Harris levels two main criticisms against our original defence of QALYs (Quality Adjusted Life Years). First, he rejects the assumption implicit in the QALY approach that not all lives are of equal value. Second, he rejects our appeal to Rawls's veil of ignorance test in support of the QALY method. In the present article we defend QALYs against Harris's criticisms. We argue that some of the conclusions Harris draws from our view that resources should be allocated on the basis of (...) potential improvements in quality of life and quantity of life are erroneous, and that others lack the moral implications Harris claims for them. On the other hand, we defend our claim that a rational egoist, behind a veil of ignorance, could consistently choose to allocate life-saving resources in accordance with the QALY method, despite Harris's claim that a rational egoist would allocate randomly if there is no better than a 50% chance of being the recipient. (shrink)

This latest volume in the eminent Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science series examines the main features of the intellectual milieu from which logical empiricism sprang, providing the first critical exploration of this context by ...

(1983). Consciousness and complexity: Evolutionary perspectives on the mind-body problem. Australasian Journal of Philosophy: Vol. 61, No. 4, pp. 378-395.

The CQUniversity Australia Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC) is a human ethics research committee registered under the auspices of the National Health and Medical Research Council. In 2009 an external review of CQUniversity Australia’s HREC policies and procedures recommended that a low risk research process be available to the institution’s researchers. Subsequently, in 2010 the Human Research Ethics Committee Low Risk Application Procedure came into operation. This paper examines the applications made under the Human Research Ethics Committee Low Risk Application (...) Procedure during the course of 2010 and 2011. The paper contributes to the literature analyzing the decision-making processes of research review committees through an analysis of the quantitative data relating to the low risk research applications made and through discourse analysis of the qualitative data represented by the assessment comments of the members of the Committee. (shrink)

At the age of fourteen, Ludwig Wittgenstein was exposed to the formative influence of Søren Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, and Arthur Schopenhauer. Two of his important works were Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the only book published during his lifetime, and Philosophical Investigations. This chapter examines Wittgenstein’s philosophy, with an emphasis on his views about doubt, silence, and metaphysics, as well as his theory of change and his account of language games. It also considers Wittgenstein’s argument that forms of life are modes (...) of organization in which our actions agree with one another. Finally, it discusses the implications of Wittgenstein’s work for organization studies, and especially organizational change. (shrink)

Restorative justice should have greater weight as a criterion in criminal justice sentencing practice. It permits a realistic recognition of the kinds of harm and damage caused by offences, and encourages individualized non-custodial sentencing options as ways of addressing these harms. Non-custodial sentences have proven more effective than incarceration in securing social reconciliation and preventing recidivism, and they avoid the serious social and personal costs of imprisonment. This paper argues in support of restorative justice as a guiding idea in sentencing. (...) As part of this defence, it considers whether the use of the idea of restorative justice will conflate criminal law with civil law or displace the authority of the criminal courts, and whether the sentences it recommends are best thought of as punishments or alternatives to punishment. (shrink)

In this installment of the Faculty Authors Series, Vance Morgan (Philosophy, Providence College) discusses his newest book, "Freelance Christianity: Philosophy, Faith, and the Real World.".

Moral perceptualism is the view that perceptual experience is attuned to pick up on moral features in our environment, just as it is attuned to pick up on mundane features of an environment like textures, shapes, colors, pitches, and timbres. One important family of views that incorporate moral perception are those of virtue theorists and sensibility theorists. On these views, one central ability of the virtuous agent is her sensitivity to morally relevant features of situations, where this sensitivity is often (...) spoken of in perceptual terms. However, sensibility theorists have often not been careful to specify how to understand their claims about moral sensibilities as perceptual. In this paper, we distinguish between what we call Attentional Moral Perception and Contentful Moral Perception. We argue that sensibility theorists should endorse Attentional Moral Perception, because it has very powerful empirical evidence in its favor, and it can play all of the explanatory roles that the sensibility theorist needs in her theory of moral sensibilities. (shrink)

