The dignity of human embryos. On the moral relevance of potentiality and numerical identity. -.

ZusammenfassungDie öffentliche Wahrnehmung der Forschung mit extrakorporalen Embryonen bildet den Kern des vorliegenden Beitrags. Hierzu wurden über 400 Personen schriftlich befragt. Die Art der Embryonengewinnung (künstliche Erzeugung vs. überzählige Embryonen) wird als bedeutsam für die Bewertung der Forschung angesehen. Mehrheitlich besteht der Wunsch nach rechtlich klaren Grenzen. Die größte Ambivalenz zeigt sich hinsichtlich der Frage nach einer gesetzlichen Erlaubnis der Embryonenforschung. Umgekehrt hat die Bevölkerung eine eindeutigere Meinung zum Verbot von Embryonenforschung und zur Einführung strikter rechtlicher Regelungen. Die (...) Wahl der Mittelkategorie bei der Untersuchung der Einstellung ist durch das Ausmaß der Ambivalenz mitbestimmt. Es konnte nachgewiesen werden, dass Laien das Dilemma der Embryonenforschung ähnlich bewerten wie Experten. Der Wunsch nach einer Freigabe der Forschung mit Embryonen besteht bei einer Teilgruppe, jedoch ist dieser Wunsch von einem hohen Ausmaß an Ambivalenz begleitet. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungDie öffentliche Wahrnehmung der Forschung mit extrakorporalen Embryonen bildet den Kern des vorliegenden Beitrags. Hierzu wurden über 400 Personen schriftlich befragt. Die Art der Embryonengewinnung (künstliche Erzeugung vs. überzählige Embryonen) wird als bedeutsam für die Bewertung der Forschung angesehen. Mehrheitlich besteht der Wunsch nach rechtlich klaren Grenzen. Die größte Ambivalenz zeigt sich hinsichtlich der Frage nach einer gesetzlichen Erlaubnis der Embryonenforschung. Umgekehrt hat die Bevölkerung eine eindeutigere Meinung zum Verbot von Embryonenforschung und zur Einführung strikter rechtlicher Regelungen. Die (...) Wahl der Mittelkategorie bei der Untersuchung der Einstellung ist durch das Ausmaß der Ambivalenz mitbestimmt. Es konnte nachgewiesen werden, dass Laien das Dilemma der Embryonenforschung ähnlich bewerten wie Experten. Der Wunsch nach einer Freigabe der Forschung mit Embryonen besteht bei einer Teilgruppe, jedoch ist dieser Wunsch von einem hohen Ausmaß an Ambivalenz begleitet. (shrink)

Würdeschutz und Lebensschutz werden insbesondere in der angewandten Ethik regelmäßig als fundamentale Beurteilungsprinzipien herangezogen. Das genaue Verhältnis dieser beiden normativen Aspekte erweist sich allerdings als unsicher: Oftmals scheinen Würdeverletzungen gerade in einer unberechtigten Beeinträchtigung von anderen Rechtsgütern wie Leben oder Gesundheit, auch Eigentum oder Ansehen zu bestehen. Darüber hinaus aber mag es Würdeverletzungen geben, die sich nicht auf eine verfehlte Missachtung solcher anderweitiger Rechtsbelange herunterbrechen lassen, sondern eigenständige Formen der Demütigung und Erniedrigung, der Ausnutzung und Verwendung bezeichnen. Der vorliegende Beitrag (...) geht dieser Frage namentlich mit Blick auf die Forschung an Menschen, an Tieren und an Embryonen nach. Dabei liefert eine bestimmte Fallkonstellation in der Debatte um die Embryonenforschung einen starken Beleg dafür, dass Würde in der Tat zuweilen einen originären Schutzbereich markiert, der unabhängig von Fragen des Umgangs mit Leben oder sonstigen elementareren Rechtsgütern ist. (shrink)

Das Potenzialitätsargument (PA) ist das wohl wichtigste Argument der Gegner der verbrauchenden Embryonenforschung und des Schwangerschaftsabbruchs. Weil schon der frühe Embryo eine potenzielle Person sei, so das Argument, besitze er bereits den moralischen Status einer Person. Mit der Möglichkeit, aus differenzierten somatischen Zellen „ethisch unproblematische“ induzierte pluripotente Stammzellen (iPS-Zellen) zu gewinnen, schien diese PA-Problematik zumindest für die Forschung umgangen. Indessen zeigen neuere wissenschaftliche Erkenntnisse, dass auch aus pluripotenten Zellen neue Organismen erwachsen können. Der Beitrag argumentiert dafür, dass nach der Logik (...) von PA nicht nur iPS-Zellen, sondern auch die somatischen Zellen, aus denen diese entstehen, als potenzielle Personen mit Würde und Lebensrecht anzusehen wären. Aufgrund dieser Implikationen ist PA auch nicht als Argument für ein Lebensrecht von Embryonen geeignet. (shrink)

I Two Traditions. Scientific inquiry, seen in a very broad perspective, may be said to present two main aspects. One is the ascertaining and discovery of ...

