Moral psychology investigates the connections between our thoughts and emotions, both of which are action guiding. Philosophical questions about moral psychology differ from scientific questions in that the latter are empirical, that is, they are questions about the way we actually express emotions. The rare possession of a healthy moral psychology might be an important qualification for being that one‐in‐a‐million person, a starship captain. Plato's student Aristotle considered magnanimity or generosity out of pride, a virtue. Good education, training, (...) and experience can provide the basis for a sound moral psychology. Some philosophers argue that our emotions are deeply connected to our beliefs, termed propositional attitudes. The emotional makeup of a starship captain is demanding; in addition to the required skills, most people simply don't have the ego required to be under such pressure and hold that level of responsibility. (shrink)

There is a crisis of leadership in sport. Leadership as an athletic excellence is under threat from the deepening influence of coaches on in-game decision- making. To appreciate what is being lost in this shift of responsibility, it is necessary to understand the challenge of athlete leadership. Captaincy is the quintessential on-field leadership role. However, the role of captain, and athlete leadership more widely, remains philosophically untheorized. This paper initiates a discussion of leadership in sport by providing the first (...) normative account of captaincy. Rugby union is used as a case study, as this sport preserves an especially demanding and complex form of captaincy that may provide a rough template for the revival of athlete leadership in other sports. A virtue theoretical analysis of the role is developed based on a functionalist conception of virtue. It is argued that discharging the responsibilities of such captaincy requires two key virtues: ‘sporting judgement’ and ‘responsibility’. (shrink)

In this chapter, the author talks about some of the finer points concerning Captain America and his eligibility to serve as a moral exemplar. The chapter explores three issues. 1) Fictional characters are simply not real. 2) Fictional characters can be perfect and we can't. 3) Fictional characters can be depicted inconsistently over the years by different writers. Fictional characters can model virtuous character traits by demonstrating their consequences in an imaginary world that readers identify with. While real‐world people (...) can't be perfect, fictional characters can be: writers just have to write them that way! Depending on how they are written, fictional characters don't have to experience difficult choices or moral weakness, and they can stick to their principles come what may. Each writer and fan will have a personal conception of a character like Captain America that leads them to regard certain behaviors as mistakes, aberrations caused by writers. (shrink)

This chapter argues that while we are polarized on narrowly defined issues, we agree on more basic principles, ideals, and goals‐which don't get as much attention in the media compared to arguments over how we should pursue them. Captain America not only defended justice, equality, and liberty to the Red Skull, but has represented them as the core ideals of the United States of America. Refocusing our attention on these ideals, remembering our common points while debating differences, is the (...) first step towards recovering a sense of national unity and restoring civility to our political life. All it takes is the determination to be better and the judgment to decide how to be excellent at what we want to do and who we want to be, and to work together to help create the society we want to live in. (shrink)

Scientific models share one central characteristic with fiction: their relation to the physical world is ambiguous. It is often unclear whether an element in a model represents something in the world or presents an artifact of model building. Fiction, too, can resemble our world to varying degrees. However, we assign a different epistemic function to scientific representations. As artifacts of human activity, how are scientific representations allowing us to make inferences about real phenomena? In reply to this concern, philosophers of (...) science have started analyzing scientific representations in terms of fictionalization strategies. Many arguments center on a dyadic relation between the model and its target system, focusing on structural resemblances and “as if” scenarios. This chapter provides a different approach. It looks more closely at model building to analyze the interpretative strategies dealing with the representational limits of models. How do we interpret ambiguous elements in models? Moreover, how do we determine the validity of model-based inferences to information that is not an explicit part of a representational structure? I argue that the problem of ambiguous inference emerges from two features of representations, namely their hybridity and incompleteness. To distinguish between fictional and non-fictional elements in scientific models my suggestion is to look at the integrative strategies that link a particular model to other methods in an ongoing research context. To exemplify this idea, I examine protein modeling through X-ray crystallography as a pivotal method in biochemistry. (shrink)

