Is the societal-level of analysis sufficient today to understand the values of those in the global workforce? Or are individual-level analyses more appropriate for assessing the influence of values on ethical behaviors across country workforces? Using multi-level analyses for a 48-society sample, we test the utility of both the societal-level and individual-level dimensions of collectivism and individualism values for predicting ethical behaviors of business professionals. Our values-based behavioral analysis indicates that values at the individual-level make a more significant contribution to (...) explaining variance in ethical behaviors than do values at the societal-level. Implicitly, our findings question the soundness of using societal-level values measures. Implications for international business research are discussed. (shrink)

The papers gathered in this volume offer precise investigations of the historical and philosophical grounds for the first medieval commentaries on the ...

This book is the result of a conference that addressed two pressing issues for christianity in the modern world.

War After September 11 considers the just aims and legitimate limits of the United States' response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

An idiolect, if there is such a thing, is a language that can be characterised exhaustively in terms of intrinsic properties of some single person at a time, a person whose idiolect it is at that time. The force of ‘intrinsic’ is that the characterisation ought not to turn on features of the person's wider linguistic community. Some think that this notion of an idiolect is unstable, and instead use ‘idiolect’ to describe a person's incomplete or erroneous grasp of their (...) language, where this latter is inherently social. Several important debates have featured discussion of individualistic, personal, or private languages. Some are considered in other entries (see the entries on the language of thought hypothesis, private language, and reference). This entry will concentrate on two influential and broadly idiolectal positions in the philosophy of language and linguistics: Noam Chomsky's preference for I-languages over E-languages (Section 2), and Donald Davidson's rejection of languages conceived as shared conventional structures that make communication possible (Section 3). David Lewis's claim that languages are a convention is a common target for both, and is outlined in an Appendix. The entry begins (Section 1) with some general remarks about the ontology of languages. Contents: 1. Idiolects and Language Individuation; 2. Chomsky on E-languages and I-languages; 2.1 The Origins of Chomsky's Distinction: Competence vs. Performance; 2.2 The Distinction Elaborated; 2.3 Why I-languages? Why Not E-languages?; 2.4 Criticisms of Chomsky's Preference for I-languages Over E-languages; 3. Davidson's Claim That There Are No Such Things As Languages; 3.1 What Davidson Aims to Show; 3.2 The Argument From Malaprops and Related Phenomena; 3.3 Reaction to Davidson's Argument; Bibliography; Other Internet Resources; Related Entries. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Prudence: Classical Virtue, Postmodern PracticeDavid DepewPrudence: Classical Virtue, Postmodern Practice. Ed. Robert Hariman. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003. Pp. xi + 337. $65.00, cloth."This volume," writes the editor, "is one contribution to the contemporary revival of interest in the concept of prudence" (ix). What interest? Notably, that of latter-day "virtue ethicists," whose discontents with the algorithmic decision-making procedures of modernism have given wings to a hope (...) that we (considered as members of some sort of imagined polis) will return to the context-sensitive "practical wisdom" of the ancients. (Prudentia is Cicero's Latin translation of the Greek phronesis, practical wisdom.)In theory, this line of reasoning was supposed to break the mold of contemporary politics. In practice, it has been captured by the political right. Virtue ethicists and civic republicans like Benjamin Barber have been outflanked by "virtuecrats" such as Bill Bennett (he of the gambling habit), the pompous columnist George Will, and Amitai Etzioni, the neo-corporatist founder of the Communitarian Party. It should be said right away, then, that few, if any, of the contributors to this collection are sympathetic to this sort of thinking. Admittedly, they share with virtuecrats a critique of rule-governed forms of decision-making, whether deontological or utilitarian, especially when these procedures masquerade as ways of "operationalizing" morality. Such calculi are indeed creatures of the institutional cultures of business firms and bureaucracies, which have increasingly affected law and politics. In addition, the authors of this volume are no less inclined than right-leaning virtuecrats to rake through intellectual history in order to come up with something relevant to the present and future. "There is a looking backward in order to see more clearly a mentality that is overlooked and undervalued in the present" (20). But they do so with a view to seeing what will come up when management of the topic of prudence is taken away from philosophers and reconnected (as it was from antiquity [End Page 167] until the nineteenth century) with the art of rhetoric, considered as an array of teachable discursive practices that are helpful in identifying and commending appropriate responses to contingent circumstances. The most salient features of the volume follow: a shift of the center of gravity from Aristotle to Cicero (ix), and a consideration of how, through rhetorical performances that involve the construction of a visible, embodied self, that strangest of creatures, a post-modern prudence, might be brought forth.I am pleased to report that changes of meaning in the collection's key term are discernible as we move from Cicero's prudentia to Machiavelli's prudenzia, and from the prudence that Edmund Burke invoked to justify American independence against his government's blind, imprudent rule-following to the quite different, and indeed incompatible, prudence that the Americans actually ended up with by the Jacksonian period, which is explored here by James Jasinski and Christine Oravec. Still, greater attention to the first great fracture in the concept, as phronesis moved across the Adriatic and became prudentia, would have made it clearer that, if there is to be a post-modern prudence, whether on terms set forth here by Maurice Charland or Hariman, or elsewhere by others, it cannot conceivably be seen as emerging out of a continuous root stock that managed to cross two seas intact, but as invented by doing repeated violence to a term, in part by providing it with a handsome pedigree that must be fitted up for the occasion.At this point let me register my only complaint. In spite of some useful remarks about Aristotle's notion of phronesis by Hariman and Charland, the volume lacks a systematic treatment of the Greek notion of practical wisdom (phronesis) even as a foil. This makes it difficult to see that the notion of phronesis was diversely interpreted by fourth-century Greeks; that Cicero's assimilation of phronesis to a Latin term already loaded with local associations—the subject of an informative essay by Robert Cape—might not preserve the Greek notion intact; that to the extent that Cicero does preserve aspects of Greek phronesis, his version is probably closer to Isocrates' rhetoric-friendly... (shrink)

