In this study, we developed and validated an instrument that researchers can use to measure the collective effort of principals and teachers who excise their own unique leadership to genera...

Many individual sentient wild animals are vulnerable to anthropogenic climate change. In this article, I suggest that animal ethicists who take sentient animals’ moral status seriously are likely to agree that, other things being equal, we have moral responsibilities to assist wild animals made vulnerable to climate change. However, I also argue that these ethicists are likely to diverge in terms of the strategies they believe would actually fulfil such moral responsibilities, depending on whether their primary concern is rectificatory justice (...) or duties of beneficence. To support this argument, I consider three plausible strategies for helping wild animals vulnerable to climate change: rescue and rehabilitation, habitat restoration, and assisted migration. I argue that different theoretical approaches to animal ethics are likely to diverge on aspects of all these strategies. These differences mean that the process of creating wide agreement among animal ethicists on climate adaptation strategies to assist vulnerable wild animals faces significant hurdles. (shrink)

In his paper The Opposite of Human Enhancement: Nanotechnology and the Blind Chicken problem (Nanoethics 2:305–316, 2008) Paul Thompson argues that the possibility of disenhancing animals in order to improve animal welfare poses a philosophical conundrum. Although many people intuitively think such disenhancement would be morally impermissible, it’s difficult to find good arguments to support such intuitions. In this brief response to Thompson, I accept that there’s a conundrum here. But I argue that if we seriously consider whether creating beings (...) can harm or benefit them, and introduce the non-identity problem to discussions of animal disehancement, the conundrum is even deeper than Thompson suggests. (shrink)

Companion Animal Ethics explores the important ethical questions and problems that arise as a result of humans keeping animals as companions. The first comprehensive book dedicated to ethical and welfare concerns surrounding companion animals Scholarly but still written in an accessible and engaging style Considers the idea of animal companionship and why it should matter ethically Explores problems associated with animals sharing human lifestyles and homes, such as obesity, behavior issues, selective breeding, over-treatment, abandonment, euthanasia and environmental impacts Offers insights (...) into practical ways of improving ethical standards relating to animal companions. (shrink)

AimsThis study evaluates a protocol for early, routine ethics consultation for patients on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation to support decision-making in the context of clinical uncertainty with the aim of mitigating ethical conflict and moral distress.MethodsWe conducted a single-site qualitative analysis of EC documentation for all patients receiving ECMO support from 15 August 2018 to 15 May 2019. Detailed analysis of 20 ethically complex cases with protracted ethics involvement identifies four key ethical domains: limits of prognostication, bridge to nowhere, burden of (...) treatment and system-level concerns. There are three subthemes: relevant contextual factors, the role of EC and observed outcomes. Content analysis of transcripts from interviews with 20 members of the multidisciplinary ECMO team yields supplemental data on providers’ perceptions of the impact of the early intervention protocol.ResultsLimited outcome data for ECMO, unclear indications for withdrawal, adverse effects of treatment and an obligation to attend to programme metrics present significant ethical challenges in the care of this patient population. Upstream EC mitigates ethical conflict by setting clear expectations about ECMO as a time limited trial, promoting consistent messaging among multiple services and supporting surrogate decision-makers. When ECMO becomes a ‘bridge to nowhere’, EC facilitates decision-making that respects patient values yet successfully sets limits on non-beneficial use of this novel therapy.ConclusionData from this study support the conclusion that ECMO poses unique ethical challenges that necessitate a standardised protocol for early, routine EC—at least while this medical technology is in its nascent stages. (shrink)

There is increased recognition of a common suite of global challenges that hamper food system sustainability at the community scale. Food price volatility, shortages of basic commodities, increased global rates of obesity and non-communicable food-related diseases, and land grabbing are among the impediments to socially just, economically robust, ecologically regenerative and politically inclusive food systems. While international political initiatives taken in response to these challenges and the groundswell of local alternatives emerging in response to challenges are well documented, more attention (...) is needed to the analysis of similarities between community approaches to global pressures. While we are not suggesting the application of a template set of good practices, the research reported in this paper point to the benefits of both sharing good practices and enabling communities to adopt good practices that are suited to their place-based capacities. The work also suggests that sharing community-derived good practices can support and reinforce global networks of sustainable community food systems, foster knowledge co-creation and ultimately cement collective action to global pressures. In turn these networks could enhance the sustainability and resilience of community food systems and facilitate wide scale food system transformation. (shrink)

