Can an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God create humans with free will without the capacity to commit evil? Scholars have taken opposite positions on the contentious problem. Using scripture and the rules of logic, we argue that God cannot create impeccable creatures because of his ‘simplicity’. God cannot create gods, because God is uncreated. Peccable humans freely choose to disobey their creator and thus cannot blame him for the horrendous evils in this world. Concerning the belief of sinless humans with free (...) will in heaven, we suggest that such an impartation of God’s impeccability can be accomplished, not through creation, but by the marriage of Christ and the Church, for the two shall become one. Believers will become children of God and partakers of the divine nature.Contribution: Theologians and philosophers have argued whether God could create humans with free will who never commit evil, and if he could, why did he not do so? The primary contribution of this article is the argument that God could not create impeccable humans with free will for God could not create gods. (shrink)

This study investigates the influence of old directors on corporate social responsibility (CSR) using roughly 25,000 firm-year observations from 2001 to 2015 in the United States. We employ the widely used selection, optimization, and compensation (SOC) model from psychology to explain the CSR decisions of old directors. Our results indicate that firms with a higher percentage of old directors tend to have lower engagement in CSR activities. To address endogeneity, we adopt the difference-in-differences method and use the event of sudden (...) deaths and unexpected retirements of old directors and find that our results remain robust. Our analysis also reveals that the negative impact of old directors on CSR is more significant in firms where directors receive fewer reputational spillover benefits from CSR initiatives and/or firms exhibiting poor corporate governance. In addition, this adverse impact of old directors comes from two effects: a reduction in efforts to enhance CSR strengths and an increase in inaction to address CSR concerns. Overall, these findings suggest that the CSR decision-making process of old directors involves assessing the costs and benefits of CSR engagements, consistent with our hypothesis derived from the SOC model. (shrink)

Some proponents of higher education English as a medium of instruction have suggested listening to English lectures provides students the opportunity to incidentally acquire unknown words. A case study was designed to examine this assumption. First, the lexical profiles of 27 Introduction to English Language Teaching first-year undergraduate course lectures were computed to determine how many words students need to know for comprehension. Then an incoming year-1 undergraduate student with an English vocabulary size of 7,500 word families and mastery of (...) the most frequent 3,000 word families listened to these lectures across 13.5 weeks with the purpose of measuring incidental acquisition gains of three aspects of word knowledge for ten targeted words. Lastly, the student’s perceptions about listening to EMI lectures and potentials for this listening inducing incidental acquisition of word knowledge were gathered through a semi-structured interview. The lexical profiling of the entire corpus showed students need knowledge of the most frequent 4,000 English word families plus proper nouns and marginal words for 98% lexical coverage; however, some lectures present students with a more substantial lexical burden than the lectures overall. The student made the most gains in receptive meaning, followed by receptive form, and finally productive meaning. Content analysis of the interview transcript found seven themes representing the student’s perception about listening to EMI lectures and their potential for inducing incidental vocabulary acquisition. While the student found listening to the EMI lectures challenging, he perceived the process as useful in preparing for university studies and a career as a secondary English teacher. The student perceived attention, topic, existing vocabulary knowledge, lecturer’s native language, and lack of interaction with the lecturer to have moderated incidental learning of vocabulary through listening to English lectures. These results indicate a need to confirm whether incoming students’ vocabulary knowledge meet the lexical demands of the EMI lectures given in the Macau context. Furthermore, pedagogical training on teacher talk strategies and orientation training for incoming students should both be provided to ensure students are receiving high quality instruction. (shrink)

The goals of this study are to test a pattern of ethical decision making that predicts ethical intentions of individuals within corporations based primarily on the ethical values embedded in corporate culture, and to see whether that model is generally stable across countries. The survey instrument used scales to measure the effects of corporate ethical values, idealism, and relativism on ethical intentions of Turkish, Thai, and American businesspeople. The samples include practitioner members of the American Marketing Association in the (...) U.S., and full-time businesspeople enrolled in executive MBA programs in Thailand and Turkey. The study is positioned within a fairly new stream that assesses patterns across countries, rather than differences between them, in a way that might be called “culture free.” The results show a generally positive influence between cultural ethical values and ethical intentions. The results also indicate that the positive effect of corporate ethical values on ethical intentions is greater for managers with low idealism and high relativism. We also discuss the implications of our results for managers of international businesses. (shrink)

