisation). But can this conservative-change maxim be extended to revising one’s credences in response to entertaining propositions or (...) concepts of which one was previously unaware? The economists Karni and Vierø (2013, 2015) make a proposal in this spirit. Philosophers have adopted effectively the same rule: revision in response to growing awareness should not affect the relative probabilities of propositions in one’s ‘old’ epistemic state. The rule is compelling, but only under the assumptions that its advocates introduce. It is not a general requirement of rationality, or so we argue. We provide informal counterexamples. And we show that, when awareness grows, the boundary between one’s ‘old’ and ‘new’ epistemic commitments is blurred. Accordingly, there is no general notion of conservative change in this setting. (shrink)

In this paper, we develop a novel response to counterfactual scepticism, the thesis that most ordinary counterfactual claims are false. In the process we aim to shed light on the relationship between debates in the philosophy of science and debates concerning the semantics and pragmatics of counterfactuals. We argue that science is concerned with many domains of inquiry, each with its own characteristic entities and regularities; moreover, statements of scientific law often include an implicit ceteris paribus clause that restricts the (...) scope of the associated regularity to circumstances that are ‘fitting’ to the domain in question. This observation reveals a way of responding to scepticism while, at the same time, doing justice both to the role of counterfactuals in science and to the complexities inherent in ordinary counterfactual discourse and reasoning. (shrink)

Stanford Encyclopedia Entry on Delusions.

Various real and imagined criminal law cases rest on “naked statistical evidence”. That is, they rest more or less entirely on a probability for guilt/liability derived from a single statistical model. The intuition is that there is something missing in these cases, high as the probability for guilt/liability may be, such that the relevant standard for legal proof is not met. Here we contribute to the considerable debate about how this intuition is best explained and what it teaches us about (...) evidential reasoning in the legal setting. We part ways with the recent scholarship, however. Unlike most others, our diagnosis is not that there is an important qualitative property that some evidence or bodies of evidence have, and that naked statistical evidence, most strikingly, lacks. Rather, we see cases resting on naked statistical evidence as lying at the extreme of a continuum of cases that are vulnerable to challenge due to “meta-uncertainty” about the underlying model. (shrink)

In this paper, we examine critically the notion of “Triple Bottom Line” accounting. We begin by asking just what it is that supporters of the Triple Bottom Line idea advocate, and attempt to distil specific, assessable claims from the vague, diverse, and sometimescontradictory uses of the Triple Bottom Line rhetoric. We then use these claims as a basis upon which to argue (a) that what issound about the idea of a Triple Bottom Line is not novel, and (b) that what (...) is novel about the idea is not sound. We argue on bothconceptual and practical grounds that the Triple Bottom Line is an unhelpful addition to current discussions of corporate social responsibility. Finally, we argue that the Triple Bottom Line paradigm cannot be rescued simply by attenuating its claims: the rhetoric isbadly misleading, and may in fact provide a smokescreen behind which firms can avoid truly effective social and environmental reporting and performance. (shrink)

Accession Number: ATLA0001712286; Hosting Book Page Citation: p 821-835.; Language(s): English; General Note: Bibliography: p 835.; Issued by ATLA: 20130825; Publication Type: Essay.

Many examples of calibration in climate science raise no alarms regarding model reliability. We examine one example and show that, in employing Classical Hypothesis-testing, it involves calibrating a base model against data that is also used to confirm the model. This is counter to the "intuitive position". We argue, however, that aspects of the intuitive position are upheld by some methods, in particular, the general Cross-validation method. How Cross-validation relates to other prominent Classical methods such as the Akaike Information Criterion (...) and Bayesian Information Criterion is also discussed. (shrink)

