Like many fields, bioethics has been constrained to thinking to race in terms of colorblindness, the idea that ideal deliberation would ignore race and hence prevent bias. There are practical and e...

Like many fields, bioethics has been constrained to thinking to race in terms of colorblindness, the idea that ideal deliberation would ignore race and hence prevent bias. There are practical and ethically significant problems with colorblind approaches to ethical deliberation, and important reasons why race is ethically relevant. Future discourse needs to understand how and why race is relevant in bioethics.

Clinicians in contemporary practice are getting accustomed to their clinical decision making being constantly questioned: by health plans, clinic and hospital administrators, and by patients. Share...

Clinical ethics consultation is largely outside the scope of regulation and oversight, despite its importance. For decades, the bioethics community has been unable to reach a consensus on whether there should be accountability in this work, as there is for other clinical activities that influence the care of patients. The American Society for Bioethics and Humanities, the primary society of bioethicists and scholars in the medical humanities and the organizational home for individuals who perform CEC in the United States, has (...) initiated a two‐step quality attestation process as a means to assess clinical ethics consultants and help identify individuals who are qualified to perform this role. This article describes the process. (shrink)

What is the nature of human well-being? This paper joins the ancient debate by rejuvenating an ancient claim that is quite unfashionable among moral philosophers today, namely, the Aristotelian claim that moral virtue is (non-instrumentally) necessary for human well-being. Call it the Aristotelian Virtue Condition (AVC). This view can be revived for contemporary debate by a state-of-the-art approach that we might call constructivist experimental philosophy, which takes as its goal the achievement of a reasonable constructivist account of well-being and takes (...) the investigation of actual folk intuitions as the central means to achieving that goal. The paper motivates this approach and challenges the commonplace philosophical rejection of AVC by arguing (1) that folk intuitions should count as evidence in the debate, especially if we aim at a constructivist account of well-being, (2) that folk intuitions can be accurately elicited through a thought experiment (the “Crib Test”), and (3) that there is some reason (subject to experimental confirmation) for thinking that folk intuitions, thus elicited, support AVC. Aristotelian ethics, and indeed the entire virtue ethics tradition, has come under fire recently by empirically informed philosophers who question the empirical adequacy of the postulation of robust character traits, but regardless of how that debate turns out, other parts of this tradition might be empirically supported rather than undermined. This paper sketches a promising, empirically informed way of supporting Aristotelian views of well-being. (shrink)

Introduction: about philosophy in general and ethics in particular -- The good and bad in experience: prolegomena -- The good and bad in experience -- Semantics of the imperative -- Ethics and the logical -- Deliberate acts -- Right acts and good acts -- Right doing and the right to do -- We approach the normative finalities.

We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Theory of "conceptual pragmatism" takes into account both modern philosophical thought and modern mathematics. Stimulating discussions of metaphysics, a priori, philosophic method, much more.

The paper links Freud’s early work in the ‘Project for a scientific psychology’ with the psychoanalytic psychology of Kleinian object relations theory now current. Freud is often accused of introducing mechanism into his psychology and installing at its core an irreconcilable dichotomy of two disparate ways of explaining human behaviour. I suggest that Freud’s early mechanistic thinking is an attempt at what he only partly achieves, a functional account of the ‘mental apparatus’. I consider whether this way of conceptualising the (...) mind in functional terms is methodologically relevant to psychoanalytic investigation or whether it is at best heuristically useful. From a brief consideration of Kleinian object relations theory, illustrated by case material, I conclude that there are grounds for accepting the first of these alternatives. (shrink)

Journal Name: Cognitive Linguistics Issue: Ahead of print.

