Examines the influence of the physical and biological sciences on society, ethics, and philosophy during the twentieth century.

This paper compares the incidence of the diagnosis of Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASD) among White and Asian children with reference to data obtained from thirteen local education authorities (LEAs) in England. It begins by outlining some of the theoretical debates associated with the definition, diagnosis and prevalence of ASD. The empirical component underpinning this work uses logistic modelling to ascertain whether the proportion of children with a statement of special educational need (SEN) for ASD is different for Asian and for (...) White children and whether the proportion of children with a statement of SEN for ASD varies between LEAs. The discussion speculates as to possible reasons for the differences found and identifies areas for further research. (shrink)

Yoga is thousands of years old, but because of its current popularity, some people wrongly dismiss it as just another exercise fad made fashionable by celebrities. In fact, as author Kathy Phillips demonstrates in this large, beautifully illustrated book, yoga is a gentle but powerful means of achieving strength, flexibility, serenity, and a healthy balance between body and mind. Originating on the Indian subcontinent at the dawn of civilization, yoga is now accepted worldwide as an effective way to deal (...) with physical and emotional stress. The Spirit of Yoga is a sensible introduction for beginners, and a source of inspiration for current practitioners who would like to learn more. It explains differences among the various yoga disciplines, enabling readers to make a considered choice that best fits their needs. The author uses her experience as a yoga teacher to describe exercises and postures-also shown in color photos-that can promote physical health and body flexibility while inducing emotional tranquility. Yoga positions are suggested as effective remedies for physical ailments and for discomforts produced by everyday stress. The author's witty approach to her subject demystifies today's yoga hype while offering readers sound guidance and emphasizing the entirely real benefits they can derive from this honorable discipline. The book's foreword is by the international fashion model Christy Turlington. Hundreds of color photos and illustrations. (shrink)

Many philosophical discussions of the narrative self touch upon the end of life. End-related terms and concepts that occur in these discussions include finitude, completion, closure, telos, retroactive meaning-conferral, life shape, and a closed beginning-middle-and-end structure. Those who emphasise life’s end in non-philosophical narrative contexts are perhaps clearer on its significance. The end is thought to play a key role in the story of a life, securing or enhancing the life narrative’s meaning or value, and thereby warranting special treatment and (...) attention. Call this thought ‘the special-ends hypothesis’. In this paper, I test the applicability of the special-ends hypothesis within philosophical narrativist accounts of the self. I examine narrativist claims pertaining to the end of life, taking seriously the specific terms they deploy, and considering the contexts in which they occur. Superficially it seems that narrativists endorse the special-ends hypothesis, overtly or by implication. But as perspective is gained on the broader theoretical context in which the concepts are situated, this apparent support diminishes. Ultimately, for most narrativists, the end of life has no special role to play in securing or enhancing the meaning or value of life as a whole. (shrink)

This article discusses two views associated with narrative conceptions of the self. The first view asserts that our whole life is reasonably regarded as a single unit of meaning. A prominent strand of the philosophical narrative account of the self is the representative of this view. The second view—which has currency beyond the confines of the philosophical narrative account—is that the meaning of a life story is dependent on what happens at the end of it. The article argues that the (...) connection between these two views is more tentative than often supposed: philosophical narrativists that see life as a single unit of value and meaning nonetheless provide grounds for arguing that the end of life is not the best and may be a particularly bad time to approach and intervene in the matter of how well one's life as a whole has gone. (shrink)

We write as Australian youth work educators. We consider some of the ethical challenges involved in teaching youth work ‘in a warm climate’, situated in the diaspora of English youth work but where youth work also has a uniquely Australian character, placing us in an ethically liminal space in our teaching between an understanding of youth work that is robustly defended as being both ‘good’ and ‘true’, and what we do, which is different from this, and has its own character (...) and strengths. We situate this in the policy history of youth work in Australia, particularly in the ‘neoliberal turn’ that this has taken in the last four decades which has created ethical challenges for us, just as it has for those elsewhere. Two guiding questions shape this paper. The first is, given our differences, what challenges do we face in maintaining connections with ‘good’ youth work and its value base as traditionally defined and defended in England, and relatedly, given that policy and funding regimes in the UK seem to be aligning more with an Australian model, is there anything that the youth work community in the UK can learn from the Australian experience? (shrink)