Die verschiedenen Aufsatze, die in diesem Band aus Anlass des 60. Geburtstages von Jan A. Aertsen gesammelt sind, widmen sich der Spannung zwischen der Metaphysik und dem Guten. Lasst sich eine Metaphysik denken, die vom Begriff des Guten ausgeht? Diese Spannung durchlauft die Philosophie in Antike und Mittelalter wie ein roter Faden und hat nicht selten zu Weiterentwicklung oder Neuorientierung Anlass gegeben. Die verschiedenen Aufsatze behandeln den Anspruch von Ethik und Metaphysik, Erste Philosophie zu sein (Carlos Steel); die Idee einer (...) praktischen Metaphysik (Theo Kobusch); die Metaphysik des Guten bei Gilbert von Poitiers (Scott MacDonald); den Begriff des Guten bei Thomas von Aquin (Rudi te Velde); die Stellung des Guten und das Metaphysikverstandnis Bonaventuras (Andreas Speer); das Gute als Ersterkanntes bei Berthold von Moosburg (Wouter Goris). Zusammen lesen sie sich als eine Deutung von der Moglichkeit und der Qualitat der Synthese von Platonismus und Aristotelismus, wie sie in der mittelalterlichen Transzendentalienlehre erstrebt wird. (shrink)

We sometimes seem to face fundamental moral uncertainty, i.e., uncertainty about what is morally good or morally right that cannot be reduced to ordinary descriptive uncertainty. This phenomenon raises a puzzle for noncognitivism, according to which moral judgments are desire-like attitudes as opposed to belief-like attitudes. Can a state of moral uncertainty really be a noncognitive state? So far, noncognitivists have not been able to offer a completely satisfactory account. Here, we argue that noncognitivists should exploit the formal analogy between (...) moral uncertainty and moral multi-objective decision problems. Our ‘multi-objective story’ enables noncognitivists to save our moral uncertainty thought and talk by explaining how the underlying phenomenon could be noncognitive. (shrink)

There are at least two plausible generalisations of subjective expected utility (SEU) theory: cumulative prospect theory (which relaxes the independence axiom) and Levi’s decision theory (which relaxes at least ordering). These theories call for a re-assessment of the minimal requirements of rational choice. Here, I consider how an analysis of sequential decision making contributes to this assessment. I criticise Hammond’s (Economica 44(176):337–350, 1977; Econ Philos 4:292–297, 1988a; Risk, decision and rationality, 1988b; Theory Decis 25:25–78, 1988c) ‘consequentialist’ argument for the SEU (...) preference axioms, but go on to formulate a related diachronic-Dutch-book-style’ argument that better achieves Hammond’s aims. Some deny the importance of Dutch-book sure losses, however, in which case, Seidenfeld’s (Econ Philos 4:267–290, 1988a) argument that distinguishes between theories that relax independence and those that relax ordering is relevant. I unravel Seidenfeld’s argument in light of the various criticisms of it and show that the crux of the argument is somewhat different and much more persuasive than what others have taken it to be; the critical issue is the modelling of future choices between ‘indifferent’ decision-tree branches in the sequential setting. Finally, I consider how Seidenfeld’s conclusions might nonetheless be resisted. (shrink)

This article gives a broad sense of existing debate about Global Citizenship Education to help situate and contextualize a novel case study. Scholars for Syria originated at a small university in southern Indiana. This grassroots response to the turmoil in Syria bridges the gap between a seemingly distant crisis and a midwestern city in the United States. The unique pedagogical and curricular dimensions of the case study work as a helpful framing device for facilitating exploration of debates about the shape (...) of GCE, as well as providing new ways in which to imagine GCE curriculum, pedagogy, and embedding ethics into wider university initiatives. (shrink)

Today, many pregnancy guides mention a nesting instinct. According to this, pregnant women would be seized by an urge to create the right environment for their child, for example to buy baby equipment or clean the apartment. The concept of the nesting instinct forms a specific configuration of knowledge: While it is widespread in the popular field, it occupies a marginal position in the scientific field. In this paper, I will investigate the historical epistemology of this form of knowledge. In (...) so doing, the following questions are addressed: How did the knowledge about a nesting instinct during pregnancy form? How was the nest as a specific natural-anthropogenic environment constructed? And to what extent do notions of gender and environment interact here? To answer these questions, the study takes the perspective of a history of knowledge in transit, in the longue durée from the nineteenth century to the present. The investigation reveals a gradual feminization of the concept of environment in the knowledge of the nesting instinct. Whereas in the nineteenth century it was often considered a male behavioral pattern and the nest was an analogy to the house, in the first decades of the twentieth century, the instinct transformed into a primarily female characteristic, with the nest representing the interior of the home. A decisive condition for this circulation of knowledge was that the nest became a ‘metaphorical thing’. As such, the nest did not simply lead to naturalization, but denoted a natural-social in-between space that increasingly became the goal of female care work. (shrink)

