In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Aviation and the Aerial View:Le Corbusier's Spatial Transformations in the 1930s and 1940sM. Christine Boyer (bio)Part One: The Aerial ViewAviation and Equipment. A London publishing house, The Studio, Ltd, sent Le Corbusier a letter in January 1935, inquiring whether he would be interested in collaborating on a new series of books to be titled The New Vision. The promoters explained that each book in the series would be (...) devoted to a unique event in industrial design, with specific attention paid to the designers, their aims, and the potential these designs held for social and human development. They would begin the series with a volume on the airplane. Le Corbusier was asked to write an introductory essay, supply captions for the images they had already collected, and offer a few suggestions for additional illustrations.1Accepting the invitation, Le Corbusier in his reply, however, transformed the project: instead of the word "airplane" he preferred "aviation," by which he meant all the prodigious phenomena opening vast new horizons in space and influencing the future of "equipment" in the broadest sense of the word.2 Already in Precisions (1930) he had written, "I replace the word 'urbanism' by the term 'equipment.' I have already replaced the term 'furniture' by that of 'equipment.' Such stubbornness shows well that we are purely and simply claiming tools for work, for we do not want to die of hunger facing the embroidered flowerbeds of aesthetic urbanism" [143]. To his bag of equipment, Le Corbusier now adds "aviation," a tool of modern communication forging new modes of exchange and new links between nations.3The material subsequently sent by the publishing house to Le Corbusier also met with lukewarm reception: he favored more lively documentation such as the view from an airplane as it flew over cities—vast open terrain, the sea, and the forests. And he wanted more picturesque treatment of the lives of aviators, their psychological and social attitudes including analysis of the great aerial routes being drawn between Europe and America, Africa, or Asia. The publishing house was unable to fulfill Le Corbusier's [End Page 93] expectations, reminding him that their focus was limited to "the airplane" and that they expected to receive all his material by May.4What did Le Corbusier mean by "aviation" and the "epic of the air," a phrase he used in the preface of the subsequent book Aircraft (1935)? What new horizons did aviation open and how did this affect the perception of space and the process of reading the terrain as a two-dimensional map or a plan? And what did aviation have to do with "equipment"? Just the year before Le Corbusier had seen the Exposition de l'Aéronautique in Milan for which Mussolini offered the maxim: "Aviation is grand, small, or nothing at all, depending on whether public awareness of aviation is grand, small, or nothing at all."5 Le Corbusier, ever the great publicist, accepted the challenge to spread the meaning of "aviation" in the inclusive sense of the word entailing adventure and service, organization, and machinery.The rapid growth of aviation during the interwar period was mercurial, dramatically reshaping perception of the world and of space. There were daring flights of aviators challenging the breath of oceans and deserts, the heights of Everest, the length of Africa, the uncharted terrain of the North and South Poles. The airplane not only internationalized cartography; it was a tool for exploring and controlling the colonies. While aerial photography, which recorded in precise detail the realistic shape of landmasses, coastlines, seas, deserts, and mountains, perfected the process of mapmaking and enriched the documentary archive of the planet.Yet even more stunning, aviation continually shrunk the size of the globe after the initial KLM flight between Amsterdam and Jakarta took off in 1924. Then the time needed to navigate the 9000 miles was 55 days; within five years it had been reduced to a mere 12 days. A world map criss-crossed with national air routes came into view. In the 1930s civil airlines began to offer passenger and mail service between London and the Middle East, then on to India and... (shrink)

Aggleton & Brown have built a convincing case that hippocampus-related circuits may be involved in thalamic amnesia. It remains to be established, however, that their model represents a distinct neurological system, that the distinction between recall and familiarity captures the roles of these pathways in episodic memory, or that there are no other systems that contribute to the signs of amnesia associated with thalamic disease.

Christine M. Korsgaard is one of today's leading moral philosophers: this volume collects ten influential papers by her on practical reason and moral psychology ...

