Corporations have increasingly turned to voluntary, multi-stakeholder governance programs to monitor workers’ rights and standards in global supply chains. This article argues that the emphasis of these programs varies significantly depending on stakeholder involvement and issue areas under examination. Corporate-influenced programs are more likely to emphasize detection of violations of minimal standards in the areas of wages, hours, and occupational safety and health because focusing on these issues provides corporations with legitimacy and reduces the risks of uncertainty created by activist (...) campaigns. In contrast, these programs are less likely to emphasize workers’ rights to form democratic and independent unions, bargain, and strike because these rights are perceived as lessening managerial control without providing firms with significant reputational value. This argument is explored by coding 805 factory audits of the Fair Labor Association between 2002 and 2010, followed by case studies of Russell Athletic in Honduras, Apple in China, and worker rights monitoring in Vietnam. (shrink)

Global supply chains (GSCs) present the International Labour Organization (ILO) with a challenge that goes to the heart of its founding mandate and structure, one built on the prominence of nation states and national representatives of employers and workers. In February 2020, discussions in the ILO on the rise of GSCs reached deadlock. To fully understand why the ILO has been unable to address decent work deficits in GSCs greater attention needs to be paid to contestation, power and legitimacy in (...) the deliberation of labour governance. Drawing on the concept of agonistic pluralism we examine the evolution of the ILO’s attempt to establish a new labour standard on GSCs under three empirical phases between 2002 and 2020. We argue that shifting power asymmetries between the tripartite constituents of governments, employers and workers, increased counter-hegemonic contestation, and intensified questioning of the deliberative legitimacy of the adversaries, explain the dissensual relations at the ILO. This article contributes to the literature on labour standards in GSCs in demonstrating how and why contestation underpins the evolution of labour governance over time. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant's final publication in ethics was The Doctrine of Virtue, Part II of the 1797 The Metaphysics of Morals. This text presents Kant's normative ethical theory. This guide is meant to be read alongside Kant's text, combining accessible explanations and novel interpretations of this difficult text. It is the first book in English devoted to The Doctrine of Virtue, one of Kant's most significant works. -/- Timmons divides the guide into five parts. Part I reviews Kant's life, the history (...) and significance of The Doctrine of Virtue, and situates Kant's ethics within his general metaphysical and epistemological views. Part II is devoted to the General Introduction to The Metaphysics of Morals, which is essential for understanding Kant's ethics. Part III and Part IV turn to The Doctrine of Virtue itself, exploring Kant's defense of a system of duties and corresponding virtues. Part V examines Kant's conception of moral education, the practice of virtue, and the conclusion to the book where Kant explains why the discipline of ethics does not include religion as a doctrine of duties to God. Timmons concludes the book highlighting key aspects of The Doctrine of Virtue, situating Kant's ethical theory in relation to other normative ethical theories. This guide is a vital resource for both students and scholars interested in ethics and the history of philosophy. (shrink)

Everyone wants to be virtuous, but recent psychological investigations suggest that this may not be possible. Mark Alfano challenges this theory and asks, not whether character is empirically adequate, but what characters human beings could have and develop. Although psychology suggests that most people do not have robust character traits such as courage, honesty and open-mindedness, Alfano argues that we have reason to attribute these virtues to people because such attributions function as self-fulfilling prophecies - children become more studious (...) if they are told that they are hard-working and adults become more generous if they are told that they are generous. He argues that we should think of virtue and character as social constructs: there is no such thing as virtue without social reinforcement. His original and provocative book will interest a wide range of readers in contemporary ethics, epistemology, moral psychology and empirically informed philosophy. (shrink)

If one rejects choice theory, one still faces the challenge of explaining what one should do in a self-torture case if one is fully rational, and why. In addition, one faces the more fundamental challenge of explaining what rationality is, if it is not choice theory. Responding to these challenges in a systematic way is one of several key contributions of Andreou’s insightful book Choosing Well, and is my focus here as well. My goal is to highlight questions that arise (...) for Andreou’s view, especially from the perspective of those who are sympathetic to choice theory. (shrink)

ArgumentBy breaking decisively with the predominantly apologetic and hagiographic literature on science during National Socialism and employing compelling terms such as “irresponsible purity” and “collaborative relations,” Herbert Mehrtens profoundly influenced both his contemporaries and the subsequent generation of historians working in this field.

