The Doctrine of Double Effect (DDE) is an influential non-consequentialist principle positing a role for intention in affecting the moral permissibility of some actions. In particular, the DDE focuses on the intend/foresee distinction, the core claim being that it is sometimes permissible to bring about as a foreseen but unintended side-effect of one’s action some harm it would have been impermissible to aim at as a means or as an end, all else being equal. This article explores the meaning and (...) application of the DDE along with current debates over the nature of the intend/foresee distinction and its moral significance. How is the line between intended effects and merely foreseen but unintended side-effects to be drawn, and how are problem cases best handled? What is an appropriate methodology for debating the tenability of the DDE? How might the DDE interact with other non-consequentialist principles, and how might it be modified to capture other related factors (resulting perhaps in a Doctrine of Triple Effect) or to avoid certain problem cases? Does the DDE make permissibility turn on the actual intentions of particular agents, as critics such as Thomson and Scanlon assume, or is the role of intention more abstract? (shrink)

This project continues our interdisciplinary research into computational and cognitive aspects of narrative comprehension. Our ultimate goal is the development of a computational theory of how humans understand narrative texts. The theory will be informed by joint research from the viewpoints of linguistics, cognitive psychology, the study of language acquisition, literary theory, geography, philosophy, and artificial intelligence. The linguists, literary theorists, and geographers in our group are developing theories of narrative language and spatial understanding that are being tested by the (...) cognitive psychologists and language researchers in our group, and a computational model of a reader of narrative text is being developed by the AI researchers, based in part on these theories and results and in part on research on knowledge representation and reasoning. This proposal describes the knowledge-representation and natural-language-processing issues involved in the computational implementation of the theory; discusses a contrast between communicative and narrative uses of language and of the relation of the narrative text to the story world it describes; investigates linguistic, literary, and hermeneutic dimensions of our research; presents a computational investigation of subjective sentences and reference in narrative; studies children’s acquisition of the ability to take third-person perspective in their own storytelling; describes the psychological validation of various linguistic devices; and examines how readers develop an understanding of the geographical space of a story. This report is a longer version of a project description submitted to NSF. This document, produced in May 2007, is a L ATEX version of Technical Report 89-07 (Buffalo: SUNY Buffalo Department of Computer Science, August 1989), with slightly.. (shrink)

I argue that it was not Plato's intention in his Socratic dialogues to provide a biography of Socrates. Rather, his intention was to describe and defend the philosophical life against its critics. The Socratic dialogues are "unhappy encounters" between Socrates, defender of the life of philosophy, and those who do not comprehend or who reject that life.

This paper argues that we ought to conceive of the Dark Energy problem—the question of how to account for observational data, naturally interpreted as accelerated expansion of the universe—as a crisis of underdetermined pursuit-worthiness. Not only are the various approaches to the Dark Energy problem evidentially underdetermined; at present, no compelling reasons single out any of them as more likely to be true than the other. More vexingly for working scientists, none of the approaches stands out as uncontroversially preferable over (...) its rivals in terms of its rationally warranted promise, i.e. the reasons to further work on, explore, and develop it. We demonstrate this claim by applying a Peircean economic model of pursuit-worthiness in terms of a cognitive cost/benefit estimate—with the instantiation of theory virtues as key indicators of cognitive gains—to the four main Dark Energy proposals (the cosmological constant approach, modified gravity, quintessence, and inhomogeneous cosmologies). According to our analysis, these approaches do not admit of an unambiguous, or uncontroversial, ranking with respect to which ansatz deserves distinguished attention and research efforts. The overall methodological counsel that our analysis underwrites recommends a pragmatic double research strategy forward: to encourage and foster theory pluralism and the search for tests—with the goal of enhancing the testability of the \(\Lambda \) CDM model and “testing it to destruction". (shrink)

We believe that clinical ethics consultants (CECs) should offer advice, options, and recommendations to attending physicians and their teams. In their article in this issue of The Journal of Clinical Ethics, however, Kornfeld and Prager give CECs a somewhat different role. The CEC they describe may at times be more aptly understood as a medical interventionist who appropriates the roles of the attending physician and the medical team than as a traditional CEC. In these remarks, we distinguish the role of (...) the CEC from that of the physician, in contrast to some of these authors’ recommendations, which confuse the two roles. (shrink)

