Although it is common in the Catholic moral tradition to hear punishment spoken of as “just” and demanded by reason, it is remarkably difficult to say why reason demands that malefactors suffer or to articulate what is rendered to whom in punishment. The present essay seeks to fill this lacuna by examining Aquinas’s treatment of punishment. After examining several themes found in his work, the paper will conclude that the conceptual key to the reasonableness of punishment is to be found (...) in the norm that demands contrapassum and that this norm is immediately derived from the same moral insight as the Golden Rule. Thus, the paper concludes, the notion of retribution is intimately and inextricably bound up in insights that are foundational to any coherent Christian ethics. (shrink)

The paper advances the conceptual understanding of responsible leadership and develops an empirical scale of discursive responsible leadership. The concept of responsible leadership presented here draws on deliberative practices and discursive conflict resolution, combining the macro-view of the business firm as a political actor with the micro-view of leadership. Ideal responsible leadership conduct thereby goes beyond the dyadic leader–follower interaction to include all stakeholders. The paper offers a definition and operationalization of responsible leadership. The studies that have been conducted to (...) develop the discursive responsible leadership scale validated the scale, discriminated it from other leadership scales, and demonstrated its utility in affecting unethical behavior and job satisfaction in organizations. Responsible leadership is shown to be first, dependent on the hierarchical level in an organization; second, capable of reducing unethical treatment of employees; and finally, a means of enhancing the job satisfaction of employees. The paper concludes with study limitations, future research directions and practical implications. (shrink)

This article examines the methodology of a core branch of contemporary political theory or philosophy: “analytic” political theory. After distinguishing political theory from related fields, such as political science, moral philosophy, and legal theory, the article discusses the analysis of political concepts. It then turns to the notions of principles and theories, as distinct from concepts, and reviews the methods of assessing such principles and theories, for the purpose of justifying or criticizing them. Finally, it looks at a recent debate (...) on how abstract and idealized political theory should be, and assesses the significance of disagreement in political theory. The discussion is carried out from an angle inspired by the philosophy of science. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000) 127-150 [Access article in PDF] They Who Burned Themselves for Peace: Quaker and Buddhist Self-Immolators during the Vietnam War Sallie B. KingJames Madison UniversityNhat Chi Mai was a lay disciple of Thich Nhat Hanh and member of the Order of Interbeing, an Engaged Buddhist order founded by Nhat Hanh. On May 16, 1967, Vesak, the celebration of the birth of the Buddha, she burned (...) herself to death outside the Tu Nghiem Temple, a nunnery. An idealistic young student with much to live for, she sacrificed herself in an effort to bring the war to an end. In a letter to the U.S. government she wrote, I offer my body as a torch to dissipate the dark to waken love among men to give peace to Vietnam the one who burns herself for peace. 1In her farewell letter to Thich Nhat Hanh she wrote, "Thay, don't worry too much. We will have peace soon." 2On November 2, 1965, Norman Morrison, a devout Quaker and ardent pacifist, drove from Baltimore to Washington and burned himself to death at the Pentagon, at a spot estimated to be 40 to 100 feet from the window of Robert S. McNamara, then Secretary of Defense and one of the chief American prosecutors of the war. Shortly before his death, he wrote to his wife, "For weeks even months I have been praying only that I be shown what I must do. This morning with no warning I was shown.... Know that I love thee but must act...." 3 Morrison took his baby daughter, Emily, along with him and held her in his arms as he prepared for his act. Somehow--accounts differ as to how it happened--she was separated from her father before the flames engulfed him and she emerged entirely unharmed, though her clothing smelled strongly of the kerosene with which Morrison had soaked himself. 4There were others who burned themselves to death during the war in Vietnam. The venerable Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc was the first. On June 11, 1963, [End Page 127] at a downtown crossroads in Saigon, he sat in the lotus posture and, in a state of meditative control, burned himself to death in protest of the Diem regime's repression of the Buddhist religion. Many Vietnamese Buddhist monks and nuns followed his example; I do not know all their names, or exactly how many they were.In America, to my knowledge, eight people burned themselves to death during the war. Two were Quakers: Norman Morrison and Alice Herz. Roger LaPorte, a former Trappist seminarian who had become a Catholic worker, burned himself to death one week after Norman Morrison. The others were: Hiroko Hayasaki, a Japanese-American Buddhist; Erik Thoen, a student of Zen Buddhism; another university student, George Winne; a high school student, Ronald Brazee; and Florence Beaumont, described as a "housewife." A number of others attempted self-immolation but survived. 5In this paper I will focus upon the self-immolations of Norman Morrison and Nhat Chi Mai. I will also have a few comments on Thich Quang Duc. My remarks are intended, however, to have relevance to all the Buddhist and Quaker self-immolators. 6Let us now consider in more detail some of the features of the self-immolations of Norman Morrison and Nhat Chi Mai, and some of the issues they pose to the Quaker and Buddhist communities, respectively. Precipitating Events While neither act was the result of a moment's impulse, we still would do well to ask what events most proximately precipitated the two self-immolations. In Norman Morrison's case, the precipitating events were two. The morning of the day he immolated himself he read a report of the American bombing of a village in Vietnam. Paris Match had published an interview with a French priest, recuperating in a Saigon clinic, who had witnessed and survived the bombing raid. The priest said, "I have seen my faithful burned up in napalm.... I have seen... (shrink)

