This article uses a notorious incident within the computer program EVE Online to exemplify and facilitate discussion of the metaphysics of virtual worlds and the morality of user behavior. The first section examines various frameworks used to understand virtual worlds, and emphasizes those which recognize virtual worlds as legal contracts, as representational worlds, and as media for communication. The second section draws on these frameworks to analyze issues of virtual theft and virtual betrayal arising in the EVE incident. The article (...) concludes by arguing that, in the absence of countervailing contractual obligations, users of virtual worlds have the same de facto duties to each other as they do in mediated and real environments. (shrink)

The age of modern biomedical science has raised many difficult ethical questions. Accordingly, leaders in bioethics have articulated methods to direct the on-going discourse while providing the systems necessary for making morally efficient decisions. In this thought-provoking study, Ashley John Moyse suggests a theory of ethics that interrupts and transforms the contemporary and abstract modes of moral discourse. Moyse moves the moral discussion of bioethics beyond abstract ends, obligations, and common moral categories. At the same time, he challenges (...) readers to take seriously the concrete moral tasks of existence. Moyse engages with Karl Barth's philosophical and theological thinking in order to investigate the moral discussions surrounding biomedical ethics. The book engagingly illuminates a path toward moral discernment that recognizes the significance of human flourishing. According to Moyse, Barth's moral theology not only grounds humans as ontologically relational but also fuels responsibility to, with, and for one's neighbors. (shrink)

Modern medicine has produced many wonderful technological breakthroughs that have extended the limits of the frail human body. However, much of the focus of this medical research has been on the physical, often reducing the human being to a biological machine to be examined, understood, and controlled. This book begins by asking whether the modern medical milieu has overly objectified the body, unwittingly or not, and whether current studies in bioethics are up to the task of restoring a fuller understanding (...) of the human person. In response, various authors here suggest that a more theological/religious approach would be helpful, or perhaps even necessary. Presenting specific perspectives from Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the book is divided into three parts: "Understanding the Body," "Respecting the Body," and "The Body at the End of Life." A panel of expert contributors—including philosophers, physicians, and theologians and scholars of religion— answer key questions such as: What is the relationship between body and soul? What are our obligations toward human bodies? How should medicine respond to suffering and death? The resulting text is an interdisciplinary treatise on how medicine can best function in our societies. Offering a new way to approach the medical humanities, this book will be of keen interest to any scholars with an interest in contemporary religious perspectives on medicine and the body. (shrink)

Five experiments demonstrate the central role of knowledge attributions in social evaluations. In Experiments 1–3, we manipulated whether an agent believes, is certain of, or knows a true proposition and asked people to rate whether the agent should perform a variety of actions. We found that knowledge, more so than belief or certainty, leads people to judge that the agent should act. In Experiments 4–5, we investigated whether attributions of knowledge or certainty can explain an important finding on how people (...) act based on statistical evidence, known as “the Wells effect”. We found that knowledge attributions, but not certainty attributions, mediate this effect on decision making. 2018 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

In this short note, we discuss several aspectsof “dimensions” and the related constructof “factors”. We concentrate on those aspectsthat are relevant to articles in this specialissue, especially those dealing with the analysisof the wild animal cases discussed inBerman and Hafner's 1993 ICAIL article. We reviewthe basic ideas about dimensions,as used in HYPO, and point out differences withfactors, as used in subsequent systemslike CATO. Our goal is to correct certainmisconceptions that have arisen over the years.

Attention has recently been proposed as the mechanism underlying the cognitive effects associated with bilingualism. However, similar to bilingualism, the term attention is complex, dynamic, and can vary from one activity to another. Throughout our daily lives, we use different types of attention that differ in complexity: sustained attention, selective attention, alternating attention, divided attention, and disengagement of attention. The present paper is a focused review summarizing the results from studies that explore the link between bilingualism and attention. For each (...) level of attention, a brief overview of relevant theoretical models will be discussed along with a spotlight on paradigms and tasks used to measure these forms of attention. The findings illustrate that different types and levels of attention are modified by the variety of bilingual experiences. Future studies wishing to examine the effects of bilingualism on attention are encouraged to embrace the complexity and diversity of both constructs rather than making global claims about bilingualism and attention. (shrink)