This book examines the effects of the market mechanism on economies and societies. It argues that perfect competition has a tendency to promote adulteration of products and a general deterioration in quality. It also contends that it is very difficult for competitive firms to behave in socially desirable ways - being kind to the environment, contributing to worthy social programmes, handling redundancy humanely. The book goes on to propose ways in which these flaws might be remedied without subverting the market (...) mechanism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:IntroductionWilliam J. ConnellOne of the more unusual works in the corpus of the Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla is the Oratio in principio sui studii, on the relation between Latin letters and the Christian faith. The speech was written and delivered in October 1455, toward the end of Valla’s life, as a lecture to inaugurate the academic year at the University of Rome where he had held the chair in (...) rhetoric since 1450. It was traditional at Rome to hold such an address each year not only to encourage the assembled students and faculty in their studies but also to thank the papacy for its support of the university, the Studium Urbis. For this reason Valla’s speech ends with customary words praising Pope Calixtus III for having increased the stipends of the lecturers in the university, even though, notwithstanding some remarkable kindnesses to Valla himself, Calixtus’s reputation was not that of a friend to scholarship. Valla’s Schoolyear Inaugural was not lengthy: it can only have lasted fifteen minutes. Nor is there indication that anyone was displeased with it. In fact, that is precisely what is oddest about the Inaugural, for throughout his career Valla had shown himself to be the sort of person who seized on such occasions to make polemical arguments. We read the speech—and it is possible that his audience also listened to it this way—expecting with each step that Valla will let fly a critical or unorthodox statement, but that never happens. 1Beginning with his earliest formal work, a comparison of Cicero and Quintilian written in 1428 and now lost, in which the humanist argued against Cicero on behalf of Quintilian, Valla seemed to delight in challenging established authorities. 2 His next important work, an attack on Bartolus of [End Page 1] Sassoferrato and the scholastic method of contemporary jurists, resulted in his forced departure from the University of Pavia. 3 A continuing combativeness is illustrated in subsequent writings, reaching an apogee in the work on the Donation. Even when Valla was developing another writer’s idea, he had a consistent way of pushing the argument to a daring extreme. This, as Riccardo Fubini argues below, is what Valla did in the De donatione, a work Fubini suggests relied more heavily on Nicholas of Cusa’s De concordantia catholica than hitherto realized, but written to promote an agenda far more radical than that of Cusanus. One of the surest indications of Valla’s brilliance as a polemicist is the fact that seventy years after his death humanists of the caliber of Agostino Steuco, the subject of Ronald K. Delph’s essay in this number, were still eager to take up cudgels against him.Valla paid a price for initiating so many disputes. In 1444, when he was called before the Inquisition in Naples after the attack on the Donation of Constantine, Valla was made to answer charges against not only that work, but also against the De vero bono for its Epicureanism, the De libero arbitrio for its determinism, the De professione religiosorum for its criticism of religious orders, and the Repastinatio totius dialectice et philosophie for various unorthodox statements, especially concerning the Trinity. This last work was the humanist’s most ambitious project, and he seems to have been aware of its explosive quality, since he alluded to a “peril to his life” should it be published. 4The 1455 Schoolyear Inaugural shows no trace of the risks that Valla took in his other writings, of his polemical temperament, or of his past disagreements with the Church. With style and vigor the speech argues that the Church deserves great thanks and praise for having ensured the survival [End Page 2] of Latin letters after the collapse of the Empire. This may seem a notable change of heart in the author who had written the oration On the Falsely Believed and Forged Donation of Constantin—a text which always seems to be lurking in the background of the Inaugural but which finds no explicit reference there. Given the proximity of Valla’s argument to the well-worn medieval theme of the translatio studii, his argument could hardly have been... (shrink)

The increasing role played by medical ethicists in the clinical setting both as teachers and consultants has brought with it a demand for new methodologies that speak more precisely to the multiple problems encountered in actual attempts at case resolution. Some of these moves have to do with a revival of the truly classic case study approach to ethics, casuistry. This approach is anchored in the revelatory text of Jonsen and Toulmin, TheAbuseofCasuistry. A fine example of this methodology is an (...) article in TheJournalofClinicalEthics, Conjoined to this approach is a renewed interest in virtue ethics. The groundwork for this was laid by MacIntyre's masterful history of its demise in AfterVirtue. A clear and concise application of this ancient but always new approach is given in Pellegrino and Thomasma's book TheVirtuesinMedicalPractice. This way of doing ethics is particularly congenial to the practice of healthcare ethics in that it understands that virtue is just a rather fancy name for a good habit or skill. Since the practice of clinical medicine is quintessentially the learning and application of a range of often highly complex patterns of professional abilities and skills, a virtue ethics approach will allow for the concomitant development of a whole set of ethical skills. But both casuistry and virtue ethics may well be seen to be operative in a larger context now known as narrative ethics. (shrink)

This functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging study investigated high and low suggestible people responding to two visual hallucination suggestions with and without a hypnotic induction. Participants in the study were asked to see color while looking at a grey image, and to see shades of grey while looking at a color image. High suggestible participants reported successful alterations in color perception in both tasks, both in and out of hypnosis, and showed a small benefit if hypnosis was induced. Low suggestible people (...) could not perform the tasks successfully with or without the hypnotic induction. The fMRI results supported the self report data, and changes in brain activity were found in a number of visual areas. The results indicate that a hypnotic induction, although having the potential to enhance the ability of high suggestible people, is not necessary for the effective alteration of color perception by suggestion. (shrink)

The claim that glycogen contains protein was first made exactly 100 years ago and has been the subject of contention ever since. It has now been established that rabbit‐muscle glycogen contains a covalently bound protein of Mr 37,000, present in equimolar proportion to glycogen. The protein, named glycogenin, is joined to muscle glycogen via a novel linkage involving the hydroxyl group of tyrosine, a fact of possible significance in the light of insulin's message being transmitted by tyrosine phosphorylation. The protein (...) is seen as the biogenetic precursor of glycogen. Its existence suggests an additional mode of regulation of glycogen metabolism since the amount, turnover and cellular location of glycogenin will influence the corresponding parameters for glycogen. A protein “primer” is suggested for the biogenesis of storage polysaccharides in general. (shrink)

The idea of role‐playing makes some people nervous – even some people who play role‐playing games (RPGs). So the idea of immersion is central to understanding how Dungeons Dragons and other aspects of participatory culture work. Phenomenology is a kind of “philosophy of mind” associated with the works of twentieth‐century philosophers Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean‐Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau‐Ponty, among others. The domain of phenomenology encompasses the entire range of experiences in the world, paying attention to what Husserl called (...) “intentionality,” or how our consciousness is directed toward particular objects in the world. The fact that this is presented as an atypical approach to play, or at least one that requires some effort, invites us to ask about typical modes of play if visualization of in‐game events is not that mode. This chapter concluded by scratch the surface of a complete phenomenological description of role‐playing. (shrink)

My interest is to examine the nature of mind in relation to value, for I suspect that the neglect by the psychologist of the true status of value has deterred his work in two respects: first, that it has prevented a genuine theory of mind's being arrived at, and secondly that it has prevented him in his clinical work from achieving for the individual the fuller expression of mind or self that makes for satisfaction or happiness.

A critical study of John Searle's Minds, Brains and Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).

The author uses a series of examples to illustrate two versions of a new, nonprobabilist principle of epistemic rationality, the special and general versions of the metacognitive, expected relative frequency principle. These are used to explain the rationality of revisions to an agent’s degrees of confidence in propositions based on evidence of the reliability or unreliability of the cognitive processes responsible for them—especially reductions in confidence assignments to propositions antecedently regarded as certain—including certainty-reductions to instances of the law of excluded (...) middle or the law of noncontradiction in logic or certainty-reductions to the certainties of probabilist epistemology. The author proposes special and general versions of the MERF principle and uses them to explain the examples, including the reasoning that would lead to thoroughgoing fallibilism—that is, to a state of being certain of nothing. The author responds to the main defenses of probabilism: Dutch Book arguments, Joyce’s potential accuracy defense, and the potential calibration defenses of Shimony and van Fraassen by showing that, even though they do not satisfy the probability axioms, degrees of belief that satisfy the MERF principle minimize expected inaccuracy in Joyce’s sense; they can be externally calibrated in Shimony and van Fraassen’s sense; and they can serve as a basis for rational betting, unlike probabilist degrees of belief, which, in many cases, human beings have no rational way of ascertaining. The author also uses the MERF principle to subsume the various epistemic akrasia principles in the literature. Finally, the author responds to Titelbaum’s argument that epistemic akrasia principles require that we be certain of some epistemological beliefs, if we are rational. (shrink)

This article offers proposed guidelines intended to protect the public interest in relationship to the advocated social responsibilities of successful entrepreneurs. The author argues that the most effective approach, then, is not preaching about obligations but, rather, establishing financial incentives for doing well by doing good. One example is the U.S. patent system. Another is a redesigned tax system that uses imposts to make socially damaging activities expensive, while reducing the financial burden on virtuous behavior.

A brief introduction to Meinong, his theory of objects, and modern interpretations of it. Sections include: The Theory of Objects, Castañeda's Theory of Guises, Parsons,'s Theory of Nonexistent Objects, Rapaport's Theory of Meinongian Objects, Routley's Theory of Items.

