The development of any novel reproductive technology involving manipulation of human embryos is almost inevitably going to be controversial and evoke sincerely held, but diametrically opposing views. The plethora of scientific, ethical and legal issues that surround the clinical use of such techniques fuels this divergence of opinion. During the policy change that was required to allow the use of mitochondrial donation in the UK, many of these issues were intensely scrutinised by a variety of people and in multiple contexts. (...) This extensive process resulted in the publication of several reports that informed the recommendations made to government. We have been intrinsically involved in the development of mitochondrial donation, from refining the basic technique for use in human embryos through to clinical service delivery, and have taken the opportunity in this article to offer our own perspective on the issues it raises. (shrink)

This textbook provides a survey of the literature of social choice. It integrates the ethical aspects of the subject, with positive aspects of decision mechanisms that centre on the revelation of true preferences. The literature on the subject presently consists of a great many papers. This book draws them together in common notation and points out interpretations which are often missing in specialist papers. Applications in economics, electoral politics, and ethics are discussed. The book will be used by senior undergraduate (...) and graduate students of economics, political science and philosophy as a text book in the subject. (shrink)

In this volume based on her 2014 Locke Lectures, Martha C. Nussbaum provides a bracing new view that strips the notion of forgiveness down to its Judeo-Christian roots, where it was structured by the moral relationship between a score-keeping God and penitent, self-abasing, and erring mortals.

This volume brings together Nussbaum's published papers on the relationship between literature and philosophy, especially moral philosophy. The papers, many of them previously inaccessible to non-specialist readers, explore such fundamental issues as the relationship between style and content in the exploration of ethical issues; the nature of ethical attention and ethical knowledge and their relationship to written forms and styles; and the role of the emotions in deliberation and self-knowledge. Nussbaum investigates and defends a conception of ethical understanding which involves (...) emotional as well as intellectual activity, and which gives a certain type of priority to the perception of particular people and situations rather than to abstract rules. She argues that this ethical conception cannot be completely and appropriately stated without turning to forms of writing usually considered literary rather than philosophical. It is consequently necessary to broaden our conception of moral philosophy in order to include these forms. Featuring two new essays and revised versions of several previously published essays, this collection attempts to articulate the relationship, within such a broader ethical inquiry, between literary and more abstractly theoretical elements. (shrink)

This book is a study of ancient views about 'moral luck'. It examines the fundamental ethical problem that many of the valued constituents of a well-lived life are vulnerable to factors outside a person's control, and asks how this affects our appraisal of persons and their lives. The Greeks made a profound contribution to these questions, yet neither the problems nor the Greek views of them have received the attention they deserve. This book thus recovers a central dimension of Greek (...) thought and addresses major issues in contemporary ethical theory. One of its most original aspects is its interrelated treatment of both literary and philosophical texts. The Fragility of Goodness has proven to be important reading for philosophers and classicists, and its non-technical style makes it accessible to any educated person interested in the difficult problems it tackles. This new edition features an entirely new preface by Martha Nussbaum. (shrink)

The Epicureans, Skeptics, and Stoics practiced philosophy not as a detached intellectual discipline, but as a worldly art of grappling with issues of daily and urgent human significance: the fear of death, love and sexuality, anger and aggression. Like medicine, philosophy to them was a rigorous science aimed both at understanding and at producing the flourishing of human life. In this engaging book, Martha Nussbaum examines texts of philosophers committed to a therapeutic paradigm--including Epicurus, Lucretius, Sextus Empiricus, Chrysippus, and Seneca--and (...) recovers a valuable source for our moral and political thought of today.The Epicureans, Skeptics, and Stoics practiced philosophy not as a detached intellectual discipline, but as a worldly art of grappling with issues of daily and urgent human significance: the fear of death, love and sexuality, anger and aggression. Like medicine, philosophy to them was a rigorous science aimed both at understanding and at producing the flourishing of human life. In this engaging book, Martha Nussbaum examines texts of philosophers committed to a therapeutic paradigm--including Epicurus, Lucretius, Sextus Empiricus, Chrysippus, and Seneca--and recovers a valuable source for our moral and political thought of today. (shrink)

The action language C+ of Giunchiglia, Lee, Lifschitz, McCain and Turner is a high-level, logical formalism for the representation of domains involving action and change. However, one cannot directly express relationships which hold between states more than one time-step distant, or even say that one action determines another at the next time. We present C+timed, a generalization of C+ which removes these limitations. As for C+, translations to the language of causal theories are given. We also define a new kind (...) of transition system called a ‘run system’ to provide a graphical semantics. Finally, we show how domains involving prohibition and permission can be modelled, by incorporating the ideas of another extension of C+. (shrink)

The cosmopolitan tradition begins with Diogenes, who claimed as his identity "citizen of the world." Martha Nussbaum traces the cosmopolitan ideal from ancient times to the present, weighing its limitations as well as merits. Using the capabilities approach, Nussbaum seeks to integrate the "noble but flawed" vision of world citizenship with cosmopolitanism's concern with moral and political justice for all.--.

