Probabilistic predictions of future risk govern much of society: healthcare, genetics, social media, national security, and finance. Both policy-makers and private companies are increasingly working to design institutional structures that seek to manage risk by controlling the behavior of citizens and consumers, using new technologies of predictive control that comb through past data to predict and shape future action. These predictions not only control social institutions but also shape individual character and forms of practical reason. Risk-based decision theory shifts people's (...) relationships to the future through knowledge of possible dangers and foregone opportunities, thus inspiring anxious solicitude and deceptive hopes for total security. This book uses virtue ethics to analyze these problems and to suggest ways to enjoy these technologies' positive benefits while constraining their dangerous aspects through a better understanding of practical reasoning and a theological analysis of our responsibility for future risks. (shrink)

What does it mean to consider the world of AI through a Christian lens? Rapid developments in AI continue to reshape society, raising new ethical questions and challenging our understanding of the human person. Encountering Artificial Intelligence draws on Pope Francis’ discussion of a culture of encounter and broader themes in Catholic social thought in order to examine how current AI applications affect human relationships in various social spheres and offers concrete recommendations for better implementation. The document also explores questions (...) regarding personhood, consciousness, and the kinds of relationships humans might have with even the most advanced AI. Through these discussions, this book investigates the theoretical and practical challenges to interpersonal encounter raised by the age of AI. (AI Research Group for the Centre for Digital Culture of the Dicastery of Culture and Education of the Holy See). (shrink)

Because Paul has proven difficult to understand, the interpreter must pay careful attention to the language, the rhetorical structure, and the context if unnecessary difficulties are to be avoided.

Trust is a temporary attachment between humans that pervades our daily lives. Recent research has shown that the affiliative hormone oxytocin rises with a social signal of interpersonal trust and is associated with trustworthy behavior (the reciprocation of trust). This commentary reports these results and relates them to the target article's findings for variations in affiliative-related behaviors.

How does personality influence the relationship between appraisals and emotions? Recent research suggests individual differences in appraisal structures: people may differ in an emotion's appraisal pattern. We explored individual differences in interest's appraisal structure, assessed as the within-person covariance of appraisals with interest. People viewed images of abstract visual art and provided ratings of interest and of interest's appraisals (novelty–complexity and coping potential) for each picture. A multilevel mixture model found two between-person classes that reflected distinct within-person appraisal styles. For (...) people in the larger class (68%), the novelty–complexity appraisal had a stronger effect on interest; for people in the smaller class (32%), the coping potential appraisal had a stronger effect. People in the larger class were significantly higher in appetitive traits related to novelty seeking (e.g., sensation seeking, openness to experience, and trait curiosity), suggesting that the appraisal classes have substantive meaning. We conclude by discussing the value of within-person mixture models for the study of personality and appraisal. (shrink)

This exploration of a notorious mathematical problem is the work of the man who discovered the solution. Written by an award-winning professor at Stanford University, it employs intuitive explanations as well as detailed mathematical proofs in a self-contained treatment. This unique text and reference is suitable for students and professionals. 1966 edition. Copyright renewed 1994.

With this paper I aim to demonstrate that a look beyond the Aristotelian square of opposition, and a related non-conservative view on logical determiners, contributes to both the understanding of Aristotelian syllogistics as well as to the study of quantificational structures in natural language.

This paper examines the strengths and weaknesses of one of science's most pervasive and flexible metaprinciples;optimalityis used to explain utility maximization in economics, least effort principles in physics, entropy in chemistry, and survival of the fittest in biology. Fermat's principle of least time involves both teleological and causal considerations, two distinct modes of explanation resting on poorly understood psychological primitives. The rationality heuristic in economics provides an example from social science of the potential biases arising from the extreme flexibility of (...) optimality considerations, including selective search for confirming vidence, ex post rationalization, and the confusion of prediction with explanation. Commentators are asked to reflect on the extent to which optimality is an organizing principle of nature, a set of relatively unconnected techniques of science, a normative principle for rational choice and social organization, a metaphysical way of looking at the world, or something else still. (shrink)

In Religion and the Obligations of Citizenship Paul J. Weithman asks whether citizens in a liberal democracy may base their votes and their public political arguments on their religious beliefs. Drawing on empirical studies of how religion actually functions in politics, he challenges the standard view that citizens who rely on religious reasons must be prepared to make good their arguments by appealing to reasons that are 'accessible' to others. He contends that churches contribute to democracy by enriching political (...) debate and by facilitating political participation, especially among the poor and minorities, and as a consequence, citizens acquire religiously based political views and diverse views of their own citizenship. He concludes that the philosophical view which most defensibly accommodates this diversity is one that allows ordinary citizens to draw on the views their churches have formed when voting and offering public arguments for their political positions. (shrink)