This provocative work provides a radical reassessment of the emergence and nature of Christian sexual morality, the dominant moral paradigm in Western society since late antiquity. While many scholars, including Michel Foucault, have found the basis of early Christian sexual restrictions in Greek ethics and political philosophy, Kathy L. Gaca demonstrates on compelling new grounds that it is misguided to regard Greek ethics and political theory—with their proposed reforms of eroticism, the family, and civic order—as the foundation of Christian (...) sexual austerity. Rather, in this thoroughly informed and wide-ranging study, Gaca shows that early Christian goals to eradicate fornication were derived from the sexual rules and poetic norms of the Septuagint, or Greek Bible, and that early Christian writers adapted these rules and norms in ways that reveal fascinating insights into the distinctive and largely non-philosophical character of Christian sexual morality. Writing with an authoritative command of both Greek philosophy and early Christian writings, Gaca investigates Plato, the Stoics, the Pythagoreans, Philo of Alexandria, the apostle Paul, and the patristic Christians Clement of Alexandria, Tatian, and Epiphanes, freshly elucidating their ideas on sexual reform with precision, depth, and originality. Early Christian writers, she demonstrates, transformed all that they borrowed from Greek ethics and political philosophy to launch innovative programs against fornication that were inimical to Greek cultural mores, popular and philosophical alike. The Septuagint's mandate to worship the Lord alone among all gods led to a Christian program to revolutionize Gentile sexual practices, only for early Christians to find this virtually impossible to carry out without going to extremes of sexual renunciation. Knowledgeable and wide-ranging, this work of intellectual history and ethics cogently demonstrates why early Christian sexual restrictions took such repressive ascetic forms, and casts sobering light on what Christian sexual morality has meant for religious pluralism in Western culture, especially among women as its bearers. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: ContentsIntroduction: A Change of Heart1. What's behind Animal Advocacy? -- 2. The Love of a Dog: Of Pets and Puppy Mills, Mixed-Breeds and Shelters -- 3. The Animal on Your Plate: Farmers, Vegans, and Locavores -- 4. Where the Wild Things Ought to Be: Sanctuaries, Zoos, and Exotic Pets -- 5. From Object to Subject: Animals in Scientific Research -- 6. Clothing Ourselves in Stories of Love: Affect and Animal AdvocacyConclusion: Trouble in the PackAcknowledgments -- Notes (...) -- Bibliography -- Index. (shrink)

This book presents the foundations of a liberal individualistic theory of rights, and explains what rights we have and do not have, why we have them, who is and who is not a holder of rights, and the place of rights within the overall structure of morality. The author argues for the moral importance of individual commitments to 'projects', and demonstrates the implications of this for a variety of problems and issues.

Educators on all levels will benefit from this book that is dedicated to the importance of learning reasoning skills concurrently with subject matter. Habits of the Mind, written by a thirty-year veteran in the field of education, is ultimately concerned with the total strengthening of education in America through the teaching of logical and critical thinking.

An examination of the development of the theory of evolution from the Renaissance to the twentieth century.

Despite what one may be led to believe by breathless reports in the media, the acme of misery in America is not the woes, financial and otherwise, of Donald Trump and Michael Jackson. People lose their jobs, have their assets drained by reversals of fortune, suffer from illiteracy, malnutrition, lack of shelter, and other mishaps. The circumstances in which they find themselves are genuinely distressing. It would be an odd understanding indeed that failed to find these circumstances directly relevant to (...) what morality asks of us. If morality is to count for anything, then surely it must take notice of exigent need. This is not merely the deliverance of a late twentieth-century Western moral consciousness massaged by the blessings of comparative affluence and graced with a newfound awareness of social justice. All traditional ethical codes of which I am aware, sacred and secular, demand that one take the distress of one's neighbor as bearing on one's own activities. “Am I my brother's keeper?” is the question; the well-nigh universal answer is “ Yes .” The disposition to be moved by and respond to distress is the virtue of charity. (shrink)