In today’s global higher education environment, international students represent not only an important source of external income for universities: the degree of cross-border student mobility also reflects the internationalization of higher education sector. Universities have engaged in efforts to sell themselves to prospective students and promotional videos are among the most widely used marketing tools for this purpose. This study reports the results of a study analyzing the content of 140 higher education promotional videos from 14 countries available on YouTube. (...) The results reveal that while the pattern of use of YouTube for two-waycommunication with viewers, information contents and appeal messages among sampled universities is fairly homogenous, some marked differences emerge when cultural background and global position ranking of the university are taken into account. The implications of these findings are that, although, transnational higher education has been profoundly globalized, culture still plays a significant role in marketing practice for the recruitment of mobile students. In addition, different universities have various student-targeted segments. These findings provide the basis of a series of recommendations for universities looking to optimize their use of YouTube and promotional video design to market to international students. (shrink)

Motivated by exploitation concerns, we argue for the importance of participant engagement in basic human intracranial electrophysiology research. This research takes advantage of unique neurosurgical opportunities to better understand complex systems of the human brain, but it also exposes participants to additional risks without immediate therapeutic intent. We argue that understanding participant values and incorporating their perspectives into the research process may help determine whether and to what extent research practices and the resulting distributions of risks and benefits constitute exploitation (...) and contribute to building a brain research paradigm that is genuinely responsive to participant values. More broadly, we highlight the importance of paying attention to participant interests in non-therapeutic brain research. (shrink)

A growing amount of media is paid for by its consumers through their very consumption of it. Typically, this new media is web-based and paid for by advertising. It includes the services offered by Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube. We offer an ethical assessment of the attention economy, the market where attention is exchanged for new media. We argue that the assessment has ethical implications for how the attention economy should be regulated. To conduct the assessment, we employ two heuristics (...) for evaluating markets. One is the “harm” criterion, which relates to whether the market tends to engender extremely harmful outcomes for individuals or society as a whole. The other is the “agency” criterion, which relates not to the outcomes of the market, but rather, to whether it somehow reflects or has its source in weakened agency. We argue that the attention economy animates concerns with respect to both criteria and that new media should be subject to the same sort of regulation as other harmful, addictive products. (shrink)

The ninth edition of Media Ethics: Issues and Cases has been updated to reflect the most pressing ethical issues in media. Featuring 25 new cases on hot topic issues from fake news to drones and a new chapter on social justice, this authoritative case book gives students the tools to make ethical decisions in an increasingly complex environment.

This paper propounds a new reading of Berkeley's account of the activity of finite spirits. Against existing interpretations, the paper argues that Berkeley does not hold that we causally contribute to the movement of our bodies. In contrast, our volitions to move our bodies are but occasions for God to cause their movement. In answer to the question of wherein then consists our activity, the paper proposes that our activity consists in the dual powers to produce (1) our volitions ? (...) the acts of willing ? and (2) our ideas of imagination. (shrink)

Recent advancements in neuroengineering research have prompted neuroethicists to propose a variety of “ethical guidance” frameworks (e.g., principles, guidelines, framing questions, responsible research innovation frameworks, and ethical priorities) to inform this work. In this chapter, we offer a comparative analysis of five recently proposed ethical guidance frameworks (NIH neuroethics guiding principles, Nuffield Council on Bioethics, Global Neuroethics Summit Delegates, the Center for Neurotechnology’s neuroethical principles and guidelines, and the Neurotechnology Ethics Taskforce’s ethical priorities). We identify some common themes among these (...) frameworks, making explicit significant areas of convergence. We also highlight three areas of ethical consideration that have not received sufficient attention across these frameworks (extended care for research participants, cultural salience, and stakeholder input). Further attention and analysis of these three areas would improve the breadth and scope of ethical considerations for neuroengineering research. (shrink)

Ostensibly a discussion of the nature of justice, The Republic presents Plato's vision of the ideal state, covering a wide range of topics: social, educational, psychological, moral, and philosophical. It also includes some of Plato's most important writing on the nature of reality and the theory of the "forms." Translated with an Introduction by Desmond Lee.

