The requirements of the UK Equality Act 2010 and some high profile criticism for using a potentially ageist methodology have prompted the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) to assess the processes and methodology it uses to make appraisal decisions. This paper argues that NICE has established rigorous systems to protect against ageist decisions, has no track record of ageism and is well placed to meet the requirements of new UK equality legislation.

In chapters ranging from "The Beautiful, the Dainty, and the Dumpy" to "Skin-deep or In the Eye of the Beholder?" Nick Zangwill investigates the nature of beauty as we conceive it, and as it is in itself. The notion of beauty is currently attracting increased interest, particularly in philosophical aesthetics and in discussions of our experiences and judgments about art. In The Metaphysics of Beauty, Zangwill argues that it is essential to beauty that it depends on the ordinary features (...) of things. He uses this principle to defend the notion of the aesthetic, to call for a version of aesthetic formalism, and to reconsider the reality of beauty. The Metaphysics of Beauty brings beauty to the center of intellectual consciousness in a manner informed by contemporary metaphysics and engages with beauty as an enduring object of human thought and experience. (shrink)

It is becoming increasingly apparent that Elizabeth Anscombe, long known as a student, friend and translator of Wittgenstein, was herself one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. No Morality, No Self examines her two best-known papers, in which she advanced her most amazing theses. In 'Modern Moral Philosophy', she claimed that the term moral, understood as picking out a special, sui generis category, is literally senseless and should therefore be abandoned. In 'The First Person', she maintained that (...) the word 'I' is not a referring expression: in other words, its function in the language is not to pick out the speaker, or 'the self' - or any entity whatsoever. Both papers are considered influential, and are frequently cited; but their main claims, and many of their arguments, have been widely misunderstood. In this book James Doyle shows that once various errors of interpretation have been cleared away, the claims can be seen to be far more plausible, and the arguments far more compelling, than even her defenders have realized. Philosophers often seek attention by making startling claims which are subsequently revealed as little more than commonplaces wrapped in hyperbole. Doyle's book makes it clear that here, in her greatest papers, Anscombe achieves something vanishingly rare in philosophy: a persuasive case for genuinely unsettling and profound conclusions. The two lines of argument, seemingly so disparate, are also shown to be connected by Anscombe's deep opposition to the Cartesian picture of the mind.--. (shrink)

"This volume is concerned with how we ought to evaluate the individual and collective actions on which the existence, numbers and identities of future people depend - discussed here as the "problem of contingent future persons." For it seems that those future persons who are brought into existence by such actions cannot benefit from or be harmed by them in any conventional sense. This is a relatively novel problem in ethics and as yet there is simply no consensus on how (...) we ought to evaluate such actions or, indeed, on whether we can. However, the pursuit of a solution to the problem has been interestingly employed by moral philosophers to press the limits of ethics and to urge a reconsideration of the nature and source of value at its most fundamental level. Intended for professional ethicists, policy researchers, and graduate students, this volume explores the theological implications of the problem and advances the investigation of it both philosophical and in theological terms." --Book Jacket. (shrink)

In Instrumental Variables (IV) estimation, the effect of an instrument on an endogenous variable may vary across the sample. In this case, IV produces a local average treatment effect (LATE), and if monotonicity does not hold, then no effect of interest is identified. In this paper, I calculate the weighted average of treatment effects that is identified under general first-stage effect heterogeneity, which is generally not the average treatment effect among those affected by the instrument. I then describe a simple (...) set of data-driven approaches to modeling variation in the effect of the instrument. These approaches identify a Super-Local Average Treatment Effect (SLATE) that weights treatment effects by the corresponding instrument effect more heavily than LATE. Even when first-stage heterogeneity is poorly modeled, these approaches considerably reduce the impact of small-sample bias compared to standard IV and unbiased weak-instrument IV methods, and can also make results more robust to violations of monotonicity. In application to a published study with a strong instrument, the preferred approach reduces error by about 19% in small (N ≈ 1, 000) subsamples, and by about 13% in larger (N ≈ 33, 000) subsamples. (shrink)

We define analogues of modal Sahlqvist formulas for the modal mu-calculus, and prove a correspondence theorem for them.