When Thomas Nagel originally coined the expression “moral luck,” he used the term “luck” to mean lack of control. This use was a matter of stipulation, as Nagel’s target had little to do with luck itself, but the question of how control is related to moral responsibility. Since then, we have seen several analyses of the concept of luck itself, and recent contributors to the moral luck literature have often assumed that any serious contribution to the moral luck debate must (...) begin with a robust concept of luck simpliciter. I argue here that this assumption is a mistake, on the basis of three reasons: the issue was originally conceived as an issue about responsibility and control, analyses of luck tend to distort and needlessly to complicate what is at issue when shoehorned into the moral luck debate, and these analyses have very little (if anything) to contribute to the discussion. (shrink)

Nineteenth century treatments of attention often argued that analysis (attention singles out an object) and synthesis (attention unifies some objects) are inseparable aspects of this activity. Subsequent philosophical work on attention concentrated on the analytic aspect and exploited William James's characterisation of attention as focussing on one object among others. The aim of this paper is to give a more balanced account of the history of philosophical work on attention as well as the activity theorised by highlighting the synthetic aspect (...) of attention. The paper is centred on Hermann Lotze's (1817–1881) work on attention. According to him, attention is constituted by comparing. I will motivate Lotze's main thesis and expound his supporting argument in detail by locating it in his work on vision. The paper will draw on George Dawes Hicks engagement with Lotze and assess Francis H. Bradley's criticism of Lotze's main thesis. (shrink)

Table of Contents -/- Introduction: Epistemic Situationism by Abrol Fairweather -/- 1. Is Every Epistemology A Virtue Epistemology? by Lauren Olin -/- 2. Epistemic Situationism: An extended prolepsis by Mark Alfano -/- 3. Virtue Epistemology in the Zombie Apocalypse: Hungry Judges, Heavy Clipboards and Grou Polarization by Berit Brogaard -/- 4. Situationism and Responsibilist Virtue Epistemology by James Montmarquet -/- 5. Virtue Theory Against Situationism by Ernest Sosa -/- 6. Intellectual Virtue Now and Again by Chris Lepock -/- 7.Responsibilism (...) Out of Character by Kurt Sylvan -/- 8. Epistemic Situationism and Cognitive Ability by John Turri -/- 9. Epistemic Situationism, Epistemic Dependence and the Epistemology of Education by J. Adam Carter and Duncan Pritchard -/- 10. The Situationist Challenge to Educating For Intellectual Virtues by Jason Baehr -/- 11. Feminist Responsibilism, Situationism and the Complexities of the Virtue ofTrustworthiness by Heidi Grasswick -/- 12. Moods and Their Unexpected Virtues by Nicole Smith . (shrink)

This article surveys the difficulties in establishing determinism for classical physics within the context of several distinct foundational approaches to the discipline. It explains that such problems commonly emerge due to a deeper problem of ‘missing physics'. The Problems of Formalism Norton's Example Three Species of Classical Mechanics 3.1 Mass point physics 3.2 The physics of perfect constraints 3.3 Continuum mechanics Conclusion CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this?

