Familiarity, so the saying goes, breeds contempt. But, why should familiarity breed such a negative thing as contempt, or other negative orientations? Walker Percy, it would seem, has a lot to say about human jadedness, sometimes through the very means by which we are meant to inhabit ontological intimacy. One may not care much about, say sparrows, but intuitively people seem jaded about something that matters to them in a deeper way. This chapter explores the personal or social sources of (...) jadedness: is it an individual problem only, or caused by broader cultural factors? I attempt to sketch an initial theory of jadedness, and then expand that theory by attending to Percy’s unique philosophical contributions. I will argue, that there are at least two types of jadedness—a narrow, domain-specific psychological type and a global, existential type—that share structural similarities such as volitional and epistemic inertia, an unsettled loss of meaning, a faulty assumption of epistemic completion or superiority, and a foreclosure of ontological possibilities. I then show how Percy uniquely integrates these two types of jadedness within a broader framework of what it means to be human. (shrink)

In this article, I probe the extent of Kierkegaard's skepticism and irrationalism by examining the nature and limits of his “objective” and “approximate” knowledge. I argue that, for Kierkegaard, certain objective knowledge of contingent being is impossible and “approximate” knowledge of the same is funded by the volitional passion of belief. But, while Kierkegaard endorses severe epistemic restrictions, he rejects wholesale skepticism, allowing for genuine “approximate” knowledge of mind-independent reality. However, I further argue that we cannot ignore his criticisms of (...) such knowledge because of its intrinsic dangers, and because epistemic limitations are crucial in developing religious selfhood before God. (shrink)

In his book Iris Murdoch: The Saint and the Artist, Peter J. Conradi suggests that “a task for critics today would seem to be to understand the indebtedness of her demonic, tormented sinners and saints and of the curious coexistence in her work of malevolence and goodness, to the dark tragi-comedies of Dostoevski.”1 In his 1986 essay “Iris Murdoch and Dostoevskii,” Conradi goes even further to argue that Fyodor Dostoevsky has been “unnoticed by commentators, a hovering or brooding presence for (...) at least two decades.”2 Both here and in his book Fyodor Dostoevsky, Conradi demonstrates “convergence” through a number of remarkable similarities: the parallels between Dostoevsky’s holy... (shrink)

This textbook brings the humanities to students in order to evoke the humanity of students. It helps to form individuals who take charge of their own minds, who are free from narrow and unreflective forms of thought, and who act compassionately in their public and professional worlds. Using concepts and methods of the humanities, the book addresses undergraduate and premed students, medical students, and students in other health professions, as well as physicians and other healthcare practitioners. It encourages them to (...) consider the ethical and existential issues related to the experience of disease, care of the dying, health policy, religion and health, and medical technology. Case studies, images, questions for discussion, and role-playing exercises help readers to engage in the practical, interpretive, and analytical aspects of the material, developing skills for critical thinking as well as compassionate care. (shrink)

As a contribution to a wider discussion on moral discernment in theological anthropology, this paper seeks to answer the question “What is the impact of mental illness on an individual’s ability to make moral decisions?” Written from a clinical psychiatric perspective, it considers recent contributions from psychology, neuropsychology and imaging technology. It notes that the popular conception that mental illness necessarily robs an individual of moral responsibility is largely unfounded. Most people who suffer from mental health problems do not lose (...) the capacity to make moral decisions, and mental illness on its own rarely explains anti-social or criminal behaviour. Moreover, the assumptions of some scientists, that recent developments in neuropsychology and brain imaging suggest biological determinism, must be treated with caution. (shrink)

The vertebrate immune system uses an impressive arsenal of mechanisms to combat harmful cellular states such as infection. One way is via cells delivering real‐time snapshots of their protein content to the cell surface in the form of short peptides. Specialized immune cells (T cells) sample these peptides and assess whether they are foreign, warranting an action such as destruction of the infected cell. The delivery of peptides to the cell surface is termed antigen processing and presentation, and decades of (...) research have provided unprecedented understanding of this process. However, predicting the capacity for a given peptide to be immunogenic—to elicit a T cell response—has remained both enigmatic and a long sought‐after goal. In the era of big data, a point is being approached where the steps of antigen processing and presentation can be quantified and assessed against peptide immunogenicity in order to build predictive models. This review presents new findings in this area and contemplates challenges ahead. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe aim of this paper is to draw attention to an issue which has been largely overlooked in contemporary just war theory – namely the impact that the conditions under which an army is assembled are liable to have on the judgments that are made with respect to traditional principles of jus ad bellum and jus in bello. I argue that the way in which an army is assembled can significantly alter judgments regarding the justice of a war. In doing (...) so, I present and defend a principle of ‘just assembly’ and argue that satisfying this principle is an essential part of any deliberation regarding the justice of a particular conflict. (shrink)

