The prospect of using genome technologies to modify the human germline has raised profound moral disagreement but also emphasizes the need for wide-ranging discussion and a well-informed policy response. The Hinxton Group brought together scientists, ethicists, policymakers, and journal editors for an international, interdisciplinary meeting on this subject. This consensus statement formulated by the group calls for support of genome editing research and the development of a scientific roadmap for safety and efficacy; recognizes the ethical challenges involved in clinical reproductive (...) applications of genome editing but, importantly, rejects the idea that human reproductive germline modification is necessarily morally unacceptable; and highlights the importance of meaningful engagement in discussions of genome editing and the development of regulation and oversight mechanisms to govern future uses of such technologies. (shrink)

The convergence of India’s rich cultural and religious heritage with its rapidly transforming economy provides a unique opportunity to understand how senior executives navigate the demands of the business environment within the context of their religious convictions. Forty senior executives with varying religious backgrounds and global responsibilities within Indian multinational corporations participated in this study. Drawing from virtue ethics theory and using systematic content analysis, several themes emerged for ethical virtues. The analysis illustrates how these deeply seated ethical virtues helped (...) to form and refine these executives’ ethical mindsets via guiding principles such as an ethical culture, environment, molding, education, commitment and leadership. In turn, these ethical mindsets influenced the executives’ ethical decision-making processes. We find that these executives’ ethical virtues and mindsets are inspired by their religious backgrounds. In summary, a very complex mental tug-of-war appears to take place as these executives rationalize and negotiate unethical circumstances while being cognizant of personal religious beliefs. We contend that in a pluralistic multi-faith society such as India, it is critical for corporations to align the virtues of its senior executives with those of the corporation so that virtues are applied consistently when dealing with various stakeholders. The findings present several theoretical and practical implications, which are discussed. (shrink)

Drawing from normal accident theory, high reliability theory, and systems theory, we analyze the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People that is promulgated by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in response to the sexual abuses of minors by clergy members. Although the Charter is a step in the right direction, there remain some areas that require immediate attention. In spite of the goodwill processes, the safety of minors must remain the concerted efforts and responsibilities of (...) individuals at all the various levels if the Catholic Church is to prevent further cases of abuse from happening. (shrink)

Business ethics and leadership play an increasingly important role for contemporary organizations as employers and employees search for new ways to cope with ongoing changes in organizational environments. Research attention to date has focused upon how to improve process and structural configurations, while there has been scant attention devoted to an examination of the ethical and leadership perspective. This article breaks new ground by exploring the applicability of the Rule of St. Benedict (RSB) to modern employment relationships. A significant proportion (...) of the RSB is directly relevant for today's leaders, as it contains crucial lessons dealing with leadership issues such as ethics, cultivating a consultative climate, encouraging the virtues of humility, obedience ("servant" leadership), justice, discretion, prudence, discernment, and personnel-related issues such as discipline and termination. (shrink)

All parties involved in researching, developing, manufacturing, and distributing COVID-19 vaccines need guidance on their ethical obligations. We focus on pharmaceutical companies' obligations because their capacities to research, develop, manufacture, and distribute vaccines make them uniquely placed for stemming the pandemic. We argue that an ethical approach to COVID-19 vaccine production and distribution should satisfy four uncontroversial principles: optimising vaccine production, including development, testing, and manufacturing; fair distribution; sustainability; and accountability. All parties' obligations should be coordinated and mutually consistent. For (...) instance, companies should not be obligated to provide host countries with additional booster shots at the expense of fulfilling bilateral contracts with countries in which there are surges. Finally, any satisfactory approach should include mechanisms for assurance that all parties are honouring their obligations. This assurance enables countries, pharmaceutical companies, global organisations, and others to verify compliance with the chosen approach and protect ethically compliant stakeholders from being unfairly exploited by unethical behaviour of others. (shrink)