Bartky draws on the experience of daily life to unmask the many disguises by which intimations of inferiority are visited upon women. She critiques both the male bias of current theory and the debilitating dominion held by notions of "proper femininity" over women and their bodies in patriarchal culture.

Is a human more conscious than an octopus? In the science of consciousness, it’s oftentimes assumed that some creatures (or mental states) are more conscious than others. But in recent years, a number of philosophers have argued that the notion of degrees of consciousness is conceptually confused. This paper (1) argues that the most prominent objections to degrees of consciousness are unsustainable, (2) examines the semantics of ‘more conscious than’ expressions, (3) develops an analysis of what it is for a (...) degreed property to count as degrees of consciousness, and (4) applies the analysis to various theories of consciousness. I argue that whether consciousness comes in degrees ultimately depends on which theory of consciousness turns out to be correct. But I also argue that most theories of consciousness entail that consciousness comes in degrees. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: So far in this book, we have examined algorithmic decision systems from three autonomy-based perspectives: in terms of what we owe autonomous agents (chapters 3 and 4), in terms of the conditions required for people to act autonomously (chapters 5 and 6), and in terms of the responsibilities of agents (chapter 7). -/- In this chapter we turn to the ways in which autonomy underwrites democratic governance. Political authority, which is to say the ability of a government to exercise (...) power, may be justifiable or not. Whether it is justified and how it can come to be justified is a question of political legitimacy. Political legitimacy is another way in which autonomy and responsibility are linked. This relationship is the basis of the current chapter, and it is important in understanding the moral salience of algorithmic systems. We will draw the connection as follows. We begin, in section 8.1, by describing two uses of technology: crime predicting technology used to drive policing practices and social media technology used to influence elections (including by Cambridge Analytica and by the Internet Research Agency). In section 8.2 we consider several views of legitimacy and argue for a hybrid version of normative legitimacy based on one recently offered by Fabienne Peter. In section 8.3 we will explain that the connection between political legitimacy and autonomy is that legitimacy is grounded in legitimating processes, which are in turn based on autonomy. Algorithmic systems—among them PredPol and the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook-Internet Research Agency amalgam—can hinder that legitimation process and conflict with democratic legitimacy, as we argue in section 8.4. We will conclude by returning to several cases that serve as through-lines to the book: Loomis, Wagner, and Houston Schools. -/- The link below is to an open-access copy of the chapter. (shrink)

Tao has been built into the foundation of East Asian culture for millennia, and many books have been written to explain it. But Tao cannot fully be explained in words; it can only felt and experienced. Tao is something you live, day by day, moment by moment. Its the omnipresent oneness beyond ephemeral phenomena that expresses itself in everything.

Il y a trop de distance entre les conceptions abstraites de la Physique et les modèles intuitifs empruntés à l'univers concret pour que l'on puisse espérer tirer de l'utilisation de ceux-ci des indications exactes. Il faut recourir à des modèles déjà conceptuels et abstraits empruntés plutôt à l'univers mathématique qu'à l'univers sensible.

