Ethical dimensions of friendship have rarely been explicitly addressed as aspects of friendship quality in studies of children's peer relationships. This study identifies aspects of moral virtue significant for friendship, as a basis for empirically investigating the role of ethical qualities in children's friendship assessments and aspirations. We introduce a eudaimonic conception of friendship quality, identify aspects of moral virtue foundational to such quality, review and contest some grounds on which children have been regarded as not mature enough to have (...) friendships that require virtue, and report a qualitative study of the friendship assessments and aspirations of children aged nine and ten. In focus group sessions conducted in ten schools across Great Britain, moral qualities figured prominently in children's assessments of friendship quality. The findings provide evidence of children having friendships exhibiting mutual respect, support, and valuing of each other's good character. (shrink)

Plato of Athens, who laid the foundations of the Western philosophical tradition and in range and depth ranks among its greatest practitioners, was born to a prosperous and politically active family circa 427 BC. In early life an admirer of Socrates, Plato later founded the first institution of higher learning in the West, the Academy, among whose many notable alumni was Aristotle. Traditionally ascribed to Plato are thirty-five dialogues developing Socrates' dialectic method and composed with great stylistic virtuosity, together with (...) the Apology and thirteen letters. The four works in this volume recount the circumstances of Socrates' trial and execution in 399 BC. In Euthyphro, set in the weeks before the trial, Socrates and Euthyphro attempt to define holiness. In Apology, Socrates answers his accusers at trial and unapologetically defends his philosophical career. In Crito, a discussion of justice and injustice explains Socrates' refusal of Crito's offer to finance his escape from prison. And in Phaedo, Socrates discusses the concept of an afterlife and offers arguments for the immortality of the soul. This edition, which replaces the original Loeb edition by Harold North Fowler, offers text, translation, and annotation that are fully current with modern scholarship." -- Publisher's description. (shrink)

Key ethical challenges for healthcare workers arising from the COVID-19 pandemic are identified: isolation and social distancing, duty of care and fair access to treatment. The paper argues for a relational approach to ethics which includes solidarity, relational autonomy, duty, equity, trust and reciprocity as core values. The needs of the poor and socially disadvantaged are highlighted. Relational autonomy and solidarity are explored in relation to isolation and social distancing. Reciprocity is discussed with reference to healthcare workers’ duty of care (...) and its limits. Priority setting and access to treatment raise ethical issues of utility and equity. Difficult ethical dilemmas around triage, do not resuscitate decisions, and withholding and withdrawing treatment are discussed in the light of recently published guidelines. The paper concludes with the hope for a wider discussion of relational ethics and a glimpse of a future after the pandemic has subsided. (shrink)

The measurement of household welfare is one of the most compelling yet demanding areas in economics. To place the analysis of inequality and poverty within an economic framework where individuals are making decisions about current and lifetime incomes and expenditures is a difficult task, made all the more challenging by the complexity of the decision-making process in which households are involved and the variety of constraints they face. This 1994 book examines the conceptual and practical difficulties of making inferences from (...) observed behaviour. It addresses the problems of making comparisons across a range of very different households and discusses how data for such comparisons should be collected. The contributions, from experts from Europe, North America and Australia, have the unifying theme that there is a strong relationship between theoretical concepts from microeconomics and the appropriate use of micro data in evaluating household welfare. (shrink)

Over the last 20 years, sex offender policies, specifically in terms of community corrections, have increased in scope. One of the most controversial and pervasive sex offender policies is that of registration. In response to the consumption of already limited resources, jurisdictions have imposed increasingly higher community supervision fees onto the offenders, requiring them to pay for their own re-entry. However, to date no research study has examined the statutory language associated with registration fees collected post release from formal community (...) sanctions. Using a statutory analysis within the United States, this research finds and quantifies the imposition of a registration fee on offenders who are legally compelled to pay these registration costs, regardless of whether they are still currently under community supervision. Results show that more than half of U.S. states (n = 28) incorporate statutory language authorizing registration fees, ranging anywhere from $5 per registration to up to $250 per year. These findings, as well as suggestions for future research and policy recommendations, are discussed. (shrink)

