The aim of this study was to assess the links between religious discrimination and developmental and contextual variables. Based on the assumption that discrimination results from the interplay of prejudice and moral thinking, discriminatory behaviour was hypothesised to be linked to age, school environment, minority or majority group membership, and parental religious socialisation practices. The results indicate that discrimination is more frequent during childhood than during pre-adolescence or adolescence, more common in homogeneous schools than in heterogeneous schools, and more likely (...) when parents frequently express messages promoting mistrust of other religious groups. Participants from the minority group were more likely to discriminate against their own ingroup than were those from the majority group. Further studies are needed to determine whether these links are correlative or predictive, and to understand the underlying processes of religious discrimination. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to assess the links between religious discrimination and developmental and contextual variables. Based on the assumption that discrimination results from the interplay of prejudice and moral thinking, discriminatory behaviour was hypothesised to be linked to age, school environment, minority or majority group membership, and parental religious socialisation practices. The results indicate that discrimination is more frequent during childhood than during pre-adolescence or adolescence, more common in homogeneous schools than in heterogeneous schools, and more likely (...) when parents frequently express messages promoting mistrust of other religious groups. Participants from the minority group were more likely to discriminate against their own ingroup than were those from the majority group. Further studies are needed to determine whether these links are correlative or predictive, and to understand the underlying processes of religious discrimination. (shrink)

Plutarch was a brilliant Platonist, an erudite historian, a gifted author of highly polished literary dialogues, a priest of Apollo at Delphi, and a devoted politician in his hometown Chaeronea. He felt confident in the most technical and specialized discussions, yet was not afraid of rhetorical generalizations. In his voluminous oeuvre, he appears as a sharp polemicist and a loving father, an ardent pupil but also a kind, inspiring teacher, a sober historian and a teller of wondrous tales. In view (...) of all these different personae, erudite versatility is without any doubt a major characteristic of Plutarch’s works. A Versatile Gentleman is dedicated to Luc Van der Stockt, professor emeritus of Greek language and literature at KU Leuven and a truly versatile gentleman. The volume aims to do justice to his and Plutarch’s versatility by discussing the Chaeronean from many different angles. As such, it sheds new light on the coherence of, and the tensions in, Plutarch’s thinking and writing. (shrink)

This essay surveys the main objections to aesthetic hedonism, the view that aesthetic value is reducible to the value of aesthetic pleasure or experience. Hedonism is the dominant view of aesthetic value, but a spate of recent criticisms has drawn its accuracy into question. I introduce some distinctions crucial to the criticisms, before using the bulk of the essay to identify and review six major lines of argument that hedonism's critics have employed against it. Whether or not these arguments suffice (...) to refute hedonism decisively, I argue that its privileged status, as the sole contender in aesthetic value theory, is detrimental to downstream research on aesthetic phenomena. The essay concludes with an overview of current work and promising avenues of inquiry into non-hedonic alternatives. (shrink)

The goal of the book is to present the latest research on the new challenges of data technologies. It will offer an overview of the social, ethical and legal problems posed by group profiling, big data and predictive analysis and of the different approaches and methods that can be used to address them. In doing so, it will help the reader to gain a better grasp of the ethical and legal conundrums posed by group profiling. The volume first maps the (...) current and emerging uses of new data technologies and clarifies the promises and dangers of group profiling in real life situations. It then balances this with an analysis of how far the current legal paradigm grants group rights to privacy and data protection, and discusses possible routes to addressing these problems. Finally, an afterword gathers the conclusions reached by the different authors and discuss future perspectives on regulating new data technologies. (shrink)

This article asks whether states have a right to close their borders because of their right to self-determination, as proposed recently by Christopher Wellman, Michael Walzer, and others. It asks the fundamental question whether self-determination can, in even its most unrestricted form, support the exclusion of immigrants. I argue that the answer is no. To show this, I construct three different ways in which one might use the idea of self-determination to justify immigration restrictions and show that each of these (...) arguments fails. My conclusion is that the nature and value of self-determination have to do with the conditions of genuine self-government, not membership of political society. Consequently, the demand for open borders is fully consistent with respect to self-determination. (shrink)

