The increasing pressure from different facets of society exerted on multinational companies to become more philanthropic and claim ownership of their impacts is now becoming a standard practice. Although research in corporate social responsibility has arguably been recent, the application of activities taking a voluntary form from MNCs seem to vary reflecting a plethora of factors, particularly one obvious being the backwater local communities of developing countries where most of the natural extraction projects are located. This chapter examines views of (...) two Papua New Guinea local communities hosting large-scale mining operations and explains the demands arising from situational relativities, which are becoming too conspicuous for mine developers not to ignore. The research undertaken with several assertions highlights the perceived imperativeness allowing companies to integrate the CSR into the essential management pursuits of running mines in PNG. (shrink)

The increasing pressure from different facets of society exerted on multinational companies (MNCs) to become more philanthropic and claim ownership of their impacts is now becoming a standard practice. Although research in corporate social responsibility (CSR) has arguably been recent (see subsequent section), the application of activities taking a voluntary form from MNCs seem to vary reflecting a plethora of factors, particularly one obvious being the backwater local communities of developing countries where most of the natural extraction projects are located. (...) This chapter examines views of two Papua New Guinea (PNG) local communities hosting large-scale mining operations and explains the demands arising from situational relativities, which are becoming too conspicuous for mine developers not to ignore. The research undertaken with several assertions highlights the perceived imperativeness allowing companies to integrate the CSR into the essential management pursuits of running mines in PNG. (shrink)

After voicing a need for soul care that meets the rigors of early parenthood, this article looks to The Rule of Saint Benedict for three life-giving principles: togetherness, ordinariness, and prayer. Togetherness means not only the meta-vision of “doing” family in a larger community; it means transparency and willingness to ask for help. We learn ordinariness from Benedict through the vow of stability, which demands that our inner lives open and connect to the present moment, and also through (...) the way Benedict honors menial tasks and vessels. The Opus Dei that the Rule weaves through all work can, for a parent, take the form of an organic Opus Dei, woven around the routines of childcare, as well as the great small-prayer practices of the church, like aspirations, Celtic prayers, the florilegia, and hesychastic prayer. These principles help early parenthood become an integral phase in our own formation and ability to care for another. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Benedict XVI, A Life: Volume 1, Youth in Nazi Germany to the Second Vatican Council 1927–1965 by Peter SeewaldEmil AntonBenedict XVI, A Life: Volume 1, Youth in Nazi Germany to the Second Vatican Council 1927–1965 by Peter Seewald, translated by Dinah Livingstone (London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2020), xi + 500 pp.What better way to spend Pope Benedict XVI's ninety-fourth birthday than by reviewing a Ratzinger biography while (...) having Apfelstrudel and some traditional Bavarian beer?German journalist and author Peter Seewald, who in his many interviews has asked Joseph Ratzinger / Pope Benedict XVI a total of two thousand or more questions (ix), has written a splendid biography that surprises even someone who has already read dozens of books by and about Benedict XVI. Written in an extremely enjoyable style and divided into chapters of just the perfect length, this page-turner deserves the highest praise. It will likely take its place alongside George Weigel's famous (and equally massive) biography of Pope John Paul II, Witness to Hope.The German biography has been divided into two volumes in English (vol. 2 was just published in November of 2021). Volume 1 deals with the years 1927–1965, dominated by two historic "Twos": World War II and Vatican II. Theologically, this is the period of the progressive Ratzinger (regardless of whether he "converted" to a more conservative stance later on), or as Seewald puts it, a man formed by "liberal Bavarian Catholicism" (124).Seewald provides lots of new and interesting information about Joseph Ratzinger, both bitter and sweet. One example from the early chapters concerns the origins of Ratzinger's mother. It turns out that she was an illegitimate child and not actually from South Tyrol, contrary to what her children had thought. A local historian has discovered that Ratzinger's mother Maria was actually born in Mühlbach "in the district of Rosenheim,... in a house that specialized in helping unmarried pregnant women to give birth" (15).For the romantic, the sweetest story of the book comes when Seewald [End Page 963] pushes the reserved Pope Emeritus to reveal more about the "painful decisions" that the young Munich seminarian had to make in relation to his vocation as a celibate priest. "'Were you in love with a girl?' 'Perhaps.' 'So, yes?' 'It could be interpreted like that.' 'How long did this passionate time last? A few weeks? A few months?' 'Longer'" (219). Ratzinger was in love! Or at least it could be interpreted like that! Other heart-warming details include the revelation that Ratzinger's childhood teddy from Marktl followed him all the way to the Apostolic Palace, as well as the fact that, when his blind brother Georg (now deceased) needed a housekeeper, Benedict XVI personally organized the job interview in the Vatican gardens.A darker episode, minimized in Ratzinger's autobiographical memoirs, concerns his role in the radar crew of the German anti-aircraft forces in World War II. The future Pope was entrusted with the task of targeting British bombers. Seewald fills in the narrative: "Ratzinger delivered readings for three guns,.... The more precisely Joseph measured, the higher the hit rate. As the war demanded" (101). Years later, Ratzinger confessed that these experiences still occasionally gave him sweaty nightmares.Seewald goes on to describe the exceptional postwar context in which Ratzinger prepared for the priesthood. The future priests knew that they would soon have to hear confessions of ex-Nazis who had shot people in the war (153). Indeed, after the war, many old Nazis turned to the Church and attempted to get de-Nazification certificates. Ratzinger's parish priest even joked that one day "they will say the only Nazis were the priests" (131).As did everyone, Ratzinger also felt the effects of poverty in postwar Germany. Whenever a festive dinner had to be given for a visitor at the seminary, "we went hungry on the most meagre rations for four long weeks in order to gather the ingredients" (189). After a short period of pastoral ministry subsequent to his ordination, the stellar theologian went back to the seminary as a teacher. Barely twenty-five-years-old, he was younger... (shrink)