COVID-19 vaccines are likely to be scarce for years to come. Many countries, from India to the U.K., have demonstrated vaccine nationalism. What are the ethical limits to this vaccine nationalism? Neither extreme nationalism nor extreme cosmopolitanism is ethically justifiable. Instead, we propose the fair priority for residents framework, in which governments can retain COVID-19 vaccine doses for their residents only to the extent that they are needed to maintain a noncrisis level of mortality while they are implementing reasonable public (...) health interventions. Practically, a noncrisis level of mortality is that experienced during a bad influenza season, which society considers an acceptable background risk. Governments take action to limit mortality from influenza, but there is no emergency that includes severe lockdowns. This “flu-risk standard” is a nonarbitrary and generally accepted heuristic. Mortality above the flu-risk standard justifies greater governmental interventions, including retaining vaccines for a country's own citizens over global need. The precise level of vaccination needed to meet the flu-risk standard will depend upon empirical factors related to the pandemic. This links the ethical principles to the scientific data emerging from the emergency. Thus, the FPR framework recognizes that governments should prioritize procuring vaccines for their country when doing so is necessary to reduce mortality to noncrisis flu-like levels. But after that, a government is obligated to do its part to share vaccines to reduce risks of mortality for people in other countries. We consider and reject objections to the FPR framework based on a country: having developed a vaccine, raising taxes to pay for vaccine research and purchase, wanting to eliminate economic and social burdens, and being ineffective in combating COVID-19 through public health interventions. (shrink)

Russellian physicalism is a promising answer to the mind–body problem which attempts to satisfy the motivating epistemic and metaphysical concerns of non-physicalists with regards to consciousness, while also maintaining a physicalist commitment to the non-existence of fundamental mentality. Chan (_Philosophical Studies, 178_:2043–62, 2021) has recently described a challenge to Russellian physicalism he deems the ‘difference-maker problem’, which is a Russellian-physicalism-specific version of the more well-known ‘combination problem’ for Russellian monism generally. The problem is to determine how a relatively small (...) set of fundamental categorical property types can ground the large variety of phenomenal properties that exist. To answer this problem, a Russellian physicalist can say that there is strong emergence from fundamental categorical properties to phenomenal properties, or she can say that there is only weak emergence from fundamental categorical properties to phenomenal properties. Chan argues that neither of these routes are viable for Russellian physicalism. This paper constitutes a response to Chan, arguing that Russellian physicalists can embrace either weak or strong emergence to explain phenomenal variety. (shrink)

In Just This Is It: Dongshan and the Practice of Suchness, Taigen Dan Leighton has written a rich introduction to the teachings of Dongshan Liangjie, one of the Chinese founders of the Caodong branch of Chan/Zen Buddhism. Drawing on his expertise as both a scholar and a Zen teacher, Leighton analyzes Dongshan's Recorded Sayings, especially its encounter dialogues, the teaching poem "Jewel Mirror Samādhi," and the doctrine of the five degrees, while also taking up anecdotes about Dongshan that appear (...) in koan collections. Given the historical fog surrounding classical Chan figures and their texts, Leighton's focus is "not the literal historical personage of Dongshan, but... (shrink)

"The book defends the thesis that the concept of self-cultivation philosophy is an informative interpretive framework for comprehending and reflecting on several philosophical outlooks in India, the Greco-Roman world and China. On the basis of an understanding of human nature and the place of human beings in the world, self-cultivation philosophies maintain that our lives can and should be substantially transformed from what is judged to be a problematic, untutored condition of human beings, our existential starting-point, into what is put (...) forward as an ideal state of being. We are to do this by undertaking a set of therapeutic or spiritual exercises guided by some philosophical analysis. The self-cultivation philosophies in India are expressed in: the Bhagavad Gītā; the Sāṃkhya and Yoga philosophies of Īśvarakṛṣṇa and Patañjali; and teaching of the Buddha and his followers Buddhaghosa and Śāntideva. The philosophies originating in Greece, with subsequent development in the Roman period, are the most prominent Hellenistic approaches: the Epicureanism of Epicurus, Lucretius and Philodemus; the Stoicism of Chrysippus, Epictetus and Seneca; and Pyrrho and the Pyrrhonism of Sextus Empiricus. The self-cultivation philosophies from China are the early Confucian outlooks of Confucius, Mencius and Xunzi; the classical Daoist perspectives of the Daodejing and the Zhuangzi; and the Chan tradition of Bodhidharma, Huineng and Linji"--. (shrink)