PurposeWe explored two complex phenomena associated with effective education. First, teachers’ professional agency, the volitional actions they take in response to perceived opportunities, was examined to consider individual differences in its enactment. Second, “strong” emotions have been proposed as important in teaching and learning, and we wished to clarify which basic emotions might be involved, besides curiosity, which is a known emotional factor in engagement in teaching. We also explored how agency and basic emotions might be related.ApproachThirteen teachers working in (...) Scottish secondary schools were interviewed at the start of the covid pandemic in 2020 to discuss relevant feelings, thoughts and actions arising from unprecedented changes in their lives and professional practices. Thematic analysis was used to identify aspects of agentic behavior and basic emotions expressed.FindingsTeacher agency was expressed through adaptability, collective agency, constrained agency, and non-action. Four basic emotion percepts were identified, which we label as “CARE”, “CURIOSITY”, “COOPERATION”, and “CHALLENGE”.OriginalityWe extend the definition of agency to include volitional non-action as a response to opportunity. In contrast to prior research emphasizing emotions as an outcome of volitional behavior, we explore emotions preceding agency. We develop four theoretical propositions related to teacher emotions. Four emotion percepts substantially influence teachers’ voluntary motivated behavior. The amount and proportion of emotions experienced varies between individual teachers. The four percepts are experienced concurrently or in rapid succession in engaged teaching contexts. Professional experience and specific situational factors also influence teachers’ behavioral choices. For future consideration, we suggest that awareness of emotion percepts may encourage both teachers’ engagement and their professional agency for the benefit of their pedagogical practice and outcomes for their students. (shrink)

The Ikhwan al-Safa (Brethren of Purity), the anonymous adepts of a tenth-century esoteric fraternity based in Basra and Baghdad, hold an eminent position in the history of science and philosophy in Islam due to the wide reception and assimilation of their monumental encyclopaedia, the Rasa'il Ikhwan al-Safa (Epistles of the Brethren of Purity). This compendium contains fifty-two epistles offering synoptic accounts of the classical sciences and philosophies of the age; divided into four classificatory parts, it treats themes in mathematics, logic, (...) natural philosophy, psychology, metaphysics, and theology, in addition to didactic fables. Epistles 32 to 36 comprise the first five treatises in the third division of the Rasa'il, on the sciences of the soul and intellect. Combining Islamic revelation with Hellenistic philosophy, the Ikhwan delineate herein their metaphysical system. Epistles 32 and 33 present adaptations of the Pythagorean doctrines, and of Neo-Platonist leitmotifs, whereby a numerical analogy is applied to the unique and transcendent God, or the One, from whom all existence emanates. Epistle 34 takes up the pervasive theme of the correspondence between microcosm and macrocosm, situating the human being as the central link between the celestial and terrestrial realms. In Epistle 35, we find an explanation of the intellectual faculties of the individual human soul, whose ultimate aim is ascension to the timeless reality of pure intellect. Finally, Epistle 36 presents itself as the astrological epistle par excellence of the Rasa'il; from the coming-to-be of worms, to the emergence of religions and empires, nothing in the sub-lunar sphere escapes the determining influence of the celestial cycles. (shrink)

© Ginn et al. 2016.The indexing methods currently used for serial femtosecond crystallography were originally developed for experiments in which crystals are rotated in the X-ray beam, providing significant three-dimensional information. On the other hand, shots from both X-ray free-electron lasers and serial synchrotron crystallography experiments are still images, in which the few three-dimensional data available arise only from the curvature of the Ewald sphere. Traditional synchrotron crystallography methods are thus less well suited to still image data processing. Here, a (...) new indexing method is presented with the aim of maximizing information use from a still image given the known unit-cell dimensions and space group. Efficacy for cubic, hexagonal and orthorhombic space groups is shown, and for those showing some evidence of diffraction the indexing rate ranged from 90% to 151%. Here, the indexing rate refers to the number of lattices indexed per image. (shrink)

THE �COINCIDENCE� CONCEPT OF THE MIRACULOUS IS FRAUGHT WITH DIFFICULTIES THAT MAKE ANY COHERENT EMPLOYMENT OF IT IN A CHRISTIAN POLEMIC IMPOSSIBLE. TO BE A MIRACLE, AN EVENT MUST BE SEEN AS CAUSED BY GOD. IT IS ONLY BECAUSE MIRACLES DO NOT ADMIT OF EXPLANATION (EXCEPT THE DIVINE EXPLANATION) THAT THEIR DISTINCTIVENESS AS A SPECIAL CLASS OF EVENTS IS MAINTAINED. IF EVENTS ADMIT OF HISTORICAL OR NATURAL EXPLANATION, THEN IT IS ONLY THEIR WONDER OR EXCITEMENT-VALUE WHICH MAKES THEM DISTINCTIVE. THIS (...) IS TOO ARBITRARY A CRITERION FOR AN EVENT TO BE SUBSUMED UNDER THE CLASS �MIRACLE� AND IT SUFFERS INSUPERABLE DIFFICULTIES. (shrink)

Machine learning algorithms may radically improve our ability to diagnose and treat disease. For moral, legal, and scientific reasons, it is essential that doctors and patients be able to understand and explain the predictions of these models. Scalable, customisable, and ethical solutions can be achieved by working together with relevant stakeholders, including patients, data scientists, and policy makers.

