The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 10, Page 37-38, October 2011.

Considered a classic in the philosophy of language movement known variously as the New Theory of Reference or the Direct-Reference Theory, as well as in the metaphysics of modal essentialism that is related to this philosophy of language. This award-winning book is based on the author’s doctoral dissertation.

In recent years there has been an explosion of philosophical work on blame. Much of this work has focused on explicating the nature of blame or on examining the norms that govern it, and the primary motivation for theorizing about blame seems to derive from blame’s tight connection to responsibility. However, very little philosophical attention has been given to praise and its attendant practices. In this paper, I identify three possible explanations for this lack of attention. My goal is to (...) show that each of these lines of thought is mistaken and to argue that praise is deserving of careful, independent analysis by philosophers interested in theorizing about responsibility. (shrink)

This book argues that Hume is a radical epistemic skeptic who gives only practical reasons for retaining belief in sensory beliefs and the deliverances of reason. He advises us to take a moderate approach to the demands of philosophy, since they sometimes diverge from the demands of life.

Although Professor Schiffer and I have many times disagreed, I share his deep and abiding commitment to argument as a primary philosophical tool. Regretting any communication failure that has occurred, I endeavor here to make clearer my earlier reply in “Illogical Belief” to Schiffer’s alleged problem for my version of Millianism.1 I shall be skeletal, however; the interested reader is encouraged to turn to “Illogical Belief” for detail and elaboration. I have argued that to bear a propositional attitude de re (...) is to bear that attitude toward the corresponding singular proposition, no more and no less. If this is right, then according to Millianism every instance of the following modal schema is true. (shrink)

While there is a great deal to agree with in the essay Expanded Terminal Sedation in End-of-Life Care there is, we think, a need to more fully appreciate the humanistic side of both palliative and end-of-life care.1 Not only does the underlying philosophy of palliative care arguably differ from that which guides curative medicine,2 dying patients are in a uniquely vulnerable position given our cultural disinclination towards open discussions of death and dying. In this brief response, we critically engage Gilbertson (...) et al ’s essay and seek to contextualise the perspective they put forward. According to Cassell, we should distinguish between pain and suffering.3 The former often gives rise to the latter, but suffering has other causes. This includes existential distress, indicating that, unlike pain, suffering is not simply physiological phenomena. Suffering involves the disintegration of the person, meaning that it can impact patient autonomy. Certainly, that a patient is suffering does not equate to a lack autonomy. Nevertheless, we should take care when making decisions in circumstance where the integrity of our embodied personhood is under threat, something that is clearly the case for those who are dying, particularly those who have refractory symptoms while doing so. Generally speaking, refractory symptoms are those which are intractable. They persist despite attempts at palliation. While this implies that such symptoms—and the suffering they cause—cannot be reversed this is not necessarily the case. Not only can the symptoms experienced by dying patients change …. (shrink)

Jeffrey King's principal objection to the direct-reference theory of demonstratives is analyzed and criticized. King has responded with a modified version of his original argument aimed at establishing the weaker conclusion that the direct-reference theory of demonstratives is either incomplete or incorrect. It is argued that this fallback argument also fails.

INTERWOVEN IN THE COMPLEX TEXTURE of Solomon Maimon's system are strands of thought originating in the theories of his avowed creditors. Maimon is one of the first modern philosophers who acknowledges his debt to diverse philosophical trends and traditions. Among his major creditors, Maimon includes Maimonides and Spinoza. The present analysis, however, will be restricted to an exploration of his debt to Leibniz, Hume, and Kant.

CHAPTER ONE FREEDOM, ACTION AND DEEDS It is an established fact that Kant's theory of deeds or acts can ultimately be equaled with his ethical theory. ...

Arguments are nowadays often presented as soundbites: as slogans, tweets, memes and even gifs. Arguments developed in detail often meet the response TL;DR (Too Long, Didn’t Read). This is unfortunate—especially when tackling the topic of abortion. Soundbites make many pro-life arguments seem stronger than they really are, while the complexities of pro-choice arguments can’t be readily reduced to soundbites.