Heritable genome editing is officially here. ‘Lulu’ and ‘Nana’, born in China, are the first children whose genomes have been intentionally modified. A third gene edited baby may have already been born. Scientists in Russia are planning similar applications.1 We recently argued that HGE should be judged by the same ethical standards that we apply to other technologies.2 There is a moral imperative to improve the health of future generations, to reduce inequalities and improve standards of living. If we can (...) use HGE to achieve these aims, we should. We want to thank Sarah Chan, Peter Mills, Rachel Horton and Anneke Lucassen for their thoughtful criticisms of our paper. We would also like to thank the editors of the Journal of Medical Ethics for helping facilitate this detailed discussion. The moral questions posed by HGE, are complex, multifaceted and difficult. They required focused attention, which formats like this encourage. Our responses to each of the commentaries are detailed below We agree with the following points made in Horton and Lucassen’s paper ‘ The moral argument for heritable genome editing requires an inappropriately deterministic view of genetics ’.3 These are some of the reasons why we say HGE targeting polygenic diseases is likely decades away.2 The technical challenges seem daunting. But science can move quickly, and often does so in bounds. Our capacity to capture and analyse genetic data is rapidly expanding. Over the next 5 years, genomic …. (shrink)

Could Christians and Muslims be referring to the same God? For an account of the reference of divine names, I follow Bogardus and Urban (2017) in advocating in favour of using Gareth Evans’s causal theory of reference, on which a name refers to the dominant source of information in the name’s “dossier”. However, I argue further that information about experiences, in which God is simply the object of acquaintance, can dominate the dossier. Thus, this demonstrative use of names offers a (...) promising alternative avenue by which users of the divine names can refer to the same referent despite having different conceptions of God. I also respond to Burling’s (2019) worship-worthiness view. (shrink)

The first thorough study in English of the multi-faceted system of Mou Zongsan, this book examines key influences on the New Confucian thinker and introduces his Kantian- and Mahāyāna Fo-inflected moral metaphysical reading of the Lu-Wang Learning of the Mind.

Neste artigo, interrogamos os funcionamentos do conceito de platô em "Mil Platôs" (1980), a obra-prima de Deleuze e Guattari. Essa pesquisa esclarece, de forma concreta, duas linhas de pensamento, que são a epistemológica, por um lado, e a ética, por outro, enfocando os parágrafos nos quais Deleuze e Guattari usam efetivamente esse conceito. Do ponto de vista epistemológico, o conceito de platô permite praticar uma maneira de escrita rizomática e a explicação antiteleológica. Do ponto de vista ético, esse conceito, tirado (...) de Gregory Bateson, nos convida a formar a alegria contínua e global, ou a gaieté em termos espinosistas. In this paper, we question the workings of the concept of plateau in "A Thousand Plateaus" (1980), Deleuze and Guattari's chef-d'oeuvre. This research specifically clarifies two lines of thought, which are epistemological on the one hand, and ethics on the other hand, focusing on the paragraphs where Deleuze and Guattari actually employ this concept. From the epistemological point of view, the concept of plateau allows practicing a way of rhizomatic writing and anti-teleological explanation. From the point of view of ethics, this concept borrowed from Gregory Bateson invites us to form the continuous and global joy, or gaiety in Spinoza's terms. (shrink)

In an age where issues like climate change and the unintended consequences of technological innovation are high on the ethical and political agenda, questions about the nature and extent of our responsibilities to future generations have never been more important, yet simultaneously so difficult to answer. This book takes a unique approach to the problem by drawing on diverse traditions of thinking about care (including developmental psychology, phenomenology and feminist ethics) to explore the nature and meaning of our relationship with (...) the future. Demonstrating that many influential perspectives on intergenerational ethics, including positions advanced by John Rawls, Brian Barry, and Ulrich Beck are undermined by problems relating to uncertainty, it shows that an approach based on care ethics can confront the uncertain future successfully and give a viable account of the nature and scope of future-oriented responsibilities. (shrink)