Different types of consent are used to obtain human biospecimens for future research. This variation has resulted in confusion regarding what research is permitted, inadvertent constraints on future research, and research proceeding without consent. The National Institutes of Health Clinical Center's Department of Bioethics held a workshop to consider the ethical acceptability of addressing these concerns by using broad consent for future research on stored biospecimens. Multiple bioethics scholars, who have written on these issues, discussed the reasons for consent, the (...) range of consent strategies, and gaps in our understanding, and concluded with a proposal for broad initial consent coupled with oversight and, when feasible, ongoing provision of information to donors. This article describes areas of agreement and areas that need more research and dialogue. Given recent proposed changes to the Common Rule, and new guidance regarding storing and sharing data and samples, this is an important and tim.. (shrink)

Christine Korsgaard has become one of the leading interpreters of Kant's moral philosophy. She is identified with a small group of philosophers who are intent on producing a version of Kant's moral philosophy that is at once sensitive to its historical roots while revealing its particular relevance to contemporary problems. She rejects the traditional picture of Kant's ethics as a cold vision of the moral life which emphasises duty at the expense of love and value. Rather, Kant's work is (...) seen as providing a resource for addressing not only the metaphysics of morals, but also for tackling practical questions about personal relations, politics, and everyday human interaction. This collection contains some of the finest current work on Kant's ethics and will command the attention of all those involved in teaching and studying moral theory. (shrink)

State concussion laws and sport-league policies are important tools for protecting public health, but also present implementation challenges. Both state laws and league policies often require athletes provide written acknowledgement of having received concussion-related information and/or of their responsibility to report concussion-related symptoms. This paper examines these requirements in two ways: an analysis of the variation in state laws and sport-league policies and a study of their effects in a cohort of collegiate football players.

Agency and identity -- Necessitation -- Acts and actions -- Aristotle and Kant -- Agency and practical identity -- The metaphysics of normativity -- Constitutive standards -- The constitution of life -- In defense of teleology -- The paradox of self-constitution -- Formal and substantive principles of reason -- Formal versus substantive -- Testing versus weighing -- Maximizing and prudence -- Practical reason and the unity of the will -- The empiricist account of normativity -- The rationalist account of normativity (...) -- Kant on the hypothetical imperative -- Against particularistic willing -- Deciding and predicting -- Autonomy and efficacy -- The function of action -- The possibility of agency -- Non-rational action -- Action -- Attribution -- The psychology of action -- Expulsion from the garden : the transition to humanity -- Instinct, emotion, intelligence, and reason -- The parts of the soul -- Inside or outside -- Pull yourself together -- The constitutional model -- Models of the soul -- The city and the soul -- Platonic virtues -- Justice : substantive, procedural, and platonic -- Kant and the constitutional model -- Defective action -- The problem of bad action -- Being governed by the wrong law -- Or five bad constitutions -- Conceptions of evil -- Degrees of action -- Integrity and interaction -- Deciding to be bad -- The ordinary cases -- Dealing with the disunified -- Kant's theory of interaction -- My reasons -- Deciding to treat someone as an end in himself -- Interacting with yourself -- How to be a person -- What's left of me? (shrink)

Background: Little is known about what factors may contribute to the growth of a consultation service or how a practice may change or evolve across time. Methods: This study examines data collected from a busy ethics consultation service over a period of more than two decades. Results: We report a number of longitudinal findings that represent significant growth in the volume of ethics consultation requests from 19 in 1990 to 551 in 2013, as well as important changes in the patient (...) population for which ethics help is requested. The findings include (1) a steady growth in requests from primary care providers (e.g., physicians and nurses), as well as increases in ancillary services (e.g., social workers); (2) a decrease in length of stay (days) before ethics help is requested; (3) an increase in the reasons that individuals ask for help from ethics; (4) an upsurge in consults requests from areas outside the intensive care unit (ICU); (5) a decrease in patients that died during hospitalization (e.g., live discharges); and (6) growth in the numbers of patients lacking decision-making capacity. Conclusions: We believe the increases in consult requests reflect appropriate and necessary growth because recent consultations have also been associated with consultations requiring (7) additional interventions and (8) reasonably high time intensity scores. (shrink)

Kant holds that the good will is a source of value, In the sense that other things acquire their values from standing in an appropriate relation to it. I argue that aristotle holds a similar view about contemplation, And that this explains his preference for the contemplative life. They differ about what the source of value is because they differ about which kind of activity, ethical or contemplative, discovers meaning and purpose in the world.

