In Democracy and the Claims of Nature, the leading thinkers in the fields of environmental, political, and social theory come together to discuss the tensions and sympathies of democratic ideals and environmental values. The prominent contributors reflect upon where we stand in our understanding of the relationship between democracy and the claims of nature. Democracy and the Claims of Nature bridges the gap between the often competing ideals of the two fields, leading to a greater understanding of each for the (...) other. (shrink)

After decades of marginalization in the secularized twentieth-century academy, moral education has enjoyed a recent resurgence in American higher education, with the establishment of more than 100 ethics centers and programs on campuses across the country. Yet the idea that the university has a civic responsibility to teach its undergraduate students ethics and morality has been met with skepticism, suspicion, and even outright rejection from both inside and outside the academy. In this collection, renowned scholars of philosophy, politics, and religion (...) debate the role of ethics in the university, investigating whether universities should proactively cultivate morality and ethics, what teaching ethics entails, and what moral education should accomplish. The essays quickly open up to broader questions regarding the very purpose of a university education in modern society. Editors Elizabeth Kiss and J. Peter Euben survey the history of ethics in higher education, then engage with provocative recent writings by Stanley Fish in which he argues that universities should not be involved in moral education. Stanley Hauerwas responds, offering a theological perspective on the university’s purpose. Contributors look at the place of politics in moral education; suggest that increasingly diverse, multicultural student bodies are resources for the teaching of ethics; and show how the debate over civic education in public grade-schools provides valuable lessons for higher education. Others reflect on the virtues and character traits that a moral education should foster in students—such as honesty, tolerance, and integrity—and the ways that ethical training formally and informally happens on campuses today, from the classroom to the basketball court. _Debating Moral Education_ is a critical contribution to the ongoing discussion of the role and evolution of ethics education in the modern liberal arts university. _Contributors_. Lawrence Blum, Romand Coles, J. Peter Euben, Stanley Fish, Michael Allen Gillespie, Ruth W. Grant, Stanley Hauerwas, David A. Hoekema, Elizabeth Kiss, Patchen Markell, Susan Jane McWilliams, Wilson Carey McWilliams, J. Donald Moon, James Bernard Murphy, Noah Pickus, Julie A. Reuben, George Shulman, Elizabeth V. Spelman. (shrink)

The author, in outlining his theory of democracy, presents, with commendable logic of sequence, his views on the nature and scope of democracy, its presuppositions, its instruments, its conditions, its justification, and its prospects. Carey McWilliams, editor of The Nation, has called this book "by all odds the finest modern exploration of the subject by an American." From the standpoint of clarity, vigor, and good sense, that accolade is deserved. While not ranking as a seminal book or one (...) that hoes its ground with pioneering originality, it brilliantly molds into an unshakable structure an extensive amassment of stones, large and small, quarried diligently and judiciously from the tests of time and polished so as to smooth away ambiguities and other imperfections. Keystone of the structure is the definition, in which every word is expertly honed, "Democracy is that system of community government in which, by and large, the members of the community participate, or may participate, directly or indirectly, in the making of decisions which affect them all." The implications of this definition are meticulously studied in chapter after chapter, and Cohen presents at the end a "note on the future of democracy" in which, eschewing pessimism or optimism, he urges concerned citizens to do what is possible to improve the conditions which can make democracy effective.—W. G. (shrink)

Are there epistemic duties to inquire? The idea enjoys intuitive support. However, prominent evidentialists argue that our only epistemic duty is to believe well (i.e., to have doxastically justified beliefs), and doing so does not require inquiry. Against this, I argue that evidentialists are plausibly committed to the idea that if we have epistemic duties to believe well, then we have epistemic duties to inquire. This is because on plausible evidentialist views of evidence possession (i.e., views that result in plausible (...) theories of evidentialist justification), inquiry is sometimes a necessary constitutive means of forming doxastically justified beliefs—beliefs that are proportioned to and based on one's evidence. So, either evidentialist views of evidence possession commit them to epistemic duties to inquire or they lead to independently implausible theories of evidentialist justification. My discussion also has important implications for the zetetic turn in epistemology, since I argue that evidentialists who are staunchly opposed to epistemic norms on inquiry have reason to reconsider. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction: Points of Departure -- Chapter 1: Instructions for Traveling -- Chapter 2: Reflections on Travel -- Chapter 3: Imagined Travelers -- Conclusion: Homecomings -- Notes -- Index.