This paper examines the idea of "objective phenomenology," or a way of understanding the phenomenal character of conscious experiences that doesn’t require one to have had the kinds of experiences under consideration. My central thesis is that structural facts about experience—facts that characterize purely how conscious experiences are structured—are objective phenomenal facts. I begin by precisifying the idea of objective phenomenology and diagnosing what makes any given phenomenal fact subjective. Then I defend the view that structural facts about experience are (...) objective. I also argue that structural facts about experience, despite being objective, nevertheless still give rise to an explanatory gap. (shrink)

This paper offers some refinements to a particular objection to act consequentialism, the “causal impotence” objection. According to proponents of the objection, when we find circumstances in which severe, unnecessary harms result entirely from voluntary acts, it seems as if we should be able to indict at least one act among those acts, but act consequentialism appears to lack the resources to offer this indictment. Our aim is to show is that the most promising response on behalf of act consequentialism, (...) the threshold argument, cannot offer a fully general prescription about what to do in cases of collective action. (shrink)

The normativity of so-called “coherence” or “structural” requirements of rationality has been hotly debated in recent years. However, relatively little has been said about the nature of structural rationality, or what makes a set of attitudes structurally irrational, if structural rationality is not ultimately a matter of responding correctly to reasons. This paper develops a novel account of incoherence (or structural irrationality), critically examining Alex Worsnip’s recent account. It first argues that Worsnip’s account both over-generates and under-generates incoherent patterns of (...) attitudes, and then proposes an alternative that both avoids these problems and captures a crucial insight behind Worsnip’s account. According to this account, a set of attitudes is incoherent just in case having all of the attitudes in that set is incompatible with reacting to a question in a way that one is, in virtue of having the attitudes, committed to. (shrink)

Algorithms influence every facet of modern life: criminal justice, education, housing, entertainment, elections, social media, news feeds, work… the list goes on. Delegating important decisions to machines, however, gives rise to deep moral concerns about responsibility, transparency, freedom, fairness, and democracy. Algorithms and Autonomy connects these concerns to the core human value of autonomy in the contexts of algorithmic teacher evaluation, risk assessment in criminal sentencing, predictive policing, background checks, news feeds, ride-sharing platforms, social media, and election interference. Using these (...) case studies, the authors provide a better understanding of machine fairness and algorithmic transparency. They explain why interventions in algorithmic systems are necessary to ensure that algorithms are not used to control citizens' participation in politics and undercut democracy. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. (shrink)

O artigo apresenta o pensamento de Dewey sustentando a tese de que formação é crescimento em função de uma efetiva relação com a vida: o humano é exigido pela vida a desenvolver-se, a crescer em direções muito diversas para então ocupar um espaço na sociedade. No intuito de gerar uma reflexão sobre o dilema da formação humana, o texto introduz outro autor, como coadjuvante, pondo em diálogo duas perspectivas implicadas pelo mesmo tema.

O artigo se propõe a refletir sobre as perspectivas, dimensões e fundamentos do saber musical sensível em escolas de educação básica brasileiras. Parte constituinte de uma pesquisa teórica voltada a pensar a epistemologia da educação musical escolar (Aquino, 2016), tem-se como pressuposto o fato de o saber musical escolar ser um tipo de saber sensível e, como tal, capaz de fomentar modos de operar articuladores de aspectos comumente percebidos como incompatíveis e, por conseguinte, apreendidos e vivenciados de forma dissociadora na (...) contemporaneidade. À medida que são estabelecidas as relações imanentes entre seus fundamentos éticos, cognitivos, emocionais e somáticos, suas dimensões científicas, filosóficas e artísticas, bem como as relações extrínsecas com outros campos do saber, acredita-se contribuir para a construção de alicerces epistemológicos mais claros para a educação musical nas escolas brasileiras de educação básica. (shrink)

When agents insert technological systems into their decision-making processes, they can obscure moral responsibility for the results. This can give rise to a distinct moral wrong, which we call “agency laundering.” At root, agency laundering involves obfuscating one’s moral responsibility by enlisting a technology or process to take some action and letting it forestall others from demanding an account for bad outcomes that result. We argue that the concept of agency laundering helps in understanding important moral problems in a number (...) of recent cases involving automated, or algorithmic, decision-systems. We apply our conception of agency laundering to a series of examples, including Facebook’s automated advertising suggestions, Uber’s driver interfaces, algorithmic evaluation of K-12 teachers, and risk assessment in criminal sentencing. We distinguish agency laundering from several other critiques of information technology, including the so-called “responsibility gap,” “bias laundering,” and masking. (shrink)

