Historically labor has been central to human interactions with the environment, yet environmentalists pay it scant attention. Indeed, they have been critical of those who foreground labor in their politics, socialists in particular. However, environmentalists have found the nineteenth-century socialist William Morris appealing despite the fact that he wrote extensively on labor. This paper considers the place of labor in the relationship between humanity and the natural world in the work of Morris and two of his contemporaries, the eminent scientist (...) Thomas Henry Huxley, and the Fabian socialist Herbert George Wells. I suggest that Morris's conception of labor has much to recommend it to environmentalists who are also interested in issues of social justice. (shrink)

The nineteenth century theologian, author and poet Charles Kingsley was a notable populariser of Darwinian evolution. He championed Darwin’s cause and that of honesty in science for more than a decade from 1859 to 1871. Kingsley’s interpretation of evolution shaped his theology, his politics and his views on race. The relationship between men and apes set the context for Kingsley’s consideration of these issues. Having defended Darwin for a decade in 1871 Kingsley was dismayed to read Darwin’s account of the (...) evolution of morals in Descent of Man. He subsequently distanced himself from Darwin’s conclusions even though he remained an ardent evolutionist until his death in 1875. (shrink)

During the British socialist revival of the 1880s competing theories of evolution were central to disagreements about strategy for social change. In News from Nowhere (1891), William Morris had portrayed socialism as the result of Lamarckian processes, and imagined a non-Malthusian future. H.G. Wells, an enthusiastic admirer of Morris in the early days of the movement, became disillusioned as a result of the Malthusianism he learnt from Huxley and his subsequent rejection of Lamarckism in light of Weismann's experiments on mice. (...) This brought him into conflict with his fellow Fabian, George Bernard Shaw, who rejected neo-Darwinism in favour of a Lamarckian conception of change he called "creative evolution.". (shrink)

After one has read for a while in the history of Western thought, one becomes cognizant of how many great intellects, believers and non-believers alike, have presented compelling examinations of Christian theism. And until recently, religious skeptics, following in the wake of David Hume, assumed that the ship of Christian philosophy of religion was too damaged to sail again. However, something unexpectedly emerged recently from the weathered ship, even after many pilots advised cautious hugging the shores, especially in light of (...) the ‘death of God’ storms of the 1960’s. Many abandoned the ancient mother ship, some escaping on rafts, lifeboats, or flotsam, transferring to modern vessels, such as SS Darwin, Freud, Marx, or Nietzsche. Still, a number of sailors stayed on board the ancient craft, and responded to the latter secularist fleet, honing their skills as navigators, first mates, and lookouts, so as to safeguard the ancient ship from secularist vessel forays.The anthology under re .. (shrink)

Medical care in the United States traditionally has focused on the treatment of disease rather than on its prevention. Heart disease, cancer, hypertension, diabetes, and other chronic diseases are the primary drivers of American health care costs; compared to other high-income countries, U.S. health indices are lowest and costs are highest.A “triple aim” — “improving the individual experience of care, improving the health of populations, and reducing the per capita costs of care for populations” — has gained traction, as the (...) social determinants of health are recognized as having significant effects on health outcomes. (shrink)

Warning research participants and patients about potential risks associated with participation/treatment is a fundamental part of consent. However, such risk warnings might cause negative expectations and subsequent nocebo effects (i.e., negative expectations cause negative outcomes) in participants. Because no existing review documents how past research has quantitatively examined nocebo effects – and negative expectations – arising from consent risk warnings, we conducted a pre-registered scoping review (N = 9). We identified several methodological issues across these studies, which in addition to (...) mixed findings, limit conclusions about whether risk warnings cause nocebo effects. (shrink)

Although they were never to meet and corresponded only briefly, Catharine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft shared a mutual admiration and a strong intellectual bond. Macaulay’s work had a profound and lasting effect on Wollstonecraft, and she developed and expanded on many of Macaulay’s ideas. While she often took these in a different direction, there remains a great synergy between their ideas to the extent that we can understand Wollstonecraft’s own feminist arguments by approaching them through the frameworks and ideas that (...) Macaulay provided. These included the principles of classical republicanism, particularly in its understanding of the values of freedom, equality and virtue, and an understanding of reason as grounded in immutable principles that apply equally to both sexes. On the question of women’s freedom and social equality with men, I argue that though Macaulay sets up the problem in far richer and more detailed philosophical terms, in the end it is Wollstonecraft that has the more compelling account of its far-reaching social implications and of how this might be addressed. (shrink)