This article explores the ethical challenges of providing Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) in a paediatric setting. More specifically, we focus on the theoretical questions that came to light when we were asked to develop a policy for responding to MAID requests at our tertiary paediatric institution. We illuminate a central point of conceptual confusion about the nature of MAID that emerges at the level of practice, and explore the various entailments for clinicians and patients that would flow from different (...) understandings. Finally, we consider the ethical challenges of building policy on what is still an extremely controversial social practice. While MAID is currently available to capable patients in Canada who are 18 years or older—a small but important subsection of the population our hospital serves—we write our policy with an eye to the near future when capable young people may gain access to MAID. We propose that an opportunity exists for MAID-providing institutions to reduce social stigma surrounding this practice, but not without potentially serious consequences for practitioners and institutions themselves. Thus, this paper is intended as a road map through the still-emerging legal and ethical landscape of paediatric MAID. We offer a view of the roads taken and considered along the way, and our justifications for travelling the paths we chose. By providing a record of our in-progress thinking, we hope to stimulate wider discussion about the issues and questions encountered in this work. (shrink)

Empirical psychology documents widespread evidence of bias in the ways that people select, interpret, and selectively interpret evidence in forming and revising their beliefs. These biases can function to create and perpetuate epistemologies of ignorance. I argue that virtue epistemology can help us explain what goes epistemically wrong in these cases, and can offer positive advice, orienting us toward ways to right it. In particular, I defend the virtue approach from epistemic situationist worries about the empirical plausibility of individual agents' (...) ability to develop corrective virtues. I argue that situational virtues are genuine responsibilist virtues, and are one of the tools at our disposal for overcoming epistemologies of ignorance. (shrink)

Only human beings have a rich conceptual repertoire with concepts like tort, entropy, Abelian group, mannerism, icon and deconstruction. How have humans constructed these concepts? And once they have been constructed by adults, how do children acquire them? While primarily focusing on the second question, in The Origin of Concepts , Susan Carey shows that the answers to both overlap substantially. Carey begins by characterizing the innate starting point for conceptual development, namely systems of core cognition. Representations of (...) core cognition are the output of dedicated input analyzers, as with perceptual representations, but these core representations differ from perceptual representations in having more abstract contents and richer functional roles. Carey argues that the key to understanding cognitive development lies in recognizing conceptual discontinuities in which new representational systems emerge that have more expressive power than core cognition and are also incommensurate with core cognition and other earlier representational systems. Finally, Carey fleshes out Quinian bootstrapping, a learning mechanism that has been repeatedly sketched in the literature on the history and philosophy of science. She demonstrates that Quinian bootstrapping is a major mechanism in the construction of new representational resources over the course of childrens cognitive development. Carey shows how developmental cognitive science resolves aspects of long-standing philosophical debates about the existence, nature, content, and format of innate knowledge. She also shows that understanding the processes of conceptual development in children illuminates the historical process by which concepts are constructed, and transforms the way we think about philosophical problems about the nature of concepts and the relations between language and thought. (shrink)

The practice of viticulture in Israelite culture is the focus of Walsh's investigation. Viticulture, no less than drinking, marked the social sphere of Israelite practitioners, and so its details were often enlisted to describe social relations in the Hebrew Bible.