How is Frege able to claim that the notion of judgement is essential to his logic without introducing a form of psychologism? I argue first that Frege’s logical notion of judgement is to be distinguished from an empirical notion of judgement, that it cannot be understood as an abstract, idealized notion, and that there are doubts concerning a transcendental reading of Frege’s writings. Then, I explain that the logical notion of judgement has to be understood from a first-person perspective, to (...) be contrasted with a third-person perspective, in which judgement is understood as an empirical, psychological phenomenon. Frege’s logic is essentially a first-person engagement, as each of us can make use of the ideography as a science of logic only if we ourselves have made the relevant judgements. Finally, I claim that the judging agent as conceived by Frege can, after all, be understood as a transcendental ego. (shrink)

Branching-time temporal logics have proved to be an extraordinarily successful tool in the formal specification and verification of distributed systems. Much of their success stems from the tractability of the model checking problem for the branching time logic CTL, which has made it possible to implement tools that allow designers to automatically verify that systems satisfy requirements expressed in CTL. Recently, CTL was generalised by Alur, Henzinger, and Kupferman in a logic known as Alternating-time Temporal Logic (ATL). The key insight (...) in ATL is that the path quantifiers of CTL could be replaced by cooperation modalities, of the form , where is a set of agents. The intended interpretation of an ATL formula is that the agents can cooperate to ensure that holds (equivalently, that have a winning strategy for ). In this paper, we extend ATL with knowledge modalities, of the kind made popular in the work of Fagin, Halpern, Moses, Vardi and colleagues. Combining these knowledge modalities with ATL, it becomes possible to express such properties as group can cooperate to bring about iff it is common knowledge in that . The resulting logic — Alternating-time Temporal Epistemic Logic (ATEL) — shares the tractability of model checking with its ATL parent, and is a succinct and expressive language for reasoning about game-like multiagent systems. (shrink)

Despite the longstanding debate on definitions of health and disease concepts, and the multitude of accounts that have been developed, no consensus has been reached. This is problematic, as the way we define health and disease has far-reaching practical consequences. In recent contributions it is proposed to view health and disease as practical- and plural concepts. Instead of searching for a general definition, it is proposed to stipulate context-specific definitions. However, it is not clear how this should be realized. In (...) this paper, we review recent contributions to the debate, and examine the importance of context-specific definitions. In particular, we explore the usefulness of analyzing the relation between the practical function of a definition and the context it is deployed in. We demonstrate that the variety of functions that health and disease concepts need to serve makes the formulation of monistic definitions not only problematic but also undesirable. We conclude that the analysis of the practical function in relation to the context is key when formulating context-specific definitions for health and disease. At last, we discuss challenges for the pluralist stance and make recommendations for future research. (shrink)

William Whewell’s 19th-century views are seldom given a prominent place in the history of the philosophy of science. There is, however, a key feature of his account that is, upon historical analysis, prescient of later developments, notably in pragmatism. Whewell calls this the “fundamental antithesis of philosophy”, which centres around the idea that there is no clear demarcation between subject and object (between mind and world or theory and fact). In this paper, I trace this notion’s genealogy. It originated with (...) Kant, who influenced Whewell. Whewell then developed it into a detailed thesis, one that influenced Peirce. It is identifiable in Quine, then (middle) Putnam, and now Cheryl Misak and Steven Levine (aka the new pragmatists). The purpose is to identify a previously overlooked lineage of influence running through the history of philosophy. Whewell’s antithesis might also offer a way to resist both the relativism that tends to accompany post-modern styles of pragmatism and the pretensions to a God’s-eye view latent in analytic metaphysics. (shrink)

