An Inquiry into the first principles of morals and justice: This book restores to us an understanding that was once settled in the 'moral sciences': that there are propositions, in morals and law, which are not only true but which cannot be ...

Hadley Arkes argues that it is necessary to move "beyond the Constitution", to the principles that stood antecedent to the text, if we are to understand the text and apply the Constitution to the cases that arise every day in our law.

The city of Cincinnati, we know, can be an engaging place, but federal judge Arthur Spiegel also found, in the mid-'90s, that it could be quite a vexing place. The city council of Cincinnati had passed what was called the Human Rights Ordinance of 1992, which barred virtually all species of discriminationAppalachian origin.sexual orientation.minority status” in the law. The framers of the amendment objected to the tendency to treat gays and lesbians on the same plane as groups that have suffered (...) discrimination based on race, religion, or gender. The proposal, known as Issue 3, drew wide support and passed in a referendum in 1993. It was, of course, challenged in the courts, which is why it found its way into the hands of Judge Spiegel. (shrink)

Budziszewski offers, in these pages, the sense of a lively mind engaging a serious question: he would resist that movement in modern philosophy which has sought to discredit the socalled naturalistic fallacy and ethical naturalism--the movement which has sought to deny that we can find, in human nature, the standards that mark a distinctly human good, and which furnish the grounds for our judgments about right and wrong. Budziszewski would restore an older understanding, in which "human nature" supplied "the rule (...) and measure for human life.". (shrink)

Responding to volatile criticisms frequently leveled at Leo Strauss and those he influenced, the prominent contributors to this volume demonstrate the profound influence that Strauss and his students have exerted on American liberal democracy and contemporary political thought. By stressing the enduring vitality of classic books and by articulating the theoretical and practical flaws of relativism and historicism, the contributors argue that Strauss and the Straussians have identified fundamental crises of modernity and liberal democracy.

... or political office or scientific research tends to think everything small which does not visibly contribute to money-getting, or political influence, ...

Review of Julian H. Franklin, Animal Rights and Moral Philosophy (Columbia, 2005).

For too long, Spinoza's ethics was misread as an ethics of ideals, in which the most virtuous life possible was said to consist of the life of pure reasoning. The "free man," Spinoza's paragon of virtue, was understood to be the individual who is neither helped nor harmed by anything external. The goal, on this view, was to transcend the life of the body, of the material, and of the political, in order to focus solely on becoming like God by (...) increasing one's store of rational ideas.This, of course, is an impoverished understanding of Spinoza's aims. Not only does it cast virtue as something unattainable for actually existing, materially and socially embedded individuals, but it overlooks a vast swath of Spinoza's... (shrink)

Halley and colleagues highlight important aspects of advocacy and justice in rare disease and provide recommendations for stakeholders to encourage progress toward equity and justice. In the rare d...

The flaws in social psychological research pointed out by Cesario have societal costs. These include ignoring crucial base rates thereby degrading the effectiveness of policy decisions, generalizing the conclusions derived from experiments on non-professionals thereby distorting the public's view of professional law enforcement personnel, questionable accusations of racism, and mis-attributions of the causes of racial differences in behavior.

According to a simple form of consequentialism, we should base decision on our judgments about their consequences for achieving out goals. Our goals give us reason to endorse consequentialism as a standard of decision making. Alternative standards invariably lead to consequences that are less good in this sense. Yet some people knowingly follow decision rules that violate consequentialism. For example, they prefer harmful omissions to less harmful acts, they favor the status quo over alternatives they would otherwise judge to be (...) better, they provide third-party compensation on the basis of the cause of an injury rather than the benefit from the compensation, they ignore deterrent effects in decisions about punishment, and they resist coercive reforms they judge to be beneficial. I suggest that nonconsequentialist principles arise from overgeneralizing rules that are consistent with consequentialism in a limited set of cases. Commitment to such rules is detached from their original purposes. The existence of such nonconsequentialist decision biases has implications for philosophical and experimental methodology, the relation between psychology and public policy, and education. (shrink)

Bringing together new theory and critical perspectives on a broad range of topics in animal ethics, this book examines the implications of recent developments in the various fields that bear upon animal ethics. Showcasing a new generation of thinkers, it exposes some important shortcomings in existing animal rights theory.

