We are living at the dawn of the first truly scientific picture of the universe-as-a-whole, yet people are still dragging along prescientific ideas about God that cannot be true and are even meaningless in the universe we now know we live in. This makes it impossible to have a coherent big picture of the modern world that includes God. But we don't have to accept an impossible God or else no God. We can have a real God if we redefine (...) God in light of knowledge no one ever had before. The key question is, “Could anything actually exist in the scientific universe that is worthy of the name, God?” My answer is yes: God is an “emergent phenomenon,” as real as the global economy or the government or the worldwide web, which are all emergent phenomena. But God arose from something deeper: the complex interactions of all humanity's aspirations. An emerging God has enormous implications. (shrink)

Beginning in 2002, Wells Fargo began opening fraudulent accounts for unsuspecting customers. Stakeholders at every level either participated in, ignored, or tolerated the bank’s behavior that defrauded consumers on a massive scale. These unethical and well-documented schemes spanned more than a decade. Using public sources, this case recounts the events and ethical lapses that unfolded over the multiyear investigation of the Wells Fargo fraudulent accounts scandal and illuminates the general systemic failures of corporate culture and governance, public regulation, and market (...) responses to promote ethical business practices. This case provides the opportunity to consider what means for fostering ethical conduct might exist if a corporation can be big enough and rich enough that civil, criminal, regulatory, and market forces cannot deter unethical corporate practices, and if the market does not punish the corporation for a culture that promotes fraud. (shrink)

Civic agriculture is characterized in the literature as complementary and embedded social and economic strategies that provide economic benefits to farmers at the same time that they ostensibly provide socio-environmental benefits to the community. This paper presents some ways in which women farmers practice civic agriculture. The data come from in-depth interviews with women practicing agriculture in Pennsylvania. Some of the strategies women farmers use to make a living from the farm have little to do with food or agricultural products, (...) but all are a product of the process of providing a living for farmers while meeting a social need in the community. Most of the women in our study also connect their business practices to their gender identity in rural and agricultural communities, and redefine successful farming in opposition to traditional views of economic rationality. (shrink)

The distinctive depth and seriousness of moral responsibility is often thought to stem from the seriousness of violating moral obligations. But this raises questions about being morally responsible for normative failure that does not belong to the deontic realm. This paper focuses on actions that we might, in the Aristotelian tradition, call ethical, and which concern how we order relations with ourselves; they concern certain fundamental conditions for agency. The paper provides a novel defense of the depth of self-directed aretaic (...) appraisal as intrapersonal responsibility; it also explains and provides a defense for Gary Watson’s claim that “Responsibility is important to issues about what it is to lead a life, indeed what it is to have a life in a biographical sense, and the quality and character of that life.” The depth of self-directed aretaic appraisal, I argue is a function of three features: its structure, the violation of normative standards and the reflective activity that it requires. Reflective human beings have an interest in leading lives that are rich, rewarding and expressive of our values and concerns. From the first-personal point of view, a life that is impoverished along any of these dimensions is defective in the aretaic sense. Protecting these interests requires discernment of these values and is accordingly a deep and serious form of appraisal. Because violation of these standards explains why at least one class of responsibility appraisal is deep and serious, depth and seriousness may have a plurality of explanations. (shrink)

Hume claims that moral assessments refer to character; it is character of which we morally approve and disapprove. This essay explores what Hume means by “character.” Is it true that moral assessments refer to character, and should Hume think this given his other commitments in moral philosophy and moral psychology? I discuss two prominent themes—namely, Hume’s views on moral responsibility; and Hume’s comparison of moral feelings with feelings of love—to see what light these themes can shed on Hume’s broader views (...) about moral assessment. I argue that at least according to a traditional understanding of the term, character could not plausibly have a role to play in Hume’s account of moral assessment, but that Hume’s moral theory could require a conception of character different from this traditional one: a conception according to which character need not be the standard one that holds character to be consistent, stable, and well-integrated. In morally assessing others, we do not do so on the basis of their characters , but on the basis of their motivational states. My account of Hume’s theory of the responsibility, passions and the moral sentiments leaves intact the central Humean insights about the conditions for action and the arousal of the moral sentiment, suggesting what Hume could have said, both more plausibly and without undermining the key features of his moral psychology. And it also shows that Hume’s moral theory has no need for a robust conception of character. (shrink)