Panentheism is the position that the world is in some sense ‘in’ God, and God ‘in’ the world, without the world being identical to God. Thus, it tries, like what I call mainstream theism and against pan- theism, to protect the transcendence of God, while giving greater emphasis to his immanence in creation than the former. I aim to explicate an approach that I call Orthodox Panentheism. The word ‘orthodox’ is to be read in two ways. First, the picture is (...) derived from the writings of some of the most important figures in Eastern Christian thought, so that it is Orthodox in the ‘big “O” sense’. Second, I hope to show that it is a legitimate Christian picture of the God–world relation which is both distinctive and worthy of being called ‘panentheism’ – an orthodox panentheism in the ‘little “o” sense’. (shrink)

In their summary and critique, Gamble, Gamble, and Pruski mischaracterise both the central arguments and the primary objectives of our original paper. Our paper does not provide an ethical justification for paediatric Medical Assistance in Dying by comparing it with other end of life care options. In fact, it does not offer arguments about the permissibility of MAID for capable young people at all. Instead, our paper focuses on the ethical questions that emerged as we worked to develop a policy (...) for responding to MAID requests at our tertiary paediatric institution. Following the Supreme Court of Canada’s recent decriminalisation of MAID, our hospital needed to answer immediate on-the-ground questions such as: ‘What are we going to do if an 18-year-old patient in our care requested MAID today, as is now their legal right? How should we protect their privacy? What is the best way to ensure patients are informed when making these decisions?’ On these important questions, Gamble, Gamble, and Pruskiare silent. (shrink)

Every individual event, qua individual, is unique. THought renders events non-unique through classification and generalization. Historical explanation demands understanding causal connections, in turn requiring the use of generalizations. History is a consumer of established laws which introduce a locus of non-uniqueness into history. Also, history is a producer of limited generalizations, covering temporally confined structual patterns which constitute the locus of uniqueness in history. It is the temporal limitation of these patterns, and not the chronological description of facts, which gives (...) history its character of uniqueness. (shrink)

Belief polarization occurs when subjects who disagree about some matter of fact are exposed to a mixed body of evidence that bears on that dispute. While we might expect mutual exposure to common evidence to mitigate disagreement, since the evidence available to subjects comes to consist increasingly of items they have in common, this is not what happens. The subjects’ initial disagreement becomes more pronounced because each person increases confidence in her antecedent belief. Kelly aims to identify the mechanisms that (...) underlie this phenomenon and assess whether these processes undermine the justification of polarized beliefs. He concludes that given evidentialism, justification is not undermined by the polarizing mechanisms. I take on board Kelly’s description of the polarizing mechanisms, but challenge his conclusion. I argue that on plausible versions of evidentialism, the beliefs that result from these routes to polarization are not justified. (shrink)

This paper explores auto-photography as a form of research practice in the area of identity and self-esteem research. It allows researchers to capture and articulate the ways identity guides human action and thought. It involves the generation and examination of the static images that participants themselves believe best represent them. Auto-photography is an important tool for building bridges with marginalized groups in the research process, since it offers researchers a way to let participants speak for themselves. Furthermore, by using this (...) method researchers can avoid exclusive reliance on survey questionnaires and other such research instruments that may be culturally biased. I present two research projects using auto-photography: one involving adolescent Latina girls and one involving Indian women. Based on the experience of these projects, I discuss auto-photography's importance in identity and self-esteem research. Finally, I discuss some of the benefits and challenges of working with this method. (shrink)

This paper describes a live ethics case project that can be used to teach ethics in a broad variety of business classes. The live case differs from regular cases in that it involves a current situation. Students select an on-going or current event that involves ethical violations and write a case about it. They then present their case and run a debate about the challenges and issues outlined in the case and the actions that could have or should have been (...) taken. The dynamic project fulfills the key criteria for effective ethics education since it increases awareness of the complexity of ethical challenges, allows application of concepts, creates a personal emotional engagement in the case, is relevant, holds students accountable for their position, and creates a setting that encourages students to think critically about ethics. (shrink)

