This essay argues that culpability and responsibility are independent notions, even though some of the same facts make us both responsible and culpable. Responsibility for one’s conduct is grounded in the strength of the agential connection between oneself and one’s conduct. Culpability for one’s conduct is the vices that give rise to that conduct. It then argues that responsibility and culpability for causing a threat are each grounds of liability to defensive harm independent of the other.

The wedge hierarchy was originally defined and studied only in the Baire space (and some other zero-dimensional spaces). Here we extend the Wadge hierarchy of Borel sets to arbitrary topological spaces by providing a set-theoretic definition of all its levels. We show that our extension behaves well in second countable spaces and especially in quasi-Polish spaces. In particular, all levels are preserved by continuous open surjections between second countable spaces which implies e.g. several Hausdorff-Kuratowski-type theorems in quasi-Polish spaces. In fact, (...) many results hold not only for the Wadge hierarchy of sets but also for its extension to Borel functions from a space to a countable better quasiorder Q. (shrink)

I am extremely grateful to Daniel Farrell, Hamish Stewart, Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen and Suzanne Uniacke for their careful, imaginative and probing responses to The Ends of Harm: The Moral Foundations of Criminal Law in this special issue of Criminal Law and Philosophy. It is especially gratifying that philosophers of this calibre, not all of whom have worked directly on the philosophy of punishment and the philosophy of criminal law, have engaged with Ends in this way.One of my ambitions in writing Ends (...) was to connect the philosophy of punishment more directly with a set of broader issues in normative ethics than is common in the philosophy of punishment. I hoped this would encourage others to see the justification of punishment as a small part of a more general normative theory of permissible harm. This special issue has further confirmed to me that this way of developing the philosophy of punishment is fruitful.I will not attempt to respond to all of the arguments i .. (shrink)

Central to Watts and Newson’s argument in their seminal paper ‘ Is there a duty to routinely reinterpret genomic variant classifications? ’ is that diagnostic laboratories are not morally obligated to actively reinterpret variants of uncertain significance (VUS) due to the superior outcomes offered by next-generation sequencing (NGS) compared with traditional methods.1 NGS technologies can identify, analyse and interpret millions of genetic variations at once. For example, ‘the use of conventional molecular assays in clinical contexts could require doing a lot (...) of assays for various mutations. Using these different assays, more tissue may be required. These targets can accurately be questioned using NGS technology in a single test.’2 If NGS-based genomic sequencing is reliable and its output outweighs the potential harm of uncertainties, then, it is plausible to say that those test providers cannot incur a moral duty to actively reinterpret VUS because there won’t be any need to do so.1 Despite its seeming reliability, diagnostic laboratories face enormous challenges in implementing NGS-based …. (shrink)

Horace, Satires 1.3.117–23, as transmitted: adsitregula, peccatis quae poenas inroget aequas,ne scutica dignum horribili sectere flagello.nam ut ferula caedas meritum maiora subire 120uerbera non uereor, cum dicas esse paris resfurta latrociniis et magnis parua minerisfalce recisurum simili te, si tibi regnumpermittant homines.Let there be a rule to impose fair penalties for transgressions, lest you pursue with terrible scourge one deserving but the stick. You see, I don't fear that you will strike with a schoolmaster's rod one who has earned more (...) serious lashing when you say mere thefts are of a pair with brigandage and threaten to trim little things and great with like sickle, would the world but grant you power. Horace is attacking the Stoics for their doctrine that all sins are equal. The overall run of sense must be that given above. If kept, the ut of line 120 must then have the value of ne: were it allowed its normal meaning in expressions of fear the opposite of what is required would be said. The oddity of the construction was long excused as a sort of anacoluthon, provoked by the postponement of uereor. Such defences of the received text were rightly criticised by Palmer and Housman: ‘incredible’, they both concluded, and indeed it is incredible that Horace could have in such a short space forgotten what he had written, and forgotten it in such a way as to say the opposite of what he meant. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Nietzsche-Studien Jahrgang: 46 Heft: 1 Seiten: 297-307.

Business Ethics for Future Leaders presents students with contemporary readings in the discipline that highlight the changing dynamics of ethics in today's business world and challenge readers to transcend the traditional leadership mindset. In Section I, students read articles that address how ethical behavior can contribute to organizational success, why individuals view ethical behavior differently, and how leaders can incorporate ethical principles into their decision making. Section II focuses on ethical challenges in the multigenerational workplace. In Sections III and IV, (...) students learn about the ideal mindset for ethical leaders and ethical challenges related to cyber security and the internet. Additional sections discuss the ethics of business decision making, sustainable environmental management, and ethical climate and safety performance. The final section speaks to ethical public affairs, issues, and crisis management. Featuring highly accessible readings, Business Ethics for Future Leaders is an ideal supplemental textbook for courses in business and leadership. (shrink)

