Explores the philosophy of corporate responsibility in in terms of collective vs individualist theory. It reports and defends distinctions among collectivities that run counter to individualist theory, develops a theory of the corporation as a moral person, and provides applications of the theory to actual cases.

V.1 Re-establishing an initial union among philosophy, science, and wisdom by recovering our understanding of philosophy, science : how philosophy, science, is, and always has been, chiefly a study of the one and the many -- v.2. An introduction to ragamuffin Thomism.

In April 1999, Dr. Curt Freed of the University of Colorado in Denver and Dr. Stanley Fahn of Columbia Presbyterian Center in New York presented the results of a four-year, $5.7 million government-financed study using tissue from aborted fetuses to treat Parkinson’s disease at a conference of the American Academy of Neurology. The results of the first government-financed, placebo-controlled clinical study using fetal tissue showed that the symptoms of some Parkinson’s patients had been relieved. This research study involved forty subjects, (...) nineteen women and twenty-one men; all suffered from Parkinson’s disease for an average of 13.5 years. In the study, each subject underwent neurosurgery: “four tiny burr holes, drilled through the wrinkle lines above the eyebrows into the skull, to clear a pathway to the brain. But only half received injections of fetal cells into the putamen, the region of the brain that controls movement; the other half received nothing. One year later, three members of the placebo group said their symptoms had improved.” In two-thirds of the transplant recipients, the fetal tissue took hold and seemed to establish a new network to produce the missing neurochemical dopamine. (shrink)

The author makes an attempt to show why (1) Darwin’s teaching in The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection and The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex cannot be “scientific” in a modern, classical, or any, sense and that, consequently, in them, (2) Darwin did not scientifically prove the reality of evolution of species. He claims that, while the question of the origin of genera and species is principally and primarily a metaphysical problem, Darwin’s ignorance (...) of the nature of philosophy and metaphysics and the complexity of the problem of the nature of genera and species caused him mistakenly to frame this metaphysical problem as one of physics, more precisely as one of biology, which Darwin reduced to a natural history of living, physical beings. (shrink)

Jorge J. E. Gracia, was born in Cuba in 1942. At age 19, he escaped Cuba and arrived in the United States. In 2019, 58 years later, in a nation which, prior to his arrival in North America, had no major Latino cultural presence in higher education and philosophy, Gracia rose to hold the Samuel P. Capen Chair and State University of New York at Buffalo Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literature. In this position, he became the leading figure (...) to institutionalize Latin American philosophy in the U.S. academy and an internationally-renowned scholar in medieval philosophy. Jorge J. E. Gracia died in the United States on July 13, 2021. In this paper the author shows that what properly explains the philosophical and adult-personal life of Gracia is the Thomistic principle of virtual quantity. He contends that the only way to understand Gracia’s personal and philosophical life is to grasp this life as one of an organizational psychologist pursuing perfect self-realization in action and understanding: someone chiefly interested in intellectually grasping precisely how organizational wholes (including his own psyche) become united and divided, and operate when so united and divided. (shrink)

Peter Schouls examines the role played by the concepts of freedom, mastery, and progress in Descartes' writings, arguing that these ideas express a vital and ...

Subjectivism about moral wrongness is the view that the moral wrongness of an action (if and how wrong that action is) is grounded solely in facts about the agent's mental state at the time of action. Antisubjectivism is the denial of subjectivism. I offer an argument against subjectivism, and for antisubjectivism, based on an examination of the main concern of the morally conscientious person, viz., the concern to avoid acting wrongly.

Normative ethical theories owe us an account of how to evaluate decisions under risk and uncertainty. Deontologists seem at a disadvantage here: our best decision theories seem tailor-made for consequentialism. For example, decision theory enjoins us to always perform our best option; deontology is more permissive. In this paper, we discuss and defend the idea that, when some pro-tanto wrongful act is all-things considered permissible, because it is a ‘lesser evil’, it is often merely permissible, by the lights of deontology. (...) We show that this raises new problems for deontological decision theory, and we show that to resolve them, we need to take a more innovative approach to morally evaluating decision-making under risk and uncertainty. (shrink)