We examine the perceived importance of three organizational preconditions theorized to be critical for ethics program effectiveness. In addition, we examine the importance of ethical leadership and congruence between formal ethics codes and informal ethical norms in influencing employee perceptions. Participants from a large southern California government agency completed a survey on the perceived effectiveness of the organization’s ethics program. Results suggest that employee perceptions of organizational preconditions, ethical leadership and informal ethical norms were related to perceptions of ethics program (...) effectiveness. Based on these findings, organizations should evaluate the presence of essential preconditions and take steps to ensure that leaders model espoused organizational values to foster perceptions of effective ethics programs. (shrink)

The growth of autistic self-advocacy and the neurodiversity movement has brought about new ethical, theoretical and ideological debates within autism theory, research and practice. These debates have had genuine impact within some areas of autism research but their influence is less evident within early intervention research. In this paper, we argue that all autism intervention stakeholders need to understand and actively engage with the views of autistic people and with neurodiversity as a concept and movement. In so doing, intervention researchers (...) and practitioners are required to move away from a normative agenda and pay diligence to environmental goodness-of-fit, autistic developmental trajectories, internal drivers and experiences, and autistic prioritized intervention targets. Autism intervention researchers must respond to these debates by reframing effectiveness, developing tools to measure autistic prioritized outcomes, and forming partnerships with autistic people. There is a pressing need for increased reflection and articulation around how intervention practices align with a neurodiversity framework and greater emphasis within intervention programmes on natural developmental processes, coping strategies, autonomy, and well-being. (shrink)

In this eloquent book, Kathy Eden challenges commonly accepted conceptions about the history of hermeneutics. Contending that the hermeneutical tradition is not a purely modern German specialty, she argues instead that the historical grounding of modern hermeneutics is in the ancient tradition of rhetoric. Eden demonstrates how the early rhetorical model of reading, called interpretatio scripti by Cicero and his followers, not only has informed a continuous tradition of interpretation from Republican Rome to Reformation Europe but also has forged (...) such enduring hermeneutical principles as meaning, context, and literary economy. (shrink)

Fifth-century Athens is praised as the cradle of democracy and sometimes treated as a potential model for modern political theory or practice. In this daring reassessment of classical Athenian democracy and its significance for the United States today, Loren J. Samons provides ample justification for our founding fathers' distrust of democracy, a form of government they scorned precisely because of their familiarity with classical Athens. How Americans have come to embrace "democracy" in its modern form—and what the positive and (...) negative effects have been—is an important story for all contemporary citizens. Confronting head-on many of the beliefs we hold dear but seldom question, Samons examines Athens's history in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. in order to test the popular idea that majority rule leads to good government. Challenging many basic assumptions about the character and success of Athenian democracy, _What's Wrong with Democracy? _offers fascinating and accessible discussions of topics including the dangers of the popular vote, Athens's acquisitive foreign policy, the tendency of the state to overspend, the place of religion in Athenian society, and more. Sure to generate controversy, Samons's bold and iconoclastic book finds that democracy has begun to function like an unacknowledged religion in our culture, immune from criticism and dissent, and he asks that we remember the Athenian example and begin to question our uncritical worship of democratic values such as freedom, choice, and diversity. (shrink)

A theory of basic moral rights ought to aim at telling us who the beings are that have rights and of what those rights consist. It may, however, seek to achieve that goal via an indirect route. In this paper I shall attempt a strategy of indirection. The first stage of the argument is a consideration of why moral theory can allow any place at all to rights. Acknowledging rights can be inconvenient. An otherwise desirable outcome is blocked if the (...) only ways in which it can be attained involve the violation of rights. Why not jettison rights and thereby render these outcomes achievable? The answer that will be suggested trades on it being a deep fact about human beings that they can and do order their lives by reference to long-term commitments and aspirations. In my terminology, they are project pursuers. If people were rational animals all of whose interests were flickering and evanescent, an ethic entirely resting on maximization of impersonal value would be appropriate. But because projects entail commitments to values not subject to trade-offs, the introduction of rights is plausible. That is the first major stage of the argument. The second builds on it and tries to show that the recognition of rights or their equivalent is morally required, that only an ethic in which basic rights are acknowledged can be properly responsive to persons' status as project pursuers. More particularly, is suggested that rights take the form of constraints imposing minimal forbearance on others such that one has reasonable expectations of being able to pursue one's projects amidst a world of other project pursuers. (shrink)