In their analysis Childress et al. (2023) suggest that withdrawal of extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) over a patient’s dissent is not justified by existing ethical arguments. The alternat...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THOMISTIC PRIDE AND LIBERAL VICE 1 PAUL J. WEITHMAN University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana L IBERALISM IS often portrayed, and sometimes portrays itself, as a moral and political view that rejects the claims of tradition. Thus liberals characteristically claim that the traditional standing of a social arrangement contributes little or nothing to its political legitimacy. Whether an arrangement is legitimate depends upon whether or not those (...) who currently live under it can understand and accept its rationale. Members of each generation must be able to examine arrangements as if they themselves were signatories of the social contract; the justification of regimes must, as it were, be susceptible of renewal in every age and to every citizen. Jefferson gave this view its most extreme expression when he claimed that each generation has the right to begin its nation's political life anew, and that national constitutions should be rewritten every two decades.2 Liberals often seem no kinder to intellectual than to political traditions. As they think political life can periodically begin anew, so they sometimes seem to think that political and moral philosophy can begin anew. Hobbes famously castigated the obscurities of scholasticism and argued that political philosophy could achieve firm footing only if the rubble of the past were swept away.3 Liberal contract theorists have followed Hobbes's lead, developing political theories that rely not at all upon classi1 Thanks to Alasdair Macintyre, David O'Connor, Michael Pakaluk, David Solomon, Eleonore Stump, and Allen Wood for helpful comments on earlier drafts. This paper is dedicated to the memory of my teacher and friend, Prof. Judith Shklar. 2 See Jefferson's famous letter to Madison of September 6, 1789 (The Portable Jefferson, ed. Merrill D. Peterson [New York: Viking, 1977], 444ff.), as well as his lesser known missive to Samuel Kercheval of July 12, 1816 (ibid., SS2ff.). 3 See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. MacPherson (New York: Penguin Books, 1985), 727, for an especially pungent expression of a view that runs throughout the Leviathan. 241 242 PAUL J. WEITHMAN cal and medieval moral philosophy. To take but one example of this neglect of the past, the ethical writings of scholasticism are dominated by richly detailed analyses of the virtues and vices, yet liberal writers roundly ignore these discussions. Liberals have been quick to defend their suspicions of the thought and politics of the past, but critics of liberalism have been equally quick to seize upon them. Champions of virtue ethics have been among the most vocal critics of liberalism in recent years, arguing that liberals court philosophical peril by neglecting the insights of earlier moral theories. Edmund Burke, the eighteenth-century opponent of liberalism, had an additional complaint. Burke discerned an arrogance in the liberal rejection of intellectual and political tradition. It was mere pride, Burke thought, to suppose that politics and political theory could be made transparent to the reason of every individual in the way that liberals sometimes claim.4 Burke's allegation that the liberal rejection of tradition reflects pride is ironic, for pride is a central element of one of the traditions of moral thought that liberals seem determined to reject. During a lengthy period of philosophy's history, pride was thought to be a motive of all wrong action. The biblical book of Sirach says that pride is the beginning of all evil5 and a long line of medieval moralists labored to explain how this might be so. Yet the tradition of moral thought that accorded pride so central a role now suffers from neglect at the hands of many philosophers. And pride itself is a vice that many philosophers now consider unworthy of attention. Most fail to consider it seriously as a motive for any wrong action at all. I have three aims in this paper. One is to examine pride's neglect more closely. I shall argue that pride suffers this neglect because of its centrality to a religiously based tradition of moral thought that many philosophers no longer accept. The alleged connection between pride and religion is, I shall argue, suggestive. It suggests what an account of pride would have to include 4 See Edmund Burke, Reflections on... (shrink)

For half a century, Ernest Fortin's scholarship has charmed and educated theologians and philosophers with its intellectual search for the best way to live. Written by friends, colleagues, and students of Fortin, this book pays tribute to a remarkable thinker in a series of essays that bear eloquent testimony to Fortin's influence and his legacy. A formidable commentator on Catholic philosophical and political thought, Ernest Fortin inspired others with his restless inquiries beyond the boundaries of conventional scholarship. With essays on (...) subjects ranging across philosophy, political science, literature, and theology Gladly to Learn and Gladly to Teach reflects the astonishing depth and breadth of Fortin's contribution to contemporary thought. (shrink)

The editors of this unique volume have brought together 24 leading emotion theorists with a wide variety of perspectives to address 12 fundamental questions about the subject.