Eric Hobsbawm is a man of the Enlightenment: does he not define socialism as the last and most extreme heir of the eighteenth century's rationalism? So it is not surprising that the distinction between ‘modern’ and ‘primitive’ or ‘archaic’ has an important place in his work. However, examining some of his writings, and in particular the three books from the period 1959-69 devoted to so-called archaic forms of revolt, it is evident that his approach differs markedly from the ‘progressive’ orthodoxy (...) in its interest, sympathy, even fascination - these are his own words - for ‘primitive’ movements of peasant antimodern (anti-capitalist) resistance and protest. I refer to Primitive Rebels (1959), Bandits (1969) and Captain Swing (1969). (shrink)

This teaching case study poses classic questions about following orders versus serving one's conscience. It tracks the actions of Captain Lawrence Rockwood, an intelligence officer with the Tenth Mountain Division of the United States Army, who was sent to Haiti in September 1994 as part of the mission to oust the dictator Cedras and put the elected Aristide in power. Captain Rockwood felt that his conscience, his humanitarian duty and international law all required that he inspect the National (...) Penitentiary where, intelligence reports showed, political prisoners were being tortured and murdered. His chain of command was unanimous in refusing him permission to inspect the prison and in directing that he do nothing that would endanger fragile relations with the peacefully departing Cedras regime. The case is intended for use in courses on force and justice, for ethics and leadership classes at military academies, at chaplaincy schools and seminaries or in classes on law of war and international law, civil-military relations, peacekeeping and new missions for the military. (shrink)

"The fixed person for fixed duties, who in older societies was such a godsend, in the future ill be a public danger." Twenty years ago, a single legal metaphor accurately captured the role that American society accorded to physicians. The physician was "c- tain of the ship." Physicians were in charge of the clinic, the Operating room, and the health care team, responsible - and held accountabl- for all that happened within the scope of their supervision. This grant of responsibility (...) carried with it a corresponding grant of authority; like the ship's captain, the physician was answerable to no one regarding the practice of his art. However compelling the metaphor, few would disagree that the mandate accorded to the medical profession by society is changing. As a result of pressures from a number of diverse directions - including technological advances, the development of new health professionals, changes in health care financing and delivery, the recent emphasis on consumer choice and patients' rights - what our society expects phy- cians to do and to be is different now. The purpose of this volume is to examine and evaluate the conceptual foundations and the moral imp- cations of that difference. Each of the twelve essays of this volume assesses the current and future validity of the "captain of the ship" metaphor from a different perspective. The essays are grouped into four sections. In Section I, Russell Maulitz explores the physician's role historically. (shrink)

This article delves into Captain Samuel Alfred Warner’s dogged campaign to sell two inventions – his submersible mine and “long range” missile – to the British government in the 1840s and 1850s. Departing from a historiography that dismisses Warner as a fraudster, it clarifies how he managed to generate widespread interest in his weapons technologies for nearly twenty years. I therefore analyze three key elements of his self-promotion: his personal branding, his pitch, and his simultaneous embrace and rejection of (...) publicity. Neither elite nor highly educated, Warner ran up against a culture of “polite science” that distinguished disinterested practitioners from profit-minded schemers. To establish his credentials, he emphasized his practical maritime experience and represented himself as a martyr willing to bear the scorn of a disbelieving establishment. In pitching his devices, Warner capitalized on alarmism over border security and the integrity of the empire; he declared that they could hobble France’s modernizing navy and quickly end colonial conflicts. When skeptics began to fret over the proliferation of his destructive weapons, Warner flipped the script and lauded the threat of mutual annihilation as a deterrent to needless warfare. The issue of publicity, however, would ultimately be Warner’s professional undoing. Despite successful demonstrations, his clashes with official investigators and his refusal to disclose his chemical secrets led critics to dispute the originality of his discoveries. An examination of Warner’s self-promotional strategies, his fraught interactions with the British state, and the ambivalent public reaction to his contraptions provides insight into how scientific authority was acquired and lost in this period. (shrink)