The Realm of Reason develops a new, general theory of what it is for a thinker to be entitled to form a given belief. The theory locates entitlement in the nexus of relations between truth, content, and understanding. Peacocke formulates three principles of rationalism that articulate this conception. The principles imply that all entitlement has a component that is justificationally independent of experience. The resulting position is thus a form of rationalism, generalized to all kinds of content.To show how these (...) principles are realized in specific domains, Peacocke applies the theory in detail to several classical problems of philosophy, including the nature of perceptual entitlement, induction, and the status of moral thought. These discussions involve an elaboration of the structure of entitlement in ways that have applications in many other areas of philosophy. He also relates the theory to classical and recent rationalist thought, and to current issues in the theory of meaning, reference and explanation. In the course of these discussions, he proposes a general theory of the a priori.The focus of the work lies in the intersection of epistemology, metaphysics, and the theory of meaning, and will be of interest both to students and researchers in these areas, and to anyone concerned with the idea of rationality. (shrink)

Large data-intensive health research programmes benefit from collaboration amongst researchers who may be located in different institutions and international contexts. However, complexities in navigating privacy frameworks and data protection laws across various jurisdictions pose significant challenges to researchers seeking to share or transfer data outside of institutional boundaries. Research on the awareness of data protection and privacy laws amongst stakeholders is limited. Our qualitative study, drawn from a larger project in Singapore, revealed insights into stakeholders’ perceptions of the role of (...) law in cross-national health data research. Stakeholders in our study demonstrated a range of perceptions regarding the role of data protection law in governing the collection and transfer of health data for research. The main criticisms included inadequate legal protection to data and lack of uniformed data protection standards. Despite these criticisms, participants recognised the importance of data protection law in supporting cross-border data transfers and proposed measures to improve perceived limitations of existing laws. These measures include strengthening existing legal framework, establishing contractual agreements and imposing severe punishments for data misuse. (shrink)

This book is available either individually, or as part of the specially-priced Arguments of the Philosphers Collection.

Suppose we believe that God created the world. Then surely we want it to be the case that he intended, in some sense at least, to create THIS world. Moreover, most theists want to hold that God didn't just guess or hope that the world would take one course or another; rather, he KNEW precisely what was going to take place in the world he planned to create. In particular, of each person P, God knew that P was to exist. (...) Call this the "standard" conception. Most theists find the standard conception appealing. Unfortunately, the view seems to conflict with the equally appealing idea — call it "temporal actualism" — that there are no "future" individuals beyond those that already exist in the present moment. For, on this view, for any historical person P, prior to creation, there was no such person as P and hence nothing about P for God to know. Hence, in particular, God couldn't have known that P was to exist. This is of course not a new problem. But past solutions to it are highly problematic. In this paper, after canvassing previous approaches, I will propose a solution that seems to preserve both temporal actualism and a suitably robust form of the standard conception while avoiding the pitfalls of the past. (shrink)

In February 54b.c. Cicero concludes a missive to his brother with a passing and – for us – tantalizing remark:Lucreti poemata ut scribis ita sunt, multis luminibus ingeni, multae tamen artis. sed cum veneris. virum te putabo si Sallusti Empedoclea legeris; hominem non putabo. Quintus had, it seems, readDe rerum natura, or at least parts thereof, just before he left Rome for an undisclosed location nearby, and he shared his enthusiasm with his brotherper codicillos. Meanwhile, he was corresponding with Julius (...) Caesar, whose staff in Gaul he was about to join. When, a few months later, he was stationed with Caesar, he was involved in another literary affair, this time concerning his brother who wrote to him, inquiring about his autobiographicalDe temporibus suis:quo modo nam, mi frater, de nostris versibus Caesar? nam primum librum se legisse scripsit ad me ante, et prima sic ut neget se ne Graeca quidem meliora legisse; reliqua ad quendam locum ῥᾳθυμότερα (hoc enim utitur verbo). dic mihi verum: num aut res eum aut χαρακτὴρ non delectat?(Q.fr.2.15.5). (shrink)