Drawing on social exchange theory, the present study seeks to understand how ethical leaders channel followers’ responses to positive treatment from the organization into a dutiful mindset, resulting in in-role and extra-role performance. Specifically, it examines the influence of perceived organizational support on both followers’ job performance and organizational citizenship behaviors, and the mediating effects of duty orientation on such relationships. In addition, it examines whether the mediated effects are contingent on the ethical leadership exhibited by the team leader. Based (...) on multi-source, multi-level data obtained from 233 employees in 60 teams from the Chinese public sector, we found that ethical leadership moderated the mediated relationship between perceived organizational support and follower work behaviors through duty orientation, such that this relationship was stronger in the presence of higher ethical leadership. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that contemporary truth pluralists have undersold the connection between their views and the semantic realism/anti-realism debate. I argue that pluralist theories of truth are essentially a combination of accepting both realist and anti-realist intuitions, and that we should take this lesson to heart. I show how we can categorize pluralist views by how realist or anti-realist they are, and introduce two notions to do so: methodological fundamentality and theoretical fundamentality. I show how viewing the pluralist (...) literature in this way reveals the core principles behind rival pluralist accounts and cuts across another influential way to divide up the truth pluralist literature. I conclude by introducing a new version of truth pluralism: methodological pluralism about truth. Methodological pluralism about truth stays methodologically neutral between its realist and anti-realist poles, and thus better accounts for both of its key theoretical motivations. (shrink)

Understanding individual differences in cognitive performance is an important part of understanding how variations in underlying cognitive processes can result in variations in task performance. However, the exploration of individual differences in the components of the decision process—such as cognitive processing speed, response caution, and motor execution speed—in previous research has been limited. Here, we assess the heritability of the components of the decision process, with heritability having been a common aspect of individual differences research within other areas of cognition. (...) Importantly, a limitation of previous work on cognitive heritability is the underlying assumption that variability in response times solely reflects variability in the speed of cognitive processing. This assumption has been problematic in other domains, due to the confounding effects of caution and motor execution speed on observed response times. We extend a cognitive model of decision‐making to account for relatedness structure in a twin study paradigm. This approach can separately quantify different contributions to the heritability of response time. Using data from the Human Connectome Project, we find strong evidence for the heritability of response caution, and more ambiguous evidence for the heritability of cognitive processing speed and motor execution speed. Our study suggests that the assumption made in previous studies—that the heritability of cognitive ability is based on cognitive processing speed—may be incorrect. More generally, our methodology provides a useful avenue for future research in complex data that aims to analyze cognitive traits across different sources of related data, whether the relation is between people, tasks, experimental phases, or methods of measurement. (shrink)

Pornography is no longer an activity confined to a small group of individuals or the privacy of one’s home. Rather, it has permeated modern culture, including the work environment. Given the pervasive nature of pornography, we study how viewing pornography affects unethical behavior at work. Using survey data from a sample that approximates a nationally representative sample in terms of demographics, we find a positive correlation between viewing pornography and intended unethical behavior. We then conduct an experiment to provide causal (...) evidence. The experiment confirms the survey—consuming pornography causes individuals to be less ethical. We find that this relationship is mediated by increased moral disengagement from dehumanization of others due to viewing pornography. Combined, our results suggest that choosing to consume pornography causes individuals to behave less ethically. Because unethical employee behavior has been linked to numerous negative organization outcomes including fraud, collusion, and other self-serving behaviors, our results have implications for most societal organizations. (shrink)

This paper is designed to help people rationally engage moral issues regarding the treatment of animals, specifically uses of animals in medical and psychological experimentation, basic research, drug development, education and training, consumer product testing and other areas.