Can a virtuous person act contrary to the virtue she possesses? Can virtues have “holes”—or blindspots—and nonetheless count as virtues? Gopal Sreenivasan defends a notion of a blindspot that is, in my view, an unstable moral category. I will argue that no trait possessing such a “hole” can qualify as a virtue. My strategy for showing this appeals to the importance of motivation to virtue, a feature of virtue to which Sreenivasan does not adequately attend. Sreenivasan’s account allows performance alone (...) to be a reliable indicator of the possession of virtue. I argue that, at least with respect to a classical, Aristotelian conception of virtue, this assumption is mistaken: a person is said to possess a virtue only when she is properly motivated. In my view, the nature of motivation required for the possession of Aristotelian virtue does not admit of blindspots. I am not primarily interested in details about the situationist critique of virtue theory but rather the implications that blindspots have for our conception of virtue. I argue that because the practical reasoning of the virtuous requires both cognitive and motivational coherence, the motivational structure of the virtuous agent cannot accommodate blindspots. My conclusion is neither a defense of motivational internalism nor of an idealized conception of Aristotelian virtue. My aim is to show that because blindspotted virtue does not cohere well with Aristotle’s conception of virtuous agency, friends of virtue theory must choose one or the other; they cannot have both. (shrink)

Using longitudinal, ethnographic data, the authors examine how the pursuit of self-sufficiency in the context of welfare reform may unintentionally encourage some women to develop alternative dangerous dependencies on abusive or potentially abusive men. In this article, the authors document how women ended up relying on men who have been abusive to them either for instrumental assistance or for more direct financial assistance as they struggled to move from welfare to work. The authors also document how some extremely disadvantaged and (...) vulnerable women became enmeshed in even more dangerous dependencies as they hit time limits and fell through public and private safety nets into drug addiction and sex work. The authors frame this discussion of dangerous dependencies with the recognition that dependency relations are necessary and inevitable components of carework. They argue that the discourse of self-sufficiency should acknowledge the fact that careworkers are productive citizens to the same extent as paid laborers and grapple with the question of the means through which they can support that productivity when personal resources are limited and paid labor is temporarily or permanently impossible. (shrink)

The past two decades of psychoanalytic discourse have witnessed a marked transformation in the way we think about women and gender. The assignment of gender carries with it a host of assumptions, yet without it we can feel lost in a void, unmoored from the world of rationality, stability and meaning. The feminist analytic thinkers whose work is collected here confront the meaning established by the assignment of gender and the uncertainty created by its absence. The contributions brought together in (...) _Psychoanalytic Reflections on a Gender-free Case_ address a cross-section of significant issues that have both chronicled and facilitated the changes in feminist psychoanalysis since the mid 1980s. Difficult issues which have previously been ignored are considered first. The book goes on to address family perspectives as they interact and shape the child’s experience of growing up male or female. Other topics covered are the authority of personal agency as influenced by the language and theory of patriarchy, male-centred concepts that consistently define women as inferior, and the concept of gender as being co-constructed within a relationship. The gender-free case presented here will fascinate all psychoanalysts interested in exploring ways of grappling with the elusive nature of gender, as well as those studying gender studies. (shrink)