The Humility Thesis is a persistent thesis in contemporary metaphysics. It is known by a variety of names, including, but not limited to, Humility, Intrinsic Humility, Kantian Humility, Kantian Physicalism, Intrinsic Ignorance, Categorical Ignorance, Irremediable Ignorance, and Noumenalism. According to the thesis, we human beings, and any knowers that share our general ways of knowing, are irremediably ignorant of a certain class of properties that are intrinsic to material entities … Continue reading Humility Regarding Intrinsic Properties →.

Aristotle attaches particular significance to the homonymy of many central concepts in philosophy and science: that is, to the diversity of ways of being common to a single general concept. His preoccupation with homonymy influences his approach to almost every subject that he considers, and it clearly structures the philosophical methodology that he employs both when criticizing others and when advancing his own positive theories. Where there is homonymy there is multiplicity: Aristotle aims to find the order within this multiplicity, (...) and believes that doing so is crucial to scientific inquiry and philosophical progress.Christopher Shields investigates and evaluates Aristotle's approach to questions about homonymy, characterizing the metaphysical and semantic commitments necessary to establish the homonymy of a given concept. Then, in a series of case-studies, Shields examines in detail some of Aristotle's principal applications of homonymy--to the body, sameness and oneness, life, goodness, and being. Shields's aim is not only to give a fuller understanding of Aristotle's methodology and to illuminate his specific doctrines in a variety of areas, but to show that this methodology remains fruitful today. (shrink)

Expressives like damn and bastard have, when uttered, an immediate and powerful impact on the context. They are performative, often destructively so. They are revealing of the perspective from which the utterance is made, and they can have a dramatic impact on how current and future utterances are perceived. This, despite the fact that speakers are invariably hard-pressed to articulate what they mean. I develop a general theory of these volatile, indispensable meanings. The theory is built around a class of (...) expressive indices. These determine the expressive setting of the context of interpretation. Expressives morphemes act on that context, actively changing its expressive setting. The theory is multidimensional in the sense that descriptives and expressives are fundamentally different but receive a unified logical treatment. (shrink)

The essays in this volume illuminate a central topic in ethical theory: moral dilemmas. Some contemporary philosophers dispute the traditional view that a true moral dilemma -- a situation in which a person has two irreconcilable moral duties -- cannot exist. This collection provides the historical background to the ongoing debate with selections from Kant, Mill, Bradley, and Ross. The best recent work on the question is represented in essays by Donagan, Foot, Hare, Marcus, Nagel, van Fraassen, Williams, and others.

The norms surrounding pejorative language, such as racial slurs and swear words, are deeply prohibitive. Pejoratives are typically a means for speakers to express their derogatory attitudes. As these attitudes vary along many dimensions and magnitudes, they initially appear to be resistant to a truth-conditional, semantic analysis. The goal of the paper is to clarify the essential linguistic phenomena surrounding pejoratives, survey the logical space of explanatory theories, evaluate each with respect to the phenomena and provide a preliminary assessment of (...) the initial resistance to a truth-conditional analysis. (shrink)

Moral error theories are often rejected by appeal to ‘companions in guilt’ arguments. The most popular form of companions in guilt argument takes epistemic reasons for belief as a ‘companion’ and proceeds by analogy. I show that this strategy fails. I claim that the companions in guilt theorist must understand epistemic reasons as evidential support relations if her argument is to be dialectically effective. I then present a dilemma. Either epistemic reasons are evidential support relations or they are not. If (...) they are not, then the companions in guilt argument fails. If they are, then a reduction of epistemic reasons to evidential support relations becomes available and, consequently, epistemic reasons cease to be a viable ‘companion’ for moral reasons. I recommend this structure of argument over existing strategies within the literature and defend my claims against recent objections from companions in guilt theorists. (shrink)