This paper considers the disciplines of literature and history and the contributions each makes to the discourse of bioethics. In each case I note the pedagogic ends that can be enacted though the appropriate use of the each of these disciplines in the sphere of medical education, particularly in the medical ethics classroom.1 I then explore the contribution that both these disciplines and their respective methodologies can and do bring to the academic field of bioethics. I conclude with a brief (...) consideration of the relations between literature and history with particular attention to the possibilities for a future bioethics informed by history and literature after the empirical turn. (shrink)

This article presents the notions of ethos and eidos as field level concepts for the sociology of morality and the anthropology of ethics. This is accomplished in the context of Bourdieuan social theory and, therefore, from the broad standpoint of practice theory. In the first instance these terms are used to refer to the normative structures of social fields and are conceived so as to represent the way in which such structures fall between two planes, that of the implicit and (...) the explicit. Subsequently, they are used to further understand a distinction between morality—roughly, the implicit moral order of a social field—and ethics—the more explicit and often codified elements of a social field’s normative structure. When presented in relation to academic philosophical inquiries into the ethical issues in healthcare and the life sciences—meaning the disciplines of applied ethics in general and applied ethics in particular—the analytic perspective these terms facilitate enables us to represent the fundamental conditions required for academic enquiry; taken together the ethos and eidos of an intellectual field constitute the requisite background of its normative epistemic and methodological commitments, thereby providing the structures of disciplined intellectual practices. Seen in this light it not only becomes possible to grasp applied ethics as a socially structured practice but to understand it in terms that can also be used to frame our everyday moral practices. In this way applied ethics can be acknowledged as a relatively unique part of our contemporary moral culture. (shrink)

This article considers the moral notion of care in the context of Quality of Care discourses. Whilst care has clear normative implications for the delivery of health care it is less clear how Quality of Care, something that is centrally involved in the governance of UK health care, relates to practice.

Although one can argue that they do not represent a radical departure from existing practices, protocols for reverse triage certainly step beyond what is ordinarily done in medicine and healthcare. Nevertheless, there seems to be some degree of moral concern regarding the ethical legitimacy of practicing reverse triage in the context of a pandemic. Such concern can be taken as a reflection of the moral antipathy some exhibit towards current practices of withdrawing treatment—that is, when withdrawal of treatment is arguably (...) in the best interests of patients—and a rejection of the purported normative insignificance of withholding and withdrawing. Given that the relevance of the psychological attitudes of some healthcare professionals to the moral assessment of withdrawing and withholding treatment continues to be debated, it would seem that some thought should be given to the introduction and implementation of reverse triage decisions in response to a pandemic. This brief paper will consider if provision should be made for healthcare professionals to conscientiously refuse to participate in reverse triage. (shrink)

This article interrogates a key feature of anarchist education; focusing on a problem with implications not only for anarchist conceptions of education, but for anarchist philosophy and pra...

This paper focuses on the practice of injecting patients who are dying with a relatively high dose of sedatives in response to a catastrophic event that will shortly precipitate death, something that we term ‘crisis sedation.’ We first present a confabulated case that illustrates the kind of events we have in mind, before offering a more detailed account of the practice. We then comment on some of the ethical issues that crisis sedation might raise. We identify the primary value of (...) crisis sedation as allowing healthcare professionals to provide some degree of reassurance to patients, their families and the professionals who are caring for them. Next we focus on the issue of informed consent. Finally, we ask whether continuous deep sedation might be preferable to crisis sedation in scenarios where potential catastrophic events can be anticipated. (shrink)

Expanding the Critical Animal Studies Imagination: Essays in Solidarity and Total Liberation pushes critical animal studies forward and outward by making new connections to movements and ideas that have been little engaged with in publication to the present. This book challenges critical animal studies adherents to expand their efforts of solidarity, mutual aid, and activism. Contributors to this volume extend invitations to those not familiar with critical animal studies to welcome them in with gestures of solidarity towards total liberation. Expanding (...) the Critical Animal Studies Imagination does not shy away from controversial topics but critically engages with them using care and tact. This is not controversy for the sake of being provocative, but not being afraid to target root causes of oppression. This book works toward coalition building to resist the current violence and build peaceful communities. (shrink)

