Although on opposite sides of the logic of discovery debate, Laudan and Simon share a thesis of divorce between discovery (invention) and justification (appraisal); but unlike some other authors, they do not base their respective versions of the divorce-thesis on the empirical/logical distinction. Laudan argues that, in contemporary science, invention is irrelevant to appraisal, and that this irrelevance renders epistemically pointless the inventionist program. Simon uses his divorce-thesis to defend his account of invention, which he claims to be non-inductive--so evading (...) the problem of induction. Underlying both authors' positions are inadequate conceptions of inductive inference. Laudan here ignores the role in contemporary science of plausibility arguments, which provide a crucial link between invention and appraisal, and thence an epistemic rationale for inventionism. Simon's account of invention does covertly call upon inductive principles from the context of appraisal, and this is what gives his program epistemic import; otherwise he would be vulnerable to Laudan's "no rationale" critique. The tensions in both authors reveal the falsity of the divorce-thesis, and the essential function of induction in both appraisal and invention of hypotheses. (shrink)

Vulnerabilities often characterize the availability of immigrant populations of interest in social behavioral science, public health, and medical research. Refugees, asylum seekers, and undocumented immigrants present unique vulnerabilities relevant to protocol development as well as ethics review procedures and criteria. This paper describes vulnerable populations in relation to the Belmont Report and US federal regulations for the protection of human subjects, both of which are commonly used in international research contexts. It argues for safeguards for immigrants comparable to protections for (...) such populations as pregnant women, prisoners, and children. The paper further presents a two-part model for the review of protocols that involve immigrants. The model is intended to help identify the risks to immigrants associated with participation in research, and to suggest how researchers can responsibly frame studies and access to research participant immigrants through community-based, and/or non-governmental organizations that serve immigrants and immigrant communities. (shrink)

What is the role of poetry in bringing about change? This book explores that question in the writings of Percy Bysshe Shelley, examining his fascination with the role of contingency in physical and historical processes. In considering the long-standing debate over Shelley's philosophical stance, Hugh Roberts turns to the poet's reading of Lucretius to show how Shelley developed an alternative approach to the issues of history, change, time, and process—one that incorporates the most compelling features of skepticism and idealism. (...) He sheds new light on the importance of _De rerum natura _to Shelley's thought, and through extended readings of _The Revolt of Islam_ and _The Triumph of Life_ he shows the poet struggling with the intellectual limitations of Romanticism and the Enlightenment and moving beyond them. Roberts then deploys some of the key concepts from the new science of chaos theory to illuminate the wider implications of Shelley's approach. He shows how with the help of this new paradigm much that has seemed baffling about the poet falls into place—most notably a new understanding of political process that allows us to better comprehend Shelley's claim that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." Readings of a number of Shelley's poems and prose works demonstrate the wide-ranging implications of this approach for our understanding of his entire oeuvre. _Shelley and the Chaos of History_ presents a Shelley whose investigations into the nature of history and the role of poetry lead us beyond contemporary deconstructionist-historicist debates. It shows that the complexity of Shelley's engagement with the major philosophical issues of his time has been greatly underestimated. (shrink)

I argue in this essay that belief/desire explanations are not logically true and not causal, and further that the antecedent of a true belief/desire conditional cannot be strengthened in such a way as to transform it into a true causal statement. I also argue that belief/desire explanations are not dispensable: they are presupposed in our justifications of scientific claims. The proposal is not that psychological determinism is false, but that some at least of our activities are not describable in causal (...) terms. These arguments prepare the ground for a puzzle. If all human intentional behaviour is caused, then all actual linkages between psychological states and behaviour should be expressed in causal statements. But neither the action of asserting a causal statement nor the action of justifying the assertion can be described as the result of a cause. Therefore if one accepts that scientific claims can be justified, not all linkages between psychological states and subsequent action are expressible in causal statements. I do not offer a solution to this puzzle. (shrink)

A formal treatment of the logic of a type of conditional found in natural speech which differs substantially from the material conditional of propositional logic and from the conditionals afforded by theories of possible worlds.

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 9, Page 14-16, September 2012.