Douglas Edwards is arguably the most prominent contemporary advocate of moderate alethic pluralism. Significantly influenced by Crispin Wright and Michael Lynch, his work on the nature of truth has become widely discussed in the topical literature. Edwards labels his version of moderate alethic pluralism determination pluralism. At first blush, determination pluralism appears philosophically promising. The position deserves thoughtful consideration, particularly because of its capacity to accommodate the scope problem. I argue, however, that upon analysis the view is better understood as (...) a form of metaphysical dualism or what I will call meta-dualism. Furthermore, determination pluralists face a dilemma; there appears to be an instability at the core of their dualistic model. On the one horn of the dilemma, they need a clear metaphysical demarcation at the interface of their two necessary domains. On the other horn, they seem to need to a metaphysically vague boundary at the interface of their two necessary domains. Determination pluralism needs substantial revision. (shrink)

In this paper a corporate social responsibility audit is developed following the underlying methodology of the quality award/excellence models. Firstly the extent to which the quality awards already incorporate the development of social responsibility is examined by looking at the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award and the European Quality Award. It will be shown that the quality awards do not yet include ethical aspects in relation to social responsibility. Both a clear definition of social responsibility and an improved audit instrument (...) are required. A definition and an audit instrument are developed which stimulate movement in that direction and help organisations to reflect on their position in relation to social responsibility. (shrink)

This paper is on the update semantics for might of Veltman. Threeconsequence relations are introduced and studied in an abstract setting.Next we present sequent-style systems for each of the consequence relations.We show the logics to be complete and decidable. The paper ends with asyntactic cut elimination result.

Our study presents an overview of the issues that were brought forward by participants of a moral case deliberation (MCD) project in two elderly care organizations. The overview was inductively derived from all case descriptions (N = 202) provided by participants of seven mixed MCD groups, consisting of care providers from various professional backgrounds, from nursing assistant to physician. The MCD groups were part of a larger MCD project within two care institutions (residential homes and nursing homes). Care providers are (...) confronted with a wide variety of largely everyday ethical issues. We distinguished three main categories: ‘resident’s behavior’, ‘divergent perspectives on good care’ and ‘organizational context’. The overview can be used for agendasetting when institutions wish to stimulate reflection and deliberation. It is important that an agenda is constructed from the bottom-up and open to a variety of issues. In addition, organizing reflection and deliberation requires effort to identify moral questions in practice whilst at the same time maintaining the connection with the organizational context and existing communication structures. Once care providers are used to dealing with divergent perspectives, inviting different perspectives (e.g. family members) to take part in the deliberation, might help to identify and address ethical ‘blind spots’. (shrink)

The Lockean theory of property licenses unilateral appropriation on the condition that there be ‘enough, and as good left in common for others’. However, the meaning of this proviso is all but clear. This article argues that the proviso is centered around the Lockean theory of freedom. To be free, I argue, we must be ‘non-subjected’ in the exercise of our rights, including our rights to appropriate. We enjoy such freedom only when the ability to exercise our rights does not (...) depend on others. That can obtain if literally enough and as good is left in common. But it can also obtain in other ways, for example through competitive labour markets. The latter offer something as good as ‘enough and as good’. (shrink)

How can a realistic ethical imagination about the future of a technology take shape? This article contains a reflection which is based on the experiences of an embedded ethicist in the context of biophysical research conducive to the development of photoacoustic mammography, which is intended for the non-invasive detection of breast cancer. Imagination in this context already informs the activities of the biophysical researchers, but its role is limited: biophysical future scenarios concentrate on the technological advances that photoacoustics could bring (...) about. In this article it is argued that it is advisable to also consider the medical practice and the ways in which this practice is likely to change as an effect of the introduction of photoacoustic mammography into it. On the basis of this more encompassing imaginative endeavor it is possible to get a clearer idea about how new technologies are able to contribute to human well being, which is informative for the setting of research-goals/priorities and a responsible implementation of new technologies into the world. (shrink)

The concept of well-being is increasingly gaining acceptance as an object of science, and many different types of well-being measures have been developed. A debate has emerged about which measures are able to capture well-being successfully. An important underlying problem is that there is no unified conceptual framework about the nature of well-being—a hotly debated topic of philosophical discussion. I argue that while there is little agreement about the nature of well-being in philosophy, there is an important agreement on some (...) important principles relevant for its measurement. I argue that well-being science has good reasons to accommodate these principles, but currently fails to do so. (shrink)