According to Craig Callender [2022], the ‘received view’ across the social sciences is that, when it comes to time and preference, only exponential time discounting is rational. Callender argues that this view is false, even pernicious. Here I endorse what I take to be Callender’s main argument, but only in so far as the received view is understood in a particular way. I go on to propose a different way of understanding the received view that makes it true. In short: (...) When time discounting is suitably conceived, the exponential form of the discounting function is indeed uniquely rational. (shrink)

In this paper we construct an extension, ℒ, of Anderson and Belnap's relevance logic R that is classical in the sense that it contains p&p → q as a theorem, and we prove that ℒ is pretabular in the sense that while it does not have a finite characteristic matrix, every proper normal extension of it does. We end the paper by commenting on the possibility of finding other classical relevance logics that are also pretabular.

Within the ethics and science literature surrounding uterus transplantation (UTx), emphasis is often placed on the extent to which UTx might improve upon, or offer additional benefits when compared to, existing ‘treatment options’ for women with absolute uterine factor infertility, such as adoption and gestational surrogacy. Within this literature UTx is often positioned as superior to surrogacy because it can deliver things that surrogacy cannot (such as the experience of gestation). Yet, in addition to claims that UTx is superior in (...) the aforementioned sense it is also often assumed (either implicitly or explicitly) that UTx is less fraught with ethical difficulties and thus should be considered a less morally problematic option. This article seeks to examine this assumption. Given that much UTx research has been performed in Sweden, a country where surrogacy is effectively although not currently explicitly forbidden, we do this through an analysis of the arguments underpinning a 2016 Swedish white paper which considered amending existing policy such that altruistic surrogacy arrangements would be permitted. By applying the white paper’s arguments for a restrictive position on altruistic surrogacy to the case of UTx using living altruistic donors we find that such arguments, if they hold in the case of surrogacy, apply similarly to UTx. We thus suggest that, for reasons of consistency, a similar stance should be taken towards the moral and legal permissibility of these two practices. (shrink)

This paper considers a key point of contention between classical and Bayesian statistics that is brought to the fore when examining so-called ‘persistent experimenters’—the issue of stopping rules, or more accurately, outcome spaces, and their influence on statistical analysis. First, a working definition of classical and Bayesian statistical tests is given, which makes clear that (1) once an experimental outcome is recorded, other possible outcomes matter only for classical inference, and (2) full outcome spaces are nevertheless relevant to both the (...) classical and Bayesian approaches, when it comes to planning/choosing a test. The latter point is shown to have important repercussions. Here we argue that it undermines what Bayesians may admit to be a compelling argument against their approach—the Bayesian indifference to persistent experimenters and their optional stopping rules. We acknowledge the prima facie appeal of the pro-classical ‘optional stopping intuition’, even for those who ordinarily have Bayesian sympathies. The final section of the paper, however, provides three error theories that may assist a Bayesian in explaining away the apparent anomaly in their reasoning. (shrink)

I focus my discussion on the well-known Ellsberg paradox. I find good normative reasons for incorporating non-precise belief, as represented by sets of probabilities, in an Ellsberg decision model. This amounts to forgoing the completeness axiom of expected utility theory. Provided that probability sets are interpreted as genuinely indeterminate belief, such a model can moreover make the “Ellsberg choices” rationally permissible. Without some further element to the story, however, the model does not explain how an agent may come to have (...) unique preferences for each of the Ellsberg options. Levi holds that the extra element amounts to innocuous secondary “risk” or security considerations that are used to break ties when more than one option is rationally permissible. While I think a lexical choice rule of this kind is very plausible, I argue that it involves a greater break with xpected utility theory than mere violation of the ordering axiom. (shrink)

Soma‐to‐germline feedback is forbidden under the neo‐Darwinian paradigm. Nevertheless, there is a growing realization it occurs frequently in immunoglobulin (Ig) variable (V) region genes. This is a surprising development. It arises from a most unlikely source in light of the exposure of co‐author EJS to the haplotype data of RL Dawkins and others on the polymorphism of the Major Histocompatibility Complex, which is generally assumed to be the most polymorphic region in the genome (spanning ∼4 Mb). The comparison between the (...) magnitude of MHC polymorphism with estimates for the human heavy chain immunoglobulin V locus (spanning ∼1 Mb), suggests IGHV could be many orders of magnitude more polymorphic than the MHC. This conclusion needs airing in the literature as it implies generational churn and soma‐to‐germline gene feedback. Pedigree‐based experimental strategies to resolve the IGHV issue are outlined. (shrink)