It is argued that the primary aim of institutional management is to protect the moral integrity of health professionals without significantly compromising other important values and interests. Institutional policies are recommended as a means to promote fair, consistent, and transparent management of conscience-based refusals. It is further recommended that those policies include the following four requirements: (1) Conscience-based refusals will be accommodated only if a requested accommodation will not impede a patient’s/surrogate’s timely access to information, counseling, and referral. (2) Conscience-based (...) refusals will be accommodated only if a requested accommodation will not impede a patient’s timely access to health care services offered within the institution. (3) Conscience-based refusals will be accommodated only if the accommodation will not impose excessive burdens on colleagues, supervisors, department heads, other administrators, or the institution. (4) Whenever feasible, health professionals should provide advance notification to department heads or supervisors. Formal review may not be required in all cases, but when it is appropriate, several recommendations are offered about standards and the review process. A key recommendation is that when reviewing an objector’s reasons, contrary to what some have proposed, it is not appropriate to adopt an adversarial approach modelled on military review boards’ assessments of requests for conscientious objector status. According to the approach recommended, the primary function of reviews of objectors’ reasons is to engage them in a process of reflecting on the nature and depth of their objections, with the objective of facilitating moral clarity on the part of objectors rather than enabling department heads, supervisors, or ethics committees to determine whether conscientious objections are sufficiently genuine. (shrink)

Resource-rational approaches offer much promise for understanding human cognition, especially if they can reach beyond the confines of individual minds. Language allows people to transcend individual resource limitations by augmenting computation and enabling distributed cognition. Interactive language use, an environment where social rational agents routinely deal with resource constraints together, offers a natural laboratory to test resource-rationality in the wild.

Emotion Review, Volume 14, Issue 1, Page 15-30, January 2022. We offer an account of mental health and well-being using the predictive processing framework. According to this framework, the difference between mental health and psychopathology can be located in the goodness of the predictive model as a regulator of action. What is crucial for avoiding the rigid patterns of thinking, feeling and acting associated with psychopathology is the regulation of action based on the valence of affective states. In PPF, valence (...) is modelled as error dynamics—the change in prediction errors over time. Our aim in this paper is to show how error dynamics can account for both momentary happiness and longer term well-being. What will emerge is a new neurocomputational framework for making sense of human flourishing. (shrink)

In many of the special sciences, mathematical models are used to provide information about specified target systems. For instance, population models are used in ecology to make predictions about the abundance of real populations of particular organisms. The status of mathematical models, though, is unclear and their use is hotly contested by some practitioners. A common objection levelled against the use of these models is that they ignore all the known, causally-relevant details of the often complex target systems. Indeed, the (...) objection continues, mathematical models, by their very nature, abstract away from what matters and thus cannot be relied upon to provide any useful information about the systems they are supposed to represent. In this paper, I will examine the role of some typical mathematical models in population ecology and elsewhere. I argue that while, in a sense, these models do ignore the causal details, this move can not only be justified, it is necessary. I will argue that idealising away from complicating causal details often gives a clearer view of what really matters. And often what really matters is not the push and shove of base-level causal processes, but higher-level predictions and (non-causal) explanations. (shrink)

This article explores the nuanced interaction early Nietzsche affords towards the thought and mission of the Christian priest in The Birth of Tragedy and its associated The Dionysiac Worldview. In terms of positive engagement, first, Nietzsche’s project of ‘justification’, central to these works, can be seen as pertaining to the project of the Christian priest, as Nietzsche understands him. Second, Nietzsche chooses to characterise and demonstrate his preferred ‘justifications’, the ‘Apollonian’ and ‘Dionysian’, by paralleling and borrowing from historical efforts of (...) theodicy formulated by the priest. Third, Nietzsche’s self-embraced project to revive a ‘Tragic’ culture, to ‘hallow’ the Dionysian, tracks the repeated historical role he attributes to the priest. Fourth, and here by way of critical engagement, Nietzsche’s analysis of the ‘Socratic’ justification, again paralleling elements from Christian theodicy, anticipates what will become Nietzsche’s mature, no longer nuanced, hostile stance towards the thought and function of the Christian priest figure. (shrink)