David Lewis—famously—never tasted vegemite. Did he have any knowledge of what it's like to taste vegemite? Most say 'no'; I say 'yes'. I argue that knowledge of what it’s like varies along a spectrum from more exact to more approximate, and that phenomenal concepts vary along a spectrum in how precisely they characterize what it’s like to undergo their target experiences. This degreed picture contrasts with the standard all-or-nothing picture, where phenomenal concepts and phenomenal knowledge lack any such degreed structure. (...) I motivate the degreed picture by appeal to (1) limits in epistemic abilities such as recognition, imagination, and inference, and (2) the semantics of ‘knows what it’s like’ expressions. I argue that approximate phenomenal knowledge cannot be explained merely via determinable or vague phenomenal concepts. I develop a framework for systematizing approximate knowledge of phenomenal character. And I explain how my view challenges some standard assumptions about the acquisition conditions, requirements for mastery, and referential mechanisms of phenomenal concepts. (shrink)

The relationship between greenwashing and visitors' green behavior remains an under-researched topic in the tourism and hospitality literature, despite evidence of the harmful effect of greenwashing on the reputation and competitive advantage of organizations. This study extends attribution theory into the green context to develop a research framework for investigating the interrelationship between greenwashing, green trust, and green word-of-mouth (WOM), especially the roles of green trust and connectedness to nature. We conducted a survey of 289 visitors staying in four- and (...) five-star hotels in Vietnam. The findings indicated that hotels should avoid greenwashing due to its negative impact on visitors' green trust and green WOM. Moreover, the study found that greenwashing had an indirect and negative influence on green WOM based on visitors' green trust. Importantly, the research revealed the value of connectedness in moderating green attitudes and behaviors among visitors. (shrink)

In ‘Discrimination Against the Dying’, Phillip Reed argues that terminally ill patients are subjected to a distinct form of discrimination called ‘terminalism’. One of Reed’s primary examples of terminalism is right to try laws, which offer terminally ill patients the option to request medications that are not FDA-approved and without IRB involvement. In this analysis, we consider additional contextual factors about right to try, suggesting that it may not neatly count as an exemplar of terminalism. When pursued with appropriate protocols (...) and oversight, right to try has the potential to broaden treatment opportunities for the terminally ill by bypassing FDA and IRB restrictions, functioning as a less stringent alternative to expanded access for patients with limited time and dwindling options. Reed acknowledges that differential treatment of patients is not inherently unjust. For instance, Reed praises expanded access laws that grant patients with severe or life-threatening diseases access to treatment options otherwise unavailable. Patients not afflicted by severe illness or who have found success with standard treatment options are unlikely to face discrimination for inability to access nonessential treatment. Conversely, availability of these treatments for the terminally ill could enhance their well-being and prolong their lifespan. It is also significant to highlight important …. (shrink)

No presente artigo pretendemos descrever os conceitos heideggerianos apresentados no ensaio A origem da obra de arte, no qual o filósofo alemão destaca que o campo instaurador da obra de arte é a verdade. Para tanto, reconstruiremos os passos argumentativos realizados por Heidegger na investigação da origem da obra de arte, a saber, a coisa, o utensílio e a obra. E, por fim, mostraremos que a verdade em Heidegger se dá no embate entre Terra e Mundo, que se caracterizam pelo (...) encobrimento e desencobrimento do ser do ente. Após tais considerações, procuramos investigar a verdade que se pôs em obra nos quadros da artista plástica Marina Rodrigues, que ressaltou o embate entre Terra e o Mundo no período pandêmico. A artista retira da terra o material para a obra de arte, instaurando um mundo em suas telas. Nos quadros de Rodrigues nos deparamos com a finitude da existência humana e o caos urbano. (shrink)

