Company–community agreements are widely considered to be a practical mechanism for recognising the rights, needs and priorities of peoples impacted by mining, for managing impacts and ensuring that mining-derived benefits are shared. The use and application of company–community agreements is increasing globally. Notwithstanding the utility of these agreements, the gender dimensions of agreement processes in mining have rarely been studied. Prior research on women and mining demonstrates that women are often more adversely impacted by mining than men, and face greater (...) challenges in accessing development opportunities that mining can bring. Nonetheless, there is currently little guidance for companies, government or communities in bringing a gender perspective to the fore in mining and agreement processes. It is undisputed in human development literature that investment in women and sensitivity to gender delivers long-term health, education and local development outcomes. In mining and development, a number of key factors remain unexplored. These include: women’s participation in agreement processes, the gendered distribution of agreement benefits, and the extent to which impacts and benefits influence women’s development and economic inclusion. This paper presents the results of the first phase of an applied research project undertaken by the Centre for Social Responsibility in Mining at The University of Queensland and funded by the Minerals Council of Australia and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. The project sought to connect with experienced practitioners who had been directly involved in mining and agreement processes to document and analyse grounded perspectives on gender dynamics and agreements, and connect those experiences with the broader literature. Findings from this study have implications for the role of mining companies and governments in promoting gender equality and empowerment as part of their commitments to sustainable development. They also have implications for community groups and their representatives in terms of how they might engage in agreement processes to maximise women’s participation and influence. In many social contexts, a key challenge will be navigating the territory of cultural norms and gender equality, particularly in cultures where women’s influence in the public sphere is not strong. The authors argue that without consideration of a gender perspective, including gender’s intersection with other factors such as class, race, poverty level, ethnic group and age, mining agreements will not be inclusive, may exacerbate gender inequalities, and fail to contribute to long-term sustainable development. (shrink)