In this article, we focus on the concept of leadership ethics and make observations about transformational, transactional and servant leadership. We consider differences in how each definition of leadership outlines what the leader is supposed to achieve, and how the leader treats people in the organization while striving to achieve the organization's goals. We also consider which leadership styles are likely to be more popular in organizations that strive to maximize short run profits. Our paper does not tout or degrade (...) any of these leadership theories. Instead, it points out which theories allow reason to play more than a minimal role in ethical decision-making, as well as those that are most consistent with a firm's desire to achieve efficiency in the short run. We explain our view that the way leadership is practiced in large, bureaucratic organizations suggests that ethics is often absent from the leader's decision-making process. Consequently, we suggest that before we engage in a meaningful dialogue about what kind of leaders we might really want in business, we must consider how much short-run profit we are willing to forego in exchange for more ethical corporate cultures. (shrink)

Background Informed consent confers upon participants the right to decline or accept participation in a study in equal measure. Consent declines can be used as a potential metric to assess the adequacy of the informed consent process. Limited literature is available on the reporting of consent declines in Clinical Research. We evaluated randomized controlled trials published in three high-impact factor journals for consent declines (four-year period) to assess the extent of exertion of autonomy by research participants. Methods CONSORT flow charts (...) in RCTs published in New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), The Lancet and Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) between 2012 and 2015 were evaluated. The total and per journal proportion of RCTs reporting consent declines was calculated. Percentage of consent declines was also compared based on number of centers (single centric vs. multicentric) and type of setting (developed vs. developing). Between-groups analysis was done using Chi Square, Chi Square for trend and a Crude odds ratio [95% C.I] (cOR) were calculated. Results Only 3.7% (1103/29,825) of the published articles were RCTs. Of the 1103 RCTs, only 532 (48.2%) reported consent declines. JAMA had the highest RCTs reporting consent declines (171/267.64%), the Lancet [129,150/781,924, 16.5%] had the most participants declining consent. Difference was significant using Chi square for linear trend [ p < 0.00001]. Consent decline rate was higher in developed countries relative to developing countries [cOR(95% C.I): 2.27(2.23,2.32), p < 0.000001] and in single centric versus multicentric studies [cOR (95% C.I): 3.63(3.56,3.71), p < 0.0000001]. Conclusion Both authors and journal editors need to ensure better reporting of consent declines. (shrink)

Trans philosophy—like everything else—has a history. The 1990s was a pivotal decade for the academic development of trans philosophy in the United States and Canada. During this period, the broader interdisciplinary field of transgender studies was beginning to emerge, and professional philosophy’s own contributions to transgender studies were starting to take shape as well. In what follows, we hear from Talia Mae Bettcher, Loren Cannon, Miqqi Alicia Gilbert, and Jacob Hale, four trans philosophers whose writings and activism helped provide the (...) contours of what is now becoming a robust and thriving area of study within academic philosophy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:"A Unity of Order":Aquinas on the End of PoliticsWilliam McCormick S.J.Nonspecialists are often surprised to learn that Aquinas's thought on Church and state is a matter of obscurity. After all, Aquinas is the most famous medieval thinker in the West, and the question of Church and state is one of the best-known medieval political questions. And yet his thought on that polemical topic remains obscure. As John Watt puts (...) it: "There are too many ambiguities in his doctrine and too many unanswerable questions about what he did or did not hold."1Why is his view not better understood? Part of its obscurity is the relative infrequency with which he writes on politics.2 Another is the relative lack of interest in medieval political thought among political scientists and historians of political thought, an obscurity dating back to the Renaissance.3 Those who do study Aquinas's thought, moreover, have been mired in a controversy over two key texts: one from book II of his Scriptum or commentary on Peter Lombard's Sentences (d. 44, q. 2, a. 3, exp. text.), and the other in book II of De regno (On kingship), chapter 3 (no. 110). For brevity, I will use S for the Scriptum passage and R for the De regno passage.4 These two [End Page 1019] appear to contradict each other, and with respect to fundamental political questions. The debate over these two texts points to what most contributes to the obscurity of Aquinas's teaching on Church and state: confusion about his vision of politics in human life. As I will show in this paper, Aquinas transcends modern categories of the "secular" and "belief" in his treatment of politics. Aquinas valorizes the integrity of political activity: that autonomy is not just a concession to the modern condition. It is in fact when Aquinas is most theological that he is most open to that integrity. The integrity of the political speaks to the intrinsic goodness of that order: it mirrors God's unity in its complex and ordered diversity.In this paper I examine R and S to show their concordance. I argue that they are complementary in what they prescribe for relations between Church and state, and indeed grounded in the same account of the origins of political authority. Through this investigation we will uncover key principles of Aquinas's political thinking that show him to have a capacious vision of politics where humans achieve the actualization of their full beings as human.A key notion will be unitas ordinis, or unity of order: the form of human cooperation in political life. As we will see, that form strikes a middle path between the simple unity of the individual person and the orderless collectivity of a crowd. For Aquinas, that order is itself a common good of politics, and an intrinsic one at that, before any "extrinsic" common good achieved by the people through that order. Part of why this seemingly secular consideration is good is its theological importance: it mirrors God.Further, if Aquinas does not elaborate on political arrangements as much as one would like, nevertheless he offers sure guidance for the principles which ought to guide the prudent development of those arrangements in a particular time and place. Ultimately Aquinas shows that medieval political thought is in key respects not as alien and hostile to us as we might imagine, but in its own way equally concerned about the integrity of the political life.5The Teaching of SAquinas's teaching on Church and state in S is widely accepted as his mature "two powers" teaching. Aquinas's most famous work, the Summa theologiae [ST], would eventually replace Lombard's Sentences, but in Thomas's own thirteenth century it was that compendium of quotations and arguments [End Page 1020] from Christian sources compiled by the twelfth-century theologian-bishop Lombard that was the standard theology textbook in the Latin West—the Ur-text for theological teaching and scholarship.6The Sentences is perhaps the most important Western book no one has heard of. It was so influential not only because it collected a rich trove of... (shrink)