I offer an appreciation and critique of Ernst Fehr’s altruism research in experimental economics that challenges the "selfishness axiom" as an account of human behavior. I describe examples of Fehr’s experiments and their results and consider his conceptual terminology, particularly his "biological" definition of altruism and its counterintuitive implications. I also look at Fehr’s experiments from a methodological perspective and examine his explanations of subjects’ behavior. In closing, I look at Fehr’s neuroscientific work in experimental economics and question his adherence (...) to a subjective expected utility interpretation of subjects’ behavior. Key Words: altruism • Ernst Fehr • strong reciprocity • neuroeconomics • experimental economics. (shrink)

This dissertation is concerned with normativity both as an explanatory device in the philosophy of language, logic and epistemology and as a philosophical issue in its own right. Following later Wittgenstein and Sellars, it is argued that language is normative, in the first instance because of the fact that speech acts take place within a structure of social norms and institutions. This fact is then utilized to show that important features of semantic content can be explained in terms of such (...) norms. ;This Sellarsian conception of linguistic usage as the performance of acts within a linguistic game of giving and asking for reasons, leads us to focus on inferential proprieties as central to semantic content. It is, then, natural to look at logical vocabulary, paradigmatically 'entails', as expressing the very normative relations definitive of this content. An idea of Brandom's is developed in providing a formal theory of the inferential content of logical vocabulary. Such normative-inferentialist semantic analyses are developed for a wide range of logical systems. ;A certain conception of justification also falls naturally out of this general theory of language. If asserting is an act performed within a linguistic game, then justification can be thought of as a matter of winning such a game, a successfully defending one's assertion in the face of licensed challenges to it. This account is developed, drawing consequences for the theory of rationality and knowledge. ;The second major issue of the dissertation is the theory of the normative itself and much of the constructive work in the philosophy of language, philosophy of logic and epistemology forms a case study for a particular theory of the normative. On the basis of Wittgensteinian considerations, it is argued that normativity must be understood as resting ultimately on social practice. ;We solve problems of earlier accounts of norms by introducing a novel normative relation between assertions of normative propriety and social practices. Normative assertions do not describe existing social standards, but do nonetheless derive their semantic content from those standards. This argument carried through in detail for cases of logical and epistemic vocabulary in the dissertation. (shrink)

This book . . . is an invitation to all Christians to begin constructing a food ethics; to the academic Christian ethicist, it presents an opportunity to join a discussion on a topic relevant in so many ways to the life of every American; to the Christian for whom the spark of the divine is detectable in the everyday life, it is a chance to begin making ethical sense out of something done every day for the entirety of one's natural (...) life-participating in agriculture. -from the Introduction In Sustainable Agriculture, Mark Graham joins the vibrant, substantive discussion about the moral issues in American agriculture by revealing what is going on in current agricultural practices and analyzing them in light of morality and sustainability. Graham's constructive proposal for change is based on a moral vision that identifies a group of core values around which our agricultural system should be developed, including: a) a consistent, safe food supply; b) vital, sustainable communities; and c) personal and environmental health. (shrink)

(2013). Should Researchers Disclose Results to Descendants? The American Journal of Bioethics: Vol. 13, No. 10, pp. 64-65. doi: 10.1080/15265161.2013.828531.

In the second volume of his Wissenschaftslehre from 1837, the Bohemian philosopher, theologian, and mathematician Bernard Bolzano introduced his concept of consequence, named derivability, together with a variety of theorems and further considerations. Derivability is an implication relation between sentences in themselves, which are not meant to be linguistic symbols but the contents of declarative sentences as well as of certain mental episodes. When Schmidt utters the sentence ‘Schnee ist weiß’, and Jones judges that snow is white, the sentence in (...) itself expressed by Schmidt is the same as the one to which Jones agrees in thought. This sentence in itself is an abstract entity: in some sense, it exists; but it is unreal insofar as it lacks a position in space and time, does not stand in causal relationships, and is independent of the existence of thinking beings and languages. (shrink)

It is argued that the conventional descriptions of chemical bonds as covalent, ionic, metallic, and Van der Waals are compromising the usefulness of quantum mechanics in the synthesis and design of new molecules and materials. Parallels are drawn between the state of chemistry now and when the idea that phlogiston was an element impeded the development of chemistry. Overcoming the current obstacles will require new methods to describe molecular structure and bonding, just as new concepts were needed before the phlogiston (...) theory could be set aside. (shrink)