Wellbeing describes how good life is for the person living it. Wellbeing comes in degrees. Subjective theories of wellbeing maintain that for objects or states of affairs to benefit us, we need to have a positive attitude towards these objects or states of affairs: the Resonance Constraint. In this article, we investigate to what extent subjectivism can plausibly account for degrees of wellbeing. There is a vast literature on whether preference-satisfaction theory – one particular subjective theory – can account for (...) degrees of wellbeing. This is generally taken to be problematic. However, other subjective theories – namely, desire-satisfaction, judgment- and value-fulfillment theories – do not suffer from the same difficulties. We introduce two models of degrees of wellbeing a subjectivist can employ: the Relative and the Absolute Model, and defend the claim that both models face difficulties. In particular, we argue that a subjectivist theory should describe instances of depression as instances of low degrees of wellbeing. We also argue that a reduction of desires may sometimes improve one’s degree of wellbeing, an idea we call the Epicurean Intuition. We then argue that the Relative Model fails to account for the disbenefit of certain types of depression, while the Absolute Model fails to meet a central commitment of subjectivism – the Resonance Constraint – and is unable to accommodate the Epicurean Intuition. The upshot of the paper is that subjectivist theories cannot account for degrees of well-being in a plausible way. (shrink)

This study argues for three main theses: (1) Immanuel Kant’s ethics is a social ethics; (2) the basic premises of his social ethics point to a socialist ethics; and (3) this socialist ethics constitutes a suitable platform for criticizing and improving Karl Marx’s view of morality. -/- Some crucial aspects of Kant’s social ethics are that we must promote the “realm of ends” as a moral society of co-legislators who assist each other in the pursuit of their individual ends, which (...) requires in turn that we seek the realization of the republican state and peace between the nations. Thus, hope for progress, as supported by the enthusiasm engendered among the spectators of the French Revolution, becomes pivotal to Kant’s ethics as well as other moral feelings such as moral indignation and solidarity with the victims of oppression. -/- Kant views the moral society in the final instance as an “inner” unification of good wills. In a decisive elaboration of Kant, the neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen argues that all our social institutions, and notably economic enterprises, must instantiate the “realm of ends,” leading him to support cooperative socialism in Wilhelmine Germany. In his own words, Kant “is the true and real originator of German socialism” (1896). -/- There are important evaluative similarities between Kantian socialist ethics and Marx, such as a condemnation of capitalism as a system of servitude and an understanding of the ideal society as a cooperative society, but only Marx contends that the ideal society does not set a moral task and that there is a dialectic operative in human history that inevitably leads to communist society. This dogmatic Hegelian understanding of history must be replaced by Kantian regulative understanding of progress in support of revolutionary praxis as moral praxis. -/- We need a “Kantianization” of Marx, as Cohen and other neo-Kantian socialists also proclaimed in the three decades leading up to World War I. This study concludes with “A Historical Note on Kantian Ethical Socialism,” addressing, among others, Cohen, Karl Vorländer, Eduard Bernstein, and Kurt Eisner and the Munich Revolution of 1918. Their voices were largely silenced by the rise of fascism, and this study hopes to show that their voices still need to be heard. -/- Awarded the 1985 Johnsonian Prize in Philosophy. (shrink)

Questions the dominant biological approach of explaining animal development as entirely genetic by exploring the explanatory value of investigating environmental influences.

Many political theorists, philosophers, social scientists, and other academics engage in political activism. And many think this is how things ought to be. In this essay, I challenge the ideal of the politically engaged academic. I argue that, quite to the contrary, political theorists, philosophers, and other political thinkers have a prima facie duty to refrain from political activism. This argument is based on a commonsense moral principle, a claim about the point of political thought, and findings in cognitive psychology.