Is sociology inherently a mode of secular materialism? Or, are there intellectual resources deep within the sociological tradition, expansively conceived, that offer the sociological imagination a spiritual `post-secular' perspective on society and culture? This article draws out the subterranean theological stream of sociological consciousness and illuminates a `sacramentalist' socio-theology with particular reference to the `iconic vision' of Paul Evdokimov. In the context of late modernity, such a radical emphasis on the sacred foundations and transcendent potentialities of life provides the possibility (...) of a fundamental critique of commodified profane culture and of sociology itself. (shrink)

(1996). The contribution of communist states to the proscription of racist speech. The European Legacy: Vol. 1, Fourth International Conference of the International Society for the study of European Ideas, pp. 801-811.

I argue that George Nakhnikian's analysis of the logic of cogito propositions (roughly, Descartes's 'cogito' and 'sum') is incomplete. The incompleteness is rectified by showing that disjunctions of cogito propositions with contingent, non-cogito propositions satisfy conditions of incorrigibility, self-certifyingness, and pragmatic consistency; hence, they belong to the class of propositions with whose help a complete characterization of cogito propositions is made possible.

In this study, we explore the dimensions of local gender norms across U.S. commuting zones. Applying hierarchical cluster analysis with four established indicators of gender norms, we find that these local cultural environments are best conceptualized with a multilevel framework. Commuting zones can be differentiated between those that are egalitarian and those that are traditional. Within these general categories, however, exist more complex dimensions. Gender-traditional areas may be distinguished between traditional-breadwinning and traditional-essentialist, while egalitarian areas are separated into those that (...) are liberal-egalitarian and egalitarian-essentialist. Examining the factors sustaining this spatial variation, we test the role of compositional and contextual effects. We find limited support for compositional effects because commuting zone demographic makeup explains little variation in gender norm indicators. Instead, we find evidence that local gender norms are sustained through contextual effects where the experience of living in a particular environment shapes residents’ attitudes and behaviors. Contextual effects are exceptionally strong in areas with traditional gender norms, where residents who would otherwise hold gender-egalitarian perspectives have more traditional outlooks than those who share the same characteristics but reside in places with egalitarian gender norms. (shrink)

According to Scheck, Newfeld, and Dwyer (2000), there have been innumerable individuals wrongly convicted of a crime and sentenced to life imprisonment or to death based upon faulty evidence. The historical development of DNA evidence as a tool in the investigative process during the past 25 years is explained/analyzed, and the role of eyewitness evidence in the wrongful conviction of innocent individuals. This paper culminates in the Anthony Capozzi case study where eyewitness testimony wrongfully imprisoned a man before the advent (...) of DNA technology and which ultimately freed him years after the crime. The methodology used is the examination of journal articles, books, and newspaper articles on the phenomenon of wrongful convictions. (shrink)

Numerous labor-management issues possess ethical dimensions and pose ethical questions. In this article, the authors discuss four labor-management issues that present important contemporary problems: union organizing, labor-management negotiations, employee involvement programs, and union obligations of fair representation. In the authors view, labor and management too often view their ethical obligations as beginning and ending at the law''s boundaries. Contemporary business realities suggest that cooperative and enlightened modes of interaction between labor and management seem appropriate.

A significant number of inmates with mental illness reside within the New York State Department of Corrections (NYSDOCS). New York State has taken the initiative to provide mentally ill inmates with necessary services through a collaboration of the New York State Department of Correctional Services and the New York State Office of Mental Health (NYSOMH). The collaboration results in a mental health delivery system that provides many essential services to mentally ill inmates. This paper focuses on the organization of mental (...) health services within NYSDOCS, best practices, past and current litigation, and staff responsibilities. As the population of mentally ill inmates continues to grow, implications for the Human Services professions of OMH and DOCS needs to continue to address and provide adequate mental health care and resources for this special population. (shrink)

Increasingly, medical students are required to face up to ethical issues in their training and practice. At the same time, there is growing interest in philosophy courses in the ethical issues raised by medical practice. This textbook, designed primarily for students of medicine, develops the issues to a philosophical level complex enough to be satisfying to students of philosophy as well as MA students on applied ethics courses. The author advocates an approach to medical ethics which breaks out of the (...) straitjacket of the narrow choice between utilitarian or deontological theory, and contains a valuable discussion of practical wisdom. It maintains a balance between case studies and philosophical arguments - which are developed in a historical context, and will be of interest at all levels of the medical profession. (shrink)