In this paper I present two new arguments against the possibility of an omniscient being. My new arguments invoke considerations of cardinality and resemble several arguments originally presented by Patrick Grim. Like Grim, I give reasons to believe that there must be more objects in the universe than there are beliefs. However, my arguments will rely on certain mereological claims, namely that Classical Extensional Mereology is necessarily true of the part-whole relation. My first argument is an instance of a problem (...) first noted by Gideon Rosen and requires an additional assumption about the mereological structure of certain beliefs. That assumption is that an omniscient being’s beliefs are mereological simples. However, this assumption is dropped when I present my second argument. Thus, I hope to show that if Classical Extensional Mereology is true of the part-whole relation, there cannot be an omniscient being. (shrink)

End-of-life disputes in Ontario are currently overwhelmingly assessed through the singular lens of patient autonomy. The current dispute resolution mechanism does not adequately consider evidence-based medical guidelines, standards of care, the patient’s best interests, expert opinion, or distributive justice. We discuss two cases adjudicated by the Consent and Capacity board of Ontario that demonstrate the over emphasis on patient autonomy. Current health care policy and the Health Care Consent Act also place emphasis on patient autonomy without considering other ethically defensible (...) factors. We argue that current policy and legislation require amendment, and unless there are measures undertaken to modify them, both the quality of care provided and the long-term capabilities of the health care system to remain publicly-funded, comprehensive and equitable, are at stake. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Go's Command by John HareJoshua T. MauldinGod's Command John Hare OXFORD: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2015. 368 pp. $110.00Divine command theory has received a significant amount of high-powered philosophical attention in recent years, notably in works by C. Stephen Evans, Robert Adams, and Philip Quinn. John Hare's book God's Command joins this [End Page 197] discussion and advances it by attending not only to the Christian tradition but also (...) to Judaism and Islam, and by engaging with evolutionary psychology. Central to Hare's account of divine command theory is the claim that human nature is a "mixture," characterized by the dual affections for advantage and for justice. Against theories that assume a single-source account of motivation (e.g., eudaimonism), Hare contends that human beings experience the pull of competing motivations, toward morality and self-interest. Any adequate moral theory will account for both motivations and indicate how they can be reconciled. Hare contends that his version of divine command theory is up to this task.It is on this point that Hare most clearly adheres to his claim at the beginning and the end of God's Command that the book "defends the thesis that what makes something morally obligatory is that God commands it, and what makes something morally wrong is that God commands us not to do it" (1). Elsewhere in the book, this kind of philosophical defense recedes. After an initial chapter describing divine command theory in general, and two chapters on eudaimonism and naturalistic deductivism, Hare provides three chapters illustrating how divine command theory is worked out by representative thinkers in the traditions of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, followed by a chapter on how divine command theory can accommodate the findings of evolutionary psychology. The book ends with a summary, showing how the various pieces of the book, which at times read like a series of independent essays, constitute a single picture. In these latter chapters, Hare seems to leave behind the philosophical defense of divine command theory, turning instead toward a discussion of what kind of divine command theory theists should adopt, given their predetermined commitment to theism and divine command theory in general.In one sense, this shift can be understood in terms of audience. Initially, Hare addresses anyone interested in ethics. By the second half of the book, Hare has shifted to convincing theistic ethicists that the best way to hold together their various commitments is to adopt a divine command theory, as opposed to other options such as Eudaimonism. This shift arises as an attempt to fend off a potential criticism of divine command theory—the possibility that people will do terrible things in the name of God's command. Hare suggests that Kant provides one solution to this problem, which is that if we think God is commanding us to do something that is at odds with practical reason, we ought to doubt that God is really commanding us to do this thing. Hare is sympathetic to Kant here, but he also seems to think that Kant's solution would undermine his own project, insofar as it makes God's command appear superfluous. Hare's alternative approach involves acknowledging that religious traditions possess safeguards to protect against the possibility that appeal to a divine command is used to justify horrendous evils. For Hare, the Abrahamic traditions provide historical evidence that the benefits of divine command ethics can be enjoyed without accepting the apparently bad aspects. [End Page 198]Hare himself notes that there is a kind of circularity here. He has made the point as a kind of hypothetical: If you already believe in God as the divine commander, and adhere to one of the Abrahamic traditions, you will possess resources to overcome this problem. As he admits at the end of chapter 5, he has not addressed the question of why someone who does not already believe in God as the source of morality ought to begin to do so. Nevertheless, the question of whether thinkers within religious traditions have provided compelling answers to the epistemological problems at the center of divine command theory will be of interest to... (shrink)