When Dr. van Fleteren writes of the articles I criticized as dating from some twenty years ago, the unwary reader might infer that my criticism of those articles was, for its part, relatively recent. The fact is, however, that when the two connected articles I eventually criticized appeared in the volumes of Augustinian Studies, I wrote this reply while Fr. Robert Russell, of happy memory, was still at the helm, and was promised publication in the near future. Meanwhile, however, Fr. (...) Russell had the discourtesy to move on to a more intimate acquaintance with Augustine than any of us on this confused planet can boast of, and someone sowed cockle into field he had tended: in unaccountable fashion my article seems to have disappeared. Only a recent letter of inquiry on my part, and Fr. Allan Fitzgerald’s understanding reply, resulted in this renewal of dialogue between Dr. van Fleteren and me. Let me assure both Dr. van Fleteren and Fr. Fitzgerald that I am grateful for giving it exactly that form, a courteous dialogue. (shrink)

The advent of moral pluralism in the post-modern age leads to a set of issues about how pluralistic societies can function. The questions of biomedical ethics frequently highlight the larger issues of moral pluralism and social cooperation. Reflection on these issues has focused on the decision making roles of the health care professionals, the patient, and the patient's family. One species of actor that has been neglected has been those institutions which are part of the public, secular realm and which (...) have a particular moral heritage. Keywords: approval, compromise, condemnation, integrity, toleration CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Christianity and Secular Reason: Classical Themes and Modern Developments ed. by Jeffrey BloechlJoseph W. Koterski, S.J.Christianity and Secular Reason: Classical Themes and Modern Developments. Edited by Jeffrey Bloechl. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012. Pp. vii + 288. $40.00 (paper). ISBN: 978-0-268-02228-0.It does not bode well for a collection of essays when the introduction needs to make a concession like the one found here: “This (...) volume brings together a plurality of approaches to a loosely related set of questions, themes, and phenomena” (6). Yet, surely, truth in advertising is an uncommon virtue. The frank honesty of Jeffrey Bloechl, the editor of this volume, is much to be commended.What unifies the essays in this volume is not a common topic or a common approach but a common concern with the problem of understanding the relation between Christianity and secular reason. The issue in play is how much respect a religion that claims to be the recipient of divine revelation owes to autonomous reasoning in any particular age. The problem is exacerbated in those periods of history that are marked by strong claims for the powers of human reasoning.Bloechl’s introduction is particularly helpful due to its distinction between secular reason and secularized reason. Unless a believer takes the fideist position of holding that only claims grounded in faith are valid knowledge-claims, there is no reason to deny or cast skeptical aspersions on secular reason. The term simply names the use of reason according to its proper governing principles on any topic where the justifications for various truth-claims are drawn only from this-worldly experience and, for disciplinary reasons, make no use of divine revelation. It is the type of reasoning that is done within a saeculum, that is, within a given period of time, according to the canons of sound reasoning operative in that epoch. The term “secularized reason,” by contrast, names the view of reason that is hostile to the legitimacy of any knowledge-claim that involves the testimony of divine self-disclosure as its warrant. The proponents of secularized reason often conveniently overlook the likelihood that such hostility risks begging the question by disallowing any form of divinely backed testimony in principle, while allowing human testimony in such spheres as history or courts or law. If one is prepared in general to accept testimony as a justification for a truth-claim, then the proper criterion is the credibility of the source. But then there is no principled way to preclude in advance the possibility that testimony that originates with God might provide the strongest possible type of warrant for certain knowledge-claims. It is mere prejudice to decide in advance that this alternative is simply beyond the pale of consideration.Threaded through the essays in this volume is the perennial problem of the relationship of faith and reason. Earlier ages posed the problem on their own terms, sometimes quite different from modern assumptions. Readers unfamiliar with the thought of Thomas Aquinas, for instance, might well be [End Page 141] surprised to learn that the very first question of the Summa theologiae asks whether any sort of sacra doctrina is necessary beyond the philosophical sciences. Such a stance does not raise a question about whether faith can be a genuine source of knowledge, but merely asks if there is need for the sort of knowledge that is grounded in faith. Aquinas answers the question not only by reflecting on the difficulties that arise from expecting that everyone will have the necessary time, interest, and intellectual resources to figure out for themselves the things that they need to know for the sake of salvation; he also notes certain areas that are entirely beyond the scope of unaided reason, such as knowledge about the triune nature of God.By contrast, the proponents of secularized reason tend to cast doubt on the very possibility that any truth-claim based on religious faith could even be counted as knowledge. Brad Gregory’s recent book, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Harvard University Press, 2012) does a masterful job in tracing the unforeseen... (shrink)