We found a direct relationship between variation in informants' grammaticality intuitions about pronoun coreference and variation in the same informants' use of a clause segmentation strategy during sentence perception. It has been proproposed that ‘c‐command’, a structural principle defined in terms of constituent dominance relations, constrains within‐sentence coreference between pronouns and noun antecedents. The relative height of the pronoun and the noun in the phrase structure hierarchy determines whether the c‐command constraint blocks coreference: Coreference is allowed only when the complement (...) structure containing the noun is attached higher than the pronoun. We collected informants' judgments on pronoun‐noun coreference in which the noun antecedent was contained in a complement structure dominated by either the Sentence‐node (S‐node) (higher than the pronoun) or the Verb‐phrase‐node (VP‐node) (not higher than the pronoun). We also assessed each informant's perceptual clause‐closure tendency using an auditory word‐monitor paradigm. Informants who strongly segmented clauses in the perceptual task did not differentiate between an S‐ and VP‐attachment of sentence complements, as revealed in their coreference judgments, but rather appeared to attach all sentence complements to the S‐node. Informants with relatively weak perceptual segmentation differentiated their coreference judgments according to the node attachment of the complement structure. These results indicate that the linguistic universal controlling within‐sentence coreference applies to the perceptually available structure for a sequence, not to its pure linguistic structure. Hence, linguistic intuitions result from the interaction of three independent faculties: language‐specific knowledge, perceptual processes, and linguistic universals. (shrink)

Wildlife Ethics A systematic account of the ethical issues related to wildlife management and conservation Wildlife Ethics is the first systematic, book-length discussion of the ethics of wildlife conservation and management, and examines the key ethical questions and controversies. Tackling both theory and practice, the text is divided into two parts. The first describes key concepts, ethical theories, and management models relating to wildlife; the second puts these concepts, theories, and models to work, illustrating their significance through detailed case studies (...) on controversies in wildlife management and conservation. The book explores pressing topics including human responsibilities due to climate change, tradeoffs when managing zoonotic disease risks, the ethics of the wildlife trade, culling non-native species, indigenous wildlife use, and zoo-based conservation programs. Readers are encouraged to explore different ways of valuing wild animals and their practical implications. This essential text: Explains and explores relationships between valuing biodiversity, human utility, ecosystems, species, and animal welfare Describes established approaches to wildlife management, such as sustainable use, and emerging concepts, such as compassionate conservation Discusses key ethical theories, including utilitarianism, ecocentrism, and animal rights Offers a practical model of how to analyze ethical issues in wildlife management and conservation Wildlife Ethics: The Ethics of Wildlife Management and Conservation is an accessible introduction to complex ethical issues, making the book an important resource for students in fields such as conservation biology, ecology, environmental science and policy, game management, public health and veterinary medicine. It will also be an invaluable tool for wildlife managers, conservationists, One Health practitioners, practicing veterinarians and animal rehabilitation staff, contemporary wildlife professionals and other stakeholders. (shrink)

Anyone interested in the influence of Presocratic thought may be tempted to begin with Plato and Aristotle. There is, however, sufficient evidence of Presocratic influence among the sophists to make it clear that this temptation should be resisted. Some traces of this earlier influence may be found in Plato and Aristotle themselves, and this fact should serve as a reminder that their own involvement with Presocratic philosophy did not take place in a vacuum but will have been conditioned or mediated (...) by previous developments. This article deals with classical thinkers who interpreted, wrote about, and preserved the Presocratics, pointing out that just as one must read the Presocratics through the filters of Plato and Aristotle and their successors and commentators, Plato and Aristotle were influenced by the already burgeoning tradition of historiography that developed in the late fifth and fourth centuries. (shrink)