Employee attributions and emotional reactions to unethical behavior of top leaders in an organization recently involved in a highly publicized ethics scandal were examined. Participants (n = 76) from a large southern California government agency completed an ethical climate assessment. Secondary data analysis was performed on the written commentary to an open-ended question seeking employees' perceptions of the ethical climate. Employees attributed the organization's poor ethical leadership to a number of causes, including: lack of moral reasoning, breaches of trust, hypocrisy, (...) and poor ethical behavior role modeling. Emotional reactions to corruption included cynicism, optimism, pessimism, paranoia and fear, and were targeted at top leaders, organizational practices (i.e., the old boy network, nepotism, and cronyism) and ethics interventions. Implications for leadership training and other organizational ethics interventions are discussed. (shrink)

The contemporary animal rights movement encompasses a wide range of sometimes-competing agendas from vegetarianism to animal liberation. For people for whom pets are family members—animal lovers outside the fray—extremist positions in which all human–animal interaction is suspect often discourage involvement in the movement to end cruelty to other beings. In _Loving Animals_, Kathy Rudy argues that in order to achieve such goals as ending animal testing and factory farming, activists need to be better attuned to the profound emotional, even (...) spiritual, attachment that many people have with the animals in their lives. Offering an alternative to both the acceptance of animal exploitation and radical animal liberation, Rudy shows that a deeper understanding of the nature of our feelings for and about animals can redefine the human–animal relationship in a positive way. Through extended interviews with people whose lives are intertwined with animals, analysis of the cultural representation of animals, and engaging personal accounts, she explores five realms in which humans use animals: as pets, for food, in entertainment, in scientific research, and for clothing. In each case she presents new methods of animal advocacy to reach a more balanced and sustainable relationship association built on reciprocity and connection. Using this intense emotional bond as her foundation, Rudy suggests that the nearly universal stories we tell of living with and loving animals will both broaden the support for animal advocacy and inspire the societal changes that will improve the lives of animals—and humans—everywhere. (shrink)

Hume's political economy and his contributions to monetary theory are usually regarded as a minor part of his philosophic output. This paper argues that Hume's monetary ideas can, in fact, be read back into his moral and epistemological concerns so as to give the institution of money a larger significance for Humean social thought. In particular, the possibility of an abstract and entirely fiduciary money, like Hume's notion of sympathy, promises to transcend the entropic logic of representation that otherwise enervates (...) Hume's utilitarian sensationalism. At the same time, Hume's stress upon money as a social convention highlights the importance of _money illusion, and of commercial virtue more generally, as nonrational underpinnings of the capitalist ethos. (edited). (shrink)

Erasmus' Adages, a vast collection of the proverbial wisdom of Greek and Roman antiquity, was published in 1508 and became one of the most influential works of the Renaissance. It also marked a turning point in the history of Western thinking about literary property. At once a singularly successful commercial product of the new printing industry and a repository of intellectual wealth, the Adages looks ahead to the development of copyright and back to an ancient philosophical tradition that ideas should (...) be universally shared in the spirit of friendship. In this elegant and tightly argued book, Kathy Eden focuses on both the commitment to friendship and common property that Erasmus shares with his favourite philosophers - Pythagoras, Plato, and Christ - and the early history of private property that gradually transforms European attitudes concerning the right to copy. In the process she accounts for the peculiar shape of Erasmus' collection of more than 3,000 proverbs and provides insightful readings of such ancient philosophical and religious thinkers as Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Iamblichus, Tertullian, Basil, Jerome, and Augustine. (shrink)

The financial Crunch of 2008 was easily explained by both the left and right–too easily. Each insisted that events thoroughly confirmed its own long-held views and utterly refuted those of the opposed camp. This essay argues that there are indeed new lessons to be drawn from the Crunch, lessons that involve balancing the bounty of the Invisible Hand against perils of the Prisoner's Dilemma. Liberal moral imperatives are traced to variables of Personal Choice and External Cost that are typically in (...) tension with each other and thus generate needs for institutional reconstructions that change according to time and circumstance. Personal bankruptcy protection, limited liability corporations, and intellectual property are cited as examples. It is argued that the Crunch occurred because of failure adequately to balance these variables. Three paradoxes came to a head in 2008: Paradox of Efficient Markets; Paradox of Reduced Risk; Paradox of Hard-won Knowledge. The essay concludes with suggestions concerning specific lessons to be drawn from the Crunch and a corresponding list of lessons not to be drawn. (shrink)