Environmental pragmatists such as Ben Minteer and Bryan Norton have argued that there is an anti-democratic strain to be found in the work of some nonanthropocentrists. I examine three possible sources of the pragmatists’ concern: the claim that nonanthropocentrists know the political truth, the claim that those who disagree with their basic principle should be excluded from discussions of policy and the claim that their basic principle is self-evident. I argue here that none of these claims are objectionably anti-democratic when (...) understood properly. (shrink)

Jesse Prinz compares Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals to its utilitarian and materialist counterparts and gives two cheers for the Nietzschean approach.1 The project is well conceived; and—readers of this journal will not need to be convinced of this—the recognition of Nietzsche’s achievement is deserved and welcome. But when we get to “the particular go of it,”2 Prinz’s account of what Nietzsche’s achievement is, I have reservations. Though we have much to learn from his juxtaposing Nietzschean genealogy to its utilitarian and (...) materialist counterparts, we can learn more when we dig deeper and pay more attention to detail. In what follows, I will show how a better account of the relationship between history... (shrink)

A national survey on researchers’ experiences with their institutional review boards (IRBs) is presented, focused exclusively on social and behavioral researchers. A wide range of experiences is apparent in the data, especially in terms of turnaround time for submitted protocols, incidence of data collection without prior IRB approval, and stated reasons for "going solo." Sixty-two percent felt that the turnaround time they typically experience is "reasonable," and 44% said they had not experienced long delays in obtaining approval. However, 48% of (...) respondents reported either conducting a project without IRB approval or modifying an existing project without IRB approval, with anticipated time for approval being the dominant reason offered for doing so. This adds a new dimension to the widely discussed "national IRB crisis" (e.g., Illinois White Paper, 2005). The article concludes with 2 preliminary recommendations for IRB reform. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis study of reporting by UK national newspapers of Gipsies, Roma and Travelers offers a macro-analysis to complement existing discourse analyses. The results show a significant imbalance...

To date, both sides in the conventionality of simultaneity debate grant that transformations from "standard" to "nonstandard" coordinates are possible without any empirically significant effects. However, it is argued here that the very possibility of defining nonstandard coordinates vanishes if one represents special relativity, not by real four-vectors (as has been the case so far in the debate), but by complex spinors as used in the representation of half-integer spin. Thus, in the topologically simplest representation of the Lorentz group, the (...) transformation over which the debate has been fought does not exist and one of the most basic foundations of the conventionalist thesis is challenged. (shrink)

In an essay published in 1989 the distinguished poet and scholar A. K. Ramanujan asked if there was such a thing as "an Indian way of thinking."1 Having formulated his subject as a question, he then spent his opening pages reflecting on whether this question could be posed at all. An extensive study by a leading Japanese scholar of Buddhism, which Ramanujan did not mention, had analyzed the "ways of thinking of Eastern peoples" in a monograph originally completed in 1947 (...) and published in an expanded English translation in 1964.2 An approach such as Hajime Nakamura's may have seemed already outdated by the time Ramanujan wrote; surely, we now know better than to identify patterns of thought... (shrink)

Operational definitions were a neo-Machean development that connected with the positivism of Logical Positivism. Logical Positivism failed, with the failure of operational definitions being just one of multiple and multifarious failures of Logical Positivism more broadly. Operationalism, however, has continued to seduce psychology more than half a century after it was repudiated by philosophers of science, including the very Logical Positivists who had first taken it seriously. It carries with it a presupposed metaphysics that is false in virtually all of (...) its particulars, and thereby distorts and obscures genuine issues concerning the nature of theory and of science. It makes it particularly difficult for psychologists, under the thrall of this dogma, to free themselves from these false presuppositions, and to think about, create, and critique genuine scientific theory and process. That is the tragedy of operationalism. (shrink)