ABSTRACT Over the past few decades the concept of (human) dignity has deeply pervaded medical ethics. Appeals to dignity, however, are often unclear. As a result some prefer to eliminate the concept from medical ethics, whereas others try to render it useful in this context. We think that appeals to dignity in medical ethics can be clarified by considering the concept from an historical perspective. Firstly, on the basis of historical texts we propose a framework for defining the concept in (...) medical debates. The framework shows that dignity can occur in a relational, an unconditional, a subjective and a Kantian form. Interestingly, all forms relate to one concept since they have four features in common: dignity refers, in a restricted sense, to the ‘special status of human beings’; it is based on essential human characteristics; the subject of dignity should live up to it; and it is a vulnerable concept, it can be lost or violated. We argue that being explicit about the meaning of dignity will prevent dignity from becoming a conversation‐stopper in moral debate. Secondly, an historical perspective on dignity shows that it is not yet time to dispose of dignity in medical ethics. At least Kantian and relational dignity can be made useful in medical ethics. (shrink)

Cognition played a pivotal role in the acceleration of technological innovation during the Industrial Revolution. Growing affluence may have provided favourable environmental conditions for a boost in cognition, enabling individuals to tackle more complex problems. Dynamical systems thinking may provide useful tools to describe sudden transitions like the Industrial Revolution, by modelling the recursive feedback between psychology and environment.

The label ‘Translational Research’ (TR) has become ever more popular in the biomedical domain in recent years. It is usually presented as an attempt to bridge a supposed gap between knowledge produced at the lab bench and its use at the clinical bedside. This is claimed to help society harvest the benefits of its investments in scientific research. The rhetorical as well as moral force of the label TR obscure, however, that it is actually used in very different ways. In (...) this paper, we analyse the scientific discourse on TR, with the aim to disentangle and critically evaluate the different meanings of the label. We start with a brief reconstruction of the history of the concept. Subsequently, we unravel how the label is actually used in a sample of scientific publications on TR and examine the presuppositions implied by different views of TR. We argue that it is useful to distinguish different views of TR on the basis of three dimensions, related to (1) the construction of the ‘translational gap’; (2) the model of the translational process; and (3) the cause of the perceived translational gap. We conclude that the motive to make society benefit from its investments in biomedical science may be laudable, but that it is doubtful whether the dominant views of TR will contribute to this end. (shrink)

We study several modal languages in which some (sets of) generalized quantifiers can be represented; the main language we consider is suitable for defining any first order definable quantifier, but we also consider a sublanguage thereof, as well as a language for dealing with the modal counterparts of some higher order quantifiers. These languages are studied both from a modal logic perspective and from a quantifier perspective. Thus the issues addressed include normal forms, expressive power, completeness both of modal systems (...) and of systems in the quantifier tradition, complexity as well as syntactic characterizations of special semantic constraints. Throughout the paper several techniques current in the theory of generalized quantifiers are used to obtain results in modal logic, and conversely. (shrink)

Most treatments of territorial rights include a discussion (and rejection) of Locke. There is a remarkable consensus about what Locke’s views were. For him, states obtain territorial rights as the result of partial transfers of people’s property rights. In this article, I reject this reading. I argue that (a) for Locke, transfers of property rights were neither necessary nor sufficient for territorial rights and that (b) Locke in fact held a two-part theory of territorial rights. I support this reading by (...) appealing to textual and contextual evidence. I conclude by drawing a lesson from Locke’s views for current debates on territorial rights. (shrink)

Moral case deliberation (MCD) is a specific form of clinical ethics, aiming to stimulate ethical reflection in daily practice in order to improve the quality of care. This article focuses on the implementation of MCD in nursing homes and the questions how and where to organize MCD. The purpose of this study was to evaluate one way of organizing MCD in two Dutch nursing homes. In both of these nursing homes the MCD groups had a heterogeneous composition and were organized (...) apart from existing institutional communication structures. As part of a naturalistic evaluation, systematic observations, interviews and focus groups were completed. The findings indicate that the heterogeneous composition and MCD meetings separate from existing structures have benefits. However, the participants also reported negative experiences. This gives rise to the question whether a mixed MCD group which meets separately is an effective way to embed MCD as an instrument for reflection on moral issues in daily practice. We conclude that there is no single answer to that question. In the end, the two implementation strategies (i.e. within existing communication structures and a mixed MCD group) can be complementary to each other. (shrink)