Among the many parodic elements in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes is the day-old baby's fart-omen. As is well-known, sneezing was considered prophetic in the ancient world, and the humour of the scene comes from the immediately preceding fart and the fact that Hermes’ bodily emissions are deliberate . Apollo has, in fact, gone in search of his baby brother on the basis of a standard bird-omen and confronted with Hermes’ signs, he recognizes that the crepitation is just as much (...) an omen as the sneeze, witness the plural τoúτoιζ oìωυoîσι a few lines later . We may compare a passage in Aristophanes’ Knights where the Sausage-seller reports that he took courage before speaking to the Council from a good omen: a man farted to the right, ༐κ δπξιâζ ᾤπέπαρδε . Aristophanes’ formulation suggests to me that the composer of the hymn may be intentionally setting up a play on words : the only difference between the verbal form ༐πέπταδε ‘sneezed’ is the reversal of the liquid and the dental stop. (shrink)

One of the most famous scenes in classical literature is theDichterweiheat the beginning of theTheogony: when Hesiod was tending his sheep below Mount Helicon, the Muses approached him, provided him with a staff and a divine voice, and told him to sing of the blessed, everlasting gods.

Among the many parodic elements in theHomeric Hymn to Hermesis the day-old baby's fart-omen. As is well-known, sneezing was considered prophetic in the ancient world, and the humour of the scene comes from the immediately preceding fart and the fact that Hermes’ bodily emissions are deliberate (σɉυ… øρασσάμευoζ ‘contriving’). Apollo has, in fact, gone in search of his baby brother on the basis of a standard bird-omen (note 2131 ‖ oìωυɂυ and 215 ‖༐σσυμέυωζ, echoed exactly in the later passage) and (...) confronted with Hermes’ signs, he recognizes that the crepitation is just as much an omen as the sneeze, witness the plural τoúτoιζ oìωυoîσι a few lines later (303). We may compare a passage in Aristophanes’Knights(638—42) where the Sausage-seller reports that he took courage before speaking to the Council from a good omen: a man farted to the right, ༐κ δπξιâζ ᾤπέπαρδε (639). Aristophanes’ formulation suggests to me that the composer of the hymn may be intentionally setting up a play on words (or even the possibility for a slip of the tongue or mishearing): the only difference between the verbal form ༐πέπταδε ‘sneezed’ (aorist to ༐πι-πτάρυuμαι, -πταíρω and its near-homophone ༐πέπαρδε ‘farted’ (aorist to ༐πι-πρδoμαι) is the (cross-linguistically trivial) reversal of the liquid and the dental stop. (shrink)