A framework is presented for studying ethical conduct in public accounting practice. Four levels of analysis are distinguished: individual, local office, multi-office firm and professional institute. Several propositions are derived from the framework and discussed: (1) The effects of ethical vs. unethical behavior on an accountant's prospects for advancement are asymmetrical in nature; (2) the way individuals perceive or frame the decision problem at hand will make an ethical response more or less likely; (3) the economic incentives present in competitive (...) markets influence the work goals of firms and offices, and lead to ethical dilemmas for individuals; and (4) initiatives at the firm or institute level aimed at compliance with professional ethical standards will by themselves have little effect on individual ethical behavior. Research into ethical behavior of practitioners will capture self-conscious and biased responses unless it is designed so as to permit indirect observation and recording of spontaneous comments. To assure valid research findings, practitioners should be interviewed and their motives assessed indirectly. A longitudinal approach is recommended, beginning with students who are choosing an accounting career. Two types of questions for use in these interviews are described. (shrink)

: This contribution offers a detailed presentation of an anonymous book on the soul ascribed to the fourteenth-century Franciscan philosopher and theologian Nicholas Bonet. The work is conserved in two manuscripts of the National Library of the Czech Republic in Prague. In both manuscripts the work is almost certainly incomplete. It has a strong focus on the vegetative and sensitive operations of the human soul and on phenomena such as light and colour. Keywords: Fourteenth-century philosophy, Nicholas Bonet, philosophical manuscripts, philosophical (...) psychology, the soul. (shrink)

Fox and her colleagues (2007) present an important and foundational study concerning the character of current ethics consultation services (ECSs). Although we have some concerns regarding the gener...

In his justly celebrated Expert Political Judgment, Philip E. Tetlock evaluates the judgment of economic and political experts by rigorously testing their ability to make accurate predictions. He finds that ability profoundly limited, implying that expert judgment is virtually useless, if not worse. He concludes by proposing a project that would seek to improve experts' performance by holding them publicly accountable for their claims. But Tetlock's methods severely underestimate the value of expert opinion. Despite their notorious disagreements, experts have highly (...) pertinent information and advice in many areas of public policy. The main problem with experts is that political actors seize on their most extreme views in one direction or the other, and overlook their areas of general agreement and the core of relatively reliable information that they provide. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:On the God of the Christians: And on One or Two Others by Rémi BraguePaul J. GriffithsOn the God of the Christians: And on One or Two Others. By Rémi Brague. Translated by Paul Seaton. South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine’s Press, 2013. Pp. xvi + 160. $26.00 (cloth). ISBN: 978-1-58731-345-5.Rémi Brague holds professorial positions at the Sorbonne in Paris and the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. He is perhaps (...) best described as a philosophical theologian and historian of ideas, and has published widely and deeply in these fields, writing mostly in French. A good portion of his work has, during the last two decades, been translated into English, and there are now half-a-dozen books and many essays by him available in that language. The book here under review was published in French in 2009.The book’s title aptly indicates one of its main themes, which is the deep and distinctive difference between the God of the Christians and other gods, especially the God of Islam. Brague does not like—and wishes to place under the ban—ways of characterizing Christianity and Islam that suggest or imply that Christians and Muslims worship the same God, and that they are each monotheistic, Abrahamic, and a people of the Book. Furthermore, he advocates such a ban, sometimes in excitable language, because of deep differences in Christian and Muslim ways of understanding, depicting, and analyzing God.Brague seems to think that difference in predicatively identifying, describing, and responding to something requires, if it reaches a certain level, the conclusion that what is being identified, described, and responded to is not the same thing. Such difference makes, for example, shared reference impossible. If the predicate list I supply for something I wish to talk about is sufficiently different from the predicate list you supply for something you wish to talk about, the conclusion Brague prefers is that we are not talking about the same thing—that we are not referring to the same thing.But there are problems here. Imagine the following case. I speak of someone who is female, sixty-eight years old, lives in Bangalore, writes in English, and has published seventy-four essays and thirteen books. You speak of someone who is male, seventy-three years old, lives in Montréal, writes in French, and has published thirty-nine books and more than one hundred essays. The predicates have little in common. It might seem reasonable to say [End Page 463] that we are and must be referring to different people because no one person could share this predicate list: the list contains noncompossibles. But a little discussion shows that we each understand ourselves to be speaking about the most eminent living philosopher; that is a description each of us applies to the person thus predicatively identified.What to say about this? Perhaps that each of us is speaking of (referring to) the most eminent living philosopher, but that one (or both) of us has identified that person wrongly. On this understanding—not one, I think, that Brague would prefer—there is no failure of reference. Rather, there is error, more or less widespread, in specifying the properties belonging to the individual to whom the overarching predicate (‘most eminent living philosopher’) applies. Alternatively, one might say that only one—or perhaps neither—of us is speaking about the most eminent living philosopher, and that failure to do so is guaranteed by a sufficient number of mistakes in the predicate list. That is the line Brague would prefer.But it is easy enough to see that such an interpretation is not necessary and may be confused. We might, after all, be in substantial agreement as to what it would take to be the most eminent living philosopher. We might, that is, give largely the same sense to that expression, even if we disagree massively as to the particulars of the person who meets the case. And if so, the proper conclusion is not that neither of us is talking about the most eminent living philosopher; it is rather that we are talking about just that person... (shrink)