When I woke up a few days ago, the following thoughts ran through my mind. ‘I need a haircut. If I don't get it first thing this morning, I won't have another chance for two weeks. But if I go to the barber down the road, he'll want to talk to me about philosophy. So I'd better go to the one in Camden Town. The tube will be very crowded, though. Still, it's a nice day. Why don't I just (...) walk there? It will only take twenty minutes. So I'd better put on these shoes now, have breakfast straight away, and then set out for Camden.’. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Prudence: Classical Virtue, Postmodern PracticeDavid DepewPrudence: Classical Virtue, Postmodern Practice. Ed. Robert Hariman. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003. Pp. xi + 337. $65.00, cloth."This volume," writes the editor, "is one contribution to the contemporary revival of interest in the concept of prudence" (ix). What interest? Notably, that of latter-day "virtue ethicists," whose discontents with the algorithmic decision-making procedures of modernism have given wings to a hope (...) that we (considered as members of some sort of imagined polis) will return to the context-sensitive "practical wisdom" of the ancients. (Prudentia is Cicero's Latin translation of the Greek phronesis, practical wisdom.)In theory, this line of reasoning was supposed to break the mold of contemporary politics. In practice, it has been captured by the political right. Virtue ethicists and civic republicans like Benjamin Barber have been outflanked by "virtuecrats" such as Bill Bennett (he of the gambling habit), the pompous columnist George Will, and Amitai Etzioni, the neo-corporatist founder of the Communitarian Party. It should be said right away, then, that few, if any, of the contributors to this collection are sympathetic to this sort of thinking. Admittedly, they share with virtuecrats a critique of rule-governed forms of decision-making, whether deontological or utilitarian, especially when these procedures masquerade as ways of "operationalizing" morality. Such calculi are indeed creatures of the institutional cultures of business firms and bureaucracies, which have increasingly affected law and politics. In addition, the authors of this volume are no less inclined than right-leaning virtuecrats to rake through intellectual history in order to come up with something relevant to the present and future. "There is a looking backward in order to see more clearly a mentality that is overlooked and undervalued in the present" (20). But they do so with a view to seeing what will come up when management of the topic of prudence is taken away from philosophers and reconnected (as it was from antiquity [End Page 167] until the nineteenth century) with the art of rhetoric, considered as an array of teachable discursive practices that are helpful in identifying and commending appropriate responses to contingent circumstances. The most salient features of the volume follow: a shift of the center of gravity from Aristotle to Cicero (ix), and a consideration of how, through rhetorical performances that involve the construction of a visible, embodied self, that strangest of creatures, a post-modern prudence, might be brought forth.I am pleased to report that changes of meaning in the collection's key term are discernible as we move from Cicero's prudentia to Machiavelli's prudenzia, and from the prudence that Edmund Burke invoked to justify American independence against his government's blind, imprudent rule-following to the quite different, and indeed incompatible, prudence that the Americans actually ended up with by the Jacksonian period, which is explored here by James Jasinski and Christine Oravec. Still, greater attention to the first great fracture in the concept, as phronesis moved across the Adriatic and became prudentia, would have made it clearer that, if there is to be a post-modern prudence, whether on terms set forth here by Maurice Charland or Hariman, or elsewhere by others, it cannot conceivably be seen as emerging out of a continuous root stock that managed to cross two seas intact, but as invented by doing repeated violence to a term, in part by providing it with a handsome pedigree that must be fitted up for the occasion.At this point let me register my only complaint. In spite of some useful remarks about Aristotle's notion of phronesis by Hariman and Charland, the volume lacks a systematic treatment of the Greek notion of practical wisdom (phronesis) even as a foil. This makes it difficult to see that the notion of phronesis was diversely interpreted by fourth-century Greeks; that Cicero's assimilation of phronesis to a Latin term already loaded with local associations—the subject of an informative essay by Robert Cape—might not preserve the Greek notion intact; that to the extent that Cicero does preserve aspects of Greek phronesis, his version is probably closer to Isocrates' rhetoric-friendly... (shrink)