"Characterized by breadth of coverage, a refreshingly balanced approach to controversial issues, & a highly readable style."-Theological Studies.

In a 1617 letter, the Bolognese artist, Ludovico Carraci described the young painter, Guercino, as a “miracle who stupefies those who see his works.”1 Interestingly then, those who view Guercino’s altarpiece “St. Francis in Ecstasy with St. Benedict,”2 will perhaps find their own stupefication to be a dynamic echo of the mystical transformation of the pictured saints themselves, an echo repeated in various tropes of transformation that engage notions of angelic presence, musical response, the lives of St. Francis (...) and St. Benedict, and the actions of the altar graced by the painting itself.Guercino’s altarpiece depicts an angel violinist at the apex of a triangle with the two.. (shrink)

The Discovery of Evolution explains what the theory of evolution is all about by providing a historical narrative of discovery. Some of the major puzzles that confront anyone studying living things are discussed and it details how these were solved from an evolutionary perspective. Beginning with the emergence of the early naturalists in the seventeenth century, the scientific discoveries that led up to and then flowed from Darwin and Wallace's theory of evolution by natural selection are then discussed, and finally (...) the modern evolutionary studies at the close of the twentieth century are detailed. This new edition of The Discovery of Evolution is fully updated and contains a new chapter on the evolutionary studies of the twentieth century. By approaching the topic of evolution in this way, it is made accessible to the non-specialist and no previous study of biology is required in order to read and understand this book. (shrink)

We are immersed within an odorous sea of chemical currents that we parse into individual odors with complex structures. Odors have been posited as determined by the structural relation between the molecules that compose the chemical compounds and their interactions with the receptor site. But, naturally occurring smells are parsed from gaseous odor plumes. To give a comprehensive account of the nature of odors the chemosciences must account for these large distributed entities as well. We offer a focused review of (...) what is known about the perception of odor plumes for olfactory navigation and tracking, which we then connect to what is known about the role odorants play as properties of the plume in determining odor identity with respect to odor quality. We end by motivating our central claim that more research needs to be conducted on the role that odorants play within the odor plume in determining odor identity. (shrink)

Contending that concern over the ethical dimensions of these and other like issues are no longer just in the domain of those involved in medical practice, the ...

Short overview of the From Small Beginnings Project and its relevance for resisting eugenics in contemporary society.

Offers an analysis of three strongly contrasting primitive civilizations, showing how behavior is influenced by custom and tradition.

Western Self-Contempt travels through civilizations since antiquity, examining major political events and the literature of ancient Greece, Rome, France, Britain, and the United States, to study evidence of cultural self-hatred and its cyclical recurrence. Benedict Beckeld explores oikophobia, described by its coiner Sir Roger Scruton as "the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture and institutions that are identifiably 'ours,'" in its political and philosophical applications. Beckeld analyzes the theories behind oikophobia along with their historical sources, revealing why oikophobia (...) is best described as a cultural malaise that befalls civilizations during their declining days. Beckeld gives a framework for why today's society is so fragmented and self-critical. He demonstrates that oikophobia is the antithesis of xenophobia. By this definition, the riots and civil unrest in the summer of 2020 were an expression of oikophobia. Excessive political correctness that attacks tradition and history is an expression of oikophobia. Beckeld argues that if we are to understand these behaviors and attitudes, we must understand oikophobia as a sociohistorical phenomenon. Western Self-Contempt is a systematic analysis of oikophobia, combining political philosophy and history to examine how Western civilizations and cultures evolve from naïve and self-promoting beginnings to states of self-loathing and decline. Concluding with a philosophical portrait of an increasingly interconnected Western civilization, Beckeld reveals how past events and ideologies, both in the US and in Europe, have led to a modern culture of self-questioning and self-rejection. (shrink)