Totalitarianism is perhaps unanimously regarded as one of the greatest political evils of the last century and has been the grounds for much of Anglo-American political theory since. Confucianism, meanwhile, has been gaining credibility in the past decades among sympathizers of democratic theory in spite of criticisms of it being anti-democratic or authoritarian. I consider how certain key concepts in the classical Confucian texts of the Mencius and the Xunzi might or might not be appropriated for ‘legitimising’ totalitarian regimes. Under (...) an Arendtian approach to understanding totalitarianism, it is precisely an unproblematised relation to a normative History and Nature that underlies the potential compatibility or incompatibility. I argue against a longstanding prejudice that if any form of Confucianism would be totalitarian, it would have to be Xunzian. Against this, I hope to show that if any form of Confucianism would be totalitarian, it might well be a naturalistic Mencian Confucianism instead of a constructivist Xunzian one. (shrink)

The mainstream view of the twentieth century suggests that the Scottish philosopher and economist Adam Smith made a tout court defense of individualism and the pure rational calculation of economics. However, we consider this to be a biased interpretation that ignores an integrated reading of his books, The Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations, which hinder a global view of his thinking. In opposition to this dominant view, we propose, as the central objective of this article, the conciliation (...) between Smith’s classical liberalism and his sentimental ethics, based on the notion of human dignity, present in the recognition of the other as an equal. If this hypothesis is confirmed, we will defend the thesis of sympathetic liberalism in Adam Smith’s philosophical system. For this, we will analyze the feeling of Smithian sympathy and its interference in interpersonal relationships, then, the device of moral justification of impartiality as a promoter of fairness behavior. Finally, we will argue that the intertwining of these two elements of Smithian sentimental ethics in public space engenders a notion of human dignity compatible with his liberalism, insofar as it respects individual freedoms while fostering the progress of commercial societies. For such, we will make use of the work Theory of Moral Sentimentalism by Adam Smith and the article Sympathetic Liberalism: Recent Work on Adam Smith by Stephen Darwall. (shrink)

In this research, patent prosecution is conceptualized as a system of reinforcement learning from human feedback. The objective of the system is to increase the likelihood for a language model to generate patent claims that have a higher chance of being granted. To showcase the controllability of the language model, the system learns from granted patents and pre-grant applications with different rewards. The status of “granted” and “pre-grant” are perceived as labeled human feedback implicitly. In addition, specific to patent drafting, (...) the experiments in this research demonstrate the model’s capability to learn from adjusting claim length and inclusion of limiting terms for narrowing claim scope. As proof of concept, the experiments focus on claim ones only and the training data originates from a patent dataset tailored specifically for artificial intelligence. Although the available human feedback in patent prosecution are limited and the quality of generated patent text requires improvement, the experiments following the 3-stage reinforcement learning from human feedback have demonstrated that generative language models are capable of reflecting the human feedback or intent in patent prosecution. To enhance the usability of language models, the implementation in this research utilizes modern techniques that enable execution on a single consumer-grade GPU. The demonstrated proof of concept, which reduces hardware requirements, will prove valuable in the future as more human feedback in patent prosecution become available for broader use, either within patent offices or in the public domain. (shrink)

A famous mathematical theorem says that the sum of an infinite series of numbers can depend on the order in which those numbers occur. Suppose we interpret the numbers in such a series as representing instances of some physical quantity, such as the weights of a collection of items. The mathematics seems to lead to the result that the weight of a collection of items can depend on the order in which those items are weighed. But that is very hard (...) to believe. A puzzle then arises: How do we interpret the metaphysical significance of this mathematical theorem? I first argue that prior solutions to the puzzle lead to implausible consequences. Then I develop my own solution, where the basic idea is that the weight of a collection of items is equal to the limit of the weights of its finite subcollections contained within ever-expanding regions of space. I show how my solution is intuitively plausible and philosophically motivated, how it reveals an underexplored line of metaphysical inquiry about quantities and locations, and how it elucidates some classic puzzles concerning supertasks. (shrink)