Experiences—visual, emotional, or otherwise—play a role in providing us with justification to believe claims about the world. Some accounts of how experiences provide justification emphasize the role of the experiences’ distinctive phenomenology, i.e. ‘what it is like’ to have the experience. Other accounts emphasize the justificatory role to the experiences’ etiology. A number of authors have used cases of cognitively penetrated visual experience to raise an epistemic challenge for theories of perceptual justification that emphasize the justificatory role of phenomenology rather (...) than etiology. Proponents of the challenge argue that cognitively penetrated visual experiences can fail to provide the usual justification because they have improper etiologies. However, extant arguments for the challenge’s key claims are subject to formidable objections. In this paper, I present the challenge’s key claims, raise objections to previous attempts to establish them, and then offer a novel argument in support of the challenge. My argument relies on an analogy between cognitively penetrated visual and emotional experiences. I argue that some emotional experiences fail to provide the relevant justification because of their improper etiologies and conclude that analogous cognitively penetrated visual experiences fail to provide the relevant justification because of their etiologies, as well. (shrink)

Frances Kamm has for some time now been a foremost champion of non-consequentialist ethics. One of her most powerful non-consequentialist themes has been the idea of inviolability. Morality's prohibitions, she argues, confer on persons the status of inviolability. This thought helps articulate a rationale for moral prohibitions that will resist the protean threat posed by the consequentialist argument that anyone should surely be willing to violate a constraint if doing so will minimize the overall number of such violations. As Kamm (...) put it in a 1992 article, ‘If morality permitted minimizing violations of persons by violating other persons, then each of those saved as well as those persons used to save others would be less inviolable. It is the permission, not any actual violation of persons, that makes this so.’ Now, as thus baldly asserted, this claim borders on the conclusory. It is almost as if the claim were that morality conferred on persons the following status: that of being protected from consequentialism. One wants to hear in what inviolability consists, in more detail, so that we can understand it independently of the negation of consequentialism. And there is also an opposite problem: if inviolability is a good, then why can't consequentialism take it into account? Hence, one also wants to hear why this would not be the case. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger wrote one and only one preface for a scholarly work on his thinking, and it was for William J. Richardson’s study Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought, first published in 1963. Ever since, both Heidegger’s Preface and Richardson’s groundbreaking book have played an important role in Heidegger scholarship. Much has been discussed about these texts over the decades, but what has not been available to students and scholars up to this point is Richardson’s original comments and (...) questions to Heidegger that led to the famous Preface. These are published here for the first time both in the German original and in our English translation. In our commentary we 1) discuss how Heidegger’s Preface came about, 2) explain the source and status of the materials published here, and 3) pair selected passages from Richardson’s text with Heidegger’s reply in his Preface to highlight the consonance of their thinking. (shrink)

Recently a great deal of attention has been paid to conflicts of interest in medical research, and the Institute of Medicine has called for more research into this important area. One research question that has not received sufficient attention concerns the mechanisms of action by which conflicts of interest can result in biased and/or flawed research. What discretion do conflicted researchers have to sway the results one way or the other? We address this issue from the perspective of selective inertia, (...) or an unnatural selection of research methods based on which are most likely to establish the preferred conclusions, rather than on which are most valid. In many cases it is abundantly clear that a method that is not being used in practice is superior to the one that is being used in practice, at least from the perspective of validity, and that it is only inertia, as opposed to any serious suggestion that the incumbent method is superior, that keeps the inferior procedure in use, to the exclusion of the superior one. By focusing on these flawed research methods we can go beyond statements of potential harm from real conflicts of interest, and can more directly assess actual harm. (shrink)

A citizen’s jury brings together a mix of citizens from different socio-economic groups who deliberate on a particular policy issue over a number of days. Since their development in the 1970s in th...

