Over the past 40 years, scholars and practitioners of public relations have often cast public relations workers in the role of the public relations-person-as-corporate-conscience. This work, however, maintains that this construct is so problematic that invoking it is of negligible use in addressing ethical issues that emerge during a crisis. In fact, a complex crisis, such as the Jahi McMath “brain death” case at Children’s Hospital Oakland, demonstrates the need to abandon the PRPaCC construct to better engage affected stakeholders, including (...) “outsiders” to the organization, who often determine whether an organization is facing a crisis. Through an examination of both the concept of the PRPaCC and the McMath crisis, this work makes the case for moving beyond the PRPaCC construct in favor of a more modest role for the public relations person: facilitating widespread ethical deliberation and discussion throughout an organization, potentially helping the organization alleviate concerns that contribute to crises. (shrink)

Suitable for those conducting research or teaching in philosophy, this title provides analyses of the continental tradition of philosophy from Kant. Placing continental philosophy within a historical context, it helps define what the continental tradition has been and where it is moving.

We begin by treating the antinaturalism of Edmund Husserl's phenomenology, and follow that by considering the recent project of “naturalizing phenomenology.” As a transitional figure, we treat Hans Jonas and the weakly emergent status he allows organismic life. In a section on “affirmative naturalism,” we treat Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, and Gilles Deleuze, emphasizing their relation to Spinoza's ethics of joy. We conclude by considering the antinaturalism of continental philosophy positions in critical race theory (Linda Alcoff), gender theory (Judith Butler), (...) and disability studies (Shelley Tremain). (shrink)

Photographers Linda and Robert Scarth have an incredible eye for that magic moment when small becomes beautiful. Matched with patience and skill, their eye for magic produces dazzling images of Iowa nature up close. Revealing the miniature beauties hidden among the patches of prairie, woodland, and wetland that remain in Iowa’s sadly overdeveloped landscape, the seventy-five color photographs in Deep Nature give us a breathtaking cross section of the state’s smallest inhabitants. The Scarths’ close-up images of showy orchis and northern (...) monkshood, great spangled fritillary and painted lady, red-breasted nuthatch and eastern wood-pewee, ornate box turtle and gray treefrog, big bluestem and cotton-grass, and many other natural wonders look more like paintings than photographs. Beginning with an iridescent fly hovering over a neon-purple fringed gentian and ending with their iconic image of coneflowers refracted in dewdrops, they have created a sparkling jewelbox of images that will make us look at the small world around us with renewed appreciation. Attending to the small things in the fabric of nature is the Scarths’ source of artistic inspiration. Taking Walt Whitman’s “every leaf is a miracle” as their beginning, they celebrate not only each leaf but each feather, insect, dewdrop, flower, lichen, and intricate organism in the evolving web of life. (shrink)

This paper asks whether David Miller's minimalist theory of human rights is coherent with his claim that obligations of global justice involve obligations to provide people with a minimally decent life. I argue that there is a justice gap in Miller's theory: the structure of his distinction between basic and societal needs is such that people will be left below the level of minimal decency even when obligations of justice are met. Miller can either bite this bullet or look for (...) alternative sources of obligations of justice. I take up the second option by arguing that there can be obligations of global justice to build institutions that enable societies to generate income and wealth. (shrink)

This article addresses the problem of filling in a missing component of David Miller's non-cosmopolitan theory of global justice, as elaborated in his recent National responsibility and global justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Miller originally included non-exploitation as one of the norms of global justice, but he does not provide a theory of exploitation in his recent book. This article is a preliminary attempt to suggest how Miller might fill in this gap. This article identifies the problems Miller faces (...) in coming up with a theory of exploitation, given the limits imposed by the other parts of his theory of global justice. It examines and criticises several possible theories of exploitation that Miller might use. Finally, it argues that a modified version of Hillel Steiner's liberal theory of exploitation fits into Miller's overall theory of global justice. (shrink)