One of Hume's most well-known works and a masterpiece of philosophy, A Treatise of Human Nature is indubitably worth taking the time to read.

Oxford Philosophical Texts Series Editor: John Cottingham The Oxford Philosophical Texts series consists of authoritative teaching editions of canonical texts in the history of philosophy from the ancient world down to modern times. Each volume provides a clear, well laid out text together with a comprehensive introduction by a leading specialist, giving the student detailed critical guidance on the intellectual context of the work and the structure and philosophical importance of the main arguments. Endnotes are supplied which provide further commentary (...) on the arguments and explain unfamiliar references and terminology, and a full bibliography and index are also included. The series aims to build up a definitive corpus of key texts in the Western philosophical tradition, which will form a reliable and enduring resource for students and teachers alike. David Hume's aim in writing An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding was to introduce his philosophy to a European culture in which many educated people read original works of philosophy. He gives an elegant and accessible presentation of strikingly original and challenging views about the limited powers of human understanding, the attractions of scepticism, the compatibility of free will and determinism, and weaknesses in the foundations of religion. Hume's philosophy was highly controversial in the eighteenth century and remains so today. The text printed in this edition is that of the Clarendon critical edition of Hume's works. A substantial introduction by the editor explains the intellectual background to the work and surveys its main themes. The volume also includes detailed explanatory notes on the text, a glossary of terms, a full list of references, and a section of supplementary readings. (shrink)

Welfare and the Constitution defends a largely forgotten understanding of the U.S. Constitution: the positive or "welfarist" view of Abraham Lincoln and the Federalist Papers. Sotirios Barber challenges conventional scholarship by arguing that the government has a constitutional duty to pursue the well-being of all the people. He shows that James Madison was right in saying that the "real welfare" of the people must be the "supreme object" of constitutional government. With conceptual rigor set in fluid prose, Barber (...) opposes the shared view of America's Right and Left: that the federal constitutional duties of public officials are limited to respecting negative liberties and maintaining processes of democratic choice. Barber contends that no historical, scientific, moral, or metaethical argument can favor today's negative constitutionalism over Madison's positive understanding. He urges scholars to develop a substantive account of constitutional ends for use in critiquing Supreme Court decisions, the policies of elected officials, and the attitudes of the larger public. He defends the philosophical possibility of such theories while also offering a theory of his own as a starting point for the discussion the book will provoke. This theory holds, for example, that voucher schemes which drain resources from secular public schools to schools that would train citizens to submit to religious authority are unconstitutional; First Amendment issues aside, such schemes defeat what is undeniably an element of the "real welfare" of the people, individually and collectively: the capacity to think critically for oneself. (shrink)