In antiquity the consensus gentium argument for God’s existence was believed to have merit (cf. Cicero, De Natura Deorum, Book II, sect.2,4), but has been considered blatantly fallacious during more recent times. In this article Bayes’ Theorem is applied to show that the argument is in fact a valid inductive argument. A two hypothesis and a four hypothesis version of the argument are analyzed. Perusal of available statistical evidence suggests that when better worldwide opinion polling data becomes available it will (...) turn out to be sound as well. (shrink)

As customer return rates increase, retailer bottom lines suffer from customers’ misuse of the policies and to the ethics of such practice. The purpose of this study is to explore customers’ orientation toward return behaviors, and to develop a return orientation assessing these dimensions. This research identified three dimensions relevant to consumer return behavior: the planned/unethical returner; the eager returner; and the reluctant/educated returner. A retest with another sample confirmed these three dimensions. Each dimension was analyzed for its relationship with (...) consumer ethical beliefs as measured by the Muncy–Vitell Consumer Ethics Scale, ethical philosophies and shopping behaviors. These relationships supported the ethical and unethical aspects of returner orientation. Results of this research imply that the core aspect of returner orientation is relevant to ethical behavior and misuse of retail return policies. The three return orientations identified partially support the Rosenbaum & Bitner-Olson research. (shrink)

As customer return rates increase, retailer bottom lines suffer from customers’ misuse of the policies and to the ethics of such practice. The purpose of this study is to explore customers’ orientation toward return behaviors, and to develop a return orientation assessing these dimensions. This research identified three dimensions relevant to consumer return behavior: the planned/unethical returner; the eager returner; and the reluctant/educated returner. A retest with another sample confirmed these three dimensions. Each dimension was analyzed for its relationship with (...) consumer ethical beliefs as measured by the Muncy–Vitell Consumer Ethics Scale, ethical philosophies and shopping behaviors. These relationships supported the ethical and unethical aspects of returner orientation. Results of this research imply that the core aspect of returner orientation is relevant to ethical behavior and misuse of retail return policies. The three return orientations identified partially support the Rosenbaum & Bitner‐Olson research. (shrink)

Following Rawls, many political liberals hold reasonableness in high regard. Reasonable citizens can disagree, however, and some may find their arguments routinely ignored in elections and legislatures. Should we be troubled by such failures of institutional responsiveness as a matter of justice? The author argues that the expectation of such failures would lead parties in an original position to favor certain classes of institutions over others: A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism together suggest a particular federal structure to a (...) republic of reasons. (shrink)

abstract Why do we routinely betray moral commitments that, in some sense, we authentically embrace? One explanation involves inattention: failure to attend to morally important aspects of our lives. Inattention ranges from an unmotivated lack of focus, or “simple” inattention, to more purposeful and wilful self‐deception. Self‐deception has received exhaustive and insightful treatment by philosophers and psychologists; what remains unexamined is the less complex, but more pervasive phenomenon of simple inattention. Since inattention is at least equally important in accounting for (...) our routine moral failures, this gap is an important one to fill. In this essay I examine moral dimensions of inattention: what makes it problematic, what vices it reflects, what duties we have to overcome it, and how we might try to do that. I argue that inattention obscures responsibilities to prevent harm, erodes autonomy, manifests a lack of virtue, and undermines integrity. For these reasons, we have obligations of attentiveness. I propose that we should attend (at least) to apparent violations of our moral values in which we are personally implicated, which we have power to affect, and to which we have been directed by clues that something is amiss. I end with practical suggestions for enhancing our attentiveness. (shrink)