Among the many parodic elements in theHomeric Hymn to Hermesis the day-old baby's fart-omen. As is well-known, sneezing was considered prophetic in the ancient world, and the humour of the scene comes from the immediately preceding fart and the fact that Hermes’ bodily emissions are deliberate (σɉυ… øρασσάμευoζ ‘contriving’). Apollo has, in fact, gone in search of his baby brother on the basis of a standard bird-omen (note 2131 ‖ oìωυɂυ and 215 ‖༐σσυμέυωζ, echoed exactly in the later passage) and (...) confronted with Hermes’ signs, he recognizes that the crepitation is just as much an omen as the sneeze, witness the plural τoúτoιζ oìωυoîσι a few lines later (303). We may compare a passage in Aristophanes’Knights(638—42) where the Sausage-seller reports that he took courage before speaking to the Council from a good omen: a man farted to the right, ༐κ δπξιâζ ᾤπέπαρδε (639). Aristophanes’ formulation suggests to me that the composer of the hymn may be intentionally setting up a play on words (or even the possibility for a slip of the tongue or mishearing): the only difference between the verbal form ༐πέπταδε ‘sneezed’ (aorist to ༐πι-πτάρυuμαι, -πταíρω and its near-homophone ༐πέπαρδε ‘farted’ (aorist to ༐πι-πρδoμαι) is the (cross-linguistically trivial) reversal of the liquid and the dental stop. (shrink)