Software piracy, the illegal and unauthorized duplication, sale, or distribution of software, is a widespread and costly phenomenon. According to Business Software Alliance, over 41% of the PC software packages installed worldwide were unauthorized copies. Software piracy behavior has been investigated for more than 30 years. However, after a review of the relevant literature, there appears to be two voids in this literature: a lack of studies in non-Western countries and a scarcity of process studies. This study contributes to literature (...) by developing a software piracy model to better understand the decision-making process that underlies this unethical behavior. The model was tested using data collected from a sample of 323 undergraduate business students. Consistent with the Theory of Reasoned Action, attitudes toward software piracy and subjective norms were significant predictors of intention to pirate software. Also, the results suggested that ethical ideology, public self-consciousness, and low self-control moderated the effect of these variables on intention to pirate software. The results have important practical implications for the software industry and governments hoping to curtail software piracy. Limitations of the study and recommendations for future studies are discussed as well. (shrink)

In this paper I examine the prevailing assumption that there is a right to procreate and question whether there exists a coherent notion of such a right. I argue that we should question any and all procreative activities, not just alternative procreative means and contexts. I suggest that clinging to the assumption of a right to procreate prevents serious scrutiny of reproductive behavior and that, instead of continuing to embrace this assumption, attempts should be made to provide a proper foundation (...) for it. I argue that the focus of procreative activities and discourse on reproductive ethics should be on obligations instead of rights, as rights talk tends to obfuscate recognition of obligations toward others, particularly those who bear the most significant burdens of the procreative process. I examine some possible foundations of a right to procreate as well as John Robertson’s thoughtful account of “procreative liberty” but conclude that at the present time there exists no compelling account of a right to procreate. Finally, I conclude that in the absence of a satisfactory account of a right to procreate, we should refrain from grounding practices or polices on the assumption that there is such a right. (shrink)

Albert Einstein read philosophy. It was not an affectation of a celebrity-physicist trying to show his adoring public that he was no mere technician, but a cultured thinker. It was an interest in evidence from the start. In 1902, Einstein was a poorly paid patent examiner in Bern seeking to make a few extra Francs by offering tutorials in physics. Maurice Solovine answered the advertisement. The tutorials quickly vanished when they discovered their common fascinations in reading and talking. They were (...) soon joined in their raucous meetings by Conrad Habicht, completing what they dubbed their “Olympia Academy.” Their explorations where wide-ranging, devouring texts and sausages with gusto. They read the philosophers and philosophically-minded scientists of the day, including Pearson, Mach, Hill, Hume, Spinoza, Avenarius, Cifford and Poincaré. (shrink)

Keith Ansell Pearson and Diane Morgan , Nihilism Now! Monsters of Energy ISBN - 9780333732922Gary Banham and Charlie Blake , Evil Spirits: Nihilism and the Fate of Modernity ISBN - 9780719056420.

The group theorist William Burnside devoted much of the last decade of his life to probability and statistics. The work led to contact with Ronald Fisher who was on his way to becoming the leading statistician of the age and with Karl Pearson, the man Fisher supplanted. Burnside corresponded with Fisher for nearly three years until their correspondence ended abruptly. This paper examines Burnside’s interactions with the statisticians and looks more generally at his work in probability and statistics.