"This book does serve a very useful purpose in returning power to the centre of the feminist stage. . . . This book makes clear the ways in which the machinations of power are more subtle, widespread, and multiform than it sometimes appears. Further, the clarity of presentation means that it is also a text that can usefully be included on student bibliographies." --Women's Philosophy Review "The Gender of Power, which announces itself in the first line of its Preface as (...) a scholarly treatment of the 'battle of the sexes,' is a fine contribution to this promising dialogue of understanding." --The Journal of Men's Studies "This well-edited book addresses the problem of gender in theories of power directly, incisively, and succinctly. It is as joyfully free of jargon and prolixity, as it is of dogma and flag-waving.". (shrink)

Fifth-century Athens is praised as the cradle of democracy and sometimes treated as a potential model for modern political theory or practice. In this daring reassessment of classical Athenian democracy and its significance for the United States today, Loren J. Samons provides ample justification for our founding fathers' distrust of democracy, a form of government they scorned precisely because of their familiarity with classical Athens. How Americans have come to embrace "democracy" in its modern form—and what the positive and (...) negative effects have been—is an important story for all contemporary citizens. Confronting head-on many of the beliefs we hold dear but seldom question, Samons examines Athens's history in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. in order to test the popular idea that majority rule leads to good government. Challenging many basic assumptions about the character and success of Athenian democracy, _What's Wrong with Democracy? _offers fascinating and accessible discussions of topics including the dangers of the popular vote, Athens's acquisitive foreign policy, the tendency of the state to overspend, the place of religion in Athenian society, and more. Sure to generate controversy, Samons's bold and iconoclastic book finds that democracy has begun to function like an unacknowledged religion in our culture, immune from criticism and dissent, and he asks that we remember the Athenian example and begin to question our uncritical worship of democratic values such as freedom, choice, and diversity. (shrink)

There is a fear of death that persistently eludes adequate explanation by contemporary philosophers of death. The reason for this is their focus on mortal harm issues, such as why death is bad for the person who dies. Claims regarding the fear of death are assumed to be contingent on the resolution of questions about the badness of death. In practice, however, consensus on some mortal harm issues has not resulted in comparable clarity on mortal fear. I contend we cannot (...) do justice to fear of death unless we detach it from theories about the badness of death, including the overwhelmingly-popular deprivation theory. The case for this involves disambiguation of certain aspects of mortal harm, a broad conception of what is involved in accounting for an emotion, and close attention to the nature of the fear in question. The source of fear of death is our departure from a context in which self-directed emotions have coherent application; our attitudes become ‘unmoored,’ in Samuel Scheffler’s phrase. While this does not result in a fear that is sui generis, it does demand that we remove the object of fear from the realm of well-being in order to make sense of it. (shrink)

This book focuses on the significance of the body in contemporary feminist scholarship. Whether the body is treated as biological bedrock or subversive metaphor, it is implicated in the cultural and historical construction of sexual difference as well as asymmetrical power relations. The contributors to this volume examine the role of the body as socially shaped and historically colonized territory and as the focus of individual womenÆs struggles for autonomy and self-determination. They also analyze its centrality to the feminist critique (...) of male-stream science as dualistic, distanced, and decontextualized. While the body has become a "hot item" in contemporary social theory and research, the renewed interest has received a mixed reaction from feminists. The body may be back, but the "new" body theory often proves to be just as disembodied as it ever was. The body revival seems to be less an attempt to re-embody masculinist science than just another expression of the same condition that evoked the feminist critique in the first place: a flight from femininity and everything that is associated with it in Western culture. Drawing on insights from contemporary feminist theories of gender and power, this book offers a timely critical appraisal of the recent "body revival." Embodied Practices not only sets an agenda for research about the body, but for an embodied perspective on the body as well. It will be a valuable and thought-provoking resource for students of womenÆs studies, social theory, cultural studies, and medical sociology. (shrink)

This article contributes to the development of a professional responsibility theory of public relations ethics. Toward that end, we examine the roles of a public relations practitioner as a professional, an institutional advocate, and the public conscience of institutions served. In the article, we review previously suggested theories of public relations ethics and propose a new theory based on the public relations professional's dual obligations to serve client organizations and the public interest.

What remains as an ongoing project, Weeks contends, is creating a theory of the constitution of subjects to account for the processes of social construction. This book presents one such account.