When he hears about automation, automatic factories, and unmanned manufacture, the worker wonders with a certain anxiety what will be his fate in an industry which is undergoing transformation and whether the trade from which he draws his livelihood today does not risk becoming useless tomorrow and leaving him without work. No doubt he has been told that the machine will never be able to replace man entirely, that there is no danger of unemployment, since new machines create new jobs, (...) and that he will be freed of heavy labor and fatigue, thanks to the automatized factory. But these arguments are not all valid for the man whose job is eliminated or modified and who must find another situation or adapt himself to a different kind of work. It makes no difference if the over-all perspectives are reassuring—they are less so on the individual's level. The economy may continue to experience a cycle of full employment, but the individual may have to face the depressing hunt for a new job or start at the bottom in a different trade. (shrink)

The Covid-19 pandemic has led to severe shortages of many essential goods and services, from hand sanitizers and N-95 masks to ICU beds and ventilators. Although rationing is not unprecedented, never before has the American public been faced with the prospect of having to ration medical goods and services on this scale.

Cross-national studies of business-related ethicality frequently have concluded that Americans possess higher ethical standards than non-Americans. These conclusions have generally been based on survey responses of relatively small convenience samples of individuals in a very limited number of countries. This article reports a study of the relationship between nationality and business-related ethicality based on survey responses from more than 6300 business students attending 120 colleges and universities in 36 countries. Two well-documented determinants of business ethics (gender and religiosity) were investigated (...) as moderators of the nationality–business ethicality relationship. The major research finding is that, while statistically significant differences were found between the business-related ethicality of American survey participants and the business-related ethicality of the non-American survey participants, the magnitudes of the differences were not substantial. The results of the study suggest that (i) more empirical cross-cultural/national research is required on business-related ethicality and (ii) previous explanations for cross-cultural/national differences in ethics need to be reconsidered before further generalizations are warranted. (shrink)

How should we understand the emotional rationality? This first part will explore two models of cognition and analogy strategies, test their intuition about the emotional desire. I distinguish between subjective and objective desire, then presents with a feeling from the "paradigm of drama" export semantics, here our emotional repertoire is acquired all the learned, and our emotions in the form of an object is fixed. It is pretty well in line with the general principles of rationality, especially the lowest reasonable (...) principles. Turned to the second part of this side of reasonable. I will inquire how emotional beliefs, desires, and behaviors contribute to the rationality. I will present a very general biological hypothesis: emotions by controlling highlights the characteristics of perception and reasoning, so that we remove the difficulties due in particular to lead to paralysis; they are being simulated by a simplified perception of information, thus limiting our practice and cognitive choice. How are we to understand emotional or axiological rationality? I pursue analogies with both the cognitive and the strategic models, testing them against intuitions about emotional desires. We distinguish two different classes of desires, the subjective and the objective, and propose that emotions have a semantics that derives from "paradigmatic scenarios", in terms of which our emotional repertoire is learned and the formal objects of our emotions fixed. This fits in well with emerging facts about how our emotional capacities develop, and it can also be squared with the general principles of rationality, particularly minimal rationality. In the second part, I return to the perspective of rationality. I ask how emotions contribute to the rationality of beliefs, desires, and behavior. I proffer a very general biological hypothesis: Emotions spare us the paralysis potentially induced by a particular predicament by controlling the salience of features of perception and reasoning; they temporarily mimic the informational encapsulation of perception and so circumscribe our practical and cognitive options. (shrink)

Presenting the most comprehensive and lucid account of the topic currently available, Robert Audi's "Practical Reasoning and Ethical Decision" is essential reading for anyone interested in the role of reason in ethics or the nature of human action. The first part of the book is a detailed critical overview of the influential theories of practical reasoning found in Aristotle, Hume and Kant, whilst the second part examines practical reasoning in the light of important topics in moral psychology - weakness (...) of will, self-deception, rationalization and others. In the third part, Audi describes the role of moral principles in practical reasoning and clarifies the way practical reasoning underlies ethical decisions. He formulates a comprehensive set of concrete ethical principles, explains how they apply to reasoning about what to do, and shows how practical reasoning guides moral conduct. (shrink)

The paper by Salloch and Eriksen (2024) offers an insightful contribution to the ethical debate on Machine Learning-driven Clinical Decision Support Systems (ML_CDSS) and provides much-needed conce...

No other book in the entire history of the world has exerted a greater influence on a larger number of people over a longer period of time than this slim volume. The spiritual cornerstone of the most populous and oldest living civilization on Earth, the Analects has inspired the Chinese and all the peoples of East Asia with its affirmation of a humanist ethics. As the Gospels are to Jesus, the Analects is the only place where we can encounter the (...) real, living Confucius. In this gem-like translation by Simon Leys, Confucius speaks with clarity and brilliance. He emerges as a man of great passion and many enthusiasms, a man of bold action whose true vocation is politics. Confucius (551-479 B.C.) lived in an age of acute cultural and political crisis. Many of his observations mark a world sinking into violence and barbarity. Unable to obtain the leading political role he sought, he endeavored to reform society and salvage civilization through ethical debate, defining for ages to come the public mission of the intellectual. (shrink)

Studie over de filosofie van de in Oostenrijk geboren Engelse wijsgeer.