This article asks about the conditions of a sociological operationalization of the capability approach developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. Raising the question of freedom and social opportunities, the capability approach has so far mainly been discussed by economists and philosophers. In order to adopt this approach for a sociological and pragmatist perspective, it engages with methodological and theoretical issues. Whereas capabilities have until now mainly been studied within quantitative frameworks, the author opts for a qualitative method of inquiry (...) that draws on a pragmatist and configurational approach. Such a shift towards qualitative inquiry is a key condition for a better sociological understanding of notions like freedom and opportunities that stand at the core of the capability approach. (shrink)

Reverse mathematics is a program in mathematical logic that seeks to give precise answers to the question of which axioms are necessary in order to prove theorems of "ordinary mathematics": roughly speaking, those concerning structures that are either themselves countable, or which can be represented by countable "codes". This includes many fundamental theorems of real, complex, and functional analysis, countable algebra, countable infinitary combinatorics, descriptive set theory, and mathematical logic. This entry aims to give the reader a broad introduction to (...) the history, methodology, and results of the reverse mathematics program, with a particular focus on its connections to foundational programs such as finitism, constructivism, and predicativism. (shrink)

In the debates on the roles of cultures in the ethics of human rights, one of them concerns Confucianism and Ubuntu, two prominent cultures in East Asia and Southern Africa, respectively. Some scholars assert that both cultures have values that are sharply different from the West, and conclude that the West should learn from these cultures. The aim of this paper is to philosophically investigate the roles of cultures in the ethics of human rights. I first introduce the works of (...) Bell, Metz and others on community values such as relationships and harmony in Confucianism and Ubuntu. I then argue that even if their interpretations were correct, their works still would not justify the conclusion they want. I show that it is better to use consequential evaluation rather than cultural evaluation to justify human rights. An example of human rights to health and privacy is discussed. This paper thus offers some preliminary but important philosophical investigations and addresses practical issues of consequential evaluation related to human rights. Keywords : Confucianism, Ubuntu, Cultural Evaluation, Consequential Evaluation, Human Rights, Health, Privacy. (shrink)

Knowledge of what it’s like to have perceptual experiences, e.g. of what it’s like to see red or taste Turkish coffee, is phenomenal knowledge; and it is knowledge the substantial or significant nature of which is widely assumed to pose a challenge for physicalism. Call this the New Challenge to physicalism. The goal of this paper is to take a closer look at the New Challenge. I show, first, that it is surprisingly difficult to spell out clearly and neutrally what (...) the New Challenge is in fact urging the physicalist to explain. What initially look like plausible or promising ways of making sense of it turn out to be either question begging or insufficient to generate a challenge to physicalism at all. I go on to suggest that what the New Challenge may be asking the physicalist to explain may be the fact that we come to token certain higher-order judgments about the significance of phenomenal knowledge. I end with a discussion of the implications of this interpretation of the New Challenge—which turns out to be as much a challenge for the anti-physicalist as it is for the physicalist. (shrink)

Among the characteristic features of depression is a diminishment in or lack of action and motivation. In this paper, I consider a dominant philosophical account which purports to explain this lack of action or motivation. This approach comes in different versions but a common theme is, I argue, an over reliance on psychologistic assumptions about action–explanation and the nature of motivation. As a corrective I consider an alternative view that gives a prominent place to the body in motivation. Central to (...) the experience of depression are changes to how a person is motivated to act and, also as central, are changes to bodily feelings and capacities. I argue that broadly characterizing motivation in terms of bodily capacities can, in particular, provide a more compelling account of depressive motivational pathology. (shrink)