Change blindness illustrates a remarkable limitation in visual processing by demonstrating that substantial changes in a visual scene can go undetected. Because these changes can ultimately be detected using top–down driven search processes, many theories assign a central role to spatial attention in overcoming change blindness. Surprisingly, it has been reported that change blindness can occur during blink-contingent changes even when observers fixate the changing location [O’Regan, J. K., Deubel, H., Clark, J. J., & Rensink, R. A. . Picture changes (...) during blinks: Looking without seeing and seeing without looking. Visual Cognition, 7, 191–212]. However, eye blinks produce a transient disruption of vision that is independent of any associated changes in the retinal image. We determined whether these ‘attentive blank stares’ could occur in the absence of blink-mediated visual suppression. Using a flicker change-blindness paradigm we confirm that despite direct attentive fixations, obvious scene changes often remain undetected. We conclude that change detection involves object or feature based attentional mechanisms, which can be ‘misdirected’ despite the allocation of spatial attention to the position of the change. (shrink)

This article focuses on the governance and ethical conduct of research within the domain of social work and social care. Globally, research in this domain appears less well regulated than those in the domains of health care. Within the United Kingdom, the Westminster government is implementing a Research GovernanceFramework for Social Care in England (RGF Social Care). This article locates this development in a broader global context and uses as an example a regionally based implementation to explore some potential issues (...) that arise from the governance and ethical framework in social work and social care. The proposed system is located with English local authorities. Various models are emerging: single department; corporate; dual or multi-council collaborations; cross-sector collaborations. Whatever the merits of the organizational form adopted, the influence of different cultures upon the form of governance and ethical regulation adopted is significant. (shrink)

This paper focuses attention on the ethical issues concerning the involvement of young service users as co-researchers. In particular the article offers an examination of the limitations of the term ?service user?, comments on degrees of participation and explores the ethical issues prior to the start of the research, during the research and after the research has been completed. Particular emphasis is focused on the topics of: the funders of research, ethics committees, valuing contributions, informed consent, confidentiality, authorship and ending (...) the research. The article also suggests that this is a complex area worthy of further exploration and that many of the ethical challenges identified for working with young service users also need to be considered for young service user co-researchers. (shrink)

This important book charts the development of philosophical thinking about history over the past 250 years, combining extracts from key texts with new explanatory and critical discussion. The book is designed to make the work of thinkers such as Hume, Herder, Hegel, Dilthey, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Foucault accessible to students with no prior knowledge of Western philosophy. An introductory section is followed by nine further chapters exploring contrasting schools of thought. The volume reveals the origins of contemporary trends in the (...) discipline and relates wider philosophical reflections to the study of history itself. It also points to connections between philosophy of history and literary and cultural theory which have developed in recent decades. (shrink)

Does the content of a physically dangerous job affect the moral permissibility of hiring for that job? To what extent may employers consider costs in choosing workplace safety measures? Drawing on Kantian ethical theory, this article defends two strong ethical standards of workplace safety. First, the content of a hazardous job does indeed affect the moral permissibility of offering it. Unless employees need hazard pay to meet basic needs, it is permissible to offer a dangerous job only if prospective employees (...) have a reason other than hazard pay to choose this job instead of safer alternatives. Second, employers typically cannot justify omitting expensive safety measures by paying employees more, even if employees prefer higher pay to greater safety. Employers offering dangerous jobs must meet these two standards to avoid treating their employees merely as means. (shrink)

The role of corporate counsel in the corporate governance process has been long overlooked. This paper uses recent comments by Breeden as the springboard for a discussion of the issues surrounding significant roles for lawyers in corporations. It considers these both from a practical and a theoretical perspective and identifies why it is problematic merely to assume hiring lawyers will ensure good compliance both in terms of legal and ethical obligations.

Moshe Tati, a sanitation worker in Jerusalem, was among the first of more than a thousand mortally sick Israelis who signed up for illicit and clandestine ‘transplant tour’ packages that included: travel to an undisclosed foreign and exotic setting; five-star hotel accommodation; surgery in a private hospital unit; a ‘fresh’ kidney purchased from a perfect stranger trafficked from a third country. Although Tati’s holiday turned into a nightmare and he had to be emergency air-lifted from a rented transplant unit in (...) a private hospital in Adana, Turkey back to Israel, Moshe became a poster-boy of transplant tourism for the next decade. João Cavalcanti was among the first of 38 residents of the slums of Recife recruited by retired military Captain Ivan da Silva and his sidekick Captain Gadddy Tauber to travel to Durban, South Africa to provide a spare kidney to an Israeli transplant tourist in Durban. This article examines the logics and practices through which kidney buyers and kidney sellers, organs brokers, surgeons and their accessories convince themselves that they are engaged in an illegal but still mutually beneficial ‘medical-recreational’ adventure, an ‘extreme medical sport’ of sorts. While life, health and survival motivate ‘transplant tourism’, a euphemism for human trafficking in spare body parts, the freedom to roam, mobility, is an essential feature of transplant tours for kidney buyers and kidney sellers. (shrink)