Scanlonian contractualism rejects the consequentialist assumptions about morality, value, and rationality in virtue of which deontological constraints appear paradoxical. And yet, Jeffrey Brand-Ballard and Robert Shaver have claimed that it cannot succeed in defending the said restrictions. That is because they see Scanlon’s tie-breaking argument as threatening to justify aggregation in paradox of deontology cases. I argue that this claim rests upon a failure to appreciate contractualism’s relational character. Once we take this feature of the view into account, it becomes (...) clear that the tie-breaking argument is ruled out in cases where the only way for us to prevent several killings would be to commit one ourselves. To show this, I provide a contractualist explanation of why our duty not to harm persons is stricter than our duty to help them when they are threatened with harm. I conclude by distinguishing two ways in which this defense of deontological restrictions might bring contractualism objectionably close to absolutism. (shrink)

This second volume completes the biography of the influential philosopher, following Whitehead's move first from Trinity College, Cambridge to London, and then, at the age of 63, to America, where the focus of his work shifted from mathematics to philosophy. Lowe (philosophy emeritus, Johns Hopkins U.) died in 1988 with this biography not quite completed. Vol.2 was edited and seen through publication by J.B. Schneewind, chairman of the Philosophy Department at Johns Hopkins. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

Long after its alleged demise, phlogiston was still presented, discussed and defended by leading chemists. Even some of the leading proponents of the new chemistry admitted its ‘absolute existence’. We demonstrate that what was defended under the title ‘phlogiston’ was no longer a particular hypothesis about combustion and respiration. Rather, it was a set of ontological and epistemological assumptions and the empirical practices associated with them. Lavoisier's gravimetric reduction, in the eyes of the phlogistians, annihilated the autonomy of chemistry together (...) with its peculiar concepts of chemical substance and quality, chemical process and chemical affinity. The defence of phlogiston was the defence of a distinctly chemical conception of matter and its appearances, a conception which reflected the chemist's acquaintance with details and particularities of substances, properties and processes and his skills of adducing causal relations from the interplay between their complexity and uniformity. (shrink)

This paper analyses the structure of evolutionary theory as a quasi-Newtonian theory and the need to establish a Zero-Cause Law. Several authors have postulated that the special character of drift is because it is the default behaviour or Zero-Cause Law of evolutionary systems, where change and not stasis is the normal state of them. For these authors, drift would be a Zero-Cause Law, the default behaviour and therefore a constituent assumption impossible to change without changing the system. I defend that (...) drift's causal and explanatory power prevents it from being considered as a Zero-Cause Law. Instead, I propose that the default behaviour of evolutionary systems is what I call the Principle of Stasis, which posits that an evolutionary system where there is no selection, drift, mutation, migration, etc., and therefore no difference-maker, will not undergo any change (it will remain in stasis). (shrink)

Monica A. Coleman achieves remarkable rigor in bringing together in one volume her long-standing interests in process philosophy and theology, womanist theology and ethics, African diaspora studies, West African religions, and African American women’s literature. Making a way out of No Way (2008) is a tour de force in contemporary African American constructive theology and especially in womanist discourse on the religious experience(s) of African American women. Coleman insists on understanding black women’s religious experience through the lens of their complex (...) subjectivity, which is irreducible to singularity or totality. As typically found in academic womanist theology, Coleman does not begin her theology with .. (shrink)

In this comparative study the author accounts for the interpretative bases of 2 Corinthians 13:5. The process of the study follows the following structure: A. Approaching the genesis of the work; B. Diachronic and synchronic reading of the text; C. Pragmatic reading and philosophical applications; D..

Despite extensive research and a multitude of computer systems, there is no viable computerized system that is even remotely capable of approaching the skill of an expert human physician. Minor obstacles in the design of a practical system include imprecise medical terminology, the use of nonindependent clinical parameters, incorrect or inaccurate information supplied to the computer, and static representation of a patient's medical history. Major problems that go beyond computer manipulation of data include the requirement for a massive data base, (...) representation of medical knowledge in general rather than specific terms, and physician fallibility in the design of a computer system. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to show that the dichotomy between factual and eidetic represents one of the fundamental presuppositions of the Husserlian phenomenology. No authentic understanding of the phenomenological reduction and of its constitutive role for the transcendental phenomenology is possible without a proper understanding of this dichotomy and of its relevance for the transcendental problem. One of the questions I am going to discuss in this paper is the following: Could it be possible that both the dichotomy (...) between fact and essence and that between empirical and eidetic sciences is actually at work in Husserl’s Ideen I as a phenomenologically uninvestigated presupposition of his undertaking? The other matter I am going to address in this paper is the concept of originary givenness and the legitimacy of the knowledge based on it (which is presupposed by the “principle of all principles” which Husserl formulates in Ideen I). I will argue that this concept is a revolutionary idea not only from a philosophical standpoint, but also from a more general scientific one, because it offers a new criteria of knowledge, that of the originary donating intuition. (shrink)

This book examines leadership strategies that allow administrators to be proactive, visionary, and flexible while increasing collaboration, open communication, and closely integrating theory and practice to ensure successful administration in higher education settings.