Critics of commodification often claim that the buying and selling of some good communicates disrespect or some other inappropriate attitude. Such semiotic critiques have been leveled against markets in sex, pornography, kidneys, surrogacy, blood, and many other things. Brennan and Jaworski (2015a) have recently argued that all such objections fail. They claim that the meaning of a market transaction is a highly contingent, socially constructed fact. If allowing a market for one of these goods can improve the supply, access or (...) quality of the good, then instead of banning the market on semiotic grounds, they urge that we should revise our semiotics. In this reply, I isolate a part of the meaning of a market transaction that is not socially constructed: our market exchanges always express preferences. I then show how cogent semiotic critiques of some markets can be constructed on the basis of this fact. (shrink)

As we build increasingly intelligent machines, we confront difficult questions about how to specify their objectives. One approach, which we call human-centered, tasks the machine with the objective of learning and satisfying human objectives by observing our behavior. This paper considers how human-centered AI should conceive the humans it is trying to help. We argue that an Aristotelian model of human agency has certain advantages over the currently dominant theory drawn from economics.

Decades of empirical and theoretical research has produced an extensive literature on the ethical judgments construct. Given its importance to understanding people’s ethical choices, future research should explore the psychological processes that produce ethical judgments. In this paper, the authors discuss two steps needed to advance this effort. First, they note that the business ethics literature lacks a single, generally accepted definition of ethical judgments. After reviewing several extant definitions, the authors offer a definition of the construct and discuss its (...) advantages. Second, future ethical judgment research would benefit from greater integration between theories of ethical decision making and theories of social cognition. Drawing upon the Hunt–Vitell ( Journal of Macromarketing 6 (Spring), 5–15, 1986 ; In: N. C. Smith and J. A. Quelch (eds.), Ethics in Marketing . Irwin, Homewood, IL, pp. 775–784, 1992 ) model and the heuristic-systematic model (Chaiken, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 39 (November), 752–766, 1980 ), the authors present a brief research agenda intended to stimulate research on the psychological processes behind ethical judgments. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue that contemporary democratic theory gives insufficient attention to the important contributions dissenting citizens make to democratic life. Guided by the dissident practices of activist women, I develop a more expansive conception of citizenship that recognizes dissent and an ethic of political courage as vital elements of democratic participation. I illustrate how this perspective on citizenship recasts and reclaims women's courageous dissidence by reconsidering the well-known story of Rosa Parks.

DISCOURSE; EXPRESSION (i) 'Discourse' is a word with a variety of meanings. One of the more useful is as an omnibus word covering both thought and talk. ...

Ethical or socially responsible investment is one of the most rapidly growing areas of finance. New government regulations mean that all pension funds are obliged to take such considerations into account. However, this phenomenon has received little critical attention from business ethicists, and a clear conceptual framework is lacking. This paper, by a practitioner in the field, attempts to fill this analytical gap. It considers what difference, if any, lies between the terms ‘ethical’, ‘green’, or ‘socially responsible’. It also tackles (...) the difficult question of how any public form of investment can be called ‘ethical’ in an overtly pluralistic society. The paper provides an account of the historical development of ethical investment, and traces the evolution of the varying terms used to describe it. This is followed by a conceptual analysis of these terms, and a description of ethical decision‐making in this context. The paper ends by considering the role of shareholder action within ethical investment, and assesses the utility of the stakeholder model as a theoretical justification. (shrink)

This study analyzes cognitive responses to explore a dual processing perspective of ethical judgment formation. Specifically, the study investigates how two factors, judgment task difficulty and moral intensity, influence the extent of deontological and teleological processing and their effects on ethical judgments. A single experiment on 110 undergraduate research participants found that judgment task difficulty affected the extent of deontological and teleological processing. Although moral intensity affected ethical judgments, it did not produce effects on either deontological or teleological cognitive responses. (...) Results did not support the hypotheses that deontological and teleological cognitive responses would mediate the relationships between the experimental factors and ethical judgments. Overall, the results support continued research of factors that affect the nature of information processing in ethical decision situations and the use of cognitive response analysis as a tool for conducting this research. (shrink)

Ethical beliefs are not justified by familiar methods. We do not directly sense ethical properties, at least not in the straightforward way we sense colors or shapes. Nor is it plausible to think – despite a tradition claiming otherwise – that there are self-evident ethical truths that we can know in the way we know conceptual or mathematical truths. Yet, if we are justified in believing anything, we are justified in believing various ethical propositions e.g., that slavery is wrong. If (...) ethical beliefs are not justified in these familiar ways, how are they justified? -/- In her widely read, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” and in her short complimentary paper, “On Brute Facts,” G.E.M. Anscombe answers this question with a compelling and unorthodox account of justification in ethics. Because of her polemical tone and because “Modern Moral Philosophy” does so much else besides, this contribution is easy to overlook. But her account is worth taking seriously, since (a) it is an underappreciated yet plausible account that sidesteps traditional controversies, (b) it offers rich conceptual tools for interpreting and critiquing ethical theories, (c) it suggests an appealing account of the place of ethical theory in ethical knowledge and, (d) it provides useful guidance for doing applied ethics. (shrink)