Technology is our conduit of power. In our modern world, technology is the gatekeeper deciding who shall have and who shall have not. Either technology works for you or you work for technology. It shapes the human race just as much as we shape it. But where is this symbiosis going? Who provides the directions, the intentions, the goals of this human-machine partnership? Such decisions do not derive from the creators of technology who are enmeshed in their individual innovations. They (...) neither come from our social leaders who possess only sufficient technical understanding to react to innovations, not to anticipate or direct their progress. Neither is there evidence of some omnipotent 'invisible hand,' the simple fact is that no one is directing this enterprise. In Mind, Machine and Morality, Peter Hancock asks questions about this insensate progress and has the temerity to suggest some cognate answers. He argues for the unbreakable symbiosis of purpose and process, and examines the dangerous possibilities that emerge when science and purpose meet. Historically, this work is a modern-day child of Bacon's hope for the 'Great Instauration.' However, unlike its forebear, the focus here is on human-machine systems. The emphasis centers on the conception that the active, extensive face of modern philosophy is technology. Whatever we are to become is bound up not only in our biology but critically in our technology also. And to achieve rational progress we need to articulate manifest purpose. This book is one step along the purposive road. (shrink)

There is presently a debate between Subjectivists and Objectivists about moral wrongness. Subjectivism is the view that the moral status of our actions, whether they are morally wrong or not, is grounded in our subjective circumstances – either our beliefs about, or our evidence concerning, the world around us. Objectivism, on the other hand, is the view that the moral status of our actions is grounded in our objective circumstances – all those facts other than those which comprise our subjective (...) circumstances. A third view, Ecumenism, has it that the moral status of our actions is grounded both in our subjective and our objective circumstances. After outlining and evaluating the various arguments both against Subjectivism and against Objectivism, this Element offers a tentative defense of Objectivism about moral wrongness. (shrink)

Peter Kwasniewski shows that St. Thomas contemplates the nature of ecstasy at key stages in the development of his thought and that it plays a crucial role in his doctrine of love. St. Thomas recognized that all love involves ecstatic transcendence, whether it be the creature's self-oblation to the Creator, the reverence of an inferior for a superior, a superior's generosity toward an inferior, or the mutual affection and help of equals joined in friendship. Love of persons for their (...) own sake generates an ecstatic love in which the self is borne as a gift to another subject by sharing a common life aspiring to common goods. Kwasniewski also examines Aquinas on the question of whether or not God experiences ecstasy, and if so, in what ways. (shrink)

In the past few decades, scholars have offered positive, normative, and most recently, interpretive theories of contract law. These theories have proceeded primarily from deontological and consequentialist premises. In A Theory of Contract Law: Empirical Understandings and Moral Psychology, Professor Peter A. Alces confronts the leading interpretive theories of contract and demonstrates their interpretive doctrinal failures. Professor Alces presents the leading canonical cases that inform the extant theories of Contract law in both their historical and transactional contexts and, argues (...) that moral psychology provides a better explanation for the contract doctrine than do alternative comprehensive interpretive approaches. (shrink)

This article examines responses from Lutheran pastors, theologians, and physicians to the arguments given by Johann Weyer in 1563 that those women who confessed to a pact with the devil suffered from melancholy and were thus not responsible for their acts. Weyer’s conception of melancholy was a medical one, yet among Lutheran pastors and theologians the concept of a spiritual form of melancholy emerged that came from religious sources. The article clarifies the difference between the concepts of medical and spiritual (...) melancholy within Lutheranism and reviews the respective roles they played in the debates over Weyer’s arguments. (shrink)

Sometimes doing what’s right depends on anticipating how people will react when you do the right thing. Consider two aspects of challenge trial payments discussed by Lynch and colleagues. Th...

In their article, “Supported Decision Making with People at the Margins of Autonomy,” Peterson, Karlawish, and Largent point to the fact that the concept of ‘supported decision-making’ has recently...

Although knowledge of torture and physical and psychological abuse was widespread at both the Guantanamo Bay detention facility and Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and known to medical personnel, there was no official report before the January 2004 Army investigation of military health personnel reporting abuse, degradation, or signs of torture. Mounting information from many sources, including Pentagon documents, the International Committee of the Red Cross, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, etc., indicate that medical personnel failed to maintain medical records, (...) conduct routine medical examinations, provide proper care of disabled and injured detainees, accurately report illnesses and injuries, and falsified medical records and death certificates. Medical personnel and medical information was also used to design and implement psychologically and physically coercive interrogations. The United States military medical system failed to protect detainee's human rights, violated the basic principles of medical ethics and ignored the basic tenets of medical professionalism. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

Since my childhood I have given up several conceptions of God. Each time there was quite a wrench, for, in my own limited way, I had been walking with my ‘living’ God. In my philosophical and theological studies, I have been impressed by the fact that one deep-souled thinker found the living God of another ‘dead’. And then I realised that a God is ‘living’ or ‘dead’ insofar as ‘He’ answers questions that are vital to the given believer.