This research examined how and why group membership diminishes the attribution of mind to individuals. We found that mind attribution was inversely related to the size of the group to which an individual belonged . Mind attribution was affected by group membership rather than the total number of entities perceived at once . Moreover, mind attribution to an individual varied with the perception that the individual was a group member. Participants attributed more mind to an individual that appeared distinct or (...) distant from other group members than to an individual that was perceived to be similar or proximal to a cohesive group . This effect occurred for both human and nonhuman targets, and was driven by the perception of the target as an entitative group member rather than by the knowledge that the target was an entitative group member. (shrink)

Recently, some work in feminist epistemology has received more uptake from mainstream western analytic epistemology than it had in the past. There has been recognition of the importance of topics like epistemic injustice, standpoint epistemology, and epistemologies of ignorance, for instance. But these discussions are often seen as orthogonal to core epistemic theorizing - they have not received uptake as fundamental contestations of the ways we understand epistemic value, or core normative epistemic concepts. I suggest that one reasons for this (...) is the perception that insofar as feminist theorizing is responsive to moral and political concerns, it is not doing epistemology because it is not theorizing about epistemic value. This assumes a specific kind of epistemic value monism - a view whose popularity, I argue, derives at least partly from features of the methodologies that are popular in mainstream epistemology. I show that by using a different type of methodology - ameliorative inquiry - we see that there is a principled reason to doubt epistemic value monism. We can thus understand feminist theorizing in ways that are richer, more accurate, and that contribute to our understanding of the ways in which our practical, moral, and epistemic agency are intertwined. (shrink)

Epistemic Modality Epistemic modality is the kind of necessity and possibility that is determined by epistemic constraints. A modal claim is a claim about how things could be or must be given some constraints, such as the rules of logic, moral obligations, or the laws of nature. A modal … Continue reading Epistemic Modality →.

My dissertation is in three parts. In “Evidentialism and Belief Polarization,” I consider the epistemic import of a belief revision process known as belief polarization, in which exposure to a mixed batch of evidence reliably causes people to increase confidence in whatever their antecedent belief was. I argue against Tom Kelly's claim that the beliefs that result from this process are justified on evidentialist grounds, and I take stock of what the phenomenon can teach us about evidentialism as a theory (...) of justification. In “Access Is Not Necessary for Justification,” I focus on a debate between mentalism and accessibilism, as internalist theories of epistemic justification. I argue against the received view that mentalism, as distinct from accessibilism, is not worth defending. In “Epistemic Oppression and Ameliorative Epistemology,” I offer an account of a phenomenon that I call epistemic oppression. It occurs when members of a social group are subject to a systematic and unfair disadvantage within a social epistemic structure, resulting from the operation of a capacity to control exercises of their epistemic agency, thus systematically and unfairly limiting their epistemic flourishing. I argue that the concept of epistemic oppression helps us to identify and understand the kind of wrong that happens in these cases where an agent's capacity for epistemic flourishing is unfairly impeded. (shrink)

Book reviewed: Michael Martin, Atheism, Morality and Meaning, 2002, Prometheus Books, 330pp, price £21.00 pb.

Masculinities vary by organizational context, demonstrating that organizational culture shapes the gendering of work even within the same occupation. The author draws on comparative and ethnographic data collected in two retail environments to understand how a common organizational culture is differently gendered by the organization of work. In these music stores, organizational culture is driven by masculinist fantasies of the rock musician lifestyle. As the products and knowledge of the rock musician lifestyle are made popularly accessible and retail work is (...) deskilled, a style of masculinity based on fraternization and competition takes the place of formal knowledge and experience—reaffirming rock musician as a populist, but exclusively male identity. The article concludes with a consideration of how the de-skilling of retail work reproduces gendered interactions that affirm men’s control over work and its products, even as retail work is presumed to be feminizing. (shrink)