Many prepared actions have to be withheld for a certain amount of time in order to have the most beneficial outcome. Therefore, keeping track of time accurately is vital to using temporal regularities in our environment. Traditional theories assume that time is tracked by means of a clock and an “attentional gate” (AG) that modulates subjective time if not enough attentional resources are directed toward the temporal process. According to the AG theory, the moment of distraction does not have an (...) influence on the subjective modulation. Here, we show, based on an analysis of 28,354 datasets, that highly motivated players of the online multiplayer real‐time strategy game StarCraft2 indeed respond later to timed events when they are distracted by other tasks during the interval. However, transient periods of distraction during the interval influence the response time to a lesser degree than distraction just before the required response. We extend the work of Taatgen, van Rijn, and Anderson (2007) and propose an alternative active check theory that postulates that distracted attention prevents people from checking their internal clock; we demonstrate that this account better predicts variance observed in response time. By analyzing StarCraft2 data, we assessed the role of attention in a naturalistic setting that more directly generalizes to real‐world settings than typical laboratory studies. (shrink)

Making better choices about future technologies that are being researched or developed is an important motivator behind lay ethics interventions. However, in practice, they do not always succeed to serve that goal. Especially authors who have noted that lay ethicists sometimes take recourse to well-known themes which stem from old, even ‘archetypical’ stories, have been criticized for making too little room for agency and decision-making in their approach. This paper aims to contribute to a reflection on how lay ethics can (...) acquire more practical relevance. It will use resources in narrative ethics to suggest that in order to be relevant for action, facilitators of lay ethics interventions need to invite participants to engage in a narrative quest. As part of a quest, lay ethicists should be asked to reflect on a specific question or choice, use diverse input which is informative about the heterogeneity of viewpoints that are defended in society and argue for their standpoints. (shrink)

The subtitle of this paper could have been, “Big Data meets Education to advance Cognitive Science.” In it, the authors analyze 20 million answers to 1700 simple arithmetic problems in an educational number game to determine “what makes some problems harder than others.” The results contribute to the cognitive science of arithmetic skill acquisition and have the potential to change how math is taught.

The precautionary principle is often invoked in relation to pregnant women and may be one of the underlying reasons for their continuous underrepresentation in clinical research. The principle is appealing, because potential fetal harm as a result of research participation is considered to be serious and irreversible. In our paper, we explore through conceptual analysis whether and if so how the precautionary principle should apply to pregnant women. We argue that the principle is a decision-making strategy underlying risk-benefit decisions in (...) clinical research, which can be applied to pregnant women. However, the current application is a strong one, leading to the promotion of absolute exclusion or, less often, absolute inclusion of pregnant women. In order to change this paralyzing situation, a shift toward weak precautionary thinking is necessary. Instead of automatic extreme precaution, a balance will be found between harms and potential benefits of including pregnant women in clinical research. (shrink)

Since Gallie introduced the notion of essentially contested concepts, it has given rise to considerable debate and confusion. The aim of this paper is to bring clarity to these debates by offering a critical reconstruction of the notion of essential contestedness. I argue that we should understand essentially contestable concepts as concepts that refer to ideals or to concepts and phenomena that can only be fully understood in light of ideals and that are, as a consequence, open to pervasive contestation. (...) Moreover, some concepts are second-order essentially contested: it may be a matter of ongoing dispute as to whether they should be regarded as essentially contested. The concept of law is an example. Some authors argue that it is ideal-oriented, whereas others claim it is not. This insight that ‘law’ is a second-order essentially contested concept may explain some of the disagreements between legal positivism and its various opponents. (shrink)