"One of the expected fruits of Descartes' philosophical enterprise is "the highest and most perfect moral system," a system which, organically developed from its metaphysical and physical foundations, will provide the moral agent with direction and purpose in each of life's contingencies. Yet, Descartes' published work contains no such moral system, and commentators have generally agreed that Descartes "has entered the history of philosophy as perhaps the only systematic philosopher of the first rank who failed to provide any methodical treatment (...) of moral problems."" "Through a careful investigation of primarily Descartes' Correspondence and his final treatise, The Passions of the Soul, Vance Morgan here constructs the framework of a working ethical system, consistent with the spirit of Cartesian metaphysics and physics. He finds that while Descartes' metaphysics are remarkable for their insistence on indubitably clear and distinct principles, his ethic is equally remarkable in its conclusion that indubitably certain, inviolable principles are not available in the realm of morals and human activity. Virtue is not defined with reference to the results of one's actions, nor to one's faithful adherence to a set of rationally derived moral directives. Rather, virtue consists in the moral attitude with which one lives one's life, the psychological conviction that one has always resolutely acted upon the best intellectual activity of which one is capable."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved. (shrink)

When we see objects blurrily, in the periphery, or in dim light, we often experience their features unclearly. This paper argues that perceptual clarity is a dimension along which experiences vary, distinct from their distal contents. Drawing on models in perception science, the paper accounts for clarity by using the probabilistic notion of precision. The account’s first part is ecumenical: it says that experiences carry information about the precision of the representations from which each distal content of experience was selected (...) and that this precision information accounts for perceptual clarity. The account’s second part entails that experiences carry the relevant precision information in the manner in which their distal contents are represented. The precision account of clarity is shown to conform to common intuitions about experiences’ contents and accuracy conditions. And it is used to illustrate how experiences could assign probability distributions over distal possibilities, even while experiences’ contents are non-probabilistic. (shrink)

Some argue that procreation is immoral due to its negative environmental impact. Since living an “eco-gluttonous” lifestyle of excessive resource consumption is wrong in virtue of the fact that it increases greenhouse gas emissions and environmental impact, then bringing another human being into existence must also be wrong, for exactly this same reason. I support this position. It has recently been the subject of criticism, however, primarily on the grounds that such a position (1) is guilty of “double-counting” environmental impacts, (...) and (2) that it over-generalizes to condemn other clearly permissible behaviors, such as saving lives, or certain instances of adoption and immigration. Here, I will defend the environmental argument against procreation from these criticisms. I will do this, first, under the assumption that our individual consumption and emissions cause significant harm. I will then address the problem of causal impotence, and argue that, even if our individual contributions to environmental problems ultimately make no difference to the amount of harm that occurs, procreation is still immoral for many, if not most, of those living in the developed world. (shrink)

Medical care of critically ill and injured infants and children globally should be based on best research evidence to ensure safe, efficacious treatment. In South Africa and other low and middle-income countries, research is needed to optimise care and ensure rational, equitable allocation of scare paediatric critical care resources.

With respect to climate change, what is wanted is an account that morally condemns the production of ‘luxury’ greenhouse gas emissions (e.g., joyriding in an SUV), but not ‘subsistence’ emissions (e.g., cooking meals). Now, our individual greenhouse gas emissions either cause harm, or they do not—and those who condemn the production of luxury emissions generally stake their position on the grounds that they do cause harm. Meanwhile, those seeking to defend the moral permissibility of luxury emissions generally do so by (...) arguing that our individual emissions do not cause harm. Here, I argue that, if our individual emissions do cause harm, then this entails too much. For, it entails not only that our luxury emissions are morally impermissible, but that our subsistence emissions are too. This is an undesirable result. Therefore, I propose that we embrace our other option. Namely, I propose that we accept that our individual emissions do not cause harm; or at least, that they make no perceptible difference with respect to the harms associated with climate change. The result of this admission is not as bad as you might think. For, I argue, even if we are individually causally impotent with respect to the harms of climate change, there remains a plausible route toward the moral condemnation of our individual luxury emissions—contrary to what others have argued. What is more, only by accepting our individual causal impotence can we successfully ground the permissibility of our individual subsistence emissions. (shrink)

1. Sometimes perceptual experience is crystal clear, as when one inspects an object close-up in bright light with corrective lenses. But experience can be less clear. To illustrate how experiences...

