This article considers two related and fundamental issues about morality in a virtual world. The first is whether the anonymity that is a feature of virtual worlds can shed light upon whether people are moral when they can act with impunity. The second issue is whether there are any moral obligations in a virtual world and if so what they might be. -/- Our reasons for being good are fundamental to understanding what it is that makes us moral or indeed (...) whether any of us truly are moral. Plato grapples with this problem in book two of The Republic where Socrates is challenged by his brothers Adeimantus and Glaucon. They argue that people are moral only because of the costs to them of being immoral; the external constraints of morality. -/- Glaucon asks us to imagine a magical ring that enables its wearers to become invisible and capable of acting anonymously. The ring is in some respects analogous to the possibilities created by online virtual worlds such as Second Life, so the dialogue is our entry point into considering morality within these worlds. These worlds are three dimensional user created environments where people control avatars and live virtual lives. As well as being an important social phenomenon, virtual worlds and what people chose to do in them can shed light on what people will do when they can act without fear of normal sanction. -/- This paper begins by explaining the traditional challenge to morality posed by Plato, relating this to conduct in virtual worlds. Then the paper will consider the following skeptical objection. A precondition of all moral requirements is the ability to act. There are no moral requirements in virtual worlds because they are virtual and it is impossible to act in a virtual world. Because avatars do not have real bodies and the persons controlling avatars are not truly embodied, it is impossible for people to truly act in a virtual world. We will show that it is possible to perform some actions and suggest a number of moral requirements that might plausibly be thought to result. Because avatars cannot feel physical pain or pleasure these moral requirements are interestingly different from those of real life. Hume’s arguments for why we should be moral apply to virtual worlds and we conclude by considering how this explains why morality exists in these environments. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence (AI) and its introduction into clinical pathways presents an array of ethical issues that are being discussed in the JME. 1–7 The development of AI technologies that can produce text that will pass plagiarism detectors 8 and are capable of appearing to be written by a human author 9 present new issues for medical ethics. One set of worries concerns authorship and whether it will now be possible to know that an author or student in fact produced submitted (...) work. That seems likely to be a general worry for secondary and higher education, as well as for all academic journals. Thus far generative AI chatbots do not seem to be able to produce a fully referenced and well-argued ethics article, but they probably could generate a blog or student essay that would... (shrink)

In some practical uncertain situations decision makers are presented with described events that are out of sequence when having to make a causal attribution. A theoretical perspective concerning the causal coherence of the explanation is developed to predict the effect of this on causal attribution. Three experiments investigated the effect on causal judgement when the described order of events did not correspond to their causal order. Participants had to judge the relative probability of two possible causes of an outcome in (...) scenarios in which presentation order varied. All three experiments found that there was a preference to judge that the cause associated with events described in causal order was more responsible for the outcome when events associated with one cause were interleaved in their presentation order with those from a second cause. This occurred when there was a strong causal relationship between events. The results were consistent with the causal coherence explanation. (shrink)

It is increasingly fashionable to attack McTaggart's arguments about the Unreality of Time with a minimum of attention to what he was trying to establish. Those who have only read his one still famous paper ‘The Unreality of Time’ [III] are too likely to assume from professional philosophers' current counter-arguments that the man was a sceptic with only a single idea in his head, rather than an ingenious, constructive metaphysician. Since so much formal and informal analysis has been directed against (...) so few of McTaggart's comments on Time, and mainly against his destructive claim that the vulgar concept of Time requires as explicans an incoherent ‘A-series’ of becomings with ever-shifted pasts, presents and futures, perhaps it is time to encourage some redirection of analytical assessment to what he was arguing for. I say this not only for historical reasons, though I shall draw historical comparisons, but because rationally assessing what McTaggart really denies about Time may require some serious interest in what he so interestingly asserts about our experience of what we call ‘Time’. Trousers, pace Austin, normally have one wearer but two legs. If McTaggart's negative points deserve such a plethora of analysis, then the positive view needs attention or the analysis is ill-aimed. (shrink)

