ABSTRACT Although basic values have been linked with unethical attitudes and behavior in non-sport contexts, their association with doping in sport has yet to be established. We examined the relationships between basic values and doping likelihood. College athletes rated the importance of basic values using the Portrait Values Questionnaire Revised and indicated their likelihood of doping in a hypothetical scenario. In terms of basic value dimensions, self-enhancement values were positively related to doping likelihood, openness to change values were unrelated to (...) doping likelihood, and self-transcendence and conservation values were negatively related to doping likelihood. In terms of the values categories, the values-doping relationship was best characterized by an unethicality pattern of coefficients. In conclusion, the current evidence extends the values-unethicality relationship to the context of sport and confirms that doping resembles other forms of unethical behavior. (shrink)

Philosophers ask just whose expression, if anyone’s, we hear in lyric poetry. Walton provides a novel possibility: it’s the reader who “uses” the poem (just as a speech giver uses a speech) who makes the language expressive. But worries arise once we consider poems in particular social or political settings, those which require a strong self-other distinction, or those with expressions that should not be disassociated from the subjects whose experience they draw from. One way to meet this challenge is (...) to consider the poem expressive of a plural subject, which frees us from looking for a particular individual whose voice we hear in the work, whether she be fictional or actual. Some lyrics give voice to a group whose experience is attended to in the work. This may be done through a posited fictional speaker, but the ontology of the speaker is shown to be less important. Attending to a group whose concerns are voiced allows us to explain how poems can manage to address our-worldly concerns even when lacking actual persons whose expressions we encounter in the poems. (shrink)

Recent work on blameworthiness has prominently featured discussions of guilt. The philosophers who develop guilt-based views of blameworthiness do an excellent job of attending to the evaluative and affective features of feeling guilty. However, these philosophers have been less attentive to guilt’s characteristic action tendencies and the role admissions of guilt play in our blaming practices. This paper focuses on the nature of guilty confession and argues that it illuminates an important function of blame that has been overlooked in the (...) recent work on guilt as it relates to blameworthiness: Blame can communicate respect. (shrink)

Preeminent psychoanalyst Mortimer Ostow believes that early childhood emotional attachments form the cognitive underpinnings of spiritual experience and religious motivation. His hypothesis, which is verifiable, relies on psychological and neurobiological evidence but is respectful of the human need for spiritual value. Ostow begins by classifying the three parts of the spiritual experience: awe, Spirituality proper, and mysticism. After he pinpoints the psychological origins of these feelings in infancy, he discusses the foundations of religious sentiment and practice and the brain (...) processes associated with spiritual experience. He then focuses on spirituality's relationship to mood regulation, and the role of negative spirituality in fostering religious fundamentalism and demonic possession. Ostow concludes with an analysis of an essay by the psychoanalyst Donald M. Marcus, who recounts his own spiritual experience during a Native American-style "vision quest" in the woods. Marcus's account demonstrates the constructive potential of spirituality and the way in which spirituality retrieves and recapitulates feelings of attachment to the mother. Persuasively and brilliantly argued, _Spirit, Mind, and Brain_ brings the disciplines of religion, behavorial neuroscience, and philosophy to bear on a groundbreaking new method for understanding religious ritual and belief. (shrink)