Social commerce as a subset of e-commerce has been emerged in part due to the popularity of social networking sites. Social commerce brings new challenges to marketing activities. And social commerce transactions like e-commerce transactions can be dangerous and cause harmful losses to personal finances, time, and information privacy. This article examines ethical issues and consumer assessments of the risks of using an e-service and how risk affects consumer evaluations and usage of Internet-based services and self-service technologies. Results from two (...) surveys totaling 1024 consumers indicated that as usage risk concerns increased, the perceived usefulness of an e-service and intention to use it decreased. Additionally as usage risk concerns increased the effect of subjective norm on PU and intention to use an e-service strengthened, and the effect of perceived ease of use on PU and intention to use an e-service weakened. These findings advance theory and contribute to the foundation for future research aimed at improving our understanding of how consumers evaluate new e-services, new commerce systems and settings, and self-service technologies in the social commerce era. (shrink)

Although Lakoff and Johnson’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory has been influential across many disciplines, little research has tested the psychological reality of conceptual metaphors using established experimental memory paradigms. Here we employ an episodic memory task based on the Deese-Roediger-McDermott false memory paradigm to explore this possibility. We find that after reading lists of sentences based on underlying conceptual metaphors that participants are more likely to falsely remember the nonpresented conceptual metaphors themselves as well as new sentences consistent with the CM (...) mapping than control items that do not share this mapping. This finding provides experimental support for conceptual metaphors and highlights the utility of using episodic tasks to explore the assumptions of this theory. (shrink)

En este trabajo presentamos un registro de la historia de vida de Mónica Medina, integrante de la comunidad weenhayek Quebracho, ubicada a 5 kilómetros de Tartagal, provincia de Salta. En esa memoria sobre sus ancestros desde tres generaciones previas hasta el presente, Mónica relata los recuerdos sobre el modo en que su familia vivió la Guerra del Paraguay que les obligó a desplazarse; las epidemias; el proceso de trashumancia y las distintas expulsiones a que se vieron sometidos; los modos en (...) que se fue transformando la vida a medida que se acercaban a los centros urbanos; la aproximación a la política partidaria y la formación de dirigentes; el proceso de conformación de demandas de reconocimiento de identidad étnica y las expectativas de futuro. Partimos de entender que este relato de vida, si bien es individual, se inscribe en la memoria colectiva de su familia, su comunidad y su pueblo, por cuanto resulta de experimentar, desde su trayectoria, ciertos recuerdos comunes. Este registro adquiere aquí un doble sentido epistémico: por un lado, permite conocer datos nodales sobre las trayectorias y las demandas actuales del Pueblo Weenhayek en torno a sus derechos a la identidad en Argentina, y particularmente sobre la disputa que libra por el reconocimiento estatal y social de su carácter de pueblo preexistente; pero a la vez, nos introduce en el trabajo de memoria que es central en el proceso de etnicidad que protagonizan estas comunidades weenhayek en su demanda y ejercicio de derechos actuales. (shrink)

The question of when or if a nation should intervene in another country’s affairs is one of the most important concerns in today’s volatile world. Taking John Stuart Mill’s famous 1859 essay “A Few Words on Non-Intervention” as his starting point, international relations scholar Michael W. Doyle addresses the thorny issue of when a state’s sovereignty should be respected and when it should be overridden or disregarded by other states in the name of humanitarian protection, national self-determination, or national (...) security. In this time of complex social and political interplay and increasingly sophisticated and deadly weaponry, Doyle reinvigorates Mill’s principles for a new era while assessing the new United Nations doctrine of responsibility to protect. In the twenty-first century, intervention can take many forms: military and economic, unilateral and multilateral. Doyle’s thought-provoking argument examines essential moral and legal questions underlying significant American foreign policy dilemmas of recent years, including Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan. (shrink)