The Cheng-Zhu 程朱 school of Confucianism congealed from the larger Learning of the Way school in the 11th and 12th centuries. In contrast to Buddhist conceptions of human nature, Cheng-Zhu advocates claimed an understanding that gave a significant role to the natural world. Addressing the ecology of the human organism in its relationship with the natural environment revealed a complex moral psychology that characterized human beings. Self-cultivation was indispensable for connecting to our inborn nature that revealed no separation between ourselves (...) and nature. Cultivating the mental state of maintaining reverence was an indispensable form of self-cultivation. This mental state initially expressed itself in courteous and caring behavior that could be taught to the young; but, when more highly developed, reverent attention was disciplined, focused thinking that revealed the mind of the Way. A new single-mindedness might then be maintained as the master of one’s actions. The morally perfected states of being called humaneness and sagehood confirmed that one was in touch with one’s inborn connection to nature. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Prospects for a Mahāyāna Theology of EmptinessA Continuing DebateJohn P. KeenanTwo articles in recent issues of Buddhist-Christian Studies—Lai Pan-chiu’s “A Mahāyāna Reading of Chalcedon Christology: A Chinese Response to John Keenan” 1 (2004) and Thomas Cattoi’s “What Has Chalcedon to Do with Lhasa? John Keenan’s and Lai Pan-chiu’s Reflections on Classical Christology and the Possible Shape of a Tibetan Theology of Incarnation” 2 (2008)—discuss my book (...) The Meaning of Christ: A Mahāyāna Theology (1989),3 prompting me to add my voice to the conversation.In “A Mahāyāna Reading of Chalcedon Christology: A Chinese Response to John Keenan,” Lai Pan-chiu reads from the perspective of a Chinese Christian thinker my formulation of a Christology informed by Indian Mahāyāna philosophy. He would prefer to configure a rather different Mahāyāna theology, wherein the polarity expressed in traditional Chalcedonian theology would be reinvested in a Chinese Mahāyāna dynamic, with its ability to hold in creative tension what are often seen as exclusionary opposites. Lai proposes to take as leitmotif for this project the Chinese Mahāyāna theme of Buddha Nature (C. fóxìng ) and its Indian precursor of Tathāgatagarbha (Skt. “matrix of the Buddha”) thought. Although—for reasons I will discuss below—I would not myself choose this approach in writing Christology for a western audience, I certainly would commend Lai Pan-chiu’s effort to do so for a Chinese audience and beyond.In “What Has Chalcedon to Do with Lhasa? John Keenan’s and Lai Pan-chiu’s Reflections on Classical Christology and the Possible Shape of a Tibetan Theology of Incarnation,” Thomas Cattoi contends that Lai has not gone far enough in responding to The Meaning of Christ. Cattoi himself then proceeds with a critique of Mahāyāna theology that reveals both his own unwavering commitment to traditional ontological theology and his apparent disinterest in engaging Buddhist Mahāyāna philosophy in depth. He makes little or no reference to the Mahāyāna philosophical themes that I discuss in detail in The Meaning of Christ—themes that I then employ to enunciate a Mahāyāna Christology. Moreover, the alternative “Tibetan Christology” that Cattoi proffers in this article also appears to avoid any deep or detailed engagement [End Page 3] with Mahāyāna thought. He seems satisfied to employ Tibetan Buddhist terminology simply to reaffirm what we have long affirmed in the Greek, emphasizing the embodiment of Christ as the unicum, the one and only embodiment of God, and the transformation of the very fabric of the universe effected thereby.4 His Christology functions as a description of that transformation and, to my lights, leaves scant room for any Trinitarian theology of the Spirit. He argues against the notion that any discourse can empty the ontological claims of “the Christian position.” For him, only the ontological theology of our Greek ancestors is adequate—apparently culturally privileged because providentially inspired.I will address herein some of the many, often convoluted, issues raised, for these issues are basic to Mahāyāna theology and to critiques against its viability. I choose not to detail the many instances in which Thomas Cattoi misreads, mischaracterizes, and misrepresents my work; I must only trust that those who have read The Meaning of Christ are well aware that Cattoi’s characterizations of that book reflect neither its content nor its tone.5 I shall use this space instead to further clarify the shape of a Mahāyāna theology that employs the principal themes of Mādhyamika and Yogācāra, and will discuss in a more general way Cattoi’s fundamental inattentiveness to those themes and to the manner in which they inform Mahāyāna theology.6 I shall also discuss Lai Pan-chiu’s very interesting proposal for a Chinese Mahāyāna theology.Ontology and MahĀyĀna Realms of UnderstandingMahāyāna theology is not Cattoi’s “Mādhyamika dualism.”7 Mahāyāna theology does not represent a Buddhist “position,” but rather the emptiness of all... (shrink)

A review of The Face in the Mirror: The Search for the Origins of Consciousness by Julian Paul Keenan with Gordon C. Gallup Jr. and Dean Falk. Ecco, New York, 2003. ISBN 006001279X.

Background -- The moral manualists -- Initiating reform : Odon Lottin -- Retrieving Scripture and charity : Fritz Tillman and Gérard Gilleman -- Synthesis : Bernard Häring -- The neo-manualists -- New foundations for moral reasoning, 1970-89 -- New foundations for a theological anthropology, 1980-2000 -- Toward a global discourse on suffering and solidarity -- Afterword: The encyclicals of Pope Benedict XVI.

McCarthy et al. rightly point out many of the ways in which theological traditions can complement secular bioethics and correct for some of its biases. These predispositions include an overl...