Why was Hensen unsuccesful in the quantification of ecological sampling? No aspect of plankton research itself seems to have hindered quantification; both collecting methods and taxonomy were sufficiently advanced. The reason is probably that at the time he began sampling, Hensen had to devise his own statistical methods for expressing the reproducibility and validity of samples. Hensen might have succeeded in this if he had overcome prevalent nineteenth-century attitudes toward randomness.The statistical literature of medicine and physics with which Hensen was (...) probably familiar gave methods for expressing reproducibility and for comparing differences between means of different sets of observations. For example, a student of Poisson writing on medical statistics advocated using Poisson's limit (standard error 2√2) to test the difference between two means56. Other authors suggested that differences between means were most meaningful if very large numbers of observations were used.57 In his laboratory subsampling, Hensen used the propable error as a limit about means. In this and other ways, he seems most indebted to the physicist Ernst Abbe for statistical methods.58 However, all the methodology available to Hensen had been developed for situations in which errors are a property of the measurement or sampling process, and not of the phenomena themselves. The available methods for measuring reproducibility were based on the assumption that differences from the average were small and that they tended to accumulate about the mean in a bell-shaped pattern. Hensen constantly reinvestigated the distribution of plankton numbers about the average using a different method each time. Westergaard points out that medical statisticians did not make such investigations with their biological data.59To a considerable extent, biological sampling problems forced development of theory because samples afforded the only information on a pattern in water or soil which could not be directly observed. The sampling methods of Laplace and the late nineteenth-century government statisticians contrasted strongly with Hensen's because, either through subjective knowledge of the population sampled or through censuses, they attempted to choose representative or typical samples.60 The high reproducibility and validity of representative sampling is attained by knowing more about a population than a biologist can ordinarily know. The uncertain reproducibility and validity of biological sampling spurred the development of formal sampling theory.A formal sampling theory developed only after change in the general intellectual attitude toward randomness, which was reflected in nineteenth-century statistics.61 The ninteenth-century attitude that randomness is not part of nature changed in the twentieth century to a view of randomness as a property of nature.62 The physicist's incorporation of randomness into physical models in response to this intellectual change late in the nineteenth-century is discussed by Bork.63 In biology, the change was initiated by the attention Darwin focused on morphological variation. The English biometricians — Francis Galton and W. F. R. Weldon, for example — were prominent in developing methods for the analysis of biological variation.64 Most pertinent to the development of sampling theory was Karl Pearson's use of frequency distributions as models of biological variation. In ecology, quantification was brought about by Ronald Fisher more than by anyone else; he incorporated randomness into sampling plans and built upon the methods developed earlier for analysis of individual variation. Fisher's use of random sampling allowed comparison between the sample collections and the collections expected from a model population of known patterning (calculated with a frequency distribution). This is a much more efficient method of determining the validity of a sample than Hensen's comparison of collections with a model uniform collection. Intellectual background and accumulated biological information caused Fisher to find variability where Hensen had seen uniformity.In summary, Victor Hensen became interested in fisheries research because of the economic importance of fishing to Germany. Hensen had considerable understanding of the prerequisites for valid sampling, but the value of his quantitative approach was limited by the general preconceptions shared by most nineteenth-century biologists. Through Hensen's efforts many other biologists were stimulated to undertake quantitative samples, even though the statistical methods for analyzing variation among populations developed only after methods for analyzing variation among individuals had been developed. *** DIRECT SUPPORT *** A8402011 00003. (shrink)

To whatever extent the use of a behavioral, not an evidential, interpretation of decisions in the Lindley-Savage argument for Bayesian theory undermines its cogency as a criticism of typical standard practice, it also undermines the Neyman-Pearson theory as a support for typical standard practice. This leaves standard practice with far less theoretical support than Bayesian methods. It does nothing to resolve the anomalies and paradoxes of standard methods. (Similar statements apply to the common protestation that the models are not (...) real anyway.) The appropriate interpretation of tests as evidence, if possible at all, is difficult and counterintuitive. Any attempt to support tests as more than rules of thumb is doomed to failure. (shrink)

The nature of intelligence and how it can be measured has occupied psychologists, educationalists, biologists and philosophers for hundreds of years. However, there has been little investigation into the rise of the traditional dominant educational ideology that intelligence and IQ have innate limits and are unchanging and unchangeable. This book traces the roots of this mind set back to early puritan communities on both sides of the Atlantic, drawing parallels between puritan dogma and the development of the traditional curricula and (...) selection processes that are still firmly embedded in school practice today. Drawing on the work of Galton, Pearson, Burt, Goddard, Terman and others in his search for the truth about intelligence testing, John White looks at the personal histories and socialised religious backgrounds of these key psychologists and casts an entirely new light on schooling in Britain and the USA in modern times. This work also shows how we can transcend this heritage and base our educational system on values and practices more in tune with the twenty-first century. (shrink)