This comment proposes that Bullot & Reber's (B&R's) emphasis on historical and intentional knowledge expands the range of emotions that can be properly viewed as aesthetic states. Many feelings, such as anger, contempt, shame, confusion, and pride, come about through complex aesthetic meanings, which integrate conceptual knowledge, beliefs about the work and the artist's intentions, and the perceiver's goals and values.

Byrne & Russon's target article displays all the difficulties encountered when one fails to take a methodological behaviourist approach to imitation. Their conceptual apparatus is grounded in a mixture of introspection and folk psychology. Their distinction between action-level and program-level imitation falters on goal imputation for sequential acts. In an alternative gradient descent model, behaviour can be simulated as a frustration/satisfaction gradient descent in the animal's “potentiality space,” as defined by knowledge, inventiveness, and the surrounding environment.

Examining the implications of a localist model for linguistic performance, I show the strengths of the P-graph, a network of elementary units of meaning where utterance results from relaxation through the operation of a dynamics of affect values. A unit of meaning is stored in a synaptic connection that brings together two words. Such a model, consistent with the anatomy and physiology of the neural tissue, eschews a number of traditional pitfalls of “semantic networks”: (1) ambiguity ceases to be an (...) issue, as similar uses of a word are automatically clustered together; (2) faster retrieval of words acquired early is explained by the larger number of their instances. In addition the P-graph takes advantage of a plausible form of information storage: the local topology of the neural tissue. (shrink)

This article argues that a close reading of friendship practices in the plays of Plautus, in light of the relevant social science and anthropological literature on friendship, can help us establish the parameters, discourse, and behaviors associated with Roman friendship. Application of a new analytical framework for studying such relationships in ancient literature (a "processual model of friendship interaction") to the plays of Plautus increases our understanding of Roman amicitia in that it marks the relationship as a precious and all (...) too rare social bond, fraught with paradox and ambivalence, and generative of tensions, anxieties, and asymmetries. (shrink)

For half a century, Ernest Fortin's scholarship has charmed and educated theologians and philosophers with its intellectual search for the best way to live. Written by friends, colleagues, and students of Fortin, this book pays tribute to a remarkable thinker in a series of essays that bear eloquent testimony to Fortin's influence and his legacy. A formidable commentator on Catholic philosophical and political thought, Ernest Fortin inspired others with his restless inquiries beyond the boundaries of conventional scholarship. With essays on (...) subjects ranging across philosophy, political science, literature, and theology Gladly to Learn and Gladly to Teach reflects the astonishing depth and breadth of Fortin's contribution to contemporary thought. (shrink)

Conflicts of interest have an erosive effect on trust in science, damaging first the attitude of the public toward scientists and their research, but also weakening the trusting interdependence of scientists. Disclosure is recognized as the key tool for management of conflicts, but rules with sanctions must be improved, new techniques for avoidance of financial conflicts by alternative funding of evaluative research must be sought, and there must be new thinking about institutional conflicts of interest. Our profession is education, and (...) both the public and research professionals of all ages would benefit from greater understanding of how science should and does work. (shrink)

Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter turns, in two contrasting ways, on the role of experts. On the one hand, Caplan uses the opinions of economists as a benchmark for identifying error in public opinion, finding such error systematic and pervasive. On the other hand, in considering remedies, he largely discounts the ability of policymakers to use expert advice and their own expertise to resist misguided public pressure. Although Caplan’s use of expert opinion as a benchmark, in principle, (...) is acceptable, he overstates what we can conclude from that exercise with his data. There are, however, alternative grounds for a more tentative, yet broadly similar, assessment of the prevalence of error in mass opinion. (shrink)