While there is growing awareness of the existence and activities of Academic Custom Writing websites, which form a small part of the contract cheating industry, how they work remains poorly understood. Very little research has been done on these sites, probably because it has been assumed that it is impossible to see behind their firewalls and password protection. We have found that, with some close scrutiny, it is indeed possible to find some ‘cracks’ in these sites through which we can (...) look to gain insights into the business processes that operate within them. We have reverse engineered the business processes that operate within some of these sites. From this we have also been able to identify three different business models that are supported by these sites. Our analysis supports important findings about how these sites operate that can be used to inform future strategies to detect and deter contract cheating. (shrink)

Is the societal-level of analysis sufficient today to understand the values of those in the global workforce? Or are individual-level analyses more appropriate for assessing the influence of values on ethical behaviors across country workforces? Using multi-level analyses for a 48-society sample, we test the utility of both the societal-level and individual-level dimensions of collectivism and individualism values for predicting ethical behaviors of business professionals. Our values-based behavioral analysis indicates that values at the individual-level make a more significant contribution to (...) explaining variance in ethical behaviors than do values at the societal-level. Implicitly, our findings question the soundness of using societal-level values measures. Implications for international business research are discussed. (shrink)

Recent discourses about the legitimacy of homeopathy have focused on its scientific plausibility, mechanism of action, and evidence base. These, frequently, conclude not only that homeopathy is scientifically baseless, but that it is “unethical.” They have also diminished patients’ perspectives, values, and preferences. We contend that these critics confuse epistemic questions with questions of ethics, misconstrue the moral status of homeopaths, and have an impoverished idea of ethics—one that fails to account either for the moral worth of care and of (...) relationships or for the perspectives, values, and preferences of patients. Utilitarian critics, in particular, endeavour to present an objective evaluation—a type of moral calculus—quantifying the utilities and disutilities of homeopathy as a justification for the exclusion of homeopathy from research and health care. But these critiques are built upon a narrow formulation of evidence and care and a diminished episteme that excludes the values and preferences of researchers, homeopaths, and patients engaged in the practice of homeopathy. We suggest that homeopathy is ethical as it fulfils the needs and expectations of many patients; may be practiced safely and prudentially; values care and the virtues of the therapeutic relationship; and provides important benefits for patients. (shrink)

The recent upsurge in “brain-training and perceptual-cognitive-training", proposing to improve isolated processes such as brain function, visual perception and decision-making, has created significant interest in elite sports practitioners, seeking to create an ‘edge’ for athletes. The claims of these related 'performance-enhancing industries' can be considered together as part of a process training approach proposing enhanced cognitive and perceptual skills and brain capacity, to support performance in everyday life activities, including sport. For example, the 'process-training industry' promotes the idea that playing (...) games not only makes you a better player, but also smarter, more alert, and a faster learner. In this position paper we critically evaluate the effectiveness of both types of process-training programmes in generalizing transfer to sport performance. These issues are addressed in three stages. First, we evaluate empirical evidence in support of perceptual-cognitive process training, and its application to enhancing sport performance. Second, we critically review putative modularised mechanisms underpinning this kind of training, addressing limitations and subsequent problems. Specifically, we consider merits of this highly specific form of training, which focuses on training of isolated processes such as cognitive processes (attention, memory, thinking) and visual perception processes, separately from performance behaviors and actions. We conclude that these approaches may, at best, may provide some 'general transfer' of underlying processes to specific sport environments, but lack 'specificity of transfer' to contextualize actual performance behaviors. A major weakness of process training methods is their focus on enhancing performance in body “modules” (e.g., eye, brain, memory, anticipatory sub-systems). What is lacking is evidence on how these isolated components are modified and subsequently interact with other process “modules”, which are considered to underlie sport performance. Finally, we propose how an ecological dynamics approach, aligned with an embodied framework of cognition undermines the rationale that modularised processes can enhance performance in competitive sport. An ecological dynamics perspective proposes that the body is a complex adaptive system, interacting with performance environments in a functionally integrated manner, emphasising that the inter-relation between motor processes, cognitive and perceptual functions and the constraints of a sport task is best understood at the performer-environment scale of analysis. (shrink)