I explore how some aspects of Foucoult’s work on power can be applied to human/animal power relations. First, I argue that because animals behave as “beings that react” and can respond in different ways to human actions, in principle at least, Foucoult’s work can offer insights into human/animal power relations. However, many of these relations fall into the category of “domination,” in which animals are unable to respond. Second, I examine different kinds of human power practices, in particular, ways in (...) which humans construct animal constitutions and animal subjectivities. Finally, I use a case study of a pet cat to show how such power practices may come together in a single instance. (shrink)

Previous research suggests that implicit sequence learning is superior for believers in the paranormal and individuals with increased cerebral dopamine. Thirty-five healthy participants performed feedback-guided anticipations of four arrow directions. A 100-trial random sequence preceded two 100-trial biased sequences in which visual targets on trial t tended to be displaced 90° clockwise or counter-clockwise from those on t − 1. ISL was defined as a positive change during the course of the biased run in the difference between pro-bias and counter-bias (...) responses. It was hypothesized that this difference would be greater for believers in the paranormal than for skeptics, for those who received dopamine than for those who received placebo, and for believers who received dopamine than for the other groups. None of the hypotheses were supported by the data. It is suggested that a simple binary guessing task with a focus on prediction accuracy during early trials should be considered for future explorations. (shrink)

This is an exploration in depth of the social theory of the Russian-born thinker Pitirim A. Sorokin, who played a large role in American thought. Sorokin's contributions to theories of culture, social change, modernity, and dialectics are evaluated in this wide-ranging study. The book emphasizes the place of values in the comparative study of civilizations. This volume includes a translationby Lawrence T. Nichols of Sorokin's essay in Russian on Tolstoy as philosopher, as well as a chapter by Nichols on Tolstoy (...) and Sorokin. In this book, Palmer Talbutt, Jr. examines his former teacher, Sorokin, within intellectual, educational, and cultural contexts. The work will be of especial interest to scholars in social philosophy, the philosophy of the social sciences, philosophy of culture, and comparative cultural studies. (shrink)

Positivists have always objected to people talking about God. Their objection rests on quite general logical grounds. They have discovered a simple, formal test by which to tell significant remarks from nonsensical collections of words. There must, they say, be some minimal conditions of intelligibility. From these we can construct a Principle of Meaning. Now religiousremarks, on any positivist Principle, are demonstrable nonsense. What are these conditions of intelligibility ? Speaker and hearer, we suppose, must use the same language; must (...) possess a rather similar background of information; must both have some interest or other in communication.… Such matters of ‘more and less’ will vary with the topic, the parties, and the occasion. (shrink)

People used to think that the items referred to by one word, e.g. , should all have certain features in common, which would jointly constitute : and that this should enable us to decide whether any given item is a triangle or not.

We use the hierarchical nature of Bayesian perceptual inference to explain a fundamental aspect of the temporality of experience, namely the phenomenology of temporal flow. The explanation says that the sense of temporal flow in conscious perception stems from probabilistic inference that the present cannot be trusted. The account begins by describing hierarchical inference under the notion of prediction error minimization, and exemplifies distrust of the present within bistable visual perception and action initiation. Distrust of the present is then discussed (...) in relation to previous research on temporal phenomenology. Finally, we discuss how there may be individual differences in the experience of temporal flow, in particular along the autism spectrum. The resulting view is that the sense of temporal flow in conscious perception results from an internal, inferential process. (shrink)