This paper traces Alasdair MacIntyre’s account of the development of the Greek polis as presented in A Short History of Ethics, After Virtue, and Whose Justice? Which Rationality?. The paper argues for the centrality of Aristotle’s conception of politics as an architectonic art to this account. It explores the foundations of MacIntyre’s presentation of moral rationality in Homer and offers the poems of Hesiod as an aid to understanding MacIntyre’s view of the post-Homeric crisis in Greek ethics. Aristotle is then (...) invoked to show how MacIntyre represents the polis as a classical response to that crisis. (shrink)

Managers have a unique fiduciary responsibility to shareholders of a firm that implies a set of ethical obligations. At a minimum, managers are required to protect shareholder’s interests when other stakeholders are unaffected by their decision. This ethical imperative has been established in the literature. In cases of conflicts of interest between managers and shareholders, the board of directors of the firm has an ethical obligation to shareholders. The structure of the board can affect its ability to fulfill this obligation. (...) Two specific cases where managerial actions have been argued to be unethical are the adoption of classified boards and poison pills. In this study, we empirically analyze the role of board structure in protecting shareholder rights in the specific case of antitakeover provisions. We test this question on a sample of firms whose shareholders have voted to remove antitakeover provisions and find that independent, focused boards are more likely to accede to shareholder resolutions than are less independent boards. Board size is also important and related to other board structures. We draw implications of this finding for future research on the ethics of board governance.What’s really needed is a change in mindset—one that fosters not only a culture of compliance but also a company-wide environment that fosters ethical behavior and decision-making.—William H. Donaldson, SEC Chairman (2004). (shrink)

The exclusion problem is held to show that mental and physical events are identical by claiming that the denial of this identity is incompatible with the causal completeness of physics and the occurrence of mental causation. The problem relies for its motivation on the claim that overdetermination of physical effects by mental and physical causes is objectionable for a variety of reasons. In this paper, I consider four different definitions of? overdetermination? and argue that, on each, overdetermination in all cases (...) of mental causation either does not occur or is unobjectionable, even when mental and physical events are non-identical. I therefore conclude that the exclusion problem cannot be used as a reason to accept that mental and physical events are identical unless some other definition of? overdetermination? is provided. (shrink)

When conducting research on sensitive topics, it is challenging to use new methods of data collection given the apprehensions of Institutional Review Boards (IRBs). This is especially worrying because sensitive topics of research often require novel approaches. In this article a brief personal history of navigating the IRB process for conducting sex communication research is presented, along with data from a survey that tested the assumptions long held by many IRBs. Results support some of the assumptions IRBs hold about sex (...) communication research, but do not support some other assumptions. (shrink)

Epistemic Modality Epistemic modality is the kind of necessity and possibility that is determined by epistemic constraints. A modal claim is a claim about how things could be or must be given some constraints, such as the rules of logic, moral obligations, or the laws of nature. A modal … Continue reading Epistemic Modality →.

Building on a previous piece that harnessed both the handbook that Saint Ignatius of Loyola (1548/ 1991 ) authored to guide his work – the _Spiritual Exercises_ – and the account of his own transformation experience captured in the _Autobiography_ – to appropriate the dynamics of Ignatius’ _Spiritual Exercises_ into a series of life-affirming questions and delineate his transformation into four phases (Carey and Tran 2023 ), this essay continues our exploratory inquiry. Following a brief overview of the contemporary (...) organizational leadership context, our article positions Ignatius’ insights on transformation within the transformational leadership discourse and considers his contribution to the professional formation of business leaders. Our study concludes with qualitative examples of how insights from St. Ignatius’ conversion process has encouraged online graduate students of organizational leadership in their quest to transition from profession to purpose. To further fuse theory and practice, the student reflections are categorized according to the Ignatian-inspired questions that inaugurated our theoretical inquiry and guides our pedagogical practice as organizational leadership educators. (shrink)

Psychological ownership may be judged differently or similarly for self and others. Potential differences in how ownership is evaluated by actors and observers raise important questions about the concept of ownership (what is Mine, Ours, and Theirs) and how to resolve conflicting perceptions.