This article examines the inherently ethical nature of resource allocation in policing. Decision-makers must make trade-offs between values such as efficiency vs. equity, individual vs. collective benefit, and adopt principles of distribution which allocate limited resources fairly. While resource allocation in healthcare has been the subject of extensive discussion in both practitioner and academic literature, ethical resource allocation in policing has received almost no attention. We first consider whether approaches used in healthcare settings would be suitable for policing. Whilst there (...) are some high-level similarities in the relevant ethical considerations and processes—such as aiming for efficient and equitable resource deployment—there are also fundamental differences between the two settings, which we argue necessitate a different approach. These differences include: (1) greater diversity and incommensurability of the benefits of policing, (2) more frequent non-linearity in returns on policing investment, (3) greater “ethical divisibility” (permissible scaling down) of programs in policing, (4) a requirement to assess “need” for policing resources at the collective (rather than individual) level, and (5) clearer primacy of equity considerations in policing. Having drawn out the implications of these differences, we sketch some tentative proposals for ethical resource allocation in policing. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Organizations constitute morally-complex environments, requiring organization members to possess levels of moral courage sufficient to promote their ethical action, while refraining from unethical actions when faced with temptations or pressures. Using a sample drawn from a military context, we explored the antecedents and consequences of moral courage. Results from this four-month field study demonstrated that authentic leadership was positively related to followers’ displays of moral courage. Further, followers’ moral courage fully mediated the effects of authentic leadership on followers’ ethical and (...) pro-social behaviors. Theoretical and practical implications for further integrating the work on moral courage, authentic leadership and ethics are discussed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Human Liberty and Human Nature in the Works of Faustus Socinus and His ReadersSarah MortimerI.Few issues were more hotly contested by early modern theologians than the extent of human liberty and its implications for both religion and society. In the Protestant world, the sixteenth century saw increasingly strident statements of mankind's bondage to sin and the importance of God's eternal decree of predestination, but the concept of human moral (...) responsibility still had its defenders. One influential proponent of human liberty was Faustus Socinus (1539–1604), the Italian scholar known most commonly today for his denial of the trinity. Yet the central theme of his theology was his insistence that Christian virtues must be carried out voluntarily; it was from this principle that his more heterodox ideas flowed. He made a sharp distinction between natural and voluntary action, and argued that the practice of Christianity must be an act of human will, not one to which men were drawn by nature. Separating Christianity from the natural order, Socinus argued that eternal life awaited those who chose to follow the law of Christ rather than the natural law. His argument challenged the Protestant commitment to the unity of natural and divine law and it opened up conceptual space for voluntary action outside the natural law. In this article, I shall sketch the Socinian position on human liberty and Christianity, and suggest how and why the Italian's ideas were developed by Protestants in the early seventeenth century. His readers included the eminent Dutch scholar Hugo [End Page 191] Grotius (1583–1645), and the exchange between Grotius and the Socinians reveals the concern on both sides to explain the relationship between human liberty, Christianity, and natural law.Socinus' life, like his theology, began within the reform movement in Italy and ended among the marginalised anti-trinitarians in Poland. Born of a long line of Italian jurists, he shared both his family's legal interests and their critical approach to the Catholic Church. In his youth he had been a courtier in Florence but his increasingly critical attitude towards Catholicism—and the death of his patron Grand-Duke Cosimo I—resulted in his departure from Italy in 1574. After a period in Basel he found a home among the Polish Anabaptists at Rakow, a young and precarious community which he helped to sustain through his advice and through the tracts which he penned on their behalf.1 During these years, he was also able to develop his own interpretation of Christianity, and to explain it in numerous works issuing from the community's press. Although his ideas generated a lively debate from the start, both in Poland and Germany, it was only after his death that they began to be absorbed into the mainstream of European intellectual discussions. Socinus' theological ideas had their attractions for some Protestant readers, but they became entangled with more political questions and their implications for civil life began to cause serious alarm. For this reason my focus will be upon the responses of Dutch and German readers, particularly Hugo Grotius and Johan Crell (1590–1633), both of whom addressed the civil as well as the theological aspects of Socinus' legacy. First, however, I shall draw out the salient points from Socinus' rich and complex theology, paying particular attention to his understanding of human liberty. Unlike his orthodox Protestant contemporaries, Socinus believed that liberty was the precondition for virtue.Socinus shared with the broader Christian humanist tradition the belief that Christ demanded works as well as faith from his followers. Christians must follow the pattern of ethical living laid down by their master; like Erasmus before him, and like the Italian exiles he met in Basel, Socinus saw Christianity as a religion of action.2 For this reason, he was determined to protect the liberty and capacity of each individual to act virtuously, and therefore to defend what he understood as human free will. It was, he felt, [End Page 192] a pressing task, for these qualities were being undermined by his contemporaries and particularly by those on the Protestant side. Most Protestants followed Luther's belief, expressed most forcefully in De Servo Arbitrio (1525... (shrink)

During the last fifteen years or so there has been much debate, among philosophers interested in perception, on the question of whether the representational content of perceptual experience is conceptual or nonconceptual. Recently, however, a number of philosophers have challenged the terms of this debate, arguing that one of its most basic assumptions is mistaken. Experience, they claim, does not have representational content at all. On the kind of approach they suggest, having a perceptual experience is not to be understood (...) on the model of thought or belief, as a matter of the subject's taking things in the world to be this or that way, or of having this or that feature. Nor is it to be understood on the model of receiving testimony about how things are in the world, as a matter of its being represented to us that things are this or that way. Rather, it is simply a matter of our being presented with things. Having a perceptual experience of an object is a matter of our standing in a certain kind of relation to it which makes it available to us to be represented in thought or belief, but which does not itself involve our representing it, or its being represented to us.1 Much of the motivation for rejecting the view that experience has representational content springs from a concern to do justice to what is distinctive about perceptual experience in contrast to thought and belief. In particular, perceptual experience seems to be more "primitive" than thought, in that it seems natural to appeal to the character of perceptual experience to explain the possibility of thought about objects rather than the other way around. There is thus a concern that we will deprive.. (shrink)

For the purposes of this paper, realism is defined as the belief that in visual perception there is a direct perception of material bodies existing in space external to the perceiver's body. Most contemporary positivists and analytical philosophers are realists in this sense. Included in this classification would be all those who argue from the character of seen relations of bodies to the uniformity view of causation; those who oppose public to private experience; those who believe that one can point (...) to facts; those who believe in the real existence of objects like extended solid tables and chairs; and those who distinguish in terms of verifiability between judgments of color and judgments of value. (shrink)

Hesperides Press are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

This book, first published in 1936, divides into roughly two parts: a re-examination of historical material; and a positive theory of causation suggested by the results of this re-examination. The historical study discloses an ambiguity in the meanings of causation and determinism; it discloses also that this ambiguity is transferred to the meaning of freedom.