This article presents a critical analysis of Disney's animated film and stage production of Beauty and the Beast, especially of the heroine, Belle, within a more general and brief historiography of the fairy tale. It is argued that Disney's version displaces the heroic focus from Belle to Beast, while also narrating a response to feminism that involves compressing feminist ideology into conventions of popular romance. The broader representation of femininity in Disney is also examined with reference, particularly, to Snow White (...) and the Seven Dwarfs, and with reflections also on non-fictional characters from media with a relationship to Disney, specifically, Diana Princess of Wales, Lillian Disney and Ellen DeGeneres. Teresa de Lauretis's `elsewhere of vision' is introduced to disrupt and rewrite the domesticating effects of Disney's feminism on its heroines. (shrink)

The possibility of domain restrictions that allow the consistent use of majority-based aggregators for rankings of objects has been widely explored. This paper extends this exploration to structures in which equivalence relations or classifications are aggregated, and shows that there is very limited scope for such restrictions in the binary structure of Mirkin and in the unary structure of Maniquet and Mongin. We develop a hybrid structure that combines binary and unary conditions on the aggregator, and that allows the use (...) of a majority-based aggregator if and only if each object is eligible for inclusion in no more than two categories out of some greater number. We also show that in many circumstances, the surjectivity requirement of Maniquet and Mongin implicitly introduces binary conditions on the aggregator, and that their structure is entailed by the hybrid structure introduced here. (shrink)

He has become the representative or symbol of the times in which he lived. ... 195; E. Monnerjahn, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, (Wiesbaden, 1960), p. ...

In the UK, over 70% of AIDS, including new cases, is located in a few Districts in central London where the distribution of previously occurring and new cases is essentially confined to the original risk groups of homosexual/bisexual men, drug addicts of both sexes, and some of their sexual partners and consorts. But control policy is still based on the assumption that HIV has already spread from persons in these risk groups into the general population, and that it will spread (...) hereafter at an increased rate because of heterosexual transmission to cause a widespread epidemic of AIDS.The basis and implications of this policy were investigated in the South East region adjacent to London, Analysis of demographic and epidemiological data shows that, with one exception, there is very little extension of AIDS from affected Districts in London to the surrounding region or even to the suburban fringe. Where AIDS is prevalent, as in this exception, the distribution follows the same, original pattern which relates essentially to risks arising from life-styles. There is no significant association between the prevalence or spread of AIDS and conventional markers of deprivation, economic and social disadvantage.Allocations of personnel, services and expenditure, assessed from returns required under the AIDS Control Act of 1987 and official registration data, continue to follow the original policy assumptions. They are therefore unrelated to the numbers of existing and new cases, disproportionate and unrealistic. Claims that this widespread excess of effort is justified by the fact that AIDS has not spread to the general population are falsified by the continuation of cases almost exclusively in risk groups. There is nothing in the data required under the Act or in registrations in this main locus of AIDS in the UK to suggest any change in this or to justify continuation of current expenditure and redundant activities.There is no evidence in these data that ethnic variations in the resident populations of Districts are associated with variations in the prevalence of AIDS. However, the larger figures available in some of the national data do indicate a disproportionate increase in some minority ethnic groups. Further detail about risks factors in these groups are required and, meanwhile, effort and expenditure should be re-orientated toward treatment, contact tracing and other public health measures for more effective containment of the continuing spread of AIDS in all the high risk groups. (shrink)

A widely held rights-based view asserts that individuals should be permitted to self-designate characteristics such as race and gender. But some argue that there are opinions that oppose the use only of self-designation, and that these should not be ignored. Kasher and Rubinstein (Logique Anal 160:385–395, 1997) demonstrated that the latter view is equivalent to accepting that one or more of five conditions must be violated. This paper extends their analysis to allow for more than two categories, and focuses on (...) simplifying the conditions without jeopardising their conclusion. In particular, we use significantly weaker conditions of independence and of symmetry than are common in other extensions of the original proposition. (shrink)

Reasons First explores the hypothesis that reasons have a basic explanatory role in ethics and epistemology. While widely accepted concerning moral worth, Schroeder argues that this idea also illuminates some long-standing puzzles to do with knowledge.

Bringing together a group of outstanding new essays on Aristotle's De Anima, this book covers topics such as the relation between soul and body, sense-perception, imagination, memory, desire, and thought, which present the philosophical substance of Aristotle's views to the modern reader. The contributors write with philosophical subtlety and wide-ranging scholarship, locating their interpretations firmly within the context of Aristotle's thought as a whole.u.

Talk about Beliefs presents a new account of beliefs and of practices of reporting them that yields solutions to foundational problems in the philosophies of...

Beliefs are concrete particulars containing ideas of properties and notions of things, which also are concrete. The claim made in a belief report is that the agent has a belief (i) whose content is a specific singular proposition, and (ii) which involves certain of the agent's notions and ideas in a certain way. No words in the report stand for the notions and ideas, so they are unarticulated constituents of the report's content (like the relevant place in "it's raining"). The (...) belief puzzles (Hesperus, Cicero, Pierre) involve reports about two different notions. So the analysis gets the puzzling truth values right. (shrink)

This article is focused on the nature of directives. It draws on Curl and Drew’s analysis of entitlement and contingency in request types and applies this to a corpus of directives that occur in UK family mealtimes involving parents and young children. While requests are built as contingent to varying degrees on the recipient’s willingness or ability to comply, directives embody no orientation to the recipient’s ability or desire to perform the relevant activity. This lack of orientation to ability or (...) desire may be what makes them recognizable as directives. When examining directives in sequence the contingencies were successively reduced or managed during the delivery of the directive, thereby treating contingencies as a resource of the speaker rather than of the recipient. In a sense the entitlement claimed is ‘to tell’ rather than ‘to ask’. In sequences involving multiple/repeated directives, non-compliance led to upgraded directives. The difference in the entitlement claimed, the response options available and the trajectory of multiple requests/directives suggests that participants orient to requests and directives as different actions, rather than more or less forceful formulations of the same. (shrink)