This article provides current Schwartz Values Survey (SVS) data from samples of business managers and professionals across 50 societies that are culturally and socioeconomically diverse. We report the society scores for SVS values dimensions for both individual- and societal-level analyses. At the individual-level, we report on the ten circumplex values sub-dimensions and two sets of values dimensions (collectivism and individualism; openness to change, conservation, self-enhancement, and self-transcendence). At the societal-level, we report on the values dimensions of embeddedness, hierarchy, mastery, affective (...) autonomy, intellectual autonomy, egalitarianism, and harmony. For each society, we report the Cronbach’s α statistics for each values dimension scale to assess their internal consistency (reliability) as well as report interrater agreement (IRA) analyses to assess the acceptability of using aggregated individual level values scores to represent country values. We also examined whether societal development level is related to systematic variation in the measurement and importance of values. Thus, the contributions of our evaluation of the SVS values dimensions are two-fold. First, we identify the SVS dimensions that have cross-culturally internally reliable structures and within-society agreement for business professionals. Second, we report the society cultural values scores developed from the twenty-first century data that can be used as macro-level predictors in multilevel and single-level international business research. (shrink)

Representations of the body depend on a social framework, a vision of the world and a definition of the person. The body is a symbolic construction and not a reality in its own right. A priori, its characterization seems to be self-evident, but ultimately nothing is less comprehensible. Far from being unanimously accepted by human societies, making the body stand out as a reality in some way distinct from man seems an uneasy effort, contradictory between one time and place and (...) another. Many societies do not retain it as part of their vision of the world. They do not detach man from his body in the dualist fashion so common to Western man. We might recall here the incident recounted by Maurice Leenhardt, who asked an elderly Kanak what the West had contributed to Melanesia. The answer surprised him. “What you brought us is the body”. With the intrusion of cultural and social values and forms from the Western world that tend to individualism, there came an awareness of the body as a barrier and a boundary distinguishing each person from every other person. In the societies to which we refer, the components of a person include the flesh without setting this off separately. The body itself is an abstraction. On the phenomenological level, only a person whose body gives him a face and establishes his presence in the world can exist. Man is indiscernible from the flesh that models him. (shrink)

The chromodomain is a highly conserved sequence motif that has been identified in a variety of animal and plant species. In mammals, chromodomain proteins appear to be either structural components of large macromolecular chromatin complexes or proteins involved in remodelling chromatin structure. Recent work has suggested that apart from a role in regulating gene activity, chromodomain proteins may also play roles in genome organisation. This article reviews progress made in characterising mammalian chromodomain proteins and emphasises their emerging role in the (...) regulation of gene expression and genome organisation. BioEssays 22:124–137, 2000. ©2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

Andrew Tooke's 1691 English translation of Samuel Pufendorf's De officio hominis et civis, published as The Whole Duty of Man According to the Law of Nature, brought Pufendorf's manual fo statist natural law into English politics at a moment of temporary equilibrium in the unfinished contest between Crown and Parliament for the rights and powers of sovereignty. Drawing on the authors' re-edition of The Whole Duty of Man, this article describes and analyses a telling instance of how--by translation--the core political (...) terms and concepts of the German natural jurist's 'absolutist' formulary were reshaped for reception in the different political culture of late seventeenth-century England. (shrink)

This book brings together recent work analysing the labour market behaviour of agents, particularly with regard to unemployment, job search, and labour supply. It considers the economic and demographic factors involved, and in particular the responsiveness of labour market behaviour to changes in these factors. There has been considerable recent progress in the design of appropriate econometric techniques and models with which to confront labour market theories with available data. The contributions to this volume represent important extensions or applications by (...) some of the foremost researchers in the field, provide tests of the available theories, and draw the consequent conclusions for policy. Subjects covered include unemployment, the duration of unemployment, the effects of insurance, benefits and taxation, youth unemployment, models of labour supply, and female participation. The contributors come from the USA, Canada, UK, France, Sweden, and Denmark. (shrink)