Much contemporary feminist theory continues to see itself as freeing women from patriarchal oppression so that they may realize their own inner truth. To be told by postmodern thinkers such as Jacques Derrida that the very possibility of such a truth must be submitted to the process of deconstruction thus seems to present a serious challenge to the feminist project. From a postmodern perspective, on the other hand, most feminist discourse remains deeply rooted, if not in essentialism, at least in (...) the logocentrism of traditional philosophical and political thought. Stepping beyond the usual confines of this debate, the eleven thinkers whose ideas are represented in this volume take a deeper look at Derrida's work to consider its specific strengths and weaknesses as a model for feminist theory and practice. Despite this common focal point, this collection is extremely diverse. The problems addressed include the status of the female subject, civil disobedience, and the AIDS epidemic; the subjects include Husserl's theory of signs, jealousy in Shakespeare's _Othello_, and Irigaray's concept of the divine; disciplines include cultural studies, literature, philosophy, political theory, religion, and the law as represented by major scholars in each field; and the opinions expressed range from strong criticism of Derrida's work to careful explorations of the avenues it creates for rethinking sexual difference. Included are an analytic introduction by Nancy J. Holland; important new essays by Elizabeth Grosz, Peggy Kamuf, Peg Birmingham, Kate Mehuron, Ellen Armour, and Dorothea Olkowski; "Choreographies," Derrida's 1982 interview with Christie V. McDonald; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's "Displacement and the Discourse of Women," published in the same year; and recent articles by Drucilla Cornell and Nancy Fraser. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger's commitment to the idea that _Dasein_ is ultimately gender neutral, as well as several other major aspects of his thought, raises significant questions for feminist philosophers. The fourteen essays included in this volume clearly illustrate the ways in which feminist readings can deepen our understanding of his philosophy. They illuminate both the richness and the limitations of the resources his work can provide for feminist thought. This volume engages the full scope of Heidegger's writings from_ Being and Time (...) _through his latest work, from his readings of the ancient Greek poets to his critique of modern technology. At the same time, it reflects a wide range of contemporary feminist concerns: the significance of gender difference; the role of the body in philosophical thought; the relationship between philosophy and the natural world, and between philosophy and the domestic realm; and the aspiration to move forward into a new, more just, political world. Included in this volume are important new essays by Ellen Armour, Carol Bigwood, Jack Caputo, Tina Chanter, Trish Glazebrook, Jennifer Gosetti, Luce Irigaray, Dorothy Leland, Mechthild Nagel, Gail Stenstad, and the editors—as well as a valuable historical and theoretical Introduction by Patricia Huntington, the first of Jacques Derrida's "Geschlecht" articles, and an important 1997 essay by Iris Marion Young. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.1 (2001) 155-165 [Access article in PDF] Critical Discussions Big Guys, Babies, and Beauty Nancy Easterlin Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began, by Ellen Dissanayake; xvii & 265 pp. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000, $29.95. The intellectual climate of postmodernism has not been particularly encouraging for the development of an evolutionary theory of the arts. Concentrated in constructionist modes of analysis and (...) interpretation for the past thirty years, the social sciences and humanities have asserted that aesthetic objects and practices are produced and regulated by social and cultural structures, and serve overwhelmingly to reinforce those structures. In its most extreme form, postmodern constructionism claims that all meaning or significance derives from social and cultural factors, and that perceived truth is a matter of agreement or a function of power. If, for instance, we like Edward Weston's photographs and Georgia O'Keefe's paintings because we observe striking similarities between the organic forms represented in them and features of the human form, postmodernism counsels us that our preferences are dictated by social and cultural regulators, such as current discourses about nature and art, and not in any way by predisposed attractions to types of natural objects or to the relationships between them.Certainly, it would be foolhardy to argue that social and cultural context have no influence on either the type of art that is produced or its reception in any given culture, but a thoroughgoing or strong [End Page 155] constructionism is another matter. 1 Strong constructionism cannot explain--or, to be more accurate, refuses to explain--why we have art in the first place. Recent intellectual fashion has dictated, in sum, that the most interesting questions about art, the truly thought-provoking and hard questions, should not be asked. Yet even in an era inimical to the study of complexity, some scholars will continue to grapple with the interesting questions. So it is that within the past twelve years Ellen Dissanayake has published three books that together stand as the major contribution to an evolutionary understanding of the arts.Dissanayake's three books--What Is Art For? (1988); Homo Aestheticus: Where the Arts Come From and Why (1992); and, most recently, Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began (2000)--build on one another, elaborating a functional account of the genesis and adaptive value of the arts. 2 It is fitting that each volume amplifies Dissanayake's central theory, representing, as it were, a new stage in that theory's evolution, for elaboration is a key concept in Dissanayake's work.First and foremost, Dissanayake establishes the need for a functional account of art in What Is Art For? before developing her central thesis. Pointing out that what we know of pre-industrial cultures is inconsistent with the traditional approach to aesthetics, Dissanayake fruitfully suggests we readjust our intellectual lens. Whereas aestheticians have been preoccupied for centuries with discovering a transcendent essence for art, a functional and evolutionary account reveals the myopia of such an approach. Premodern cultures, because they do not separate life into discrete categories including the real and everyday, the imaginative and aesthetic, and the religious, have no concept of art apart from everyday activities or utilitarian considerations and, therefore, the study of these cultures calls the existence of a transcendent art essence into question. As constructionist colleagues would be happy to point out, the quest for essences does indeed attest to a cultural bias, that particular bias being an overwhelming tendency to conceptualize in rigid dualities within modern western culture; simultaneously, the quest for essences conflicts with an evolutionary understanding of human beings and their practices. In thus preparing the ground for her central argument, Dissanayake recommends persuasively the need for a major shift in focus among aestheticians, who are encouraged to look at how art behaviors work in adaptively significant ways within human social life.In Dissanayake's account, all of those activities, adornments, and the like in pre-industrial culture that we today see as the ancestors of [End Page 156] modern art forms exemplify a predisposition toward elaboration or, in her chosen phrase... (shrink)