The debate over euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide continues to ignore the philosophical anthropology on which certain critical claims rest. In this paper, I offer several anthropologically based arguments against one prominent justification for EPAS: the Argument from the Evil of Suffering. I demonstrate that the argument is, at its core, a utilitarian one, and that a sound rebuttal can be found by examining Karol Wojtyla/Pope John Paul II's view of suffering as a transformative experience for the human person. Wojtyla (...) both rejects the secular bioethics vision of meaningless, quantifiable suffering, but also offers to take Christian bioethics far beyond the story of Job and into the realm of phenomenological change. By focusing on participation of the suffering sick in community with others, and rejecting alienation, Christians can arrive at a more complete conception of suffering that embraces the complementarities of philosophy and theology. (shrink)

Confusion surrounds Catholic teaching on the use of assisted nutrition and hydration, specifically the question of when, if ever, its refusal or removal is ethical. This paper focuses on two often-neglected considerations: the relationship between means and mechanism, and an assessment of proportionality of the mechanism from the patient’s perspective. The authors draw on two critical principles of Catholic moral teaching: only ordinary means are required, and proportionality is subject to the perspective of the patient, not just that of experts (...) or the culture. The mechanisms that provide food and water have distinct benefits and burdens. Their proportionality is properly subject to analysis by the patient or surrogate, who determines which mechanism is acceptable in the patient’s situation. (shrink)

‘Writing Pain’ argues that Anna Seward‘s Letters and Mary Robinson‘s letters create alternative models of sensibility from the suffering poet of Charlotte Smith‘s Elegiac Sonnets. Immensely popular, Smith‘s sonnets made feminine suffering a source of poetic agency by aestheticizing and privatizing it. However, despite their sincerity, her sonnets effaced the physical, nervous body of sensibility on which Seward‘s and Robinsons early poetic reputations had depended and for which they had been mocked. The popularity of Smith‘s model made it an important (...) model for women poets, but, by the end of the eighteenth century, sensibility was also associated with sickness and artifice. For Seward and Robinson, who wanted to build their literary reputations but were living with disabled bodies, Smiths example needed to be reimagined to account for the reciprocity of body and mind as they struggled to write through pain. (shrink)

Placebos are much discussed in both the medical and philosophy of medicine literatures. Once narrowly defined as inert “sugar pills,”, they now are now most often taken to be “treatments that appear similar to experimental treatments, but that lack their characteristic components”. In addition to their use in the control groups of many clinical trials, placebos are also now widely recognized by medical practitioners to be powerful therapies in themselves, often outperforming conventional drug therapies in these studies.Given this, I find (...) Haller’s book, which is divided into six chapters, “Evidence Based Medicine,” “Postmodernist Medicine,” “The Powerful Placebo,” “Politics of... (shrink)

In his review of the field of environmental political theory in The Politics of Nature, Andrew Dobson suggested that one way for the discipline to develop was through an engagement with the history of political thought, through “bringing previously buried political theorists to our attention… forcing us to reassess the work of canonical theorists”. Over ten years after Dobson’s initial suggestion, John Meyer notes that this approach had flourished as “a new generation of political theorists” engaged in this project (...) and the results of their work have shone new light on the political canon and broke new ground in environmental political thought.However for all the good... (shrink)

The permissibility of euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide is actively debated worldwide. Writers such as Ruth Macklin and Steven Pinker have argued that dignity is not a useful concept in bioethics and cannot be used legitimately by either side in the debate. In this essay, the author expands on a defense of the human person based in dignity and rooted in the work of Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II) and Gabriel Marcel. He defends the idea, introduced by John (...) F. Crosby, that a human person has dignity because of her “unrepeatableness,” a concept known as incommunicability. The author argues that the concept of dignity—far from being abstract, useless, or dangerous, as some writers have recently claimed—is a practical and vital protection for persons. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 10.3 (Autumn 2010): 529–546. (shrink)

This paper applies speech-act theory to craft a new response to Pyrrhonian skepticism and diagnose its appeal. Carefully distinguishing between different levels of language-use and noting their interrelations can help us identify a subtle mistake in a key Pyrrhonian argument.