Changing and often class-dependent non-stationarities of signals are a big challenge in the transfer of common findings in cognitive workload estimation using Electroencephalography (EEG) from laboratory experiments to realistic scenarios or other experiments. Additionally, it often remains an open question whether actual cognitive workload reflected by brain signals was the main contribution to the estimation or discriminative and class-dependent muscle and eye activity, which can be secondary effects of changing workload levels. Within this study, we investigated a novel approach to (...) spatial filtering based on beamforming adapted to changing settings. We compare it to no spatial filtering and Common Spatial Patterns (CSP). We used a realistic maneuvering task, as well as an auditoryn-backsecondary task on a tugboat simulator as two different conditions to induce workload changes on professional tugboat captains. Apart from the typical within condition classification, we investigated the ability of the different classification methods to transfer between then-backcondition and the maneuvering task. The results show a clear advantage of the proposed approach over the others in the challenging transfer setting. While no filtering leads to lowest within-condition normalized classification loss on average in two scenarios (22 and 10%), our approach using adaptive beamforming (30 and 18%) performs comparably to CSP (33 and 15%). Importantly, in the transfer from one to another setting, no filtering and CSP lead to performance around chance level (45 to 53%), while our approach in contrast is the only one capable of classifying in all other scenarios (34 and 35%) with a significant difference from chance level. The changing signal composition over the scenarios leads to a need to adapt the spatial filtering in order to be transferable. With our approach, the transfer is successful due to filtering being optimized for the extraction of neural components and additional investigation of their scalp patterns revealed mainly neural origin. Interesting findings are that rather the patterns slightly change between conditions. We conclude that the approaches with low normalized loss depend on eye and muscle activity which is successful for classification within conditions, but fail in the classifier transfer since eye and muscle contributions are highly condition-specific. (shrink)

The debate about what constitutes the discipline of ethics and who qualifies as an ethics consultant is linked unavoidably to a debate that is potentiated by the reality of a rapidly changing and high-stakes health care consultation marketplace. Who we are and what we can offer to the moral gesture that is medicine is shaped by our fundamental understanding of the place of expert knowledge in the transformation of social reality. The struggle for self-definition is particularly freighted since clinical ethics (...) consultation aspires to be more than academic contemplation. Two recent books (Ethics Consultation by John La Puma and David Schiedermayer and The Health Care Ethics Consultant: A Practical Guide, edited by Francoise Baylis) exemplify the two most popular but most widely divergent positions on these issues. We argue that while useful, neither book addresses fully the particular and distinct role of the professional ethicist. (shrink)

The debate about what constitutes the discipline of ethics and who qualifies as an ethics consultant is linked unavoidably to a debate that is potentiated by the reality of a rapidly changing and high-stakes health care consultation marketplace. Who we are and what we can offer to the moral gesture that is medicine is shaped by our fundamental understanding of the place of expert knowledge in the transformation of social reality. The struggle for self-definition is particularly freighted since clinical ethics (...) consultation aspires to be more than academic contemplation. Two recent books (Ethics Consultation by John La Puma and David Schiedermayer and The Health Care Ethics Consultant: A Practical Guide, edited by Francoise Baylis) exemplify the two most popular but most widely divergent positions on these issues. We argue that while useful, neither book addresses fully the particular and distinct role of the professional ethicist. (shrink)

The first look at the philosophy behind the _Captain America_ comics and movies, publishing in advance of the movie release of _Captain America: The Winter Solider_ in April 2014. In _The Virtues of Captain America_, philosopher and long-time comics fan Mark D. White argues that the core principles, compassion, and judgment exhibited by the 1940’s comic book character Captain America remain relevant to the modern world. Simply put, "Cap" embodies many of the classical virtues that have been important (...) to us since the days of the ancient Greeks: honesty, courage, loyalty, perseverance, and, perhaps most importantly, honor. Full of entertaining examples from more than 50 years of comic books, White offers some serious philosophical discussions of everyone’s favorite patriot in a light-hearted and accessible way. Presents serious arguments on the virtues of Captain America while being written in a light-hearted and often humorous tone Introduces basic concepts in moral and political philosophy to the general reader Utilizes examples from 50 years of comics featuring Captain America, the Avengers, and other Marvel superheroes Affirms the value of "old-fashioned" virtues for the modern world without indulging in nostalgia for times long passed Reveals the importance of the sound principles that America was founded upon Publishing in advance of _Captain America: The Winter Soldier _out in April 2014. (shrink)