Purpose/methods: This study investigated the relationship between ethics education and training, and the use and usefulness of ethics resources, confidence in moral decisions, and moral action/activism through a survey of practicing nurses and social workers from four United States (US) census regions. Findings: The sample (n = 1215) was primarily Caucasian (83%), female (85%), well educated (57% with a master's degree). no ethics education at all was reported by 14% of study participants (8% of social workers had no ethics education, (...) versus 23% of nurses), and only 57% of participants had ethics education in their professional educational program. Those with both professional ethics education and in-service or continuing education were more confident in their moral judgments and more likely to use ethics resources and to take moral action. Social workers had more overall education, more ethics education, and higher confidence and moral action scores, and were more likely to use ethics resources than nurses. Conclusion: Ethics education has a significant positive influence on moral confidence, moral action, and use of ethics resources by nurses and social workers. (shrink)

A contribution to a panel on ethics and animals forthcoming in The Harvard Review of Philosophy.

The Hearts and Minds of Ghana project improves the lives of those who are less fortunate and have few resources. Providing clear goals for the mission, devising prior guidelines for patient selection and treatment, achieving a better understanding of local culture and expectations, and good team work, facilitate making better ethical decisions, but doesn’t make them less difficult.

Christine M. Korsgaard is Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. She was educated at the University of Illinois and received a Ph.D. from Harvard. She has held positions at Yale, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Chicago, and visiting positions at Berkeley and UCLA. She is a member of the American Philosophical Association and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has published extensively on Kant, and about (...) moral philosophy and its history, the theory of practical reason, the philosophy of action, and personal identity. Her two published books are The Sources of Normativity (1992) and Creating the King- dom of Ends (1996). (shrink)

What do we mean when we say we act "for a reason"? What is the connection between Reason, as a faculty, and the reasons of our actions? This article maintains that Aristotle and Kant had a similar answer to this question. Moreover: the answer they give can help us to clarify the controversy between moral realism and empiricism regarding the ontological and epistemological status of what we call the reason of an action.

Content skepticism about practical reason is doubt about the bearing of rational considerations on the activities of deliberation and choice. Motivational skepticism is doubt about the scope of reason as a motive. Some people think that motivational considerations alone provide grounds for skepticism about the project of founding ethics on practical reason. I will argue, against this view, that motivational skepticism must always be based on content skepticism. I will not address the question of whether or not content skepticism is (...) justified. I want only to establish the fact that motivational skepticism has no independent force. (shrink)

In the Editorial for the previous issue of Journal of Global Ethics, we selected to discuss COVID-19, a global issue affecting very nearly all of us in unprecedented ways. The disease continues as...

Journal of Global Ethics, Volume 9, Issue 3, Page 263-275, December 2013.

This paper criticizes two accounts of the normativity of practical principles: the empiricist account and the rationalist or realist account. It argues against the empiricist view, focusing on the Humean texts that are usually taken to be its locus classicus. It then argues both against the dogmatic rationalist view, and for the Kantian view, through a discussion of Kant's own remarks about instrumental rationality in the second section of the Groundwork. It further argues that the instrumental principle cannot stand alone. (...) Unless there are normative principles directing us to the adoption of certain ends, there can be no requirement to take the means to our ends. The familiar view that the instrumental principle is the only requirement of practical reason is incoherent. (shrink)

This paper offers an account of the property Feuerbach and Marx called “species-being,” the human being’s distinctive tendency to identify herself as a member of her species, and to think of the species as a “we.” It links the notion to Kant’s theory of rights, arguing that every claim of right commits the maker of that claim to something like world government, and therefore to the conception of humanity as a collective agent. It also links species-being to the concept of (...) practical identity, arguing that the conceptions under which we find our lives and actions valuable are ones according to which we make a positive contribution to the life of the species. It then argues that the resulting conception of humanity, together with certain considerations about the nature of the good, provides grounds for challenging the familiar claim that death is generally worse for human beings than for animals. On the other hand, because of species-being, the extinction of our species is a much worse prospect for human beings than for the other animals. (shrink)