This chapter contains sections titled: God and the primordial causes God and the world: theophany “Man: how great a thing and great a name, the image of divine nature” (V, 821C) Last things Eriugena in his time and beyond.

Much of traditional AI exemplifies the explicit representation paradigm, and during the late 1980''s a heated debate arose between the classical and connectionist camps as to whether beliefs and rules receive an explicit or implicit representation in human cognition. In a recent paper, Kirsh (1990) questions the coherence of the fundamental distinction underlying this debate. He argues that our basic intuitions concerning explicit and implicit representations are not only confused but inconsistent. Ultimately, Kirsh proposes a new formulation of the distinction, (...) based upon the criterion ofconstant time processing.The present paper examines Kirsh''s claims. It is argued that Kirsh fails to demonstrate that our usage of explicit and implicit is seriously confused or inconsistent. Furthermore, it is argued that Kirsh''s new formulation of the explicit-implicit distinction is excessively stringent, in that it banishes virtually all sentences of natural language from the realm of explicit representation. By contrast, the present paper proposes definitions for explicit and implicit which preserve most of our strong intuitions concerning straightforward uses of these terms. It is also argued that the distinction delineated here sustains the meaningfulness of the abovementioned debate between classicists and connectionists. (shrink)

This book presents a theory of habitat rights for wild animals, positioning animal property rights within the existing institution of property and discussing the practical implications of giving property rights to animals.

Third-party intervention has been the focus of recent debate in self-defense theory. When is it permissible for third-parties to intervene on behalf of an innocent victim facing an unjustified attack or threat? In line with recent self-defense theory, if an attacker is morally responsible for their actions and does not have an acceptable excuse then it is permissible for third-parties to use proportionate violence against them.

abstract Most moral philosophers accept that we have obligations to provide at least some aid and assistance to distant strangers in dire need. Philosophers who extend rights and obligations to nonhuman animals, however, have been less than explicit about whether we have any positive duties to free‐roaming or ‘wild’ animals. I argue our obligations to free‐roaming nonhuman animals in dire need are essentially no different to those we have to severely cognitively impaired distant strangers. I address three objections to the (...) view that we have positive duties to free‐roaming nonhuman animals, and respond to the predation objection to animal rights. (shrink)

Abstract Drawing upon evolutionary theory and the work of Daniel Dennett and Nicholas Agar, I offer an argument for broadening discussion of the ethics of disenhancement beyond animal welfare concerns to a consideration of animal “biopreferences”. Short of rendering animals completely unconscious or decerebrate, it is reasonable to suggest that disenhanced animals will continue to have some preferences. To the extent that these preferences can be understood as what Agar refers to as “plausible naturalizations” for familiar moral concepts like beliefs (...) and desires, then they can make moral claims on us and provide support for intuitive opposition to disenhancement. Content Type Journal Article Category Original Paper Pages 1-6 DOI 10.1007/s11569-012-0142-6 Authors John Hadley, School of Humanities and Communication Arts, University of Western Sydney, 7.G.10b, Bankstown Campus, Locked Bag 1797, Penrith, NSW 2751, Australia Journal NanoEthics Online ISSN 1871-4765 Print ISSN 1871-4757. (shrink)

Fodor's and Pylyshyn's stand on systematicity in thought and language has been debated and criticized. Van Gelder and Niklasson, among others, have argued that Fodor and Pylyshyn offer no precise definition of systematicity. However, our concern here is with a learning based formulation of that concept. In particular, Hadley has proposed that a network exhibits strong semantic systematicity when, as a result of training, it can assign appropriate meaning representations to novel sentences (both simple and embedded) which contain words (...) in syntactic positions they did not occupy during training. The experience of researchers indicates that strong systematicity in any form is difficult to achieve in connectionist systems.Herein we describe a network which displays strong semantic systematicity in response to Hebbian, connectionist training. During training, two-thirds of all nouns are presented only in a single syntactic position (either as grammatical subject or object). Yet, during testing, the network correctly interprets thousands of sentences containing those nouns in novel positions. In addition, the network generalizes to novel levels of embedding. Successful training requires a, corpus of about 1000 sentences, and network training is quite rapid. The architecture and learning algorithms are purely connectionist, but classical insights are discernible in one respect, viz, that complex semantic representations spatially contain their semantic constituents. However, in other important respects, the architecture is distinctly non-classical. (shrink)