The integration of psychedelic substances into modern Western therapeutic practice has sparked a critical examination of many topics including: efficacy of psychedelics to treat mental health diagnoses without psychotherapeutic intervention, what models of therapy to use, and ethical implications related to altered states of consciousness. Of utmost concern are issues of power dynamics leading to incidents of sexual abuse. These issues underscore the importance of understanding therapeutic dynamics within the context of psychedelic-assisted therapy. This paper aims to explore these intersections, (...) addressing sexual abuse issues in Western psychedelic-assisted therapy while elucidating pathways towards ethical practice and regulatory frameworks. (shrink)

How can different religions be compared? Which religions are true? To raise such questions univocally of all religions there first needs to be some objective grounds of comparison. Neville's book develops and empirically tests a speculative hypothesis that provides these grounds. This hypothesis has two parts--the ontological and cosmological. Neville maps out these parts along with his primary concept of divinity explicated in terms of creation ex nihilo. He then uses his hypothesis to compare the multiple-layered concept of divinity--masks of (...) God--found in various religions, especially the Christian and Chinese. (shrink)

What are the relations, if any, between philosophy and literary style? Lang asserts "that the 'literariness' of philosophical writing is not accidental or ornamental but unavoidable--imbedded in that discourse and so also in its substantive questions and proposed solutions". Lang attempts to clarify and support his thesis in discussions of philosophy as literature and philosophy of literature.

Martine argues that "the relation between the determinate and indeterminate dimensions of our experiences precludes any attempt to restrict our conceptions of intelligibility to the determinately biased models that we have used in the past". Consider the world we experience in our daily lives. We come into contact with all sorts of things. What these things are and what we know of them is determined as much by what they are not as by what they are. This suggests there are (...) boundaries to be drawn, but not eternal, unchanging, absolutely clear and distinct boundaries, between what is determinate and what is not. Yet our Western bias is for the absolutely clear, the certain. Such clarity, however, is found only in our maps of reality which, divorced from the phenomenal world, we confuse with that world. (shrink)

The many comments on good and evil found in the writings of A. N. Whitehead are exhibited in his mind against the two categories of positive and negative value. His concern in value-considerations is with the “trinity” of truth, beauty and goodness on the one hand, and with falsehood, ugliness and evil on the other. For him, “value” is a word employed for “the intrinsic reality of an event” and very frequently in his treatment of the value-theme he uses the (...) term “importance” as having equivalence to “value.”. (shrink)

"In this study, James R. Harrison compares the modern cult of celebrity to the quest for glory in late republican and early imperial society. He shows how Paul's ethic of humility, based upon the crucified Christ, stands out in a world obsessed with mutual comparison, boasting, and self-sufficiency." --.

Reports of ethical lapses in the business world have been numerous and widespread. Ethical awareness in business education has received a great deal of attention because of the number and severity of business scandals. Given Sarbanes-Oxley legislation and recent Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business International’s (AACSBI) recommendations, this study examined respective websites of Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regulated public companies and AACSBI-accredited business schools for ethical policy statement content. The analysis was accomplished by classifying ethical expressions into (...) a framework consisting of the attributes of thematic content and focus/themes partially based on the 2004 research of Gaumnitz and Lere. Findings indicate that public companies have been diligent in presenting website ethical content that closely follows authoritative recommendations. Business schools appear not to have prioritized such disclosure to the extent done so by public companies. Although there was improvement between two samples taken in 2005 and 2007, this study provides evidence that many accredited business schools have little or no disclosed ethical expectations in their mission, vision, goals, or other similar types of statements on their websites. Additional findings provide several opportunities for future research. (shrink)

In clinical research, decision-making capacity is often equated with unspecified conceptions of autonomy, and autonomy is often equated with personhood. On this view, the loss of decision-making capacity is seen as a loss of autonomy, and the loss of autonomy subsumes a loss of personhood. An ethical concern arises at the intersection of those philosophical considerations with the legal considerations in informed consent. Because persons with inadequate decision-making capacity cannot provide legally effective consent, enrollment in research can occur only if (...) a surrogate gives permission on the person’s behalf. Federal regulations and resulting institutional policies allow permission from surrogates empowered under state law to consent to medical treatment procedures, typically in a hierarchy of legislatively prioritized relationships lacking regard for what the surrogate actually knows about the current research-related values and preferences of the potential subject. As a result, the research enterprise often countenances reliance on surrogates who have no relational or informational basis for an enrollment decision that aligns with the values and preferences of the subject. Arguing from the perspective that losing decision-making capacity does not alter the moral status of persons, and that respect for persons rather than respect for autonomy is the central ethical obligation, I assess the ethical implications of allowing persons with no knowledge of the values and preferences of the potential subject to make enrollment decisions, concluding that reliance on uninformed surrogates is not an ethically defensible approach to enrolling subjects in clinical research. (shrink)

A correlational pilot study (N = 143) and an integrative data analysis of two experiments (total N = 377) provide evidence linking anger to the psychology of social hierarchy. The experiments demonstrate that the experience of anger increases the psychological accessibility of implicit cognitions related to social hierarchy: compared to participants in a control condition, participants in an anger-priming condition completed word stems with significantly more hierarchy-related words. We found little support for sex differences in the effect of anger on (...) implicit hierarchy-related cognition; effects were equivalent across male and female participants. Findings fit with functionalist evolutionary views of anger suggesting that anger may motivate the use of dominance to strive for high social rank in group hierarchies. Implications for downstream behaviour, including aggression and negotiation, are discussed. (shrink)

In this essay I wish to raise the question of whether it is meaningful to say that a certain sort of robot is in pain. This is, of course, not an empirical question. There exists no robot of the sort I shall describe. But, I shall argue, if such a robot did in fact exist, it would be meaningful to say it is in pain.

Individuals typically resist changing their minds, but support for same-sex marriage increased from 35% to 61% between 2006-2016. What explains this anomaly?