We present a one per cent measurement of the cosmic distance scale from the detections of the baryon acoustic oscillations in the clustering of galaxies from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, which is part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III. Our results come from the Data Release 11 sample, containing nearly one million galaxies and covering approximately 8500 square degrees and the redshift range 0.2 < z < 0.7. We also compare these results with those from the publicly released (...) DR9 and DR10 samples. Assuming a concordance Λ cold dark matter cosmological model, the DR11 sample covers a volume of 13 Gpc3 and is the largest region of the Universe ever surveyed at this density. We measure the correlation function and power spectrum, including density-field reconstruction of the BAO feature. The acoustic features are detected at a significance of over 7σ in both the correlation function and power spectrum. Fitting for the position of the acoustic features measures the distance relative to the sound horizon at the drag epoch, rd, which has a value of rd,fid = 149.28 Mpc in our fiducial cosmology. We find DV = at z = 0.32 and DV = at z = 0.57. At 1.0 per cent, this latter measure is the most precise distance constraint ever obtained from a galaxy survey. Separating the clustering along and transverse to the line of sight yields measurements at z = 0.57 of DA = and H =. Our measurements of the distance scale are in good agreement with previous BAO measurements and with the predictions from cosmic microwave background data for a spatially flat CDM model with a cosmological constant. © 2014 The Author Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. (shrink)

The proofs of the existence of God in part 4 of Descartes’s Discourse on Method may yet surprise us. These arguments appear to be crafted with such ambiguity that their deeper import has rarely been suspected. This essay proposes that, in spite of the text’s conventional appearance, Descartes exposes the error of scholastic metaphysics, namely, that it mistakes the perfectibility of the human mind for a transcendent perfect being. Superficially, the thinker’s “idea of a more perfect being” serves to ground (...) the traditional theology; but surreptitiously, this idea refers to human possibility and supplies the metaphysical basis for scientific progress, freed from theology altogether. This ironic result is obtained not by speculating on Descartes’s irony directly, but by submitting the “idea of a more perfect being” itself to the Cartesian test of truth and falsehood. In that light, the text’s proofs of God reveal their skeptical, philanthropic intent. (shrink)