Deleuze’s philosophy of immanence, because it vigorously rejects every appeal to the beyond, is often presumed to be indifferent to the concerns of religion. This book argues against such a presumption. It does so, first of all, by emphasising how both Deleuze’s thought and the notion of religion are motivated by a demand to create new modes of existence, or to imagine and enact a future that would substantively break with the present configuration of being. If Deleuze’s thought and the (...) notion of religion intersect in this regard, then their divergence must be located elsewhere, namely in the distinction between immanence and transcendence. The book thus argues that the enemy of Deleuze’s thought is not religion in general but instead the specific operation of transcendence. Furthermore, it argues that since Deleuze’s thought is not simply anti-religious, it cannot be identified with secularism. Along these lines, the book shows how Deleuzian immanence is able both to oppose religious transcendence and to enter an allliance with immanent accounts of the name of God. The effect of this is to suspend the paralysing debate between religion and the secular in order to attend to the ways in which immanence – whether “religious” or “secular” – is able to break with the present and to create the future. (shrink)

This paper offers and defends a particular version of the view that it is the intentions with which it is performed that determine the truth conditions of an utterance. A competing version, implied by Grice's work on meaning, is rejected as inadequate. This latter is incompatible with the phenomenon of anti-lying: performing a true utterance with the intention that one's audience believe it to be false. In place of the quasi-Gricean version, the paper maintains that an utterance is true-iff-p just (...) in case it is performed with the intention that its intended audience recognize it as true-iff-p. Delicacy is called for in the interpretation of 'recognition' if this biconditional is to be plausible. Moreover, since truth conditions are extensional and intentions intensional, this simple statement of the view requires qualification. And finally, some methodological self-awareness is needed to see off the charge of analytical circularity (since the analysans contains the analysandum). This intention-based view is proffered as an attractive and viable alternative to any view according to which the semantics of utterances are determined by the semantics of expressions, where the latter can largely float free from the intentions of a particular utterer. (shrink)

The essence of Dussel's thought is presented through the concept of "ethical hermeneutics" which seeks to interpret reality from the viewpoint of what Emmanuel Levinas presents as the "other" - those who are vanquished, forgotten, or excluded from existent socio-political or cultural systems. Barber traces Dussel's development toward Levinas' philosophy through his discussion of the Hegelian dialectic and through the stages of Dussel's own ethical theory.

From religion to philosophy to science, all human systems of definition are formed by human brains. The nature and limits of the human brain are the nature and limits of those systems. This essay shows how the human brain works normally then unusually, and what this reveals about the limits of human knowledge. There are many conditions and instances where the brain processes information unusually, including mental disorders, physical events, and drug use. This essay focuses on the neurological events called (...) mystical experiences. (shrink)

This short peer-reviewed text is a concise look at the psychology of how human beings make decisions, including how they form their worldviews and make arguments.

This paper aims to provide two abductive considerations adducing in favor of the thesis of Necessitism in modal ontology. I demonstrate how instances of the Barcan formula can be witnessed, when the modal operators are interpreted 'naturally' -- i.e., as including geometric possibilities -- and the quantifiers in the formula range over a domain of natural, or concrete, entities and their contingently non-concrete analogues. I argue that, because there are considerations within physics and metaphysical inquiry which corroborate modal relationalist claims (...) concerning the possible geometric structures of spacetime, and dispositional properties are actual possible entities, the condition of being grounded in the concrete is consistent with the Barcan formula; and thus -- in the geometric setting -- merits adoption by the Necessitist. (shrink)

Part of the appeal of the biological approach to personal identity is that it does not have to countenance spatially coincident entities. But if the termination thesis is correct and the organism ceases to exist at death, then it appears that the corpse is a dead body that earlier was a living body and distinct from but spatially coincident with the organism. If the organism is identified with the body, then the unwelcome spatial coincidence could perhaps be avoided. It is (...) argued that such an identification would be a mistake. A living organism has a different part/whole relationship and persistence conditions than the alleged body. A case will be made that the concept ‘human body’ is a conceptual mess, vague in an unprincipled manner, and that an eliminativist stance towards dead bodies is the appropriate response. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

Various U.S. laws, such as the Clean Air Act and the Food Quality Protection Act, require additional protections for susceptible subpopulations who face greater environmental health risks. The main ethical rationale for providing these protections is to ensure that environmental health risks are distributed fairly. In this article, we (1) consider how several influential theories of justice deal with issues related to the distribution of environmental health risks; (2) show that these theories often fail to provide specific guidance concerning policy (...) choices; and (3) argue that an approach to public decision making known as accountability for reasonableness can complement theories of justice in establishing acceptable environmental health risks for the general population and susceptible subpopulations. Since accountability for reasonableness focuses on the fairness of the decision-making process, not the outcome, it does not guarantee that susceptible subpopulations will receive a maximum level of protection, regardless of costs or other morally relevant considerations. (shrink)

This book is a defense of modal realism; the thesis that our world is but one of a plurality of worlds, and that the individuals that inhabit our world are only a few out of all the inhabitants of all the worlds. Lewis argues that the philosophical utility of modal realism is a good reason for believing that it is true.

sirAt a recent health authority meeting Professor Stacey, the NHSE Head of Research Ethics, was quoted as stating that for multicentre trials rapid responses were required ….