Business managers regularly employ metaphorical violent rhetoric as a means of motivating their employees to action. While it might be effective to this end, research on violent media suggests that violent rhetoric might have other, less desirable consequences. This study examines how the use of metaphorical violent rhetoric by business managers impacts the ethical decision making of employees. We develop and test a model that explains how the use of violent rhetoric impacts employees’ willingness to break ethical standards, depending on (...) the source of the rhetoric. The results of two experiments suggest that the use of violent rhetoric by a CEO at a competing company increases employees’ willingness to engage in ethical violations while the use of violent rhetoric by employees’ own CEO decreases their willingness to engage in unethical behavior. Furthermore, we find that participants who made less ethical decisions motivated by violent rhetoric used by a competitor’s CEO did not view their decisions as less ethical than the other participants in the experiments. The results of these studies highlight potentially harmful unintended consequences of the use of violent rhetoric, providing knowledge that should be useful to managers and academics who want to increase employee motivation without increasing a willingness to engage in unethical behavior. (shrink)

The early work of Alasdair MacIntyre aims to provide resources to “fragmented” modern selves for adjudicating “incommensurable” claims of rival moral traditions and for committing to one with full allegiance. But MacIntyre seems to undermine rational choice through his thesis of Rational Particularism, namely, that there is no tradition-independent, universally acceptable rational standpoint from which to evaluate competing claims of rival traditions. In this paper I combat a prevalent argument that his Particularism thesis render the choice of tradition allegiance by (...) fragmented selves wholly arbitrary, hence committing MacIntyre to relativism about practical rationality and moral theory. This argument founders on a false analogy between the self-avowed relativist and MacIntyre’s target reader. Thus, MacIntyre can retain strong particularism without yielding to relativism. I also show how MacIntyre can consistently offer rational, historical, imaginative, and personal narrative resources to fragmented selves who seek a coherent moral tradition. (shrink)

While many people outside India find the images, sounds, and practices of Indian performing arts compelling and endeavor to incorporate them into the "global" repertoire, few are aware of the central role of religious belief and practice in Indian aesthetics. Completing the trilogy that includes Darsan: Seeing the Divine and Mantra: Hearing the Divine in India and America, this volume focuses on how rasa has been applied in a range of Indian performance traditions. "Rasa" is taste, essence, flavor. How is (...) it possible that a word used to describe a delicious masala can also be used to critique a Bharata Natyam performance? Rasa expresses the primary goals of performing arts in India in all the major literary, philosophical, and aesthetic texts, and it provides the cornerstone of the oral traditions of transmission. It is also essential to the study and production of sculpture, architecture, and painting. Yet its primary referent is cuisine. This book articulates the religious sensibility underlying the traditional performing arts as well as other applications of rasa and examines the relationships between the arts and religion in India today. (shrink)

Nearly all of the scant comparative work on Søren Kierkegaard and Confucius places the two starkly at odds with each other. Kierkegaard is pictured as the paradigmatic exemplar of the Western self: a discrete rights-bearing and volitional atom who is quite alone in the world, while Confucius, by contrast, is the paradigmatic exemplar of the Eastern self: a complex and irreducibly embedded communitarian bundle of relations and rich social roles. In this article, I challenge this oppositional approach, since it is (...) both erroneous and obscures fruitful dialogue between the two on conceptually commensurate problems. I argue (1) that Kierkegaard offers a relational ontology of the self which moves in a Confucian direction, (2) that subjectivity and relational reciprocity are not fundamentally at odds in the two thinkers, (3) that both thinkers value a life of harmonious integration that entails right relation to others, and finally (4) that Confucius’ appeal to Heaven as a source of normativity allows for salutary social critique of prevailing ethical norms and practices, in a way that provides important comparative insights with Kierkegaardian theism. (shrink)