TERENCE Irwin's Socrates will be a familiar figure to many readers of his new translation and philosophical commentary on the Gorgias. In his widely read Plato's Moral Theory: The Early and Middle Dialogues, Irwin presented a comprehensive interpretation of the moral theory underlying Socrates' examination of his various interlocutors in Plato's early dialogues. Central to this interpretation is Irwin's conception of what Socrates is committed to by the reliance on the analogy between virtues and crafts that is so prominent a (...) feature of his argumentation. Irwin thinks Socrates' craft analogy commits him to holding that the virtues have a product that is totally distinct from them, and by reference to which they do their work of selecting particular actions and general plans for living. The result is that virtuous ways of living cannot be any part of the goal of life on Socrates' theory, but can only be rightly chosen as the best way of securing some good or goods whose nature and existence are totally independent of them. So Irwin's Socrates not only holds, as other interpreters have supposed, that all desires are for the agent's overall good and that virtues like courage and justice are nothing but cognitive states, with nothing merely affective about them. He is also committed to a solely instrumental relation between each of these virtues and the agent's overall good. Hence for Irwin there is no difficulty in Socrates' apparent championing of the hedonism of ordinary people in the Protagoras. If hedonism is true then this supposed commitment of Socrates' will find a ready vindication: the virtues are just the most effective instrumental means to happiness construed as the maximum excess of pleasure over pain over one's whole lifetime. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:PLATO'S STATESMAN STORY: THE BIRTH OF FICTION RECONCEIVED by John Tomasi In "Plato's Atlantis Story and the Birth of Fiction," Christopher Gill wants to distinguish the story ofAdantis in the Critias from Plato's earlier stories—like diat in the Statesman.1 These stories, Gill claims, belong to different literary genres. While the Statesman story is but another example of fable, the Adantis story of the Critias represents the first example—the (...) first in Plato and indeed the earliest in all Western written culture—of an exciting new literary genre: narrative fiction. Gill describes narrative fiction as a kind ofgame into which the author invites his audience to join. The invitation to play the game of fiction is an invitation "to share in the willing and conscious acceptance of the false as true" (p. 65). The audience is provided the opportunity to become "willfully self-deceived" about the story's truth. Perhaps the main constraint on a story's belonging to the genre of fiction is the author's ability to transmit this special invitation to his reader. Gill says one major way to do this is by a framework of introductory signals which are mixed in a certain way. The Adantis story, as Gill claims, seems to be framed with signals that a self-deception game is about to begin. Socrates says Critias is like a playwright competing in front of an audience (108a). Gill reads line 107 to mean that Critias is concerned direcdy with "the problem of giving his narrative the illusory realism which he says audiences require." Also, Gill says, "the fact that it is a game is signalled by the overt claim to historical truth in a context in which we are not disposed to accept the claim" (p. 72). Plato thus introduces the Adantis story with a delicate mixture ofconflictingclaims about the story's factual status. Gill suggests the reader should interpret this special mixture of signals as being a Philosophy and Literature, © 1990, 14: 348-358 John Tomasi349 sort of invitation to "make pretend," to play a pleasant game, to allow die reader to become willfully self-deceived. Within die Adantis story itself diere are further marks of die fiction genre. Narrative fiction can be a compelling game, and good fiction writers often slip into the game themselves, writing with a concern for detail and with a word choice so sensitive that the reader may feel that die writer too must believe in this fictional world. The Adantis story certainly exhibits this mark of fiction. As Gill puts it, in writing about Adantis Plato seems at times to have become "momentarily infatuated with the world he is creating."2 Such infatuation, exhibited especially perhaps in the detailed descriptions in the Critias of the splendors of the Adantean city and in the passionate portrayal of the growth of hubris in the citizens' hearts, is perhaps what gives the Adantis story some of its special potency, what makes it especially gripping to us (116c—ll7e; 121a-c). Clearly, it is a story with which writer as well as reader might develop an intimate relationship. In Plato's Atlantis story the framing signals are mixed with a deliberate subtlety, and the reader at times senses the writer's infatuation with his own tale. The Adantis story is thus crafted to get from the reader what Plato is after: "a willed self-deception, a chosen suspension ofincredulity for the duration of the story." Gill concludes, "This new element of intended complicity in the fictional game makes his work the first piece of deliberately fictional narrative in Greek literature" (p. 76). Gill's argumentthat the Adantis story belongs to the genre ofnarrative fiction is provocative and on the whole convincing. But is the Adantis story really the first Western instance of that genre? Is it even Plato's first attempt at fiction? I think it is not. I would like now to examine the storywithin the Statesman, a storywhich Gill says was probablywritten before the Adantis story. Might the Statesman story be a still earlier instance of narrative fiction? The signals framing the Statesman story are mixed indeed. At first, the Stranger tells young Socrates that... (shrink)

As Louisiana and Cuba emerged from slavery in the late nineteenth century, each faced the question of what rights former slaves could claim. Degrees of Freedom compares and contrasts these two societies in which slavery was destroyed by war, and citizenship was redefined through social and political upheaval. Both Louisiana and Cuba were rich in sugar plantations that depended on an enslaved labor force. After abolition, on both sides of the Gulf of Mexico, ordinary people-cane cutters and cigar workers, laundresses (...) and labor organizers-forged alliances to protect and expand the freedoms they had won. But by the beginning of the twentieth century, Louisiana and Cuba diverged sharply in the meanings attributed to race and color in public life, and in the boundaries placed on citizenship. Louisiana had taken the path of disenfranchisement and state-mandated racial segregation; Cuba had enacted universal manhood suffrage and had seen the emergence of a transracial conception of the nation. What might explain these differences? Moving through the cane fields, small farms, and cities of Louisiana and Cuba, Rebecca Scott skillfully observes the people, places, legislation, and leadership that shaped how these societies adjusted to the abolition of slavery. The two distinctive worlds also come together, as Cuban exiles take refuge in New Orleans in the 1880s, and black soldiers from Louisiana garrison small towns in eastern Cuba during the 1899 U.S. military occupation. Crafting her narrative from the words and deeds of the actors themselves, Scott brings to life the historical drama of race and citizenship in postemancipation societies. (shrink)