Social isolation and loneliness are ongoing threats to health made worse by the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic. During the pandemic, half the globe's population have been placed under strict physical distancing orders and many long-term care facilities serving older adults went into lockdown mode, restricting access to all visitors, including family members. Before the pandemic emerged, a 2020 National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine report warned of the underappreciated adverse effects of social isolation and loneliness on health, especially among (...) older populations. Social isolation and loneliness predict all-cause mortality at rates that rival clinical risk factors, such as obesity and smoking; they are associated with greater incidence of psychological, cognitive, and physical morbidities. This paper sets forth a proposal to design robots to function as companions and friends for socially isolated and lonely older people during pandemic emergencies and in aging societies more generally. “The proposal” section presents and defends the proposal. The “Replies to objections” section answers objections based on coercive design, replacement of humans with robots, privacy incursions, and counterfeit companionship. The “Conclusion” section submits that sociable robots offer a promising avenue for addressing social isolation and loneliness during pandemics and hold promise for aging societies more broadly. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between the bonds of practitioner/patient trust and the notion of a justified lie. The intersection of moral theories on lying which prioritize right action with institutional discretionary power allows practitioners to dismiss, or at least not take seriously enough, the harm done when a patient's trust is betrayed. Even when a lie can be shown to be justified, the trustworthiness of the practitioner may be called into question in ways that neither theories of right action (...) nor contemporary discourse in health care attends to adequately. I set out features of full trustworthiness along Aristotelian lines. (shrink)

Philosophers of science have had little to say about ‘middle-range theory’ although much of what is done in science and of what drives its successes falls under that label. These lectures aim to spark an interest in the topic and to lay groundwork for further research on it. ‘Middle’ in ‘middle range’ is with respect to the level both of abstraction and generality. Much middle-range theory is about things that come under the label ‘mechanism’. The lectures explore three different kinds (...) of mechanism: struc tural mechanisms or underlying systems that afford causal pathways; causal-chain mechanisms that are represented in what in policy contexts are called ‘theories of change’ and for which I give an extended account following the causal process theory of Wesley Salmon; and middle-range-law mechanisms like those discussed by Jon Elster, which I claim are —and rightly are— rampant throughout the social sciences. The theory of the democratic peace, that democracies do not go to war with democracies, serves as a running example. The discussions build up to the start of, first, an argument that reliability in social (and natural) science depends not so much on evidence as it does on the support of a virtuous tangle of practices (without which there couldn’t even be evidence), and second, a defence of a community-practice centred instrumentalist understanding of many of the central basic principles that we use (often successfully) in social (and in natural) science for explanation, prediction and evaluation. (shrink)

For evidence-based practice and policy, randomised controlled trials (RCTs) are the current gold standard. But exactly why? We know that RCTs do not, without a series of strong assumptions, warrant predictions about what happens in practice. But just what are these assumptions? I maintain that, from a philosophical stance, answers to both questions are obscured because we don't attend to what causal claims say. Causal claims entering evidence-based medicine at different points say different things and, I would suggest, failure to (...) attend to these differences makes much current guidance about evidence for medical and social policy misleading. (shrink)

Mechanisms are now taken widely in philosophy of science to provide one of modern science’s basic explanatory devices. This has raised lively debate concerning the relationship between mechanisms, laws and explanation. This paper focuses on cases where a mechanism gives rise to a ceteris paribus law, addressing two inter-related questions: What kind of explanation is involved? and What is going on in the world when mechanism M affords behavior B described in a ceteris paribus law? We explore various answers offered (...) by ‘new mechanists’ and others before setting out and explaining our own answers: mechanistic explanations are a species of oldfashioned covering-law explanation and this often accounts in part for their explanatory power; and B is what it takes for some set of principles that govern the features of M’s parts in their arrangement in M all to be instanced together. (shrink)