In the work of Nietzsche, sacrifice can only sacrifice itself over and over because what it seeks to overcome makes this sacrifice of itself both necessary and useless . The truth is eternally postponed in a necessary sacrificial gesture that can only sacrifice itself, thereby rendering itself useless . In the attempt to step beyond nihilism, that is, in the attempt to negate nihilism, one repeats the negation characteristic of nihilism. One becomes inextricably implicated in the move of nihilistic sacrifice. (...) The sacrifice of the sacrifice characteristic of nihilism , that is, the sacrifice of sacrifice, can only take place as the impossibility of its realization. One, therefore, produces or performs an interminable step/not beyond, an incessant step beyond that eternally returns. (shrink)

This book offers an analysis of the ways a linked set of ethico-political concepts - responsibility, rights, freedom, equality, and justice - might be re-thought, in view of the linguistic deconstruction of their underlying principle, the individual human subject. In a series of readings of contemporary thinkers and their philosophical antecedents the author argues that an encounter with the difficulties of reading language, precisely what resists the immediate comprehension or mastery of a subject, enables in turn a new thought of (...) rights and responsibility. The book is driven by a sense that literary and theoretical questions, and the ideas or concepts they appeal to or provoke, play a critical role in the way we think about and experience politics. The author seeks to harness this specialized discourse in order to consider what ethical and political thinking might learn from literature and its theorists. (shrink)

Moral Wisdom introduces moral theory through a Catholic lens. Connecting the Catholic tradition to the realities of modern life, the third edition has been revised throughout to include new examples, the teachings of Pope Francis, new scholarship on the Ten Commandments and the teachings of Jesus, and a new chapter on applying lessons to life.

How is a disease contracted, and how does it progress through the body? Answers to these questions are fundamental to understanding both basic biology and medicine. Advances in the biomedical sciences continue to provide more tools to address these fundamental questions and to uncover questions that have not been thought of before. Despite these major advances, we are still facing conceptual and technical challenges when learning about the etiology of disease, especially for genetic diseases. In this review, we illustrate this (...) point by discussing the causal links between molecular mechanisms and systems-level phenotypes in molecular diseases. We begin with an examination of sickle cell anemia, and how mechanisms of the disease have been comprehended over the last century. While sickle cell anemia involves a mutation in a single protein in a single cell type, other diseases involve mutations in networks with many protein interactions and in diverse cell types. We introduce the challenges that result from these differences and illustrate the current obstacles by discussing the RASopathies, a recently discovered class of developmental syndromes that result from mutations in signaling networks. Methods to study mutant genotypes that lead to mutant phenotypes are discussed, particularly the use of model organisms and mutant proteins to study protein interactions that may be important for development of disease. These studies will point toward the future of diagnosing and treating genetic disease. (shrink)

The dispute between two of Princeton Theological Seminary's leading Barth scholars concerning theological ontology invites engagement from the contemporary Thomistic tradition. On the one hand, McCormack argues that, in a fully Barthian theological ontology, divine triunity is constituted by the pretemporal election of Jesus Christ. On the other hand, Hunsinger contends that this election is expressive of an antecedent trinity. In the light of scholastic disputes between Dominican and Franciscan theologians, McCormack's proposal is seen to resemble aspects of the Bonaventurean (...) account of triune relationality, particularly the account of procession as constitutive of personal distinction and the affirmation of a primordial ‘primity’ adhering to the Father's innascibility. Whilst McCormack seeks to avoid an undetermined originary plenitude, his treatment of the divine attributes as logically consequent to election risks attributing to pretemporality a status akin to originary primity. Affirming, with Hunsinger, an eternal trinity antecedent to election, the Thomistic tradition nonetheless contains the resources necessary to prevent this antecedence becoming a dissociative antecedence. As such, Thomism preserves divine aseity whilst equally safeguarding against the disconnection of logos asarkos from logos incarnandus that McCormack regards as an unwarranted metaphysical speculation that bypasses the particularity of revelation in Jesus Christ. (shrink)

Predicting future trends in bioethics depends on the recognition of contemporary innovations. Because of the extraordinary challenges brought on by the HIV/AIDS pandemic, bioethics has had to undergo a critical examination of its own effectiveness. This essay examines 10 developments that have helped shape the future of bioethics in a time of HIV/AIDS.