Achievements have recently begun to attract increased attention from value theorists. One recurring idea in this budding literature is that one important factor determining the magnitude or value of an achievement is the amount of effort the achiever invested. The aim of this paper is to present the most plausible version of this idea. This advances the current state of debate where authors are invoking substantially different notions of effort and are thus talking past each other. While the concept of (...) effort has been invoked in the philosophical analysis of a number of important concepts such as desert, attention, competence, and distributive justice, it has hardly ever been analyzed itself. This paper makes headway in this regard by discussing three ambiguities in the everyday notion of effort. It continues to develop two accounts of effort and shows how both of them are achievement-enhancing. (shrink)

Keine ausführliche Beschreibung für "Die Überwindung des mathematischen Erkenntnisideals" verfügbar.

Collective emotions are at the heart of any society and become evident in gatherings, crowds, or responses to widely salient events. However, they remain poorly understood and conceptualized in scientific terms. Here, we provide first steps towards a theory of collective emotions. We first review accounts of the social and cultural embeddedness of emotion that contribute to understanding collective emotions from three broad perspectives: face-to-face encounters, culture and shared knowledge, and identification with a social collective. In discussing their strengths and (...) shortcomings and highlighting areas of conceptual overlap, we translate these views into a number of bottom–up mechanisms that explain collective emotion elicitation on the levels of social cognition, expressive behavior, and social practices. (shrink)

This paper critically assesses existing accounts of the nature of difficulty, finds them wanting, and proposes a new account. The concept of difficulty is routinely invoked in debates regarding degrees of moral responsibility, and the value of achievement. Until recently, however, there has not been any sustained attempt to provide an account of the nature of difficulty itself. This has changed with Gwen Bradford’s Achievement, which argues that difficulty is a matter of how much intense effort is expended. But while (...) this account captures something important about the relationship between difficulty and achievement, it fails to account for the fact that part of what makes achievements great is that they are difficult in a moderately agent-neutral kind of way. Nor is this thought captured by any other extant account. I argue that to fill this gap we should think of difficulty in terms of low probability of success. (shrink)

Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) reflects an innovation paradigm that acknowledges that market innovations do not automatically deliver on socially desirable objectives, and requires a broad governance of knowledge coalitions of governmental bodies as well as industrial and societal actors to address market deficits. Responsible Innovation should be understood as a new paradigm for innovation which requires institutional changes in the research and innovation system and the public governance of the economy. It also requires the institutionalisation of an ethics of (...) co-responsibility as well as the introduction of new standards and certification processes for products. Dr. Dr. phil. von Schomberg will introduce Responsible Innovation against the background of 6 deficits of the (global) research and innovation system. (shrink)

IN 1959 and 1960 I gave the Gifford Lectures in the University of St. Andrews. The lectures were called 'Norms and Values, an Inquiry into the Conceptual Foundations of Morals and Legislation'. The present work is substantially the same as the content of the second series of lectures, then advertised under the not very adequate title 'Values'. It is my plan to publish a revised version of the content of the first series of lectures, called 'Norms', as a separate book. (...) The two works will be independent of one another. (shrink)

way on the information available in the contexts in which they are used, it’s not surprising that there is a minor but growing industry of work in semantics and the philosophy of language concerned with the precise nature of the context-dependency of epistemically modalized sentences. Take, for instance, an epistemic might-claim like..