No existing normative decision theory adequately handles risk. Expected Utility Theory is overly restrictive in prohibiting a range of reasonable preferences. And theories designed to accommodate such preferences (for example, Buchak's (2013) Risk‐Weighted Expected Utility Theory) violate the Betweenness axiom, which requires that you are indifferent to randomizing over two options between which you are already indifferent. Betweenness has been overlooked by philosophers, and we argue that it is a compelling normative constraint. Furthermore, neither Expected nor Risk‐Weighted Expected Utility Theory (...) allow for stakes‐sensitive risk‐attitudes—they require that risk matters in the same way whether you are gambling for loose change or millions of dollars. We provide a novel normative interpretation of Weighted‐Linear Utility Theory that solves all of these problems. (shrink)

Fallacies and Argument Appraisal presents an introduction to the nature, identification, and causes of fallacious reasoning, along with key questions for evaluation. Drawing from the latest work on fallacies as well as some of the standard ideas that have remained relevant since Aristotle, Christopher Tindale investigates central cases of major fallacies in order to understand what has gone wrong and how this has occurred. Dispensing with the approach that simply assigns labels and brief descriptions of fallacies, Tindale provides fuller (...) treatments that recognize the dialectical and rhetorical contexts in which fallacies arise. This volume analyzes major fallacies through accessible, everyday examples. Critical questions are developed for each fallacy to help the student identify them and provide considered evaluations. (shrink)

Discusses Derrida's writings on Plato, Kant, Hegel, Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Freud.

Two groups of scientists have just announced what is being described as a leap forward in human stem cell research.1–3 Both have found ways of producing what are being called “induced pluripotent cells” , stem cells that they hope will demonstrate the same key properties of regeneration and unrestricted differentiation that human embryonic stem cells possess, but which are derived from skin cells not from embryos. In simple terms, these scientists have succeeded in reprogramming skin cells to behave like hESCs.Stem (...) cell research has been hailed as one of the most important and exciting areas of science, because it is believed that these types of cells will not only play an important part in regenerative medicine, but also yield valuable scientific information. These latest developments in cell reprogramming represent a milestone for stem cell science. No longer does the paradigm of irreversible cell specialisation hold true; instead, almost any type of cell might have the potential to become any other.The advent of techniques for producing these iPCs has also been hailed as an ethical breakthrough. Up until now, the production of hESCs has required a process which involves the destruction of embryos. Many of these embryos are available as by-products of IVF; but in addition, the process of somatic cell nuclear transfer to produce cloned embryonic stem cells requires a supply of human oocytes, which must currently be harvested from female donors at no insignificant cost. In a nutshell, iPCs seem to enable us to produce “embryo-free” human pluripotent stem cells, and in a “gender-neutral” way—that is, without the need for human oocytes.The response from the scientific community, ethical commentators and the public has, however, reflected an inherent confusion over the ethical significance of this research. The anti-embryo …. (shrink)

In this paper, we describe four broad ‘meta-methods’ employed in scientific and philosophical research of qualia. These are the theory-centred metamethod, the property-centred meta-method, the argument-centred meta-method, and the event-centred meta-method. Broadly speaking, the theory-centred meta-method is interested in the role of qualia as some theoretical entities picked out by our folk psychological theories; the property-centred meta-method is interested in some metaphysical properties of qualia that we immediately observe through introspection ; the argument-centred meta-method is interested in the role of (...) qualia in some arguments for non-physicalism; the event-centred metamethod is interested in the role of qualia as some natural events whose nature is hidden and must be uncovered empirically. We will argue that the event-centred metamethod is the most promising route to a comprehensive scientific conception of qualia because of the flexibility of ontological and methodological assumptions it can provide. We also reveal the hidden influences of the different meta-methods and in doing so show why consideration of meta-methods has value for the study of consciousness. (shrink)