This explores the role of intention in interpreting designed artefacts. The relationship between how designers intend products to be interpreted and how they are subsequently interpreted has often been represented as a process of communication. However, such representations are attacked for allegedly implying that designers' intended meanings are somehow ‘contained’ in products and that those meanings are passively received by consumers. Instead, critics argue that consumers actively construct their own meanings as they engage with products, and therefore that designers' intentions (...) are not relevant to this process. In contrast, this article asserts the validity and utility of relating intention to interpretation by exploring the nature of that relationship in design practice and consumer response. Communicative perspectives on design are thereby defended and new avenues of empirical enquiry are proposed. (shrink)

Upholding cooperative norms via punishment is of central importance in organizations. But what effect does punishing have on the reputation of the punisher? Although previous research shows third parties can garner reputational benefits for punishing transgressors who violate social norms, we proposed that such reputational benefits can vary based on the perceived motive for the punishment. In Studies 1 and 2, we found that individuals who endorsed a consequentialist (versus deontological) motive for punishing were seen as more trustworthy. In Study (...) 3, the results showed that when pitted against one another, a person who endorsed a consequentialist (versus deontological) motive for punishing was chosen more often as a partner in a Trust Game. In Study 4, we found that a manager who expressed a consequentialist reason for punishing an employee was seen as having less psychopathic tendencies, and this related to the manager being perceived as more trustworthy and a superior cooperation partner. Using a recall methodology, Study 5 results showed that employees who perceived their managers as having more consequentialist (versus deontological) motives for punishing also perceived their managers as being less psychopathic and more trustworthy. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. (shrink)

Upholding cooperative norms via punishment is of central importance in organizations. But what effect does punishing have on the reputation of the punisher? Although previous research shows third parties can garner reputational benefits for punishing transgressors who violate social norms, we proposed that such reputational benefits can vary based on the perceived motive for the punishment. In Studies 1 and 2, we found that individuals who endorsed a consequentialist motive for punishing were seen as more trustworthy. In Study 3, the (...) results showed that when pitted against one another, a person who endorsed a consequentialist motive for punishing was chosen more often as a partner in a Trust Game. In Study 4, we found that a manager who expressed a consequentialist reason for punishing an employee was seen as having less psychopathic tendencies, and this related to the manager being perceived as more trustworthy and a superior cooperation partner. Using a recall methodology, Study 5 results showed that employees who perceived their managers as having more consequentialist motives for punishing also perceived their managers as being less psychopathic and more trustworthy. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. (shrink)

AbstractAgroecosystems in the Midwestern United States are undergoing changes that pressure farmers to adapt their farming practices. Because farmers decide what practices to implement on their land, there are needs to understand how they adapt to competing demands of changes in global markets, technology, farm sizes, and decreasing rural populations. Increased understanding of farmer decision-making can also inform agricultural policy in ways that encourage farmer adoption of sustainable practices. In this research we adopt a grounded view of farmers by interpreting (...) their decision-making through their stories of everyday life. We use a narrative analysis to identify recurrent themes that characterize farmer decisions as active negotiations between the demands of efficiency in maximizing crop yields with a desire to steward land through past, present, and future generations. Together these narratives portray farmer decisions as a place-making process that seeks compatibility among distinct aspirations for their land. (shrink)

The cosmetics, detergents and food industries trial development products using healthy human volunteer studies. They also use human tissue for in vitro investigations. Hitherto, the ethics of such work has not been regulated. The UK Human Tissue Act will have legal implications on current arrangements for such studies within the industry, especially with regards to informed consent and seeking ethical review of research proposals. At present, however, it is unclear who will fund ethical review for use of ‘relevant material’ in (...) non-medical research, and on the required status of ethics committees to review such work. The principles behind the sampling, storage and processing of ‘relevant material’ are largely identical whether it be for medical or non-medical investigations. It is argued, therefore, that this is further justification for industry and professional bodies to adopt best practice of ethical review for all studies in ‘grey areas’ outside the scope of regulations. This would follow closely those standards applied to biomedical research. (shrink)

Can the Internet reach beyond the U. S. college samples predominant in social science research? A sample of 564,502 participants completed a personality questionnaire online. We found that 19% were not from advanced economies; 20% were from non-Western societies; 35% of the Western-society sample were not from the United States; and 66% of the U. S. sample were not in the 18–22 (college) age group.