In the recent literature on all things metaontological, discussion of a notorious Meinongian doctrine—the thesis that some objects have no kind of being at all—has been conspicuous by its absence. And this is despite the fact that this thesis is the central element of the noneist metaphysics of Richard Routley (1980) and Graham Priest (2005). In this paper, we therefore examine the metaontological foundations of noneism, with a view to seeing exactly how the noneist's approach to ontological inquiry differs from (...) the orthodox Quinean one. We proceed by arguing that the core anti-Quinean element in noneism has routinely been misidentified: rather than concerning Quine's thesis that to be is to be the value of a variable, the real difference is that the noneist rejects what we identify as Quine's “translate-and-deflate” methodology. In rejecting this aspect of Quinean orthodoxy, the noneist is in good company: many of those who think that questions of fundamentality should be the proper focus of ontological inquiry can be read as rejecting it too. Accordingly, we then examine the differences between the noneist's conception of ontology and that offered by the fundamentalist. We argue that these two anti-Quinean approaches differ in terms of their respective conceptions of the theoretical role associated with the notion of being. And the contrast that emerges between them is, in the end, an explanatory one. (shrink)

According to the Market Failures Approach to business ethics, beyond-compliance duties can be derived by employing the same rationale and arguments that justify state regulation of economic conduct. Very roughly the idea is that managers have a duty to behave as if they were complying with an ideal regulatory regime ensuring Pareto-optimal market outcomes. Proponents of the approach argue that managers have a professional duty not to undermine the institutional setting that defines their role, namely the competitive market. This answer (...) is inadequate, however, for it is the hierarchical firm, rather than the competitive market, that defines the role of corporate managers and shapes their professional obligations. Thus, if the obligations that the market failures approach generates are to apply to managers, they must do so in an indirect way. I suggest that the obligations the market failures approach generates directly apply to shareholders. Managers, in turn, inherit these obligations as part of their duties as loyal agents. (shrink)

Like Hayek, Mises moved beyond economics in his later years to address questions regarding the foundation of all social science. But unlike Hayeks attempts, Misess writings on these matters have received less attention than they deserve. Theory and Histor, writes Rothbard in his introduction, "remains by far the most neglected masterwork of Mises. Here Mises defends his all-important idea of methodological dualism: one approach to the hard sciences and another for the social sciences. He defends the epistemological status of economic (...) proposition. He has his most extended analysis of those who want to claim that there is more than one logical structure by which we think about reality. He grapples with the problem of determinism and free will. And presents philosophy of history and historical research. Overall, this is a tremendously lucid defense of the fundamental Misesian approach to social philosophy. "It is Misess great methodological work, explaining the basis of his approach to economics, and providing scintillating critiques of such fallacious alternatives as historicism, scientism, and Marxian dialectical materialism. Austrian economics will never enjoy a genuine renaissance until economists read and absorb the vital lessons of this unfortunately neglected work." Theory and History should be required for any student of 20th century ideas. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAchievements are among the things that make a life good. Assessing the plausibility of this intuitive claim requires an account of the nature of achievements. One necessary condition for achievement appears to be that the achieving agent acted competently, i.e. was not just lucky. I begin by critically assessing existing accounts of anti-luck conditions for achievements in both the ethics and epistemology literature. My own proposal is that a goal is reached competently, only if the actions of the would-be-achiever make (...) success likely, and that this is the reason why she acts that way. (shrink)

It is widely held that our beliefs can be epistemically faultless despite being morally flawed. Theories of moral encroachment challenge this, holding that moral considerations bear on the epistemic status of our attitudes. According to attitude-based theories of moral encroachment, morality encroaches upon the epistemic standing of our attitudes on the grounds that we can morally injure others with our epistemic practices. In this paper, I aim to show that current attitude-based theories have asymmetric mechanisms: moral features only make it (...) harder for attitudes to secure epistemic merits. I argue that, if attitudes can incur moral injury, failure to form attitudes can too. To make sense of this, I contend, attitude-based accounts require symmetric mechanisms, allowing that moral considerations make it both harder and easier for attitudes to attain epistemic merits. I maintain that, once we recognize this, attitude-based encroachment views must soon concede that they sometimes demand we believe against the evidence. (shrink)

This paper responds to the Radical Behavioral Challenge to normative business ethics. According to RBC, recent research on bounded ethicality shows that it is psychologically impossible for people to follow the prescriptions of normative business ethics. Thus, said prescriptions run afoul of the principle that nobody has an obligation to do something that they cannot do. I show that the only explicit response to this challenge in the business ethics literature is flawed because it limits normative business ethics to condemning (...) practitioners’ behavior without providing usable suggestions for how to do better. I argue that a more satisfying response is to, first, recognize that most obligations in business are wide-scope which, second, implies that there are multiple ways of fulfilling them. This provides a solid theoretical grounding for the increasingly popular view that we have obligations to erect institutional safeguards when bounded ethicality is likely to interfere with our ability to do what is right. I conclude with examples of such safeguards and some advice on how to use the research findings on bounded ethicality in designing ethical business organizations. (shrink)