Most healthcare providers work from ethical principles based on a Western model of practice that may not adhere to the cultural values intrinsic to Indigenous peoples. Breaking bad news is an important topic of ethical concern in health research. While much has been documented on BBN globally, the ethical implications of receiving bad news, from an Indigenous patient perspective in particular, is an area that requires further inquiry. This article discusses the experiences of Māori lung cancer patients and their families, (...) in order to investigate the ethical implications of receiving bad news. Data collection occurred through 23 semistructured interviews and nine focus groups with Māori lung cancer patients and their families in four districts in the Midland Region of New Zealand: Waikato, Bay of Plenty, Lakes and Tairāwhiti. The findings of this study were categorised into two key themes: communication and context. Avenues for best practice include understanding the centrality of the HCP–patient relationship and family ties in the healthcare journey, and providing patients with the full range of viable treatment options including hope, clear advice and guidance when the situation calls for it. Overall, the findings of this study hold implications for providing culturally safe and humanistic cancer care when BBN to Māori and Indigenous patients. (shrink)

Leaders and managers of today's multinational corporations face a plethora of problems and issues directly attributable to the fact that they are operating in an international context. With work-sites, plants and/or customers based in another country, or even several countries, representing a vast spectrum of cultural differences, international trade and offshore operations, coupled with increased globalisation in respect to political, social and economic realities, contribute to new dilemmas that these leaders must deal with. Not the least of these being a (...) Code of Ethics and ethical decision making.This paper examines the differences in culture between a group of managers from the United States and similar group from Croatia using Hofstede's theory of International Cultures. The study explores how these cultural dimensions may help in our understanding of the differences in reported whistleblowing. The authors then postulate four hypotheses regarding various aspects of whistleblowing. These Hypotheses were than tested using a survey administered to a sample of U.S.A. and Croatian managers. Finally, the paper discusses the findings and practical implications for contemporary managers in the international arena. (shrink)

Localizing the self in the brain has been the goal of consciousness research for centuries. Recently, there has been an increase in attention to the localization of the self. Here we present data from patients suffering from a loss of self in an attempt to understand the neural correlates of consciousness. Focusing on delusional misidentification syndrome , we find that frontal regions, as well as the right hemisphere appear to play a significant role in DMS and DMS related disorders. These (...) data are placed in the context of neuroimaging findings. (shrink)

Response to wrongdoing is modeled as a decision process in an organizational context. The model is grounded in theory of risk, ambiguity, and informational influences on decision making. Time pressure, inadequate information and coworker influences are addressed. Along the way, a handful of propositions are provided which emphasize influences on the actual choice between response options.

At the heart of any ethics of human enhancement must be some normative assumptions about human nature. The purpose of this essay is to draw on themes from a Protestant theological anthropology to provide a basis for understanding and evaluating the tension between maintaining our humanity and enhancing it. Drawing primarily on the work of theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, I interpret enhancement as proceeding from the anxiety that characterizes human experience at the juncture of freedom and finiteness. Religious and moral dimensions (...) of human sinfulness are considered in relation to cultural values that motivate human enhancement generally. I employ these dimensions in a series of benchmarks to suggest a background of theological, anthropological, and moral considerations against which enhancement is not to be condemned but rather critically evaluated. (shrink)

This fascinating volume will be invaluable to neuroscientists, psychologists, psychiatrists, neurologists, and philosophers of mind, and to their students and ...

Linguists rely on intuitive conceptions of structure when comparing expressions and languages. In an algebraic presentation of a language, some natural notions of similarity can be rigorously defined (e.g. among elements of a language, equivalence w.r.t. isomorphisms of the language; and among languages, equivalence w.r.t. isomorphisms of symmetry groups), but it tums out that slightly more complex and nonstandard notions are needed to capture the kinds of comparisons linguists want to make. This paper identihes some of the important notions of (...) structural similarity, with attention to similarity claims that are prominent in the current linguistic tradition of transformational grammar. @ 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. (shrink)