When I first starting hearing and reading about Jacques Rancière a number of years ago, I was deeply skeptical. Wasn’t this yet another European man becoming the new political theory “It Girl”? Wasn’t the claim that Rancière had a singular, fresh approach to dissent and protest overblown, when other people—especially critical race scholars, postcolonial theorists, feminists, queer theorists, and so on—had already addressed these topics thoroughly but were rarely acknowledged in mainstream scholarship? Did we really need to deify and create (...) a cottage industry around yet one more white male Western theorist, especially one who so rarely deigns to cite his influences or the work of others? It took... (shrink)

Many take the claim that you cannot ‘get’ an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ to imply that non- moral beliefs are by themselves incapable of justifying moral beliefs. I argue that this is a mistake and that the position that moral beliefs are justified exclusively by non-moral beliefs—a view that I call moral inferentialism—presents an attractive non-sceptical moral epistemology.

An animal confronts numerous challenges when constructing an optimal navigational route. Spatial representations used for path optimization are likely constrained by critical environmental factors that dictate which neural systems control navigation. Multiple coding schemes depend upon their ecological relevance for a particular species, particularly when dealing with the third, or vertical, dimension of space.

Toward the end of the twentieth century, Highland Maya intellectuals and activists in Guatemala began to argue for the recognition of indigenous customary law, rooted in traditional Maya moral and ritual discourse. Such law is often in tension with the Western notion of rights that undergirds national and international treatises regarding indigenous peoples. This essay identifies three distinct but mutually engaged pairs of moral concepts—hot/cold, left/right, and favorable/not favorable—articulated through K'iche' Maya quotidian and ceremonial practices and speech. It also identifies (...) the extent to which they do not necessarily align with Western notions of good and bad. These three pairs of moral terms, specifically as conserved through the high-register of Maya discourse used by traditional ceremonial specialists, illustrate a normative means by which Highland Maya discern understandings of justice, and ground their advocacy for restorative justice. (shrink)

Talking Politics is a philosophical examination of some of the basic concepts of political discourse. Its primary focus is on the ordinary ; on what is said by politicians, in newspapers and by people in pubs, rather than on the works of political theorists. This is a work of , but not on political theory. Talking Politics is: * Invaluable as a source of reference for students, and contains a detailed index * Arranged thematically, around topics such as `Nation'. Each (...) entry has copious cross-references and suggestions for further reading A. W. Sparkes is uniquely qualified to write such a book, combining some thirty years' teaching as a philosopher with wide experience of, and a life-long fascination with, politics. His attitude is that of a critical, but uncynical, observer. (shrink)

_Talking Politics_ is a philosophical examination of some of the basic concepts of political discourse. Its primary focus is on the _ordinary_; on what is said by politicians, in newspapers and by people in pubs, rather than on the works of political theorists. This is a work _of_, but not _on_ political theory. _Talking Politics_ is: * Invaluable as a source of reference for students, and contains a detailed index * Arranged thematically, around topics such as `Nation'. Each entry has (...) copious cross-references and suggestions for further reading A. W. Sparkes is uniquely qualified to write such a book, combining some thirty years' teaching as a philosopher with wide experience of, and a life-long fascination with, politics. His attitude is that of a critical, but uncynical, observer. (shrink)

The following thesis explores the notion of truth as developed in the work of Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin. Contrary to the position adopted by many commentators, who seek to drive a wedge between Heidegger's unorthodox phenomenology and the resolutely non -phenomenological Benjamin, I shall want to show how both begin with a rigorously Husserlian conception of truth as an intuition of essence in order, finally, to deviate from it. I argue that, for neither one, can truth be merely one (...) problem or issue taken up by a thinking secure in itself. Rather, from its most classical determination in, for example, the Metaphysics as έπιστήμη της άληθείας, the way in which truth has been determined has itself determined the very project of philosophy. Yet whilst the trajectory of both Heidegger and Benjamin's work can thus be determined in large measure by the question of truth, both are also concerned to re-orient that question in a direction that renders problematic Aristotle's implicit connection of truth to knowledge and knowledge to intuition and presence. I argue that their respective challenges to the location of truth in the act of knowing -a challenge made each time by way of an analytical regression from a propositional understanding of truth to intuitive truth to, finally, its more original character as disclosedness - remain thoroughly phenomenological before showing how it is in the work of art, and in tragedy in particular, that each one finds the resources for a still more radical understanding of truth. Not in the cognitivist sense that art makes truth claims about the world, but in the sense that it is with the work of art that the historical act of disclosure and world -constitution that Benjamin and Heidegger call truth is most emphatically made. (shrink)