Monuments and statues are forms of commemoration. They typically pay tribute to people or events and aim to serve as a permanent marker, a link between present and past generations, committing them to memory and assigning them with importance and meaning. While commemorations can be beneficial in terms of recognising a legacy of the past and helping foster relationships between opposing groups, they can also be divisive and painful, failing to acknowledge other dimensions of historical fact and further hardening the (...) boundaries between groups in conflict. Essentially, what we choose to commemorate reflects what we as a society actually value. This paper focuses on the unsettled fates of the Captain Cook statue that stands with prominence in Hyde Park, Warrane, and other colonial monuments in Australia. It also discusses the emotionality surrounding such commemorations. We question whether Cook’s actual achievements constitute the notoriety that has been bestowed upon him. A range of commentators have put forward ideas around what to do about the Cook statue which we discuss while also considering what the future might look like if the truth of colonial history is known and open conversations can be had. (shrink)

Buckminster Fuller’s experiences in the Navy became a model for his ecological design projects and suggestions for the global management of ‘Spaceship Earth’. Inspired by technocratic ideas of the 1930s, Fuller envisaged, in the 1970s, an elitist world without politics, in which designers were at the helm, steering the planet out of its environmental crises.

"Childhood Spirituality," "The Hidden Message of Descartes," "Boomeritis Buddhism," "Sharing and Caring," and "The Meaning of 'Levels' of Consciousness." Please stay tuned!

Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry's humanism is well known. While it may be that the inclusion of talk about gods reflected the interest in religion in his own time, the way that the show talked about gods reflects a humanist theology that's at least compatible with, and perhaps an expression of, Roddenberry's own vision. If the relationship of Star Trek to humanism has been unambiguous, its relationship to, and view of, posthumanism is less clear. Posthumanism can refer to the notion (...) that an all‐embracing ethos of the kind offered by humanism ought to be reconfigured to incorporate other beings besides terrestrial ones. If compassion is the defining attribute of a god, then Star Trek's humanist theology encourages not only to believe that divinity is a real possibility for humanity in the future, but also to recognize it as a possibility in the present. (shrink)

There seems to be some initial evidence that team captains are selected based on non-leadership factors such as team tenure, technical abilities, being the daughter of the club president, or playing position. This is concerning since players expect their ideal team captain to have superior motivational and social skills. Adding to this literature on captain selection, the present study investigates relationships between the reasons for which team captains are selected and their perceived leadership quality; and perceived acceptance. To (...) accomplish this, we recruited 450 coaches and 198 players from Flemish football and volleyball teams. Participants evaluated 41 reasons on the extent to which they played a role in the selection of their team captain. Additionally, participants rated their team captain’s leadership quality and level of acceptance. The results consistently indicated that captains who were selected for having good motivational and social competencies were given higher ratings on perceived leadership quality and acceptance by participants. In conclusion, athletes who are motivated, good at motivating others and have superior social skills tend to be better suited for captaincy than those selected based on non-leadership factors. (shrink)

The environment is one of the salient issues that continues to challenge the political and cultural aspects of the society. The question that interrogates this paper is whether environmentalism is a modern phenomenon or has existed from the past? The paper also exposes the importance of the environment in the 19th century and its relation to politics. By focusing on two novels by Captain Frederick Marryat, a conservative and right-wing writer, the paper shows the approach to environmentalism defended by (...) Tory governments in the Victorian period. Addressing also the topic of youth education through narrative fiction, the example of Captain Marratt's The Children of the New Forest (1847) and Masterman Ready (1841) offers insights into the relationship between education, sustainability and collective memory. (shrink)