I defend the normativity of meaning against recent objections by arguing for a new interpretation of the ‘ought’ relevant to meaning. Both critics and defenders of the normativity thesis have understood statements about how an expression ought to be used as either prescriptive or semantic. I propose an alternative view of the ‘ought’ as conveying the primitively normative attitudes speakers must adopt towards their uses if they are to use the expression with understanding.

The biological world is full of phenomena that seem to run counter to Darwin's insight that natural selection can lead to the appearance of design. For instance, why do organisms in some species divide reproductive labor? The existence of non-reproducing organisms in such 'eusocial' species looks to be at odds with an evolutionary theory which posits traits exist because they help organisms survive and reproduce. What is the evolutionary advantage of an insect being distasteful to its predators? The distastefulness appears (...) designed to deter predators, but can only affect the predator's actions when the insect is eaten; it is hard to see how such a trait could be passed on. This Element will cover the shared foundations of evolutionary explanations for these and other seemingly puzzling phenomena, focusing on the concepts of inclusive fitness and kin selection. (shrink)

Describing rabbinic reasoning as a rational response to experience. Hashkes combines insights from the analytic philosophy of Wittgenstein, Quine, and Davidson with the semiotics of Peirce to construe knowledge as systematic reasoning occurring within a community of inquiry. Her reading of the works of Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Marion allows her to create a philosophical bridge between a discourse of God and a discourse of reason. This synthesis of analytic philosophy and pragmatism, hermeneutics and theology provides Hashkes with a sophisticated (...) tool to understand Rabbinic Judaism. It also makes this study both unique and path breaking in contemporary Jewish philosophy and Rabbinic thought. (shrink)

Debates about empathy's role in morality are notoriously complex. On the one hand, proponents of empathy argue that it plays a crucial role in the process of making moral judgments, moral motivation, moral development, and the cultivation of meaningful personal relationships. On the other hand, critics of empathy warn that it is especially susceptible to a number of morally troubling biases and motivational shortcomings. Yet there is little consensus about what empathy is or what it might be good for from (...) a moral point of view. As a result, critics and proponents of empathy alike often wind up talking past each other and debates about empathy's role in morality reach an impasse. This paper proposes a typology of empathy's affective, cognitive, and motivational dimensions and the different forms that empathy can take depending on the nature and degree of prominence of these. It argues that different forms of empathy are well equipped to handle some moral tasks as well as ill‐equipped to handle others. Its aim in doing so is to clarify an otherwise conceptually thorny set of debates and to amplify future research on empathy and its role in the moral life. (shrink)

This new translation is an extremely welcome addition to the continuing Cambridge Edition of Kant’s works. English-speaking readers of the third Critique have long been hampered by the lack of an adequate translation of this important and difficult work. James Creed Meredith’s much-reprinted translation has charm and elegance, but it is often too loose to be useful for scholarly purposes. Moreover it does not include the first version of Kant’s introduction, the so-called “First Introduction,” which is now recognized as indispensable (...) for an understanding of the work. Werner Pluhar’s more recent translation, which does include the First Introduction, is highly accurate when it confines itself to rendering Kant’s German. However, it is often more of a reconstruction than a translation, containing so many interpretative interpolations that it is often difficult to separate out Kant’s original text from the translator’s contributions. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews have provided a translation that compares to or exceeds Pluhar’s in its literal approach to the German, but that confines all interpretative material to footnotes and endnotes, so that the text itself, with all its unclarities and ambiguities, lies open to view. In addition, Guyer, as editor of the volume, has provided a great deal of valuable supplementary material. This includes an introduction with an outline of the work and details of the history of its composition and publication, and a wealth of endnotes offering clarifications of the text, background information, and, most strikingly, many references to related passages in Kant’s voluminous writings, particularly in connection with Kant’s earlier writings related to aesthetics. The edition also records differences among the first three editions of the work, and—of particular interest—erasures from and additions to Kant’s manuscript of the First Introduction. Although the introduction and endnotes reflect interpretative views that are sometimes disputable, this supplementary material makes the present edition into a valuable resource even for those able to read the text in German. (shrink)

Treating such issues as animal sex, species politics, environmental justice, lesbian space and "gay" ghettos, AIDS literatures, and queer nationalities, this lively collection asks important questions at the intersections of sexuality and environmental studies. Contributors from a wide range of disciplines present a focused engagement with the critical, philosophical, and political dimensions of sex and nature. These discussions are particularly relevant to current debates in many disciplines, including environmental studies, queer theory, critical race theory, philosophy, literary criticism, and politics. As (...) a whole, Queer Ecologies stands as a powerful corrective to views that equate "natural" with "straight" while "queer" is held to be against nature. (shrink)