Prima facie it seems easy to understand what he had in mind when he spoke of accidental being and being as true. Accidental or incidental being, what the Latins would later call ens per accidens, was in fact a juxtaposition of two or more categorical beings. As such it lacked a unified essence and thus it lacked genuine being. It was being "only in name." Being as true, he told us, was in the synthesis of the intellect, that is, the (...) intellect's second operation of judgment. Apparently, it was the being of the copula "is" in a true judgment. Contrasted with this was being as false, or pseudo-being, which strictly is nonbeing, found in the copula of a false judgment. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the boundaries of political sovereignty, one key aspect of global political justice and an important background condition to the issues of global economic justice treated in the other papers of this volume. I first present an interpretive summary of the traditional arguments against and for intervention, stressing, to a greater extent than is usual, the consequentialist character of the ethics of intervention. It makes a difference whether we think that an intervention will do more good than (...) harm, and some of the factors that determine the outcome are matters of strategy and institutional choice. I then explore the significance of a key factor that makes for much of what is new in the new interventionism: the role of multilateral and particularly U.N. authorization and implementation. I argue that the more salient role of the United Nations should lead us to a more expansive tolerance of international intervention and that global standards of justice, both political and economic, can therefore be more widely enforced against claims to national autonomy. (shrink)

Some self-knowledge must be arrived at by the subject herself, rather than being transmitted by another’s testimony. Yet in many cases the subject interacts with an expert in part because she is likely to have the relevant knowledge of their mind. This raises a question: what is the expert’s knowledge like that there are barriers to simply transmitting it by testimony? I argue that the expert’s knowledge is, in some circumstances, proleptic, referring to attitudes the subject would hold were she (...) to reflect in certain ways. The expert’s knowledge cannot be transmitted by testimony because self-knowledge cannot be proleptic. (shrink)

Quasi-experimental evaluation methods promised to provide a way of testing and improving solutions to social problems. These methods have been found wanting. Alternative approaches, including “pragmatic evaluation,” “naturalistic evaluation,” and “pluralist evaluation” are also shown to be unsatisfactory. The initial promise of the evaluation movement has been disappointed. Realistic evaluation is advocated as an alternative to existing forms of evaluation. It is rooted in some European traditions in epistemology, ontology, and social theory. It offers a framework within which rigorous outcome (...) evaluations can be undertaken with results that can inform policy and practice. (shrink)

This clear and user-friendly text provides practical guidance on how to incorporate citizenship into the curriculum. It offers a wealth of teaching aids including: * tried-and-tested photocopiable materials * case studies * suggested teaching strategies * comprehensive reference and resource section. Nick Clough and Cathie Holden are fully experienced in the field having both taught in primary and middle schools and both now specialise in providing citizenship education courses for trainee teachers and practising teachers. This up-to-date book will help (...) engage those teaching the new requirement of Education for Citizenship at Key Stages 2 and 3, and along with lively examples of pupils' work and discussions of the changes to the QCA guidelines regarding citizenship, they provide a comprehensive and complete resource. It is also of immense value to curriculum coordinators and to those wishing to know more about the thinking behind education for citizenship. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.2 (2002) 153-174 [Access article in PDF] LSDNA: Rhetoric, Consciousness Expansion, and the Emergence of Biotechnology Richard Doyle I had to struggle to speak intelligibly. —Albert Hofmann on his self-experiment with LSD-25 Finding a place to start is of utmost importance. Natural DNA is a tractless coil, like an unwound and tangled audio tape on the floor of the car in the dark. —Kary Mullis (...) on the invention of Polymerase Chain Reaction 1. Undoing life What happened is this: Once upon a time there was a narrative of vitality. Ok, not a narrative, but an apprehension, a fear, a vision. It didn't have a beginning, middle, or end. It was. Its contours were no more determinable than those of consciousness. Indeed, our consciousness, as humans, was our sole alleged difference from it. From something called "life." We were more than life, but were also, tragically, confined to it. You know the story all too well. Some of its major authors were Cuvier, Lamarck, Darwin, Bichat. Even Shelley.Just because this sudden transformation happened on paper doesn't mean it was easy to endure. Enormous numbers of humans went on tranquilizers just to deal with the effects. Others, elsewhere, knew nothing but rumors. Nonetheless, they became increasingly implicated in its effects, the effects of understanding and experiencing both "life" and "consciousness" as informatic events. Suddenly—and it is sudden, a real surprise—both our vitality and our thought were distributed, scattered across a network and nowhere in particular. Timothy Leary and Francis Crick were speaking the same language, the language of information where the organic and the machinic enfold each other helically and, sometimes, the capacity for replication goes through the ceiling. This new language of information would [End Page 153] introduce a novel response and abyss: the pleasures and hells of eternal replication. The distribution of both life and consciousness enabled a dream of immortality from which we have not yet awakened, as the mere specter of infinite clonal replicants provokes entropies of identity even as it preserves the self from onslaughts of decay. 1In at least one of its characteristics this shift toward an informatic understanding of life is perhaps not really so novel. The seductions of control are hardly, historians of science tell us, foreign to the practices and effects of technoscience. Evelyn Fox Keller makes this point concisely and precisely in her not-quite eponymous essay, "From Secrets of Life to Secrets of Death," itself a self-professed sequel to her 1986 "Making Gender Visible." Here the scientific "impulse" is underwritten by a perennial motif that underlies much of scientific creativity, namely, the urge to fathom the secrets of nature and the collateral hope that, in fathoming the secrets of nature, we will fathom (and hence gain control of) our own mortality (Secrets, 29).Surely Keller is correct that the nascent practices of molecular biology were cryptographic in character, an espionage project unknowingly launched by Erwin Schrodinger during the Second World War. Surely it is crucial to this moment that while Schrodinger's 1943 Dublin lectures were introducing audiences to the concept of the code-script, Alan Turing again brilliantly decrypted a modified U-boat code, giving the Allies code superiority for the remainder of the war. 2 But in this segment on that strange growth called "biotechnology," I want to focus on what Keller has called the "collateral" of hope in this cryptographic impulse, namely the collateral equation between inquiry and control, specifically the control of mortality.For is "fathoming" a secret identical to the exercise of control? The very cadence and rhetorical encryption of Keller's formulation here, a general parenthetical syllogistic conclusion within and alongside a hyphenated invocation of particularity, suggest that concepts and practices of secrecy are more unstable than Keller implies with her invocation of Feynman's "disease" of lock picking: "One of my diseases, one of my things in life, is that anything that is secret, I try to undo" (40).For Keller, Feynman's confession is emblematic of a desire to control life and death... (shrink)