These six lectures from the twentyfirst Thomas Spencer Jerome Lectures, an annual series exploring various dimensions of Roman life, provide an invaluable reflection on the relationship, Pelikan’s “counterpoint,” between Genesis and the Timaeus down through the ages. How did the only Platonic dialogue known in its entirety during the Middle Ages influence Judaeo-Christian cosmology? Pelikan chooses to answer this question by first discussing “Classical Rome: ‘Description of the Universe as Philosophy’” and Lucretius’ theological and literary contributions to the history of (...) cosmogonic speculation. In rejecting divine causality, Lucretius’ atomism made room for natural science and for a teleology without explicit reference to direct heavenly agency. Talk of the divine was thus interpreted apophatically and the poetry of de Rerum Natura allowed the truths of what remains for us a “likely story” to be conveyed without a historical or anthropomorphic literalness. Lucretius’ indebtedness to Epicurean materialism is obvious and as Pelikan stresses, “it was from Athens that classical Rome learned to think philosophically about cosmogony”. In “Athens: Geneseôs Archê as ‘The Principle of Becoming’,” Pelikan poses the fundamental questions: Why was the cosmos created? And according to what model had it been created? Plato’s answer is of course that the world of becoming is an image of an immutable and perfect model. This patterning is due to God as Goodness and his willing that all things act together for a purpose. Chapter 3 continues this inquiry with “Jerusalem: Genesis as a ‘Likely Account’ of One God Almighty Maker.” Here Pelikan focuses in on Jerusalem’s contribution of the imago Dei. While the Timaeus defines “the terms of the counterpoint,” Genesis sets “the outline and sequence” of creation, the crowning achievement of which is the rational and sovereign human person. Therefore, whereas Plato may have understood the entire universe to be in God’s image, Moses reserved this exalted position for humanity alone, a dignity Pelikan treats in his discussion of free moral choice. (shrink)

Echoing much of the neo-Thomistic revival of the twentieth century, Fides et Ratio §76 sketches the two main characteristics of a Christian philosophy: it is a type of thinking which simultaneously employs yet always seeks to purify reason and, secondly, it does not close itself off to the concerns and content of revelation. In this way, Pope John Paul II calls for a contemporary understanding of faith which is seen as a virtue freeing human reason from presumption, "the typical temptation (...) of the philosopher." In his latest, Bruno Niederbacher likewise calls for such learned docility in both the human soul as well as in the modern Academy. Divided into six main sections, this work concentrates on two main arguments. First, he shows why Thomas held that faith enables assent to what is and thus proves to be a necessary virtue for correct thinking and action and, secondly, what significance such a claim has for us today. (shrink)