Schadenfreude, gluckschmerz, jealousy, and hate are distinctive emotional phenomena, understudied and deserving of increased attention. The authors of this special section have admirably synthesized large literatures, describing major characteristics, eliciting conditions, and functions. We discuss the contributions of each article as well as the issues they raise for theories of emotions and some remaining questions, and suggest ways in which these might be profitably addressed.

From the early ninth century until about eight centuries later, the Middle East witnessed a series of both simple and systematic astronomical observations for the purpose of testing contemporary astronomical tables and deriving the fundamental solar, lunar, and planetary parameters. Of them, the extensive observations of lunar eclipses available before 1000 AD for testing the ephemeredes computed from the astronomical tables are in a relatively sharp contrast to the twelve lunar observations that are pertained to the four extant accounts of (...) the measurements of the basic parameters of Ptolemaic lunar model. The last of them are Taqī al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Ma‘rūf’s trio of lunar eclipses observed from Istanbul, Cairo, and Thessalonica in 1576–1577 and documented in chapter 2 of book 5 of his famous work, Sidrat muntaha al-afkar fī malakūt al-falak al-dawwār. In this article, we provide a detailed analysis of the accuracy of his solar and lunar observations. (shrink)

This article considers the ethics of photojournalism from a television news perspective. The author, on the basis of his participant?observation study conducted at two major?market television stations, suggests that while most of the television news photographers he observed and interviewed expressed strong ethical beliefs and values, those same individuals admitted they often acted in contradiction to many of their personal ethical beliefs. Their actions in carrying out their work and their revelations on the structure of their ethical beliefs indicate they (...) face a dilemma in balancing values. They must deal with the often contradictory values of competition, careerism, journalistic norms, peer pressure, technology, and management and organizational expectations. (shrink)

THE PRINCIPLES OF SOCIAL EVOLUTION by C. R. Hallpike New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. 426pp., $59.00 CULTURE AND THE EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS by Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. 339pp., $29.95.

From Charles Taylor to Marcel Gauchet, theorists of the social imaginary have given us new ways to talk about the shared structures of meanings and practices of the West. Theorists of this group have argued against the narrow horizons of meaning that are deployed by deliberative political theories in developing their basic normative concepts and principles, providing an alternative to the oscillation between the constructivism and the realism. Theorists of the imaginary have enabled us to think about normatively charged collective (...) imaginaries as logically prior to the construction of normative principles. What theorists of the imaginary have not done is make specific connections between the ontological background of social imaginaries and the normative utterance. This lacuna has left them vulnerable to the charges of ‘normative deficit’ and vagueness that Habermas and others famously make against philosophies of ‘world disclosure’. This article develops a conception of the normative utterance that enables... (shrink)

This paper returns to some themes found in David Mitrany's classical ‘functionalist’ approach to international politics, in order to reconstruct practical principles that might be applied to contemporary politics as well as debates in International Relations and international political theory. It attempts to do this through two moves — ‘restoration’ and ‘contemporary reconstruction’. In restoring some of the insights Mitrany provides us that have been somewhat obscured over time, the paper hopes to demonstrate the ‘function’ behind functionalism — that its (...) core assumptions as an approach (if not ‘theory’) to international politics can prove to be just as instructive today as they were during the several decades of their initial development by Mitrany. Reconstruction, however, is necessitated by the observation that some of Mitrany's aspirations for functional theory — namely that it would produce ‘bonds’ that not only transcend national communities, but provide for the unraveling of the nation-state system as we know it — were a bit utopian. Thus, the paper proposes several avenues to reconstruct classical functionalism for contemporary politics. The paper then discusses three small empirical illustrations where micro-political insights can be extracted and briefly analysed: peace camps, the Regional Cooperation Council of the former Yugoslavia, and a more detailed analysis of the so-called ‘surge’ strategy in the ongoing US-Iraq conflict. It concludes with a two-pronged discussion on how micro-politics might speak to current debates in international political theory, and some mechanisms for securing functional spaces. (shrink)