The purpose of this communication is to announce some recent results on the computably enumerable sets. There are two disjoint sets of results; the first involves invariant classes and the second involves automorphisms of the computably enumerable sets. What these results have in common is that the guts of the proofs of these theorems uses a new form of definable coding for the computably enumerable sets.We will work in the structure of the computably enumerable sets. The language is just inclusion, (...) ⊆. This structure is called ε.All sets will be computably enumerable non-computable sets and all degrees will be computably enumerable and non-computable, unless otherwise noted. Our notation and definitions are standard and follow Soare [1987]; however we will warm up with some definitions and notation issues so the reader need not consult Soare [1987]. Some historical remarks follow in Section 2.1 and throughout Section 3.We will also consider the quotient structure ε modulo the ideal of finite sets, ε*. ε* is a definable quotient structure of ε since “Χ is finite” is definable in ε; “Χ is finite” iff all subsets of Χ are computable. We use A* to denote the equivalent class of A under the ideal of finite sets. (shrink)

Based on the results of open ended interviews with managers in a variety of organizational positions, moral questions encountered in everyday managerial life are described. These involve transactions with employees, peers and superiors, customers, suppliers and other stakeholders. It is suggested that managers identify transactions as involving personal moral concern when they believe that a moral standard has a bearing on the situation and when they experience themselves as having the power to affect the transaction. This is the first in (...) a research series of three papers. (shrink)

This new book describes the intellectual structure of modern science as a body of knowledge produced by the Cartesian method.

Ethics and College Sports is a careful analysis of the root problems in intercollegiate athletics in American universities. It examines the prevalent myths that are regularly used to justify the inclusion of intercollegiate athletics, and all of the abuses and scandals it has brought to university campuses, from a moral perspective.

We discuss two inconsistencies between Levelt et al.'s model and existing theory about, and data from, picture-word experiments. These inconsistencies show that the empirical support for WEAVER ++ is much weaker than Levelt et al. suggest. We close with a discussion of the proposed explanation for phonological coactivation of near synonyms of a target word.

Emerging neuroscientific insights are changing our understanding of what it means to be human. The resulting reconceptualization continues to impact law and the fit between law and morality. This book takes account of those developments and suggests that normative theory, particularly in its non-instrumental iterations, will be challenged, most profoundly. If we are, as the science suggests, nothing more than the coincidence of mechanical forces, then law and normative theory that depend on the immaterial and that would draw distinctions between (...) the "mental" or "emotional" and the more manifestly physical are misguided, so misguided that they would actually undermine human thriving. Indeed, they already do. The ramifications of that conclusion are profound. Trialectic posits and investigates the impact of those ramifications on law. (shrink)

I wish this essay to be a tribute to Edwin A. Burtt. He stands for a quality of intellectual and spiritual hospitality that is all the more inspiring because it stems from widespread scholarly analysis and a moral passion for catholicity and civility. Like Kant, he has given much of his acute philosophical ability to the task of understanding the foundations of scientific, moral, and religious beliefs. If anything, he goes a step further than Kant. Persons, he argues, win truth (...) only as love unifies all their efforts. (shrink)

When people make judgments about the effects of a perturbation on populations of species in a food web, their judgments exhibit the dissipation effect: a tendency to judge that effects of the perturbation weaken or dissipate as they spread out through the food web from the locus of the perturbation. In the present research evidence for two more phenomena is reported. Terminal locations are points in the food web with just a single connection to the rest of the web. Judged (...) changes tended to be higher for species at terminal locations than for species the same distance from the perturbation but at nonterminal locations. Branches are points in the web where a route splits into two or more routes. Judged changes tended to be lower for species following branching points than for species the same distance from the perturbation but not following branching points. It is proposed that the findings can be explained as effects of a mental model employing concepts of influence and resistance. Under this model a perturbation is a change in energy level at a point in the system that acts as an influence affecting the rest of the system. The basic concepts in this model are domain‐general and on that basis it is predicted that the dissipation effect should be found in judgments of any physical system to which notions of influence and resistance can be applied. (shrink)

There is a moral phenomenon of “Secondary Permissibility” in which an otherwise morally impermissible option is made morally permissible by the presence of another option. In this paper I explain how this phenomenon works and argue that understanding how it works suggests a new model for the structure of the ethics of harming.