This book, the first comprehensive study in English of Heidegger's philosophy of art, starts in the mid-1930s with Heidegger's discussion of the Greek temple and his Hegelian declaration that a great artwork gathers together an entire culture in affirmative celebration of its foundational 'truth', and that, by this criterion, art in modernity is 'dead'. His subsequent work on Hölderlin, whom he later identified as the decisive influence on his mature philosophy, led him into a passionate engagement with the art of (...) Rilke, Ce;zanne, Klee and Zen Buddhism, liberating him not only from the overly restrictive conception of art of the mid-1930s but also from the disastrous politics of the period. Drawing on material hitherto unknown in the anglophone world, Young establishes a new account of Heidegger's philosophy of art and shows that his famous essay 'The Origin of the Work of Art' is its beginning, not its end. (shrink)

Loin de se cantonner à une aide exceptionnelle et d’urgence, l’aide alimentaire est devenue le moyen de se nourrir pour des milliers de personnes. Dans cet article, l’autrice ne s’intéresse pas seulement à la question de l’aide, mais à celle plus globale du système alimentaire, de la production à la distribution. Partie du don inconditionnel avec les Restos du Cœur, l’aide alimentaire s’est profondément éloignée de l’esprit Coluche empreint de partage et d’humanisme, pour aller vers une organisation à but économique (...) qui conduit à des violences alimentaires. Les bénéficiaires sont en effet assignés à une nourriture qu’ils n’ont pas choisie et qui heurte souvent leurs pratiques ou leur culture. Il s’agit pour les agro-industriels et distributeurs de faire des profits, spéculer sur le prix des denrées de base, recycler les produits invendables en « ramasses », profiter des subventions en denrées du Fonds social européen. Face à cette situation catastrophique, l’autrice jette les bases d’une Sécurité sociale alimentaire, universelle et répondant au droit à l’alimentation. (shrink)

It is a striking fact from reverse mathematics that almost all theorems of countable and countably representable mathematics are equivalent to just five subsystems of second order arithmetic. The standard view is that the significance of these equivalences lies in the set existence principles that are necessary and sufficient to prove those theorems. In this article I analyse the role of set existence principles in reverse mathematics, and argue that they are best understood as closure conditions on the powerset of (...) the natural numbers. (shrink)

This article concerns the nature and limits of individuals’ rights to privacy over information that they have made public. For some, even suggesting that an individual can have a right to privacy over such information may seem paradoxical. First, one has no right to privacy over information that was never private to begin with. Second, insofar as one makes once-private information public – whether intentionally or unintentionally – one waives one’s right to privacy to that information. In this article, however, (...) we suggest the moral situation is more complicated than this. Rather, we argue that there is a class of public information – namely, once-private information that individuals have made public unintentionally – which remains within the scope of an individuals’ right to privacy, even when it has passed into the public domain. Significantly, this class includes any information rights-holders were unaware could be inferred from information they have made public and which they would not otherwise have wanted to be in the public domain. As we show, as well as clarifying several everyday dilemmas with regards to individuals’ privacy rights, this finding has elucidates a number of problems in the ethics of Big Data. (shrink)

Balfe argues against enhanced interrogation. He particularly focuses on the involvement of U.S. healthcare professionals in enhanced interrogation. He identifies several empirical and normative factors and argues that they are not good reasons to morally justify enhanced interrogation. I argue that his argument can be improved by making two points. First, Balfe considers the reasoning of those healthcare professionals as utilitarian. However, careful consideration of their ideas reveals that their reasoning is consequential rather than utilitarian evaluation. Second, torture is a (...) serious human rights abuse. When healthcare professionals become involved in enhanced interrogation, they violate not only human rights against torture but also human rights to health. Considering the consequential reasoning against human rights abuses, healthcare professionals’ involvement in enhanced interrogation is not morally justified. Supplementing Balfe’s position with these two points makes his argument more complete and convincing, and hence it can contribute to the way which shows that enhanced interrogation is not justified by consequential evaluation. (shrink)

Health systems that provide for universal patient access through a scheme of prepayments—whether through taxes, social insurance, or a combination of the two—need to make decisions on the scope of coverage that they secure. Such decisions are inherently controversial, implying, as they do, that some patients will receive less than comprehensive health care, or less than complete protection from the financial consequences of ill-heath, even when there is a clinically effective therapy to which they might have access.Controversial decisions of this (...) sort call for a public justification for covering or not covering a given treatment. Priority-setting agencies play a key role in providing such a justification. A recent... (shrink)