Knowing the individual skills and competences of one's group members may be important for deciding from whom to learn (social learning), with whom to collaborate and whom to follow. We investigated whether 12 jackdaws could select conspecifics based on their helping skills, which had been exhibited in a previous context. The birds were tested in a blocked-exit-situation, where they could choose between two conspecifics, one of which could be recruited inside. One conspecific had previously displayed the ability to open the (...) exit door whilst the other individual lacked the skill. The subjects showed a significant preference for the skilled conspecific if they had previously directly benefited from this skill. If they had merely observed the skilled (and non-skilled) individual opening (or failing to open) the exit door, they did not preferably choose the skilled conspecific. Taken together, these results suggest that jackdaws are capable of assessing other individuals' competence under certain circumstances. (shrink)

In their article, Crutchfield and Redinger (2024) outline the conditions that they have identified as situations in which it is ethically permissible to use chemical restraints, defined as medicati...

Intellectual humility is a concept in progress—philosophers and psychologists are in the process of defining and coming to understand what intellectual humility is and what place it has in our theories. Most accounts of intellectual humility build from work in virtue epistemology, the study of knowledge as the state that results when agents are epistemically virtuous (or, perhaps, the view that the proper object of study for epistemology is the intellectually virtuous agent). [...].

_ Source: _Page Count 11 Epistemic Authority: A Theory of Trust, Authority, and Autonomy in Belief. By Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. xiii +279. isbn 978–0–19–993647–2.

For forty years, Harvey Mansfield has been worth reading. Whether plumbing the depths of MachiavelliOs Discourses or explaining what was at stake in Bill ClintonOs impeachment, MansfieldOs work in political philosophy and political science has set the standard. In Educating the Prince, twenty-one of his students, themselves distinguished scholars, try to live up to that standard. Their essays offer penetrating analyses of Machiavellianism, liberalism, and America., all of them informed by MansfieldOs own work. The volume also includes a bibliography of (...) MansfieldOs writings. (shrink)

Concerns have been raised in Africa to address women’s construction health and safety needs adequately. These concerns include less participation of women in the sector, low income and less benefits being given to women, lack of adequate protective construction clothing suited for women, unfavourable employment conditions for women, and lack of construction site security and other facilities for women. This research article provides an overview of the suggested solutions to address the concerns raised. In addition, practical interventions being implemented by (...) the Durban University of Technology and Makerere University research collaboration project team to address women’s needs in construction health and safety through women empowerment and involvement in construction research, education and practice in Africa are outlined. The main approaches applied in this research study are as follows: use of relevant publications on women’s construction health and safety needs in Africa and analysis of data obtained from reliable construction professional bodies in South Africa and Uganda to demonstrate gender imbalances.Contribution: The main contribution of this study was to emphasise the significance of including and involving women in construction research, education and practice as a major solution to address women’s health and safety needs in Africa in the future as women are in a much better position to understand their own needs than men. (shrink)

In this paper we critically examine and seek to extend Philip Kitcher’s Ethical Project to weave together a distinctive naturalistic conception of how ethics came to occupy the place it does in our lives and how the existing ethical project should be revised and extended into the future. Although we endorse his insight that ethical progress is better conceived of as the improvement of an existing state than an incremental approach towards a fixed endpoint, we nonetheless go on to argue (...) that the metaethical apparatus Kitcher constructs around this creative metaethical proposal simply cannot do the work that he demands of it. The prospect of fundamental conflict between different functions of the ethical project requires Kitcher to appeal to a particular normative stance in order to judge specific changes in the ethical project to be genuinely progressive, and we argue that the virtues of continuity and coherence to which he appeals can only specify rather than justify the normative stance he favors. We conclude by suggesting an alternative approach for ethical naturalists that seems to us ultimately more promising than Kitcher’s own. (shrink)