Recently, dramatic price increases by several pharmaceutical companies have provoked public outrage. These scandals raise questions both about how pharmaceutical firms should be regulated and about how pharmaceutical executives ethically ought to make pricing decisions when drug prices are largely unregulated. Though there is an extensive literature on the regulatory question, the ethical question has been largely unexplored. This article defends a Kantian approach to the ethics of pharmaceutical pricing in an unregulated market. To the extent possible, pharmaceutical companies must (...) price drugs so that those who genuinely need them can get them without financial ruin. This requirement is an ethical side constraint, like the moral prohibitions on deception and theft, that takes precedence over a business’s interest in maximizing profit. That said, the requirement’s application is sensitive to the need to recoup the costs of research and to produce a return that financially justifies the original investment. It may not be either feasible or desirable for government to attempt to enforce the ethical requirements concerning just pharmaceutical pricing. Either price regulation or subsidy could fulfill government’s obligation to protect patients from being objectionably vulnerable to pricing decisions by private companies. (shrink)

De beroemde Australische kunstcriticus Robert Hughes verdedigt het onschatbare in de kunst tegen commercie, hype en marketing. In deze Nexus-lezing van 2009 ontmaskert hij nietsontziend hedendaagse iconen als Damien Hirst, Jackson Pollack en Andy Warhol, en verguist hij een markt die de prijzen van kunstwerken tot absurde hoogten doen stijgen. Daartegenover stelt hij datgene wat kunst echt waardevol maakt: de vakmanschap, intensiteit en subtiliteit van waarlijk grote kunstenaars als Vermeer, Rembrandt en Goya.

Government’s use of imprisonment raises distinctive moral issues. Even if government has broad authority to make and to enforce law, government may not be entitled to use imprisonment as a punishment for all the criminal laws it is entitled to make. Indeed, there may be some serious crimes that it is wrong to punish with imprisonment, even if the conditions of imprisonment are humane and even if no adequate alternative punishments are available.

Though political philosophers often presuppose that coercive enforcement is fundamental to law, many legal philosophers have doubted this. This article explores doubts of two types. Some legal philosophers argue that given an adequate account of coercion and coerciveness, the enforcement of law in actual legal systems will generally not count as coercive. Others accept that actual legal systems enforce many laws coercively, but they deny that law has a necessary connection with coercion. There can be individual laws that lack coercive (...) sanctions, and it is at least conceptually possible for there to be a legal system that lacks coercive enforcement altogether. This article then examines why most political philosophers and some legal philosophers have been reluctant to treat the conceptual possibility of non-coercive law as significant. (shrink)

It is widely agreed that foreign sponsors of research in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are morally required to ensure that their research benefits the broader host community. There is no agreement, however, about how much benefit or what type of benefit research sponsors must provide, nor is there agreement about what group of people is entitled to benefit. To settle these questions, it is necessary to examine why research sponsors have an obligation to benefit the broader host community, not (...) only their subjects. Justifying this claim is not straightforward. There are three justifications for an obligation to benefit host communities that each apply to some research, but not to all. Each requires a different amount of benefit, and each requires benefit to be directed toward a different group. If research involves significant net risk to LMIC subjects, research must provide adequate benefit to people in LMICs to avoid an unjustified appeal to subjects’ altruism. If research places significant burdens on public resources, research must provide fair compensation to the community whose public resources are burdened. If research is for profit, research sponsors must contribute adequately to the upkeep of public goods from which they benefit in order to avoid the wrong of free-riding, even if their use of these public goods is not burdensome. (shrink)

When a business has competitors that break a burdensome law, is it morally required to obey this law, or may it break the law to avoid an unfair competitive disadvantage? Though this ethical question is pervasive in the business world, many non-skeptical theories of the obligation to obey the law cannot give it a clear answer. A broadly Kantian account, by contrast, can explain why businesspeople ought to obey laws of a certain type even under competitive pressure, namely laws that (...) play a direct role in defining rights to use physical or financial resources free from substantial interference. Businesspeople must obey these laws even at the cost of allowing their businesses to fail and even when the acts proscribed are mala prohibita. This argument for obeying the law in competitive contexts has limited scope. Considerations of fairness or self-preservation may justify violating laws of other types under competitive pressure. (shrink)