Abstract In recent debates, both physicalist and anti-physicalist philosophers of mind have come to agree that understanding the nature of phenomenal concepts is key to understanding the nature of phenomenal consciousness itself. Recently, however, Derek Ball (2009) and Michael Tye (2009) have argued that there are no such concepts. Their case is especially troubling because they make use of a type of argument that proponents of phenomenal concepts have typically found persuasive in other contexts; namely, arguments much like those that (...) Tyler Burge used to motivate a certain form of externalism about mental content. The goal of this paper is to defend phenomenal concepts against this line of attack. Burge-style arguments, I contend, cannot be successfully used to make the case that there are no phenomenal concepts. As such, phenomenal concepts must remain central to understanding the nature of phenomenal consciousness. (shrink)

In philosophical debates on human rights between the East and the West, scholars argue whether rights in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and other international documents (in short, “international human rights”) are universal or culturally relative. Some scholars who emphasize the importance of East Asian cultures (such as the Confucian tradition) have different attitudes toward civil and political rights (CP rights) than toward economic, social, and cultural rights (ESC Rights). They argue that at least some international human rights (...) on the list of CP rights are not universal and believe that East Asian cultures can contribute to the moral justification of ESC rights. This chapter introduces a philosophical argument to support a normative account of human rights. This normative account, called “the minimal account of human rights,” is based on the ideas of minimal values, especially essential necessities of dignity. Based on this account, we can explain why international human rights are both universal and justified by East Asian cultures, especially the Confucian tradition. To explain this minimal account and illustrate how it can be applied to debates on international human rights, this chapter focuses on debates on the international human rights to liberty on the list of CP rights and the human rights to health on the list of ESC rights. (shrink)

ABSTRACTEvaluative conditioning is a change in the liking of a stimulus due to its previous pairings with another stimulus. In three...

The study tests the hypothesis that conditional probability judgments can be influenced by causal links between the target event and the evidence even when the statistical relations among variables are held constant. Three experiments varied the causal structure relating three variables and found that (a) the target event was perceived as more probable when it was linked to evidence by a causal chain than when both variables shared a common cause; (b) predictive chains in which evidence is a cause of (...) the hypothesis gave rise to higher judgments than diagnostic chains in which evidence is an effect of the hypothesis; and (c) direct chains gave rise to higher judgments than indirect chains. A Bayesian learning model was applied to our data but failed to explain them. An explanation-based hypothesis stating that statistical information will affect judgments only to the extent that it changes beliefs about causal structure is consistent with the results. (shrink)

Can we formulate a moral theory that captures the moral significance of patterns of group behaviour we cannot affect through our own action while at the same time avoiding the so-called ‘Ideal Worlds’ objection? In a recent article, Caleb Perl has argued that we can. Specifically, Perl claims that one view that does so is his Patterned View: roughly, you ought to act only in accordance with that set of sufficiently general rules that has optimal moral value (Perl 2021: 98). (...) The Patterned View undoubtedly constitutes a welcome contribution to our existing set of moral theories. However, does it avoid the Ideal Worlds objection? In this article, I argue ‘no’. (shrink)

For the role of utilitarianism in the ethics of war and peace, Shaw suggests there is a Utilitarian War Principle (UWP) and argues that the principles of the just war theory should be treated as intermediate principles that are subordinated to UWP. He also argues that the state should be the primary legitimate authority to wage war and holder of the right of national defense. I argue that the utilitarian approach should be specifically linked with contingent pacifism, a new understanding (...) of pacifism from within the just war tradition, and the utilitarian contingent pacifism only endorses individual self-defense but not national defense. This finding is not only theoretically important but has practical implications for the debate on Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution. Utilitarian contingent pacifism supports the idealist position that Article 9 is morally significant because it makes Japan a pioneer of the new kind of pacifism. (shrink)

This paper explores the ways in which music educators have allowed others outside of music education to name who and how they are in the world. Often comfortable with voicing advocacy and purpose from the status of second class citizen, music educators are complicit in the very processes of reproduction they wish to challenge. Seeking to address what could be a privileged positioning of marginalized status, this paper also speaks to the spaces that are created that could afford possibilities of (...) transformation. Thus, rather than to allow the perceived netherworld of marginalized status to name who we are and can be, we can name our own reality as we challenge the ways in which our own thoughts, beliefs, and actions are acquired and reproduced. (shrink)

Wood, Kressel, Joshi, and Louie report that published, but not unpublished, studies of masculinity, dominance, symmetry, and health preferences show significant overall effects of cycle phase. They interpret this as evidence that reports of cyclic shifts in mate preferences are artifacts of publication bias. I will first discuss why these conclusions do not necessarily follow straightforwardly from their results. I will then discuss their findings for health preferences specifically, concluding that their dismissal of a significant overall effect of cycle phase (...) is unreasonable. (shrink)