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In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 39.2 (2003) 308-311 [Access article in PDF] Joseph Hamburger. John Stuart Mill on Liberty and Control. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Pp. xx + 239. Cloth, $35.00. C. L. Ten, editor. Mill's Moral, Political and Legal Philosophy. Aldershot: Dartmouth Publishing Company, 1999. Pp. xxiii + 498. Cloth, $180.00. John Stuart Mill's On Liberty is commonly viewed as the classic defense of individual liberty, (...) and Mill himself as the grandfather of modern liberalism. In John Stuart Mill on Liberty and Control Joseph Hamburger seeks to dislodge this orthodox interpretation [End Page 308] of Mill. As the title of the work suggests, Hamburger, who died shortly before this work came to press, seeks to convince the reader that a proper understanding of Mill's account of individual liberty needs to be nuanced by an appreciation of those substantial controls that Mill was willing to place upon individuals.Hamburger suggests that the association of Mill with modern liberalism results from viewing the arguments presented in On Liberty in isolation from the context in which they were written. Hamburger argues that Mill's real purpose in writing On Liberty is neither self-evident nor is it one that is easily assimilated to modern libertarian ideals. Hamburger interprets "Mill as making an esoteric argument in On Liberty" (xvii). There are two additional pieces that Hamburger claims one needs in order to properly decipher the puzzle, and thus grasp the true import of Mill's claims concerning liberty. First, Hamburger argues that Mill's desire to bring about cultural reform was dependent upon his rejection of Christianity. Mill's unpublished writings reveal that he was far more antagonistic to the influence of Christian religion than is often recognized. Hamburger argues that for Mill initiating true moral reform depended upon overcoming the old social order of which Christianity was a primary constituent. In order for this to occur, one needed "to establish liberty for those who would implement his plan for moral reformation" (86). Second, Hamburger argues that we must also grasp Mill's view of history if we are to properly understand his project of moral reform and the place of On Liberty within this project. Hamburger claims that Mill's vision of history was strongly influenced by thinkers such as Comte and St. Simon. From them, Mill adopted the view that societies alternate between transitional and natural states, and that the values that are applicable in these states are quite different. Hamburger claims that "Mill easily recognized his own age as being transitional," and that this influences all of his arguments in On Liberty (111).Putting the above together, Hamburger concludes that Mill's arguments are specifically directed toward securing the liberty of those who would combat the influence of Christianity and the old moral order, and that "the liberty recommended in On Liberty was especially valued because it would hasten the undermining of old doctrines and institutions which occurred in transitional periods" (212). Hamburger argues that the liberty that Mill meant to secure in this work was not intended to apply equally to all persons or in all periods. Thus, Hamburger argues that Mill was quite willing to advocate strong forms of social control in other contexts.The latter claim, which Hamburger argues provides a more coherent interpretation of On Liberty, does not necessarily follow from Mill's view of religion and history. Here, I think there is room for two distinct judgments regarding Hamburger's achievement in this book. Hamburger has undoubtedly provided a great service in examining the often neglected areas of Mill's corpus and their relevance to his more prominent works. Philosophers who view On Liberty as an isolated piece of argument, or at best only consider it in relation to Mill's Utilitarianism, thus would profit much from reading this work. I am less convinced, however, of Hamburger's claim that heeding these aspects of Mill's thought will lead one to form a radically different understanding of Mill's claims concerning... (shrink)