An adequate theory of rights ought to forbid the harming of animals to promote trivial interests of humans, as is often done in the animal-user industries. But what should the rights view say about situations in which harming some animals is necessary to prevent intolerable injustices to other animals? I develop an account of respectful treatment on which, under certain conditions, it’s justified to intentionally harm some individuals to prevent serious harm to others. This can be compatible with recognizing the (...) inherent value of the ones who are harmed. My theory has important implications for contemporary moral issues in nonhuman animal ethics, such as the development of cultured meat and animal research. (shrink)

Value capture occurs when an agent’s values are rich and subtle; they enter a social environment that presents simplified — typically quantified — versions of those values; and those simplified articulations come to dominate their practical reasoning. Examples include becoming motivated by FitBit’s step counts, Twitter Likes and Re-tweets, citation rates, ranked lists of best schools, and Grade Point Averages. We are vulnerable to value capture because of the competitive advantage that such crisp and clear expressions of value have in (...) our private reasoning and our public justification. There is, however, a price. In value capture, we take a central component of our autonomy — our ongoing deliberation over the exact articulation of our values — and we outsource it. And the metrics to which we outsource usually engineered for the interests of some external force, like a large-scale institution’s interest in cross-contextual comprehensibility and quick aggregability. That outsourcing cuts off one of the key benefits to personal deliberation. In value capture, we no longer adjust our values and their articulations in light of own rich experience of the world. Our values should often be carefully tailored to our particular selves or our small-scale communities, but in value capture, we buy our values off the rack. In some cases – like decreasing CO2 emissions – the costs of non-tailored values are outweighed by the benefit of precise collective coordination. In other cases, like in our aesthetic lives, they are not. This suggests that we should want different values suited to different scales. We should want value federalism. Some values are perhaps best pursued at the largest-scale level, others at smaller scales. The problem occurs when we exhibit an excess preference for the largest-scale values – when we consistently let the universal metrics swamp our quieter interests. (shrink)

In The Case for Animal Rights, Tom Regan argues that although all subjects-of-a-life have equal inherent value, there are often differences in the value of lives. According to Regan, lives that have the highest value are lives which have more possible sources of satisfaction. Regan claims that the highest source of satisfaction, which is available to only rational beings, is the satisfaction associated with thinking impartially about moral choices. Since rational beings can bring impartial reasons to bear on decision making, (...) Regan maintains that they have an additional possible source of satisfaction that nonrational beings do not have and, consequently, the lives of rational beings turn out to have greater value.. (shrink)

Differentiating self from other has been investigated at the neural level, and its incorporation into the model proposed Hurley is necessary for the model to be complete. With an emphasis on the feed-forward model in layer 2, we examine the role that self and other disruptions, including auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs), may have in expanding the model proposed by Hurley.

Анотація. У статті проаналізовані досягнення Соціального Вчительства Католицької Церкви, репрезентовані працями Лева ХІІІ, Пія ХІ, Пія ХІІ, Івана Павла ІІ, що розкривають змістовні характеристики поняття «принцип субсидіарності», його роль і значення в системі християнських цінностей. Принцип субсидіарності робить можливими такі взаємовідносини в соціальному житті, коли спільнота вищого порядку не втручається у внутрішнє життя спільноти нижчого порядку, перебираючи на себе належні тій функції; заради спільного добра, спільного блага вона надає їй у разі потреби підтримку й допомогу, узгоджуючи у такий спосіб її (...) взаємодію з іншими соціальними структурами. Принцип субсидіарності скеровує соціальну практику на утвердження спільного блага в людському співтоваристві. Поширення і застосування принципу субсидіарності протистоїть небезпеці «одержавлення» суспільства та найзагрозливіших проявів колективізму, обмежує абсолютизацію влади, бюрократизацію державних і соціокультурних структур, стає одним із гарантів дотримання прав і свобод громадян своєї країни. (shrink)