Psychiatry is rapidly adopting digital phenotyping and artificial intelligence/machine learning tools to study mental illness based on tracking participants’ locations, online activity, phone and text message usage, heart rate, sleep, physical activity, and more. Existing ethical frameworks for return of individual research results (IRRs) are inadequate to guide researchers for when, if, and how to return this unprecedented number of potentially sensitive results about each participant’s real-world behavior. To address this gap, we convened an interdisciplinary expert working group, supported by (...) a National Institute of Mental Health grant. Building on established guidelines and the emerging norm of returning results in participant-centered research, we present a novel framework specific to the ethical, legal, and social implications of returning IRRs in digital phenotyping research. Our framework offers researchers, clinicians, and Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) urgently needed guidance, and the principles developed here in the context of psychiatry will be readily adaptable to other therapeutic areas. (shrink)

Two theses are central to recent work on the epistemology of disagreement: Conciliationism:?In a revealed peer disagreement over P, each thinker should give at least some weight to her peer's attitude. Uniqueness:?For any given proposition and total body of evidence, the evidence fully justifies exactly one level of confidence in the proposition. 1This paper is the product of full and equal collaboration between its authors. Does Conciliationism commit one to Uniqueness? Thomas Kelly 2010 has argued that it does. After some (...) scene-setting (?1), in ?2 we explain and criticize Kelly's argument, thereby defeating his larger argument that Conciliationism deserves no dialectical special treatment. But we argue further that Conciliationists are committed to a disjunction, one of whose disjuncts is Uniqueness, that amounts to an ?extremely strong and unobvious position? (??3?4). If we are correct, theorists should not treat Conciliationism as a default position in debates about the epistemic significance of disagreement. (shrink)

What were Shakespeare's final thoughts on history, tragedy, and comedy? Shakespeare's Last Plays focuses much needed scholarly attention on Shakespeare's "Late Romances." The work--a collection of newly commissioned essays by leading scholars of classical political philosophy and literature--offers careful textual analysis of Pericles, Prince of Tyre, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, All is True, and The Two Noble Kinsmen. The essays reveal how Shakespeare's thought in these final works compliments, challenges, fulfills, or transforms previously held conceptions of the playwright (...) and his political-philosophical views. (shrink)

What does it mean to consider the world of AI through a Christian lens? Rapid developments in AI continue to reshape society, raising new ethical questions and challenging our understanding of the human person. Encountering Artificial Intelligence draws on Pope Francis’ discussion of a culture of encounter and broader themes in Catholic social thought in order to examine how current AI applications affect human relationships in various social spheres and offers concrete recommendations for better implementation. The document also explores questions (...) regarding personhood, consciousness, and the kinds of relationships humans might have with even the most advanced AI. Through these discussions, this book investigates the theoretical and practical challenges to interpersonal encounter raised by the age of AI. (AI Research Group for the Centre for Digital Culture of the Dicastery of Culture and Education of the Holy See). (shrink)

Discovering the underlying mathematical expressions describing a dataset is a core challenge for artificial intelligence. This is the problem of symbolic regression. Despite recent advances in training neural networks to solve complex tasks, deep learning approaches to symbolic regression are underexplored. We propose a framework that leverages deep learning for symbolic regression via a simple idea: use a large model to search the space of small models. Specifically, we use a recurrent neural network to emit a distribution over tractable mathematical (...) expressions and employ a novel risk-seeking policy gradient to train the network to generate better-fitting expressions. Our algorithm outperforms several baseline methods (including Eureqa, the gold standard for symbolic regression) in its ability to exactly recover symbolic expressions on a series of benchmark problems, both with and without added noise. More broadly, our contributions include a framework that can be applied to optimize hierarchical, variable-length objects under a blackbox performance metric, with the ability to incorporate constraints in situ, and a risk-seeking policy gradient formulation that optimizes for best-case performance instead of expected performance. (shrink)

Recently, Michael Huemer has defended the Principle of Phenomenal Conservatism: If it seems to S that p, then, in the absence of defeaters, S thereby has at least some degree of justification for believing that p. This principle has potentially far-reaching implications. Huemer uses it to argue against skepticism and to defend a version of ethical intuitionism. I employ a reductio to show that PC is false. If PC is true, beliefs can yield justification for believing their contents in cases (...) where, intuitively, they should not be able to do so. I argue that there are cases where a belief that p can behave like an appearance that p and thereby make it seem to one that p. (shrink)

Attentional control theory suggests that high cognitive demands impair the flexible deployment of attention control in anxious adults, particularly when paired with external threats. Extending this...