This paper argues that we can see our lives as a snapshot happening now or as a moving picture extending across time. These dual ways of seeing our lives inform how we conceive of the problem of age group justice. A snapshot view sees age group justice as an interpersonal problem between distinct age groups. A moving picture view sees age group justice as a first-person problem of prudential choice. This paper explores these different ways of thinking about age group (...) justice and illustrates them using a principle of respect for human dignity, understood in terms of reasonable support for floor level central human capabilities at each stage of life. I argue that different frames are suitable for different kinds of decisions, and each provides a true, but partial, picture of aging and age group justice. (shrink)

Abstract.Altruism, defined here as a regard for or devotion to the interest of others with whom we are interrelated, is pitted against two other dispositions in human beings: nepotism and egoism. We propose that to become fully human is to become more altruistic. We describe how altruism is mediated by our physiology, is expressed in our psychological development, is evolving in our social institutions, and becomes the moral communities that enforce our sense of right and wrong. A change in any (...) one of these influences changes our disposition—changes who we are and what we do—potentially making altruism more possible in the world. (shrink)

This volume presents an exploration of the intersection between the work of Michel Foucault and feminist theory, focusing on Foucault's theories of sex/body, identity/subject, and power/politics. Like the other books in this series, this volume seeks to bring a feminist perspective to bear on the interpretation of a major figure in the philosophical canon. In the case of Michel Foucault, however, this aim is somewhat ironic because Foucault sees his work as disrupting that very canon. Since feminists see their work (...) as similarly disruptive, Foucault and feminism would seem to find much common ground, but, as the contributors to this collection reveal, the matter is not so simple. Foucault, like many feminists, is centrally concerned with questions related to sexuality and the body. This concern has led both Foucault and feminists to challenge the founding concept of the modernist philosophical canon: the disembodied transcendental subject. For both Foucault and feminists, this subject must be deconstructed and a new concept of identity articulated. The exciting possibilities of a Foucaultian approach to issues of the subject and identity, especially as they relate to sex and the body, are detailed in several of the essays collected here. Despite these possibilities, however, Foucault's approach has raised serious questions about an equally crucial area of feminist thought-politics. Some feminist critics of Foucault have argued that his deconstruction of the concept "woman" also deconstructs the possibility of a feminist politics. Several essays explore the implications of this deconstruction for feminist politics and suggest that a Foucaultian feminist politics is not viable. Overall, this collection illustrates the range of interest Foucault's thought has generated among feminist thinkers and both the advantages and liabilities of his approach for the development of feminist theory and politics. Contributors are Nancy Fraser, Nancy Hartsock, Judith Butler, Ellen L. McCallum, Linda Alcoff, Honi Haber, Jana Sawicki, Jon Simons, Monique Deveaux, Moya Lloyd, Amy Allen, and Terry Aladjem. (shrink)

Gilligan’s (1982) refinement of Kohlberg’s theory on moral development operates on two theses: (1) females, more so than males, reach moral decisions based on the personalities of the relevant individuals; and (2) female behaviors stemming from moral decisions are based upon “care” and “responsibility for others.” This article accepts the first thesis but argues that the second is incorrect. That is, self-interest—i.e., aiding “blood” kin and/or carefully monitoring reciprocity—rather than “altruism” is argued to be the operant dynamic in forging distaff (...) morality and resultant behavior. Six empirical examples are presented as contraindicative of Gilligan’s second thesis. Finally, it is suggested that selection for the psychological traits of independence and the mastery of subtle social chess yielded ancestral females who had more descendants—us—than did females with alternative profiles. (shrink)

Evidence abounds of a close relation between ingestive and affective processes in rats and in humans. Emotional distress alters food intake and body weight; conversely, alterations in eating and weight influence emotional health. Thorough experimental analysis of the ingestion-affect relation may clarify the mechanisms of anxiety and depression. A strategy is proposed for examination of environmental and dispositional determinants of ingestive processes, emotionality, and responses to stress.

This chapter contains sections titled: Naturalism and Religious Empiricism as World‐view Radical Empiricism and Pragmatism Religious Themes.

Fostering shame in societies may not curb violence, because shame is alienating. The person experiencing shame may not care enough about others to curb violent instincts. Furthermore, men may be less shame-prone than are women. Finally, if shame is too prevalent in a society, perpetrators may be reluctant to talk about their actions and motives, if indeed they know their own motives. We may be unable accurately to discover how perpetrators think about their own violence.