Rene Descartes credited his success in philosophy, mathematics, and physics to the discovery of a universal method of inquiry, but he provided no systematic description of his method. _Descartes and Method_ carefully examines Descartes' scattered remarks on his application and puts forward a systematic account of his method with particular attention to the role it plays in the _Meditations_. Daniel E. Flage and Clarence A. Bonnen boldly and convincingly argue against the orthodox conception that Descartes had no method. Through (...) a rigorous and thorough examination, Flage and Bonnen unearth and explain the role of the method of analysis in the _ Meditations_. _Descartes and Method_ is a ground-breaking book that is sure to make a considerable impact on the philosophy community. Anyone wishing to gain a new understanding of Descartes's _Meditations_ should read this book. (shrink)

Theory of "conceptual pragmatism" takes into account both modern philosophical thought and modern mathematics.

This study compares the relationship between the moral reasoning modes and leadership orientation of males versus females, and managers versus engineers/scientists. A questionnaire developed by Worthley (1987) was used to measure the degree of each participant's respective independence and justice, and relationships and caring moral reasoning modes. Leadership orientation values and attitudes were measured using the Fiedler and Chemers (1984) Least Preferred Coworker Scale.The results suggest that, although males differ from female in their dominant moral reasoning modes, managers are not (...) distinguishable from the engineers/scientists they manage in terms of their moral reasoning mode or Least Preferred Coworker score. (shrink)

Rene Descartes credited his success in philosophy, mathematics, and physics to the discovery of a universal method of inquiry, but he provided no systematic description of his method. _Descartes and Method_ carefully examines Descartes' scattered remarks on his application and puts forward a systematic account of his method with particular attention to the role it plays in the _Meditations_. Daniel E. Flage and Clarence A. Bonnen boldly and convincingly argue against the orthodox conception that Descartes had no method. Through (...) a rigorous and thorough examination, Flage and Bonnen unearth and explain the role of the method of analysis in the _ Meditations_. _Descartes and Method_ is a ground-breaking book that is sure to make a considerable impact on the philosophy community. Anyone wishing to gain a new understanding of Descartes's _Meditations_ should read this book. (shrink)

Do the cognitive origins of our theistic beliefs debunk them or explain them away? This paper develops an empirically-motivated debunking argument and defends it against objections. First, we introduce the empirical and epistemological background. Second, we develop and defend the main argument, the debunking argument from false god beliefs. Third, we characterize and evaluate the most prominent religious debunking argument to date, the debunking argument from insensitivity. It is found that insensitivity-based arguments are problematic, which makes them less promising than (...) the debunking argument from false god beliefs. (shrink)

The editor's introduction discusses Clarence I. Lewis's conceptual pragmatism when compared with post-empiricist epistemology and argues that several Cartesian assumptions play a major role in the work, not unlike those of Logical Positivism. The suggestion is made that the Cartesian legacy still hidden in Logical Positivism turns out to be a rather heavy ballast for Lewis’s project of restructuring epistemology in a pragmatist key. More in detail, the sore point is the nature of inter-subjectivity. For Lewis, no less than (...) for the Logical Positivists at the time of the Protocols Controversy and Husserl in the Cartesian Meditations, this is a problem without a solution. The reason is that all these philosophers are apparently unable to realize that the existence of a plurality of knowing subjects cannot be treated at once both as a speculative problem and a methodological one. Lewis, thanks to his pragmatist approach both comes closer to the right answer and offers an even more naïve unsatisfactory solution to the pseudo-problem under discussion. The fact that he has clear in mind that inter-subjectivity means not only a plurality of linguistic utterances but also a co-existence of different kinds of practical behaviour. Eventually, the very idea of mind, the key-idea in the book, suffers from the above mentioned tension. In fact, if inter-subjective communication and action is considered at a methodological level, the very idea of mind would not need an analysis, and no kind of ‘reflexive’ analysis. Methodology might be limited to a ‘naïve’ level where the existence of the world and a plurality of subjects be taken as a bedrock of uncritically accepted evidence. Philosophical reflection on ultimate evidence, instead, would take a different approach, maybe the one Wittgenstein was putting into practice in the same years when Mind and the world order was written, namely it would be bound to question the very meaning of the idea of ‘mind’ as an undue fiction – the same carried out by Descartes – when he assumed the Cogito to be at once a body of self-evident truths and a thing or substance, the familiar Platonic idea of psyche or soul. (shrink)