Dietrich von Hildebrand, widely regarded as one of the great Catholic philosophers of the 20th century, is well-known for his numerous books, but, until this present work, not much has been known of his remarkable and inspiring life. Written by his wife, Alice, also a highly respected Catholic thinker, this is a fascinating, moving and, at times, gripping account of a truly great man of the Church who suffered much for the faith. Based on a very long "letter" Dietrich wrote (...) to his wife late in his life, it tells his story from his glorious youth with a unique intellectual and cultural formation, his coversion to Catholisism, his great passion for truth and beauty, his extensive writing on Christian philosophy and theology, and his steadfast, determined opposition to Nazism that made him a marked man who miraculously escaped execution. A powerful biography of a relentless fighter against injustice, a devoted son of the Church, a man who had the "soul of a lion". Illustrated. (shrink)

Hermann von Helmholtz was a leading figure of nineteenth-century European intellectual life, remarkable even among the many scientists of the period for the range and depth of his interests. A pioneer of physiology and physics, he was also deeply concerned with the implications of science for philosophy and culture. From the 1850s to the 1890s, Helmholtz delivered more than two dozen popular lectures, seeking to educate the public and to enlighten the leaders of European society and governments about the potential (...) benefits of science and technology to a developing modern society. David Cahan has selected fifteen of these lectures, which reflect the wide range of topics of crucial importance to Helmholtz and his audiences. Among the subjects discussed are the origins of the planetary system, the relation of natural science to science in general, the aims and progress of the physical sciences, the problems of perception, and academic freedom in German universities. This collection also includes Helmholtz's fascinating lectures on the relation of optics to painting and the physiological causes of harmony in music, which provide insight into the relations between science and aesthetics. Science and Culture makes available again Helmholtz's eloquent arguments on the usefulness, benefits, and, intellectual pleasures of understanding the natural world. With Cahan's Introduction to set these essays in their broader context, this collection makes an important contribution to the philosophical and intellectual history of Europe at a time when science played an increasingly significant role in social, economic, and cultural life. (shrink)

We argue that dominant research approaches concerning mental illness, which are centered on traditional categories of psychiatric classification as codified in the DSM-IV, have serious empirical, conceptual, and foundational problems. These problems have led to a classification scheme and body of research findings that provide a very poor map of the domain of mental illness, a map that, in turn, undermines clinical and research pursuits. We discuss some current efforts to respond to these problems and argue that the DSM-5 revision (...) process is not very promising, whereas the NIMH Research Domain Criteria initiative and some recent research in cognitive neuroscience fares better, although the latter remains potentially compromised by residual influences of the DSM-based approach. We conclude with some lessons and suggestions for the pursuit of alternative research pathways. (shrink)

this article makes the case that the rationale of open science and responsible innovation will help to build public planetary goods: the necessity of this rationale is illustrated on the COViD-19 case.

This contribution provides a brief commentary to Bakker’s and Lelkes’s plea to emotion researchers to engage more thoroughly with research on affective polarisation. I begin by summarising some of the main arguments and suggestions developed by Bakker and Lelkes and then make a number of suggestions that focus on how accounting for discrete emotions can make a particularly valuable contribution to affective polarisation research. The first suggestion pertains to the intentionality of emotions, and specifically of political emotions in intergroup contexts. (...) The second suggestion emphasises that emotions convey meaning about social relations that is considerably richer than the information contained in affect alone. The third proposition highlights that relations characterised by discrete emotions also reveal information about the cultural value and appropriateness of these relations. Finally, I discuss how discrete emotions specifically contribute to processes of community building and social exclusion. (shrink)

Business ethics denial refers to one of two claims about moral motivation in a business context: that there is no need for it, or that it is impossible. Neither of these radical claims is endorsed by serious theorists in the academic fields that study business ethics. Nevertheless, public commentators, as well as university students, often make claims that seem to imply that they subscribe to some form of business ethics denial. This paper fills a gap by making explicit both the (...) various forms that business ethics denial can take, and the reasons why such views are ultimately implausible. The paper argues that this type of serious engagement with business ethics denial should be an important part of the job description for teachers of business ethics. (shrink)