One of the debates of recent moral philosophy concerns the question whether moral judgments express “internal” or “external” reasons. According to internalists, if someone knows or accepts a moral judgment then she must have a motive for acting on it. The motive is part of the content of the judgment: the reason why the action is right is a reason for doing it. According to externalists, this is not necessarily so: there could be a case in which I understand both (...) that and why it is right for me to do something, and yet have no motive for doing it. Since most of us believe that an action’s being right is a reason for doing it, internalism seems more plausible. It captures one element of our sense that moral judgments have normative force: they are motivating. But some philosophers believe that internalism, if correct, would also impose a restriction on moral reasons. If moral reasons are to motivate, they must spring from an agent’s personal desires and commitments. This is unappealing, for unless the desires and commitments that motivate moral conduct are universal and inescapable, it cannot be required of everyone. And this leaves out the other element of our sense that moral judgments have normative force: they are binding. Some internalists, however, have argued that the force of internalism cuts the other way. If moral reasons must motivate, and I show you that an action is morally right, I have ipso facto provided you with a motive for doing it. Moral reasons motivate because they are perceived as binding. A good person, according to these internalists, does the right thing because it is the right thing, or acts from the motive of duty. (shrink)

Corporate image is a function of organizational signals which determine the perceptions of various stakeholders regarding the actions of an organization. Because of its relationship to the actions of an organization, image has been studied as an indicator of the social performance of the organization. Recent research has determined that social performance has direct effects on the behaviors and attitudes of the organization's employees. To better understand these effects, this study develops and empirically tests a model which links corporate leaders' (...) actions, employees' perceptions of corporate image, and the employees' level of association with the organization. The effects of managing the social environment of an organization on its employees' perceptions of image, attitudes, and intended behaviors are discussed. (shrink)

Wild horses are becoming dependent on transitional environments between domesticity and wildness. In Dutch new nature areas they are learning to perform roles as ecological surrogates for their extinct ancestors. In the U.S. wild horses are 'feral' and exist in numbers deemed to be in excess of the carrying capacity of semi-arid public range lands. The federal government is removing and relocating thousands to long-term holding pastures. The capabilities approach of Nussbaum (2006) allows us to evaluate this transitional environment against (...) a threshold of opportunities to exercise capabilities judged to be central to their flourishing as wild horses. (shrink)

Rape myth acceptance, perceived barriers, and self-efficacy were examined as predictors of likelihood to report different types of rape to law enforcement among 409 undergraduates. Participants had lower likelihood to report incapacitated compared to physically forced rape. Men had lower reporting likelihood than women for rape perpetrated by the same and opposite sex and were more likely to perceive several barriers. RMA and perceived barriers predicted a lower likelihood to report several types of rape. Among men, higher self-efficacy predicted increased (...) reporting likelihood. Targeting RMA and decreasing perceived barriers is imperative to increase college students’ likelihood to report rape to local and campus law enforcement. (shrink)

You are the kind of entity for whom things can be good or bad. This is one of the most important facts about you. It provides you with the grounds for taking a passionate interest in your own life, for you are deeply concerned that things should go well for you. Presumably, you also want to do well, but that may be in part because you think that doing well is good for you, and that your life would be impoverished (...) if you did not. But even if your interest in doing well is completely independent of any reference to your own condition, it probably depends on the thought that there are other entities, entities who are dependent upon you or affected by you, for whom things can be good or bad. It is only because there are entities like you, entities for whom things can be good or bad, that anything is important at all. If there were no entities for whom things can be good or bad, nothing would matter. (shrink)

Aristotle believes that an agent lacks virtue unless she enjoys the performance of virtuous actions, while Kant claims that the person who does her duty despite contrary inclinations exhibits a moral worth that the person who acts from inclination lacks. Despite these differences, this chapter argues that Aristotle and Kant share a distinctive view of the object of human choice and locus of moral value: that what we choose, and what has moral value, are not mere acts, but actions: acts (...) done for the sake of ends. Morally good actions embody a kind of intrinsic value that inspires us to do them from duty (in Kant) or for the sake of the noble (in Aristotle). The chapter traces the difference in their attitudes about doing one's duty with pleasure to a difference in their attitudes towards pleasure itself: Aristotle sees it as a perception of the good, while Kant thinks of it as mere feeling. (shrink)

One of the great difficulties with Kant’s moral philosophy is that it seems to imply that our moral obligations leave us powerless in the face of evil. Kant’s theory sets a high ideal of conduct and tells us to live up to that ideal regardless of what other persons are doing. The results may be very bad. But Kant says that the law "remains in full force, because it commands categorically" (G, 438-39/57).* The most weI1—known example of...