Originally published: Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932.

How should one react when one has a belief, but knows that other people—who have roughly the same evidence as one has, and seem roughly as likely to react to it correctly—disagree? This paper argues that the disagreement of other competent inquirers often requires one to be much less confident in one’s opinions than one would otherwise be.

The singularity hypothesis is a radical hypothesis about the future of artificial intelligence on which self-improving artificial agents will quickly become orders of magnitude more intelligent than the average human. Despite the ambitiousness of its claims, the singularity hypothesis has been defended at length by leading philosophers and artificial intelligence researchers. In this paper, I argue that the singularity hypothesis rests on scientifically implausible growth assumptions. I show how leading philosophical defenses of the singularity hypothesis (Chalmers 2010, Bostrom 2014) fail (...) to overcome the case for skepticism. I conclude by drawing out philosophical implications of this discussion for our understanding of consciousness, personal identity, digital minds, existential risk, and ethical longtermism. GPI Working Paper No . 19-2022. (shrink)

In the Garden of Eden, we had unmediated contact with the world. We were directly acquainted with objects in the world and with their properties. Objects were simply presented to us without causal mediation, and properties were revealed to us in their true intrinsic glory.

Los medios de comunicación incrementan la cobertura de hallazgos sobre el pasado. Impedir la discriminación por razón de sexo es mandato de los códigos deontológicos periodísticos. Desde la perspectiva de género, el estudio abordó la presencia de científicas como sujetos noticiables y fuentes expertas. Se analizaron mediante técnicas cuantitativas y cualitativas mensajes (n=59) en los dos principales diarios españoles de referencia (El País, El Mundo). Es preponderante la voz del profesional de la arqueología y prima la autoría de reporteros especializados. (...) Lo femenino ocupa un segundo plano temático, que relega a la mujer como científica, especialista y reportera. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

What happens when machines become more intelligent than humans? One view is that this event will be followed by an explosion to ever-greater levels of intelligence, as each generation of machines creates more intelligent machines in turn. This intelligence explosion is now often known as the “singularity”. The basic argument here was set out by the statistician I.J. Good in his 1965 article “Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine”: Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far (...) surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an “intelligence explosion”, and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make. The key idea is that a machine that is more intelligent than humans will be better than humans at designing machines. So it will be capable of designing a machine more intelligent than the most intelligent machine that humans can design. So if it is itself designed by humans, it will be capable of designing a machine more intelligent than itself. By similar reasoning, this next machine will also be capable of designing a machine more intelligent than itself. If every machine in turn does what it is capable of, we should expect a sequence of ever more intelligent machines. This intelligence explosion is sometimes combined with another idea, which we might call the “speed explosion”. The argument for a speed explosion starts from the familiar observation that computer processing speed doubles at regular intervals. Suppose that speed doubles every two years and will do so indefinitely. Now suppose that we have human-level artificial intelligence 1 designing new processors. Then faster processing will lead to faster designers and an ever-faster design cycle, leading to a limit point soon afterwards. The argument for a speed explosion was set out by the artificial intelligence researcher Ray Solomonoff in his 1985 article “The Time Scale of Artificial Intelligence”.1 Eliezer Yudkowsky gives a succinct version of the argument in his 1996 article “Staring at the Singularity”: “Computing speed doubles every two subjective years of work.. (shrink)

What is good prescribing? In this paper we will look at the kinds of criteria which are relevant to evaluating prescribing. In particular we wish to challenge, or at least re-frame, the picture of prescribing as an essentially technical process. In so doing we hope to indicate something more general about the power, and limitations, of technical rationality in health care, and to contribute something to work in health care technology assessment. Finally we hope this discussion will act as a (...) stimulus towards a much needed revision of the way ‘good’ prescribing is defined by current policies, guidelines and protocols. (shrink)