Authorship has proven a magnetic topic for literary studies and is now identified as an index of the current state of literary history and theory. The significance of this topic stems from a characteristic that literary criticism shared with the other human sciences: its drive to adopt a reflexive and self-critical posture towards its own central objects and concepts. By reflecting on authorship, criticism aspires not just to describe a literary phenomenon; it also wishes to bring to light the conditions (...) that make this phenomenon possible and thinkable.At the heart of recent studies of authorship, no matter how historical their aspiration, we find a certain quasi-philosophical dialectic or play between authorship and its material conditions, between the author as an exemplary consciousness and the unconscious determinations that bring this consciousness into being and speak through it. The thematic name for this play is the ‘formation of the subject.’. Our purpose is to provide a historical and theoretical argument against this conception of authorship and to outline an alternative approach. David Saunders and Ian Hunter teach in the Division of the Humanities, Griffith University, in Brisbane, Australia. Saunders is the author of Law and Authorship , and is coauthor with Hunter and Dugald Williamson of Book Sex: Obscenity Law and the Policing of Pornography . Hunter is the author of Culture and Government: The Emergence of Literary Education . His current project is a study of aesthetics as an ethos or way of life. (shrink)

In Ethics, Economics, and Politics Ian Little returns to offer a new defence of a rule-based utilitarianism as a basis for assessing the role of the State. Lucidly and elegantly he explains how the three disiplines of philosophy, economics and politics can be integrated to provide guidance on issues of public policy.

Wikipedia is a goldmine of information; not just for its many readers, but also for the growing community of researchers who recognize it as a resource of exceptional scale and utility. It represents a vast investment of manual effort and judgment: a huge, constantly evolving tapestry of concepts and relations that is being applied to a host of tasks. This article provides a comprehensive description of this work. It focuses on research that extracts and makes use of the concepts, relations, (...) facts and descriptions found in Wikipedia, and organizes the work into four broad categories: applying Wikipedia to natural language processing; using it to facilitate information retrieval and information extraction; and as a resource for ontology building. The article addresses how Wikipedia is being used as is, how it is being improved and adapted, and how it is being combined with other structures to create entirely new resources. We identify the research groups and individuals involved, and how their work has developed in the last few years. We provide a comprehensive list of the open-source software they have produced. (shrink)

The Foundations of Mathematics (Stewart and Tall) is a horse of a different color. The writing is excellent and there is actually some useful mathematics. I definitely like this book."--The Bulletin of Mathematics Books.

Ian Little offers a new defence of utilitarianism as a basis for assessing the role of the State. Lucidly and elegantly he explains how the three disciplines of philosophy, economics, and politics can be integrated to provide guidance on issues of public policy. Anyone interested in public affairs will be enlightened by Little's crisp analysis and any student taking an interdisciplinary course in social science will find a clear framework for thinking about the subject.

. Sponsorship, Academic Independence and Critical Engagement: a Forum on Shell, the Ogoni Dispute and the Royal Geographical Society Ethics, Place & Environment: Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 219-257.

THIS PAPER CONCERNS A CONTROVERSY about priorities between J. D. Forbes, Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, and the noted Swiss scientist Louis Agassiz, later to be a distinguished teacher at Harvard. Its origins lie in the visit which Forbes made at Agassiz' invitation to the Unteraar glacier in Switzerland, in the summer of 1841, during which a major topic of interest was their observations of the bandes bleues, markings in the ice previously little discussed. Both men, (...) in independent later publications, were to establish the importance of the bandes in the theory of glacial ice and its movement. The question of credit for the discovery, and priority in its publication, was unclear at the time and has remained so despite bitter debate. Examination of surviving papers in Great Britain and in Switzerland suggests that previous discussions have not closed the question,' and our purpose is to review the evidence and if possible to clarify the issue. (shrink)

The possibility of aesthetic objectivity is a standard topic within philosophical aesthetics and raises questions that have always been heavily disputed. ‘Endlos umstritten, ewig schön’ will readdress these issues through the most prominent concept within the philosophy of art, namely the concept of beauty, and ask the question: Can artworks be beautiful in themselves or is beauty a subjective reaction of the viewer? For artists since the beginning of the 20th century, the notion of beauty has been associated with frivolity, (...) consumerism and pure pleasure and as a result, challenged and rejected. Thus the term has been replaced in recent aesthetic debates by discourses such as relational aesthetics, art as social space, art as service and poetic knowledge. The exhibition, which will represent current artistic positions from the UK and Germany that challenge both classical and more contemporary conceptions of beauty, will provide the context for an interdisciplinary symposium. Art theorists and philosophers from varying aesthetic traditions have been invited to take part and to discuss the possible relevance beauty could have for the production and reception of contemporary art. In bringing dynamic artists, philosophers and theorists together, we hope to examine this old debate from new and invigorating perspectives. (shrink)