Decades of psychological research have been aimed at modeling how people learn features and categories. The empirical validation of these theories is often based on artificial stimuli with simple representations. Recently, deep neural networks have reached or surpassed human accuracy on tasks such as identifying objects in natural images. These networks learn representations of real‐world stimuli that can potentially be leveraged to capture psychological representations. We find that state‐of‐the‐art object classification networks provide surprisingly accurate predictions of human similarity judgments for (...) natural images, but they fail to capture some of the structure represented by people. We show that a simple transformation that corrects these discrepancies can be obtained through convex optimization. We use the resulting representations to predict the difficulty of learning novel categories of natural images. Our results extend the scope of psychological experiments and computational modeling by enabling tractable use of large natural stimulus sets. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Religion and Public Policy: Human Rights, Conflict, and Ethics ed. by Sumner B. Twiss, Marian Simion, and Rodney L. PetersenJoshua T. MauldinReligion and Public Policy: Human Rights, Conflict, and Ethics Edited by Sumner B. Twiss, Marian Simion, and Rodney L. Petersen NEW YORK: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2015. 372 PP. $99.00This festschrift in honor of David Little canvasses the range of topics Little explored during a distinguished career. The (...) breadth of Little's research interests is reflected in the diversity of essays represented in the volume. Some of the seventeen chapters reflect directly on issues within Little's corpus while others discuss the influence Little had on various fields of inquiry or draw on his ideas for new areas of research.John Witte and Gene Outka provide essays of the first sort: Witte examines Little's work on the religious origins of human rights, while Outka raises questions about how Little's historical work on Reformed Protestantism relates to his work in human rights. Outka raises broader questions about methodology in religious ethics, questions also explored in a chapter by John Kelsay. These include foundationalism, the role of normativity in the study of religion, and the role of expressly theological concepts in religious ethics. The questions are intertwined but played out in different ways in Little's scholarly career; the first [End Page 224] two issues arose in response to the 1978 volume, Comparative Religious Ethics: A New Method, which was foundationalist in orientation. It sought to find the "basic" norm that was the ground of all other moral ideas in a religious system, whether Christianity, Buddhism, or the religion of the Navajo. Jeffrey Stout's critique of the book's foundationalist assumptions struck a serious blow to the project; in response, Little conceded so many of Stout's points that Stout questioned whether the methodology of the volume was meant to be taken seriously. As Kelsey notes in his chapter, some wondered whether the rigid methodology of Comparative Religious Ethics was created primarily to give religious ethicists a respectable job to do in an academic environment in which the study of religion was otherwise suspect. It sought to create a neo-Weberian study of religious ethical systems in which the scholar bracketed out her own ethical assumptions. Through this "value-free" descriptive science, the comparative ethicist hoped to gain admission to the secular academy. Foundationalism was meant to provide the kind of objectivity that gave the religious ethicist something objective to study. Giving up foundationalism would mean giving up the hope of comparative religious ethics as a science.This brings us to the role of distinctly theological claims in Little's work. When putting on the normative hat of the ethicist, Little preferred to bracket out theological assumptions, precisely in order to maintain conversation with his nonreligious interlocutors. The benefits of such a method are evident in this volume. Little managed to engage in moral and political conversation with scholars across a variety of religious, political, and national locations. As is clear in Little's afterword to this volume, he believes that bracketing out his first-order theological assumptions made this dialogue possible. But how can we be sure that this is the case? Perhaps other intellectual and moral virtues allowed this dialogue to flourish, and perhaps Little's virtues would have made such a dialogue possible, even had he been more open about his theological assumptions all along the way. It's hard to know for sure. But in light of the difficulties involved in bracketing out first-order theological assumptions, perhaps the better option is to make one's assumptions explicit while remaining willing to change one's mind when given compelling reasons to do so. That, it seems to me, is what it means to be reasonable—and this is compatible with holding theological beliefs. [End Page 225]Joshua T. MauldinCenter of Theological InquiryCopyright © 2017 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Secular Government, Religious People by Ira C. Lupu and Robert W. TuttleJoshua T. MauldinSecular Government, Religious People Ira C. Lupu and Robert W. Tuttle grand rapids, mi: eerdmans, 2014. 279 pp. $25.00.In Secular Government, Religious People, Ira C. Lupu and Robert W. Tuttle provide a structuralist account of the Establishment Clause and suggest that their conception of the secular character of government resonates with the dominant strand of (...) First Amendment jurisprudence. On their view, the religion clauses are not only about the religious rights of persons; the Establishment Clause is primarily about the character of government itself. That character is secular, meaning that the government is “constitutionally disabled” from settling “ecclesiastical questions.” These include not only obviously theological questions about the nature of God or true religion but also seemingly more mundane matters such as “Who is fit to be a minister?” or “Which faction of a fractured religious congregation is closer to the beliefs of the congregation’s charter members?”The problem with judicial attempts to engage such questions became increasingly evident in the development of legal doctrine throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and one of the primary values of this book is its clear account of this history. One example is the “iconic” Supreme Court decision in the 1971 case of Lemon v. Kurtzman, which included an important rule against “excessive entanglement” between the state and religious groups, based on the Establishment Clause. For Lupu and Tuttle, this ruling is paradigmatic of their structuralist argument for nonestablishment. If the Establishment Clause requires that government be secular, then the government may not claim divine authority or establish a covenant with God or engage in acts of worship. The government may, nevertheless, acknowledge the religious character of its people; the religious freedom of the people is protected by the secular character of government in that a sphere of society is reserved for religious practice and thereby protected from governmental intrusion. While religious persons might actually prefer that government “interfere” in the religious sphere for various reasons, and might even view the government’s failure to do so as an assault on religious freedom, it is precisely the noninterference of government in religious matters that protects religious freedom.The book involves both a descriptive analysis of the development of American law and a normative argument for a particular legal philosophy. Tuttle and Lupu argue that it is best when government is secular, and they suggest that this is a basic assumption of mainstream American law, both in its origins and later [End Page 213] trajectory. Some will question the sharp distinction drawn between “government” and “people.” In a democratic society, is there a clear line between the people and the government as representative of the people’s will? Furthermore, one wonders whether the kind of American “civil religion” that Robert Bellah famously analyzed in the 1960s, and against which Tuttle and Lupu inveigh, is simply here to stay. American presidents continue to invoke God in public speeches, and many citizens believe that the United States itself is in a covenant with God. Tuttle and Lupu worry that any appeal to such a covenant leads to the “totalitarian” identification of political and divine authority. But the covenant with God could just as easily lead to a critique of political authority as to a reinforcement of it. As Abraham Lincoln declared in a legendary piece of American political theology, “The Almighty has his own purposes.” For Tuttle and Lupu, this kind of civil religion is both unconstitutional and bad public policy. But one wonders whether we could ever really eradicate it, and even if we could, whether it would be wise to do so.Joshua T. MauldinCenter of Theological InquiryCopyright © 2016 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

(2012). A Review of “Lowering Higher Education: The Rise of Corporate Universities and the Fall of Liberal Education”. Educational Studies: Vol. 48, No. 5, pp. 485-489.