This book offers an introduction to the way art is perceived, interpreted, and felt and approaches these mindful events from a multidisciplinary perspective.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Motion and Mercutio in Romeo and JulietDaryl W. PalmerThere is nothing permanent that is not true, what can be true that is uncertaine? How can that be certaine, that stands upon uncertain grounds? 1It is by now a commonplace in modern scholarship that drama, particularly Tudor drama, poses questions, rehearses familiar debates, and even speculates about mere possibilities. 2 In 1954, Madeleine Doran spelled out some of the ways (...) in which debate "affected the structure of Elizabethan drama." 3 In turn, Joel B. Altman, having eloquently extended Doran's examination, concludes that "the plays functioned as media of intellectual and emotional exploration for minds that were accustomed to examine the many sides of a given theme, to entertain opposing ideals, and by so exercising the understanding, to move toward some fuller apprehension of truth that could be discerned only through the total action of the drama." 4 Altman points to Henry Medwall's Fulgens and Lucres (c. 1490) as an exemplar of this practice. Although the interlude instructs and entertains, "the center of interest has shifted from demonstration to inquiry. The action develops not from an abstract assertion, but from a specific question: who is the nobler man, Cornelius or Gaius?" 5 By the time William Shakespeare began to write his plays, inquiry was an essential part of dramatic construction. So Juliet asks, "What's in a name?" 6 Hamlet opens with the question: "Who's [End Page 540] there?" (1.1.1), and achieves a kind of apotheosis in the figure of its hero: "To be, or not to be, that is the question..." (3.1.55). Everyone recognizes these familiar questions, and we know (or think we know) how to describe the most viable answers. I want to suggest, however, that this familiarity has dulled our appreciation of the drama's interrogative range. As a way of resisting this tendency, I want to argue that Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet takes up an ancient conversation about motion, a dialog that originates with the pre-Socratics. This is not to say that the play is ultimately about motion. It obviously engages a panoply of thematic materials. I have simply chosen, in this limited space, to concentrate on the way the playwright stages his questioning as a kind of fencing lesson. My goal is to produce neither a "reading" of the play nor an allegory of philosophy, but rather to recollect the ways in which Shakespeare's drama qualifies and extends an ancient interrogative tradition. In so doing, I follow Stanley Cavell who maintains "that Shakespeare could not be who he is—the burden of the name of the greatest writer in the language, the creature of the greatest ordering of English—unless his writing is engaging the depth of the philosophical preoccupations of his culture." 7Some of the most venerable documents of Western philosophy fix on the problem of motion. If we go back more than 2,300 years, we come upon Plato's Theaetetus, in which Socrates explains a "first principle" to the title character, namely that "the universe really is motion and nothing else." 8 A kind of history lesson in ontology and epistemology, this tentative explanation has its origins in Heraclitus or Empedocles or Protagoras or some combination of the aforementioned. Perhaps the most famous expression of this ideal comes from Heraclitus: "You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters and yet others go ever flowing on." 9 More to the point is the following declaration from the same philosopher: "Everything flows and nothing abides; everything gives way and nothing stays fixed." 10 In this spirit, Protagoras declares, "All matter is in a state of flux." 11 Such precedents provide the backdrop for Socrates in the Theaetetus as he summarizes: "The point is that all these things are, as we were saying, in motion, but there is a quickness or slowness in their motion" (Thea, 156c). In this historical spirit, he identifies "a tradition from the ancients, who hid their meaning from the common herd in poetical figures, that Oceanus and Tethys, the source of all things, are flowing streams and nothing is at rest" (Thea, 180d–e).To... (shrink)

This essay was Gadamer 's position paper in the April 1981 “debate” with Derrida at a conference on “Text and Interpretation” held at the Sorbonne in Paris. In it he discusses his approach to texts and several elements of Derrida's philosophy,..

The essay aims to sum up distinctions and relations between motives, purposes, and reasons, to ground a socio-cultural account of action. The method is selective critique of recent analyses and arguments.Motives are causal, but reasons are not. The construal of motives and purposes should be broader than usual. Purpose is that for the sake of which something is done, motive correlating to it as attitude to object; actions may count as intrinsic goods when done for their own sake; lastly, all (...) actions are motivated. If a purpose is unreasoned and arbitrary, it doesn’t count as a reason, reasons being justificatory.Davidson’s breaching the distinction between reasons and causes can only be extenuated, not justified. That line holds by virtue of the way philosophy of culture, not philosophy of nature, makes sense of reasons in terms of approbative emulation. There is both a basis for dualism in the differentiation of culture from the world and one for monism in their mergence. Philosophy of action and ethics effectively suggest this joint divergence/mergence. (shrink)

The essay aims to sum up distinctions and relations between motives, purposes, and reasons, to ground a socio-cultural account of action. The method is selective critique of recent analyses and arguments.Motives are causal, but reasons are not. The construal of motives and purposes should be broader than usual. Purpose is that for the sake of which something is done, motive correlating to it as attitude to object; actions may count as intrinsic goods when done for their own sake; lastly, all (...) actions are motivated. If a purpose is unreasoned and arbitrary, it doesn’t count as a reason, reasons being justificatory.Davidson’s breaching the distinction between reasons and causes can only be extenuated, not justified. That line holds by virtue of the way philosophy of culture, not philosophy of nature, makes sense of reasons in terms of approbative emulation. There is both a basis for dualism in the differentiation of culture from the world and one for monism in their mergence. Philosophy of action and ethics effectively suggest this joint divergence/mergence. (shrink)