The philosopher Henry Richardson's short book is a defense of a position on a neglected topic in medical research ethics. Clinical research ethics has been a longstanding area of study, dating back to the aftermath of the Nazi death-camp doctors and the Tuskegee syphilis study. Most ethical regulations and institutions have developed in response to those past abuses, including the stress on obtaining informed consent from the subject. Richardson points out that that these ethical regulations do not address (...) one of the key dilemmas faced by medical researchers -- whether or not they have obligations towards subjects who need care not directly related to the purpose of the study, termed 'ancillary care obligation'. (shrink)

Nursing has a unique opportunity to address issues of structural violence that contribute to poor health outcomes. Models for designing nursing care relative to the social determinants of health can be adapted from the discipline of peace studies and the phenomenon of peacebuilding. The aim of this qualitative study was to describe the lived experience of peacebuilding from the perspective of community or public health nurses. Interviews were conducted with eight participants. Attributes of the peacebuilder included fostering human relationships that (...) value the inherent worth and dignity of others, nurturing a character of humility and moral courage, and contemplating the personal cost of engaging in prolonged processes of peacebuilding. Practices of peacebuilding included mediating conflict through multilayered processes, accompanying others to places of empowerment, and utilizing interdisciplinary teaching and learning to build capacity for change. Increasing an understanding of the lived experience of peacebuilding by nurses is relevant to nursing research, theory, and practice, and adds to a broader understanding of peacebuilding. (shrink)

Brenda Watson asks where moral and religious indoctrination ends and education begins, and tackles the arguments of some liberals.

Despite a growing body of research by management scholars to understand and explain failures in ethical decision making (EDM), misconduct prevails. Scholars have identified character, founded in virtue ethics, as an important perspective that can help to address the gap in organizational misconduct. While character has been offered as a valid perspective in EDM, current theorizing on how it applies to EDM has not been well developed. We thus integrate character, founded in virtue ethics, into Rest’s (1986) EDM model to (...) reveal how shifting attention to the nature of the moral agent provides critical insights into decision making more broadly and EDM specifically. Virtue ethics provides a perspective on EDM that acknowledges and anticipates uncertainties, considers its contextual constraints, and contemplates the development of the moral agent. We thus answer the call by many scholars to integrate character in EDM in order to advance the understanding of the field and suggest propositions for how to move forward. We conclude with implications of a character-infused approach to EDM for future research. (shrink)

Truthmaker theory has become immensely popular in recent years. So, it is not surprising that we are beginning to see it put to work in other areas of philosophy. Recently, several philosophers have proposed that truthmaker theory is the key to solving the Gettier problem. Edmund Gettier demonstrated that the traditional analysis of knowledge (as justified, true belief) was unsatisfactory. The truthmaker solution proposes that knowledge is a justified, true belief, where the source of one's justification is either identical to, (...) or else causally related to, the state of affairs which makes the believed proposition true. This amendment of the traditional analysis of knowledge purportedly escapes the problems identified by Gettier cases. In this paper, I will examine two particular recent endorsements of this solution – those from Sven Bernecker and Adrian Heathcote – and argue that truthmaker theory is not the key to solving the Gettier problem. (shrink)

Henry S. Richardson is Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University. From 2008-18, he was the editor of Ethics. His previous books include Practical Reasoning about Final Ends, Democratic Autonomy, and Moral Entanglements. He has held fellowships sponsored by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University.

There are a number of cases where, collectively, groups cause harm, and yet no single individual’s contribution to the collective makes any difference to the amount of harm that is caused. For instance, though human activity is collectively causing climate change, my individual greenhouse gas emissions are neither necessary nor sufficient for any harm that results from climate change. Some (e.g., Sinnott-Armstrong) take this to indicate that there is no individual moral obligation to reduce emissions. There is a collective action (...) problem here, to which I offer a solution. My solution rests on an argument for a (sometimes) bare moral difference between intending harm and foreseeing with near certainty that harm will result as an unintended side-effect of one’s action. I conclude that we have a moral obligation to reduce our individual emissions; and, more broadly, an obligation to not participate in many other harmful group activities (e.g., factory-farming). (shrink)