Debate continues to rage among philosophers of religion over Anthony Flew's famous little paper ‘Theology and Falsification’ and the responses it provoked, most notably R. M. Hare's response that religious claims are in no way like scientific hypotheses. For now, twenty years later, we still find many theists taking a similar tack to Hare's. A particularly interesting example is J. F. Miller in Religious Studies , 1969, who replies to Flew that propositions like ‘God loves mankind’ cannot be subject to (...) falsifiability conditions because they are used as claims expressing ‘ religious first-order principles of the Judaeo-Christian Weltanschauung and as such are not amenable to falsification’ . Miller seems to put his faith in some kind of great gulf fixed between what he would consider decently falsifiable scientific hypotheses and what he takes to be unfalsifiable first-order principles both of theology and of contemporary science. In what follows we will try to sketch a more rational strategy for modern believers of a liberal empiricist type, for those whose interest in appealing and deferring to experience includes but is not restricted to so-called ‘sense experience’. This will involve accepting analogies between theological statements and so-called hypotheses, insofar as the latter are propositions held and put forward in a somewhat tentative spirit with a view to explaining what we experience. (shrink)

Over 40 years of research have shown that traumatic brain injury affects brain volume. However, technical and practical limitations made it difficult to detect brain volume abnormalities in patients suffering from chronic effects of mild or moderate traumatic brain injury. This situation improved in 2006 with the FDA clearance of NeuroQuant®, a commercially available, computer-automated software program for measuring MRI brain volume in human subjects. More recent strides were made with the introduction of NeuroGage®, commercially available software that is based (...) on NeuroQuant® and extends its utility in several ways. Studies using these and similar methods have found that most patients with chronic mild or moderate traumatic brain injury have brain volume abnormalities, and several of these studies found—surprisingly—more abnormal enlargement than atrophy. More generally, 102 peer-reviewed studies have supported the reliability and validity of NeuroQuant® and NeuroGage®. Furthermore, this updated version of a previous review addresses whether NeuroQuant® and NeuroGage® meet the Daubert standard for admissibility in court. It concludes that NeuroQuant® and NeuroGage® meet the Daubert standard based on their reliability, validity, and objectivity. Due to the improvements in technology over the years, these brain volumetric techniques are practical and readily available for clinical or forensic use, and thus they are important tools for detecting signs of brain injury. (shrink)

Putative resolutions of the sorites paradox in which the major premise is declared false or illegitimate, Including max black's treatment in terms of the alleged illegitimacy of vague attributions to borderline cases, Are rejected on semantical grounds. The resort to a non-Bivalent logic of representational "accuracy" with a continuum of accuracy values is shown to resolve the paradox, And the identification of accuracy values as truth values is defended as compatible with the central insight of the correspondence theory of truth (...) and with the practical legitimacy of most applications of ordinary, Bivalent logic to statements involving vague predicates. (shrink)

Topics discussed include Aristotle's semantics, individuation, essentialism, causation, & being. Contents: The Aporematic Approach to Primary Being in Metaphysics Z. Aristotle's Semantics & a Puzzle Concerning Change. Aristotle & Individuation. Singular Statements & Essentialism in Aristotle. What is Aristotle's Theory of Essence?. Aristotle on the Proximate Efficient Cause of Action. Causes as Necessary Conditions: Aristotle, Alexander of Aphrodisias & J.L. Mackie.

Debate continues to rage among philosophers of religion over Anthony Flew's famous little paper ‘Theology and Falsification’ and the responses it provoked, most notably R. M. Hare's response that religious claims are in no way like scientific hypotheses. For now, twenty years later, we still find many theists taking a similar tack to Hare's. A particularly interesting example is J. F. Miller in Religious Studies, 1969, who replies to Flew that propositions like ‘God loves mankind’ cannot be subject to falsifiability (...) conditions because they are used as claims expressing ‘religious first-order principles of the Judaeo-Christian Weltanschauung and as such are not amenable to falsification’ (p. 50). Miller seems to put his faith in some kind of great gulf fixed between what he would consider decently falsifiable scientific hypotheses and what he takes to be unfalsifiable first-order principles both of theology and of contemporary science. In what follows we will try to sketch a more rational strategy for modern believers of a liberal empiricist type, for those whose interest in appealing and deferring to experience includes but is not restricted to so-called ‘sense experience’. This will involve accepting analogies between theological statements and so-called hypotheses, insofar as the latter are propositions held and put forward in a somewhat tentative spirit with a view to explaining what we experience. (shrink)

NO ANALOGY IS ADEQUATE FOR THE RELATIONS BETWEEN THE PERSONS OF THE TRINITY. A FAMOUS AND HELPFUL ONE OF ST AUGUSTINE’S IS DISCUSSED AND AN INADEQUACY SUGGESTED: TRIPLENESS OF PERSONS IS TOO RESTRICTED. ANOTHER LIMITED, BUT PARTLY OFFSETTING ANALOGY COUCHED IN TERMS OF ’MULTIPLE PERSONALITIES’ IN PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY IS SPELLED OUT FOR EVALUATION.