As with other areas of the social world, academic research in the contemporary healthcare setting has undergone adaptation and change. For example, research methods are increasingly incorporating citizen participation in the research process, and there has been an increase in collaborative research that brings academic and industry partners together. There have been numerous positive outcomes associated with both of these growing methodological and collaborative processes; nonetheless, both bring with them ethical considerations that require careful thought and attention. This paper addresses (...) the ethical considerations that research teams must consider when using participatory methods and/or when working with industry and outlines a novel informed consent matrix designed to maintain the high ethical standard to which academic research in the healthcare arena has traditionally adhered. (shrink)

However much Greek tragedy was concerned with fate, it was more deeply concerned with the ways of men, the failures and achievements of human freedom.

This essay identifies and explores an underappreciated win-win policy option that has the potential to address both the needs of refugees for resettlement and the labor demand of destination countries. Building upon provisions of the Model International Mobility Convention—a model convention endorsed by dozens of leading migration and refugee experts—and a program pioneered by Talent Beyond Boundaries, we explore how to scale up valuable measures for identifying job opportunities that can resettle refugees from asylum countries to destination countries. The latter (...) can benefit from the labor of refugees and thereby offer long-term refuge for populations in desperate need of resettlement. (shrink)

The literature on migrant care workers has tended to place little emphasis on the multiple relationships that migrant carers form with care recipients, employers/managers and work colleagues. This article makes a contribution to this emerging field, drawing on data from qualitative interviews carried out with 40 migrant care workers employed in the institutional and domiciliary care sectors in Dublin, Ireland. While the analysis revealed generally positive carer—care recipient relationships, significant racial and cultural tensions were evident within the vertical and especially (...) the horizontal relationships in the care workplace. The article argues that these findings highlight the need for additional research on the relationships formed in the long-term care sector and further theorizing on the meaning and importance of the affective components of care work within increasingly commodified care markets. (shrink)

Theories of laughter exemplify the radical difference between descriptive language and actuality. This difference is figured by Henri Bergson in his classic treatment of laughter as the mismatch between the mechanical and the living, a differential locus modeled herein with the help of a banana peel.