Most cognitive psychology experiments evaluate models of human cognition using a relatively small, well-controlled set of stimuli. This approach stands in contrast to current work in neuroscience, perception, and computer vision, which have begun to focus on using large databases of natural images. We argue that natural images provide a powerful tool for characterizing the statistical environment in which people operate, for better evaluating psychological theories, and for bringing the insights of cognitive science closer to real applications. We discuss how (...) some of the challenges of using natural images as stimuli in experiments can be addressed through increased sample sizes, using representations from computer vision, and developing new experimental methods. Finally, we illustrate these points by summarizing recent work using large image databases to explore questions about human cognition in four different domains: modeling subjective randomness, defining a quantitative measure of representativeness, identifying prior knowledge used in word learning, and determining the structure of natural categories. (shrink)

Deborah is a thirty-three-year-old who presented to labor and delivery at thirty-seven weeks gestation with complaints of contractions. Upon arrival, she explained that her fetus, Nathan, had been diagnosed with a “lethal” condition by her primary obstetrician. At twenty-two weeks gestation, an amniocentesis confirmed trisomy 13, a chromosomal abnormality leading to miscarriage or stillbirth in nearly one-half of affected pregnancies. During the admission process, Deborah voices the worry that due to Nathan's brain and heart structure, vaginal delivery could be traumatic (...) and cause him to suffer. Deborah wishes for him to have as painless and as dignified a death as possible; cesarean section, she feels, will achieve this. Yet with her history of three prior vaginal deliveries, normally progressing labor, and poor fetal prognosis that is unlikely to improve with cesarean delivery, there is no maternal or fetal indication for a cesarean section. Should the obstetrician proceed with a cesarean delivery despite knowing that it would expose the mother to surgical risks with little or no corresponding fetal or neonatal benefit? (shrink)

Would we lie to ourselves? We don't need to. Rather than a single self equipped with a few bivariate processes, the mind is composed of a dissociated aggregation of subselves processing qualitatively different information relevant to different adaptive problems. Each subself selectively processes the information coming in to the brain as well as information previously stored in the brain.

Drawing on the influence of primacy and recency effects in processing information about corporate social responsibility, the authors examine how internal and external factors impact the consumer-firm relationship in the presence of contradictory CSR information. Evaluating these factors provides a more comprehensive understanding of how consumers react to unethical and socially irresponsible actions. Contrary to recent research that suggests a reactive CSR communication strategy to be best due to recency effects, the present findings show that past customer experiences with the (...) firm facilitate a ‘primacy effect’. Thus, when corporate social irresponsibility occurs, a customer’s prior experiences mitigate negative consequences. Conversely, a firm’s positive CSR reputation may provide goodwill, although it does not guarantee that consumers will process CSR information differently. Therefore, firms cannot build a strong CSR reputation and expect to be immune from the consequences of CSI. Given these new findings of how consumers process contradictory CSR information, firms should implement a strategic and deliberate communication plan that delivers different messages to different stakeholders. Specifically, these findings suggest that firms benefit most from a proactive communication strategy with their current customers and a reactive communication strategy with the general public. (shrink)

Documenting capacity assessments and identifying substitute decisionmakers in healthcare facilities is ethically required for optimal patient care. Lack of such documentation has the potential to generate confusion and contention among patients, their family members, and members of the healthcare team. An overview of our research at the Ottawa Hospital and issues that influence the consistency of documentation in the Canadian context are presented here, as well as ideas for the mitigation of these issues and ways to encourage better documentation.