This paper reviews the development of socially responsible investment (SRI) over recent years and highlights the prospects for an increasingly strong connection with the practice of corporate social responsibility. The paper argues that not only has SRI grown significantly, it has also matured. In particular, it has become an investment philosophy adopted by a growing proportion of large investment institutions. This shift in SRI from margin to mainstream and the position in which institutional investors find themselves is leading to a (...) new form of SRI shareholder pressure. Although this bears some resemblance to lobbying campaigns which might take advantage of shareholder rights, we seek to distinguish it as an important phenomenon in its own right — one to which corporate executives are likely to be paying increasing attention in the years to come. We further argue that this approach potentially meets some of the earlier ethical criticisms of certain forms of SRI but, ironically, probably owes its existence to those pioneering approaches. We conclude with some suggestions for further research to inform discussion of the issues highlighted in the paper. (shrink)

In this study, Paola Marrati approaches—in an extremely insightful, rigorous, and well-argued way—the question of the philosophical sources of Derrida's thought through a consideration of his reading of both Husserl and Heidegger. A central focus of the book is the analysis of the concepts of genesis and trace as they define Derrida's thinking of historicity, time, and subjectivity. Notions such as the contamination of the empirical and the transcendental, dissemination and writing, are explained as key categories establishing a guiding thread (...) that runs through Derrida's early and later works. Whereas in his discussion of Husserl Derrida problematizes the relationship between the ideality of meaning and the singularity of its historical production, in his interpretation of Heidegger he challenges the very idea of the originary finitude of temporality. This book is essential reading not only for those interested in the philosophical roots of deconstruction, but for all those interested in the central questions of history and temporality, subjectivity and language, that pervade contemporary debates in cultural, literary, and visual theory alike. (shrink)

Brennan and Jaworski (2018) accuse me of misunderstanding their thesis and failing to produce a counterexample to it. In this Response, I clarify my central argument in “Can’t Buy Me Love,” explain why I used prostitution as an example, and work to advance the debate.

I shall argue that the central doctrines of Locke's politics have a theological basis, a doctrine of Creation similar to the Thomist one. Locke does not elaborate this doctrine; he presupposes it. It is not a hidden, esoteric element in his thought; it is there on the surface, but in a scattered and fragmentary form.I shall proceed in this fashion: First, I shall set out this doctrine of Creation and show its connexion with Locke's moral theory by way of an (...) examination of his doctrines of property and power. I shall then show that Locke extends this doctrine of Creation to human productive activity with crippling results for his political theory. (shrink)

From Plato's _Republic_ and Aristotle's _Poetics_ to Nietzsche's _The Birth of Tragedy_, the theme of tragedy has been subject to radically conflicting philosophical interpretations. Despite being at the heart of philosophical debate from Ancient Greece to the Nineteenth Century, however, tragedy has yet to receive proper treatment as a philosophical tradition in its own right. _Philosophy and Tragedy_ is a compelling contribution to that oversight and the first book to address the topic in a major way. Eleven new essays by (...) internationally renowned philosophers clearly show how time and again, major thinkers have returned to tragedy in many of their key works. _Philosophy and Tragedy_ aks why it is that thinkers as far apart as Hegel and Benjamin should make tragedy such an important theme in their work, and why, after Kant, an important strand of philosophy should present itself tragically. From Heidegger's reading of Sophocles' Antigone to Nietzsche and Benjamin's book-length studies of tragedy, _Philosophy and Tragedy_ presents an outstanding and original study of this preoccupation. The five sections are organised clearly around five major philosophers: Hegel, Holderlin, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Benjamin. (shrink)

“Death” sits at the center of this issue of the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy. Each article, in its own fashion, touches on the problems of thinking about the nature of death in the light of contemporary scientific and medical advances. Three articles explicitly center on the ongoing debate over the Uniform Determination of Death Act, and three center on thematic issues surrounding death. Despite the topic, the discussion is lively and thoughtful. After introducing each article and sketching their contours, (...) I offer some closing remarks on a central issue dredged up by these articles: the role of evaluative commitments and other interests in selecting criteria for the determination of death. These articles raise interesting questions about the relationship between the nature of “death” and ethical, epistemic, social-political, and economic values. This further opens up interesting lines of inquiry into medical epistemology. Finally, they broach deep questions about the nature of “function” and the relationship between organic and artificially sustained function. (shrink)