In seeking for an understanding of ethical practices in health care situations, our challenge is always both to recognize and respond to the call of individuals in need. In attuning ourselves to the call of the vulnerable other an ethical moment arises. Asking ‘how are you?’ in health care practice is our very first possibility to learn how a particular person finds herself or himself in this particular situation. Here, ‘how are you?’ shows itself as an ethical question that opens (...) up a relational space that calls forth a response. It is a way to understand the situated moments in which we are already that enables us to act respectfully. Our ethical frameworks assist us in trying to decide what is the right thing to do given a set of circumstances. Yet there is a prior step that already calls us to ethical attention; this is when we ask ‘how are you?’, which transforms a seemingly small interaction into an ethical moment. ‘How are you?’ is a question that turns us back to who we are as health care professionals and calls us to be more deeply attentive to the moment. When we sincerely ask ‘how are you?’ we enact our ethical commitments to one another. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider the implications of grief for philosophical theorising about absence experience. I argue that whilst some absence experiences that occur in grief might be explained by extant philosophical accounts of absence experience, others need different treatment. I propose that grieving subjects' descriptions of feeling as if the world seems empty or a part of them seems missing can be understood as referring to a distinctive type of absence experience. In these profound absence experiences, I will argue, (...) the absence of a person as a condition on various possibilities is made manifest in the structure of experience over time. Thus, by paying close attention to grief, we can see that even accounts of absence experience that are presented as in competition with one another may not be so, and that to explain all kinds of absence experience we sometimes need to appeal to something overlooked in other accounts, and which is neither straightforwardly perceptual or cognitive. I also suggest that we would have good reason to take such experiences to be part of and not merely psychological effects of grief. (shrink)

Perception purports to help you gain knowledge of the world even if the world is not the way you expected it to be. Perception also purports to be an independent tribunal against which you can test your beliefs. It is natural to think that in order to serve these and other central functions, perceptual representations must not causally depend on your prior beliefs and expectations. In this paper, I clarify and then argue against the natural thought above. All perceptual systems (...) must solve an under-determination problem: the sensory data they receive could be caused by indefinitely many arrangements of distal objects and properties. Using a Bayesian approach to perceptual processing, I argue that in order to solve the under-determination problem, perceptual capacities must rely on prior beliefs or expectations of some kind. I then argue that perceptual states or processes can help ground knowledge of the world whether the ‘beliefs’ necessary for perceptual processing are encoded as sub-personal states within a perceptual system or cognitive states, such as person-level beliefs. My argument has two main parts. First, I give a preliminary argument that cognitive influence on perception can be appropriate, and I respond to three lines of objection. Second, I argue that cognitively influenced perceptual states can be instances of seeing that p, which makes the relevant states well suited to help ground knowledge that p. I conclude that a cognitively penetrated perceptual state or process can help ground knowledge under some circumstances. (shrink)

This paper concerns how extant theorists of predictive coding conceptualize and explain possible instances of cognitive penetration. §I offers brief clarification of the predictive coding framework and relevant mechanisms, and a brief characterization of cognitive penetration and some challenges that come with defining it. §II develops more precise ways that the predictive coding framework can explain, and of course thereby allow for, genuine top-down causal effects on perceptual experience, of the kind discussed in the context of cognitive penetration. §III develops (...) these insights further with an eye towards tracking one extant criterion for cognitive penetration, namely, that the relevant cognitive effects on perception must be sufficiently direct. Throughout these discussions, we extend the analyses of the predictive coding models, as we know them. So one open question that surfaces is how much of the extended analyses are genuinely just part of the predictive coding models, or something that must be added to them in order to generate these additional explanatory benefits. In §IV, we analyze and criticize a claim made by some theorists of predictive coding, namely, that (interesting) instances of cognitive penetration tend to occur in perceptual circumstances involving substantial noise or uncertainty. It is here that our analysis is most critical. We argue that, when applied, the claim fails to explain (or perhaps even be consistent with) a large range of important and uncontroversially interesting possible cases of cognitive penetration. We conclude with a general speculation about how the recent work on the predictive mind may influence the current dialectic concerning top-down effects on perception. (shrink)