The doctrine of the resurrection says that God will resurrect the body that lived and died on earth—that the post-mortem body will be numerically identical to the pre-mortem body. After exegetically supporting this claim, and defending it from a recent objection, we ask: supposing that the doctrine of the resurrection is true, what are the implications for the mind-body relation? Why would God resurrect the body that lived and died on earth? We compare three accounts of the mind-body relation that (...) have been applied to the doctrine of the resurrection: substance dualism, constitutionalism, and animalism. We argue that animalism offers a superior explanation for the necessity of the resurrection: since human persons just are their bodies, life after death requires resurrection of one’s body. We conclude that those endorsing the doctrine of the resurrection should be animalists. (shrink)

Evolutionary models of behavior often encounter resistance due to an apparent focus on themes of sex, selfishness, and gender differences. The target article might seem ripe for such criticism. However, life history theory suggests that these themes, and their counterparts, including cooperation, generosity, and gender similarities, represent two sides of the same coin – all are consequences of reproductive trade-offs made throughout development.

Universities are expected to be places where knowledge is shared freely among academicians. However, the reality shows that knowledge sharing is barely present within universities these days. As Malaysia shifts towards building a knowledge-based society, academic institutions, particularly the public universities, now face ever-growing faculty demands for sharing quality resources and expertise. As a result, knowledge sharing in academia has become a rising concern. The purpose of this study, then, is to uncover the factors that propel knowledge sharing among academicians (...) in higher learning institutions of Malaysia. Using the Theory of Reasoned Action as the basis for this study’s research framework, data was gathered from 447 academicians in 10 public universities scattered throughout the country. Findings from the Partial Least Squares analysis revealed that extrinsic motivation, reciprocal relationships, sense of self-worth and subjective norm are vital determinants of an academician’s attitude towards knowledge sharing. In turn, this attitude that is formed will largely determine whether the academician engages in knowledge sharing behaviors or not. Besides having a positive effect on attitude, sense of self-worth also exhibited a positive impact on the subjective norm to share knowledge. Consequently, this subjective norm will have an impact upon knowledge sharing behavior. In addition, perceived behavioral control and organizational climate were discovered to have a direct influence on knowledge sharing behaviors. Implications, limitations as well as suggestions for future research are accordingly discussed in this paper. (shrink)

By introducing the concept of “mental data,” Palermos (2023) highlights an underappreciated aspect of data ethics that policymakers would do well to heed. Sweeping artificial intelligence (AI) legi...

Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms represents a bold examination of previous feminist criticisms of Fanon and argues that Fanon's writings on women and resistance provide the formative kernels of a liberating praxis for women existing under colonial and neocolonial oppression. Sharpley-Whiting skillfully brings together approaches from a broad range of academic fields, including critical race theory, literary and cultural criticism, and psychoanalysis as she assesses the relevance of Fanon's theories of oppression to a feminist politics of resistance.

My conversion into a knower has been a long and winding road. From childhood reverie to the years of formal schooling, education has never ceased to lure me into its magical power. How do we really get to know/see/learn whatever happens on our educational journey? In this paper, I will re‐trace my quest for knowledge that reaches beyond the boundaries of traditional epistemology. My wonderings will take me to explore, via Jung, the possibilities of imaginative education through Gnosis and Sophia. (...) The paper intends to weave together several Jungian discourses with their versions by other thinkers who have contributed to the fields of depth psychology, esotericism, and educational philosophy. (shrink)

If philosophical moral reflection tends to promote moral behavior, one might think that professional ethicists would behave morally better than do socially comparable non-ethicists. We examined three types of courteous and discourteous behavior at American Philosophical Association conferences: talking audibly while the speaker is talking (versus remaining silent), allowing the door to slam shut while entering or exiting mid-session (versus attempting to close the door quietly), and leaving behind clutter at the end of a session (versus leaving one's seat tidy). (...) By these three measures, audiences in ethics sessions did not appear to behave any more courteously than did audiences in non-ethics sessions. However, audiences in environmental ethics sessions did appear to leave behind less trash. (shrink)