ABSTRACTNo comprehensive research of Erasmus’ ethnological mind has been published, so far. Erasmus’ attitudes toward Turks and Jews were discussed analytically but not synthetically or comparatively. An attempt to widen the ethnological scope and to define and classify Erasmus’ attitudes toward different non-Christian groups is presented here. Christian Europeans were at the top of Erasmus’ echelon. Second to them were ‘half-Christians’, i.e. Turks, or Muslims in general. Below them were Jews, and lower in the hierarchy were black Africans. Yet, no (...) one was unworthy of conversion to Christianity, even barbarians of the third kind – according to Bartolomé Las Casas’ sort – the most inferior barbarians, slaves by nature, as defined by Aristotle. According to Las Casas, these barbarians were too low to ask for God and were not candidates for conversion to Christianity. Erasmus’ believed that Barbarians of any kind deserved Christianity without being brutally forced to accept it. Yet, in practice, converts from Judaism to Christianity were rated, even by Erasmus, as lower than Christians. This, in addition to the principle that Christian peace excludes war against the Turks, is the very essence of Erasmus’ pax et concordia. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Patrician Tribune: P. Clodius PulcherNathan RosensteinW. Jeffrey Tatum. The Patrician Tribune: P. Clodius Pulcher. Studies in the History of Greece and Rome. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. xii + 365 pp. Cloth, $49.95.Ancient historians rarely tackle political narrative anymore; institutions and culture and structures social, economic, and political are the staples of academic endeavor these days. Thus the biography of a major political figure (...) of the late Republic comes as a refreshing change and evokes a certain nostalgia, for this reviewer at least. One encounters many of the old topics that so preoccupied scholars a generation ago--the Bona Dea scandal, the exile and recall of Cicero, the conference at Luca--and, to judge by the paucity of recent works on them and their like in Tatum's bibliography, excite little interest now. A pity, really, for Tatum shows how much is still to be learned from their study, even if solutions to puzzles like the Vettius affair seem as elusive as ever. The outlines of the story Tatum has to tell will be familiar to its readers; as one would expect, the interest lies in the changes of emphasis and tone and the new insights he brings to these events.Tatum admits that Clodius' personality is largely beyond recovery but [End Page 592] suggests that "One will probably not err by much in picturing Clodius as a handsome, urbane, and proud (at times, indeed, obnoxious) noble, of violent temper and of somewhat dubious moral fiber--possessed of a fascination with adventure yet capable nonetheless of very traditional pretensions" (43). Tatum describes an early career that was largely conventional: like other young nobles Clodius sought military experience abroad and political involvement at home, prosecuting Catiline (Tatum dismisses contemporary claims of collusion with the defense), and serving as Murena's go-between to the divisores in the consular elections for 62 b.c.e. (something neither "novel or in any way indicative of the direction of his later mastery of the plebs urbana" [58]). With regard to the events of late 63, Tatum accepts Plutarch's statement that Clodius supported Cicero against Catiline, despite Cicero's later claims to the contrary. The sole anomaly here is Clodius' instigation of a mutiny among Lucullus' troops at Nisibis in the winter of 68-67 because the latter failed to accord Clodius the honor he thought his due. Tatum downplays the importance of this episode, however, arguing that it did not compromise Lucullus' position, which had already collapsed at Rome, nor did it reveal an incipient demagogic bent, only arrogance.However, the "dangerous combination of arrogance and immaturity" (86), coupled with curiosity and perhaps the hope of an affair with Caesar's wife led Clodius to profane the rites of the Bona Dea. Tatum has no doubt of Clodius' guilt or that the prosecution for incestum was trumped up by Clodius' enemies, since the patres traditionally left the punishment of religious delicts to the gods themselves. But more than factional politics was involved. The most attractive feature of Tatum's study is that it draws on recent studies of aristocratic culture to explore dimensions of the events he describes that prior treatments overlooked. Linderski, North, and other students of Republican religion have made it impossible any longer to doubt that senators and plebs alike took the civic cult seriously. Hence for Tatum, genuine religious outrage enabled the factio out to get Clodius to press home its attack. Likewise, Tatum follows Brunt and others in recognizing the importance of ideas as well as personal alignments in shaping the political struggles of the era; guided by Millar, he sees sovereignty of the people as no mere slogan and stresses that a principled popularis stance was well within the bounds of aristocratic ideology. Tatum therefore argues that, by attacking the senate's proposal that the praetor should hand-pick the jurors who would hear the case against Clodius, his supporters cast the struggle as one over the limits of senatorial auctoritas in the face of libertas and the iurapopuli. The claim revived the central conflict in Cicero's suppression of the Catilinarian conspiracy and once again roused the... (shrink)