When health budgets are insufficient to provide care for all, allocating resources to treat a person with a rare and expensive disorder entails that we cannot treat at least one person with a more common, less expensive disorder. Since any allocation scheme will entail such trade‐offs, how should prudent policy‐makers, concerned about justice and fairness, allocate their community's health resources? In their article in this issue of the Hastings Center Report, Emily Largent and Steven Pearson frame this problem as (...) a conflict between the “rule of rescue” and utilitarian allocation schemes that try to maximize the benefits produced by a given budget. In his article, Norman Daniels discusses the related problem of the “identified victim bias.” I doubt that the problem of crafting an equitable health policy regarding orphan diseases maps onto either of these factors in a way that sheds light on the key moral issues. (shrink)

The essays in Practicing Gnosis demonstrate that the Gnostics were not necessarily trendy intellectuals seeking epistomological certainities. Instead, this book explores how Gnostics were seeking religious experiences that relied on practices including ritual, magic, liturgy, and theurgy. This book celebrates the career of Birger A. Pearson.

Do Quine and Carnap distort the social nature of inquiry by privileging individual epistemic subjects? This objection is at the heart of Donald Davidson’s claim that Quine fails to grasp the significance of the concept of truth. In Carnap’s case, the objection may be detected in Charles Morris’s call to ground scientific philosophy in semiotics, the science of signs, rather than syntax, the formal investigation of languages. Drawing out the challenge from Morris’s proposal requires examining a neglected influence on this (...) neglected philosopher: his advisor George Herbert Mead’s social theory of mind. I argue that Morris and Davidson can both be understood as demanding that scientific philosophers socialize their conception of objectivity. (shrink)

With precision and profundity born of 30 years of devoted study, John Boyle offers an essential introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas on Scripture, shedding helpful light on the goals, methods, and commitments that animate the Angelic Doctor's engagement with the sacred page. Because the genius of St. Thomas's approach to the Bible lies not so much in its novelty but rather in the fidelity and clarity with which he recapitulates the riches of the preceding interpretive Tradition, this initiation into (...) St. Thomas's vision of Scripture is itself an orientation to the Church's vision of Scripture, from the Fathers through and beyond the Middle Ages. St. Thomas's embeddedness within the Church's Tradition and his own historical context is integral to his approach to Scripture, yet it sets him at some distance from modern readers, for whom his interpretive vision may seem perplexing or even impenetrable. In this Primer, Boyle first provides an acclimation to this medieval context through a survey and explanation of pertinent technical terminology used by St. Thomas and characteristic of the scholastic theology of the time. With an eye to the medieval practice of considering Scripture according to the fourfold division of causes, Boyle builds on this initial foundation by exploring in turn St. Thomas's accounts of the end or use of Scripture (final cause), its divine and human authorship (efficient cause), its order and division (material cause), and its literary styles or genres (formal cause). Drawing on writings from across St. Thomas's corpus, but especially his work On the Commendation and Division of Sacred Scripture and the prologues to his biblical commentaries, Boyle masterfully elucidates both the hermeneutical principles and deep wisdom of the Angelic Doctor's approach to Scripture, imparting invaluable guidance not only for reading and understanding St. Thomas and other great masters of the Tradition, but also-and ultimately-for understanding Scripture in light of this Tradition and reading it with greater benefit and joy. (shrink)

It is becoming increasingly common for authoritarian regimes to leverage digital technologies to surveil, repress and manipulate their citizens. Experts typically refer to this practice as “digital authoritarianism” (DA). Existing definitions of DA consistently presuppose a politically repressive agent intentionally exploiting digital technology in pursuit of authoritarian ends. I refer to this as the "intention-based definition." This paper argues that this definition is untenable as a general description of DA. I begin by illustrating the current predominance of the intention-based definition (...) (Section 1). Section 2 then presents four counterexamples to this definition: benign surveillance; digital sovereignty; attention-harvesting algorithms; and tech-induced loneliness. In each case, we witness authoritarianism being promoted by digital technologies without any evidence of this being intentionally caused by politically repressive agents. Based on these observations, I contend that the intention-based definition is underinclusive and therefore unsustainable. Section 3 then outlines an improved definition of DA – what I call the "promotion-based definition." Since this more expansive definition does not posit intentional, politically repressive agency as a precondition of DA, it can accommodate the counterexamples discussed in Section 2. Moreover, it enables us to catch a broader spectrum of cases of DA, such as tech-induced loneliness, which those adhering to the intention-based definition are prone to overlook. After outlining further practical benefits of the promotion-based definition, I argue that we still need to distinguish between intentional and unintentional forms of DA since they call for distinct types of remedial action. (shrink)