In this paper, we present an informal introduction to Logical English and illustrate its use to standardise the legal wording of the Automatic Early Termination clauses of International Swaps and Derivatives Association Agreements. LE can be viewed both as an alternative to conventional legal English for expressing legal documents, and as an alternative to conventional computer languages for automating legal documents. LE is a controlled natural language, which is designed both to be computer-executable and to be readable by English speakers (...) without special training. The basic form of LE is syntactic sugar for logic programs, in which all sentences have the same standard form, either as rules of the form conclusion if conditions or as unconditional sentences of the form conclusion. However, LE extends normal logic programming by introducing features that are present in other computer languages and other logics. These features include typed variables signalled by common nouns, and existentially quantified variables in the conclusions of sentences signalled by indefinite articles. Although LE translates naturally into a logic programming language such as Prolog or ASP, it can also serve as a neutral standard, which can be compiled into other lower-level computer languages. (shrink)

This essay assesses the rationale for regulating research administrators as carefully as they regulate researchers. The reasons for such regulation are identical: protecting scientific integrity, ensuring responsible use of public funds, addressing the lack of effective recourse for victims, creating negative consequences for misbehaving actors, and addressing high incentives for misconduct. Whereas the reasons compelling us to regulate research administrators are obvious, counterarguments to administrative oversight are based on suggestions that the incidence and prevalence of cases of administrative misconduct are (...) too low to warrant formal regulation. I briefly describe examples of the phenomenon drawn from publicly available records. My analysis suggests that the misconduct of research administrators is both serious and worthy of better oversight. Improved oversight of research administration will help steward tax dollars appropriately and enhance the overall integrity of the scientific record and of the free pursuit of knowledge more generally. (shrink)

This volume reflects the breadth of Alexy's philosophy, identifies new areas of inquiry and offers a new impetus to the discourse theory of law.

-By way of introduction: An ancient tale retold, by R. M. MacIver.-The rule versus the cause; On deceiving the public for the public good, by L. Bryson. Fact, fiction, and reality, by F. E. Johnson. On the justifiable grounds of disobedience to law, by R. N. Baldwin. On the limits of justifiable disobedience, by F. L. Neumann. On the enlistment of dubious allies, by H. Simons. On "making friends with the mammon of unrighteousness," by L. Pope.-Some conflicts of our times: (...) The Hiroshima issue, by W. W. Waymack. Institutionalism and the faith, by L. Finkelstein. Freedom and interference in American education, by O. Tead. Private profit and public interest in mass communication, by R. Saudek. The threat to privacy, by H. D. Lasswell. (shrink)

Is incivility in the U.S. increasing? Certainly, there is a widespread perception that it is. In this paper, I examine the extent of that perception in a variety of settings. Of necessity, almost all of the evidence is anecdotal in nature. Equally inconclusive is the analysis of that evidence, since it consists almost entirely of interpretations. However, the reader may become persuaded that incivility seems to be an indicator of deleterious social psychological effects. More specifically, I suggest that Emile Durkheim's (...) anomie theory provides insight into the relation between apparently superficial incivility and more deep-seated social pathologies, so that it becomes plausible to see incivility as a barometer of underlying societal decay. (shrink)

China es el mayor desafío económico de Europa. La aspiración de China por el dominio geopolítico, económico y tecnológico está tensionando gravemente sus relaciones con Europa, que se encuentran en una clara trayectoria descendente. Las posiciones se han endurecido por ambas partes, con China volviéndose económicamente hacia adentro y la Unión Europea etiquetando a China como un competidor total, con limitadas áreas para el compromiso. El enfoque de China es a largo plazo y estratégico, explotando las divisiones internas de la (...) UE y la débil cooperación transatlántica con Estados Unidos. A China le gustaría tener acceso a tecnologías avanzadas con posibles aplicaciones militares, y ha adquirido puertos europeos y otras infraestructuras estratégicas. A través de la Iniciativa de la Franja y la Ruta, se ha convertido en el mayor acreedor bilateral del mundo. En último término, China busca revisar la arquitectura económica internacional y “reescribir las reglas del juego”. La respuesta de Europa no ha estado bien coordinada, ha sido a corto plazo y fragmentaria, lo que refleja las divisiones internas en la Unión. Para responder eficazmente al desafío de China, Europa necesita superar los intereses nacionales, cooperar con sus aliados y actuar más estratégicamente. (shrink)

This paper criticises John Harris's attempts to defend an account of a ‘harmed condition’ that can stand independently of intuitions about what is ‘normal’. I argue that because Homo sapiens is a sexually dimorphic species, determining whether a particular individual is in a harmed condition or not will sometimes require making reference to the normal capacities of their sex. Consequently, Harris's account is unable to play the role he intends for it in debates about the ethics of human enhancement.

February is Black History Month and so healthcare practitioners will soon rummage history books for information about famous African Americans, like Onesimus, the African slave who...

In an earlier paper I identified two desiderata of a theory of practical reasons which favour internalism, and then argued that forms of this doctrine which are currently on offer lose either one or the other in trying to avoid the conditional fallacy. Michael Brady, Mark van Roojen and Josh Gert have separately attempted to respond to my argument. I set out reasons why all fail.