In her BBC Reith Lectures on Trust, Onora O’Neill offers a short, but biting, criticism of transparency. People think that trust and transparency go together but in reality, says O'Neill, they are deeply opposed. Transparency forces people to conceal their actual reasons for action and invent different ones for public consumption. Transparency forces deception. I work out the details of her argument and worsen her conclusion. I focus on public transparency – that is, transparency to the public over expert domains. (...) I offer two versions of the criticism. First, the epistemic intrusion argument: The drive to transparency forces experts to explain their reasoning to non-experts. But expert reasons are, by their nature, often inaccessible to non-experts. So the demand for transparency can pressure experts to act only in those ways for which they can offer public justification. Second, the intimate reasons argument: In many cases of practical deliberation, the relevant reasons are intimate to a community and not easily explicable to those who lack a particular shared background. The demand for transparency, then, pressures community members to abandon the special understanding and sensitivity that arises from their particular experiences. Transparency, it turns out, is a form of surveillance. By forcing reasoning into the explicit and public sphere, transparency roots out corruption — but it also inhibits the full application of expert skill, sensitivity, and subtle shared understandings. The difficulty here arises from the basic fact that human knowledge vastly outstrips any individual’s capacities. We all depend on experts, which makes us vulnerable to their biases and corruption. But if we try to wholly secure our trust — if we leash groups of experts to pursuing only the goals and taking only the actions that can be justified to the non-expert public — then we will undermine their expertise. We need both trust and transparency, but they are in essential tension. This is a deep practical dilemma; it admits of no neat resolution, but only painful compromise. (shrink)

We develop a formal semantic analysis of the alarm calls used by Campbell’s monkeys in the Tai forest and on Tiwai island —two sites that differ in the main predators that the monkeys are exposed to. Building on data discussed in Ouattara et al. :e7808, 2009a; PNAS 106: 22026–22031, 2009b and Arnold et al., we argue that on both sites alarm calls include the roots krak and hok, which can optionally be affixed with -oo, a kind of attenuating suffix; in (...) addition, sentences can start with boom boom, which indicates that the context is not one of predation. In line with Arnold et al., we show that the meaning of the roots is not quite the same in Tai and on Tiwai: krak often functions as a leopard alarm call in Tai, but as a general alarm call on Tiwai. We develop models based on a compositional semantics in which concatenation is interpreted as conjunction, roots have lexical meanings, -oo is an attenuating suffix, and an all-purpose alarm parameter is raised with each individual call. The first model accounts for the difference between Tai and Tiwai by way of different lexical entries for krak. The second model gives the same underspecified entry to krak in both locations, but it makes use of a competition mechanism akin to scalar implicatures. In Tai, strengthening yields a meaning equivalent to non-aerial dangerous predator and turns out to single out leopards. On Tiwai, strengthening yields a nearly contradictory meaning due to the absence of ground predators, and only the unstrengthened meaning is used. (shrink)

Recent discussions in the just war literature suggest that soldiers have a duty to assume certain risks in order to protect the lives of all innocent civilians. I challenge this principle of risk by arguing that it is justified neither as a principle that guides the conduct of combat soldiers, nor as a principle that guides commanders in the US military. I demonstrate that the principle of risk fails on the first account because it requires soldiers both to violate their (...) strict duty of obedience and loyalty and to exceed their special obligations to protect their fellow comrades, the state, the state's constituents and other protected civilians. I then illustrate that the principle of risk fails on the second account since it conflicts with the commander's primary obligation to protect and promote the welfare and lives of his or her soldiers. I conclude by arguing that we cannot reasonably expect soldiers and commanders to adhere to the principle of risk until there is a radical, institutional-level transformation of militaristic goals, values, strategies, policies, warrior codes and expectations of service members in the US Armed Forces. (shrink)

Research on whistleblowing has not yet provided a finite set of variables which have been shown to influence an employee's decision to report wrongdoing. Prior research on business ethics suggests that ethical business decisions are influenced by both organizational as well as intrapersonal variables. As such, this paper attempts to predict the decision to whistleblow using organizational and intrapersonal variables. External whistleblowing was found to be significantly related to supervisor support, informal policies, gender, and ideal values. External whistleblowing was not (...) found to be significantly predicted by formal policies, organizational tenure, age, education, satisfaction, or commitment. (shrink)