The notion of proof is central to mathematics yet it is one of the most difficult aspects of the subject to teach and master. In particular, undergraduate mathematics students often experience difficulties in understanding and constructing proofs. Understanding Mathematical Proof describes the nature of mathematical proof, explores the various techniques that mathematicians adopt to prove their results, and offers advice and strategies for constructing proofs. It will improve students’ ability to understand proofs and construct correct proofs of their own. The (...) first chapter of the text introduces the kind of reasoning that mathematicians use when writing their proofs and gives some example proofs to set the scene. The book then describes basic logic to enable an understanding of the structure of both individual mathematical statements and whole mathematical proofs. It also explains the notions of sets and functions and dissects several proofs with a view to exposing some of the underlying features common to most mathematical proofs. The remainder of the book delves further into different types of proof, including direct proof, proof using contrapositive, proof by contradiction, and mathematical induction. The authors also discuss existence and uniqueness proofs and the role of counter examples. (shrink)

Despite recurring efforts, a gap exists across a variety of contexts between the protection of patients' safety in theory and in practice. This timely Research Handbook highlights these critical issues and suggests both legal and policy changes are necessary to better protect patients' safety. Multidisciplinary in nature, this Research Handbook features contributions from eminent academics, policy makers and medical practitioners from the Global North and South, discussing the essential facets concerning patient safety and the law. It highlights how the role (...) of legislation and case law has the potential to influence, both positively and negatively, medical practice and the quality of care. Chapters explore patient safety and the global health agenda; physiotherapy; 'non-therapeutic' clinical research with children; patient safety awareness in healthcare education; and the increasing use of robotics and artificial intelligence in healthcare. Outlining a wide range of international perspectives on patient safety and the law, this Research Handbook will appeal to academics and researchers specialising in health and medical law, human rights and healthcare regulation. It will also serve as a valuable resource for legal and medical practitioners alike, as well as clinicians and professionals working in healthcare governance. (shrink)

Nietzsche regarded Thus Spoke Zarathustra as his most important philosophical contribution because it proposes solutions to the problems and questions he poses in his later books – for example, his cure for the human disposition to vengefulness and his creation of new values as the antidote to nihilism. It is also the only place where he elaborates his concepts of the superhuman and the eternal recurrence of the same. In this Critical Guide, an international group of distinguished scholars analyze the (...) philosophical ideas in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, discussing a range of topics that include literary parody as philosophical critique, philosophy as a way of life, the meaning of human life, philosophical naturalism, fatalism, radical flux, human passions and virtues, great politics, transhumanism, and ecological conscience. The volume will be invaluable for philosophers, scholars and students interested in Nietzsche's thought. (shrink)

While Nietzsche's works and ideas are relevant across the many branches of philosophy, the themes of contest and conflict have been mostly overlooked. Conflict and Contest in Nietzsche's Philosophy redresses this situation, arguing for the importance of these issues throughout Nietzsche's work. The volume has three key lines of inquiry: Nietzsche's ontology of conflict; Nietzsche's conception of the agon; and Nietzsche's warrior-philosophy. Under these three umbrellas is a collection of insightful and provocative essays considering, among other topics, Nietzsche's understanding of (...) resistance; his engagement with classical thinkers alongside his contemporaries, including Jacob Burckhardt; his views on language, metaphor and aphorism; and war, revolt and terror. In bringing together such topics, Conflict and Contest in Nietzsche's Philosophy seeks to correct the one-sided tendencies within the existing literature to read simply 'hard' and 'soft' analyses of conflict. Written by scholars across the Anglophone and the European traditions, within and beyond philosophy, this collection emphasises the entire problematic of conflict in Nietzsche's thought and its relation to his philosophical and literary practice. (shrink)