A part of European cultural patrimony rests on the relationships our ancestors had with time. A few examples chosen at random will suffice to show how their attitude toward this point evolved over the ages. The famous Carpe Diem by Horace was an invitation to take advantage of the present moment. In Jewish tradition man‘s obligation to work was considered a curse. Similarly a saying attributed by Pliny to the painter Appelles emphasized the necessity of daily labor. In still (...) other ages time appeared as the great destroyer of all things, and Christianity promised its enemies tortures that were no less eternal than the joys it reserved for its disciples. (shrink)

Human risk (the risk of people doing things they shouldn't, or not doing things they should') is the largest single risk facing all organisations -- when things go wrong, there's always a human component, either causing the problem or making it worse. Collectively, companies spend billions trying to manage human risk via functions like Compliance, InfoSec, Risk, Audit, Legal, Human Resources and Internal Comms -- it is people in these functions, as well as those tasked with managing people, that is (...) the target audience for the book. Technology exacerbates the problem by providing each of us with weapons of mass destruction' from a human risk perspective -- even the most junior employee can cause huge damage via their keyboard, either in the work environment or via their personal social media account -- and by taking over basic, repetitive tasks, which mean people are spending more time in human risk sensitive' activities. Traditional approaches to mitigating human risk rely heavily on the idealised presumption that because people are employed, they can simply be told what to do -- this works well in safety-critical environments, where the black & white' parameters of desired outcomes are easy to predict, but is much harder when it comes to grey', less codifiable, areas like ethics which are often difficult to monitor until it's too late and rely on employees being positively engaged. If we want to mitigate the risks posed by human decision-making, then we need to base our approach on an understanding of how humans actually make decisions, which is where Behavioural Science -- a discipline based on academic research and field-tested on real' humans by advertisers, governments and transport authorities -- can help achieve better outcomes. This book is designed to help all those involved in managing human risk to achieve compliance' with a small -- in other words, getting their desired outcome -- and explores how organisations can get the best out of their people by designing frameworks that work with, rather than against, the grain of human thinking. Readers will learn to challenge their existing presumptions about managing human risk and discover practical techniques and examples they can deploy in their work environment. (shrink)

The themes of will and willing form a central but so far largely overlooked level of discourse in Hartmann’s Gregorius. At the heart of this discourse is the opposition between human and divine will, which is negotiated in terms of the tension between controllability and uncontrollability. To this end, Hartmann’s legendary romance takes recourse to a narrative pattern characteristic of, among others, the Latin legend of St. Brendan. Structuring the text and plot of Gregorius, it serves to present the protagonist’s (...) voyages on the water as a surrender to the will of God. When the protagonist decides to leave the monastery island, however, the pattern is conspicuously deviated from. It is through this deviation that the second instance of incest emerges as a personally attributable result of the protagonist’s attitude toward his creaturely will – which requires correction – rather than as guilt in the moral-theological sense. In Hartmann, a quasi-mystical theology of the will is molded into a narrative. In clear contrast to its French source, his adaptation thus reflects on the limits of human self-determination and controllability from an immanent perspective, the relationship to the world, as well as a transcendental perspective, the relationship to God. The prologue and Gregorius’s tablet suggest that Hartmann’s legend also deals with uncontrollability on a meta-level, as it ponders the problem of how the transcendent can be represented through narrative. (shrink)

Erfüllen gewachsene Demokratien in der industrialisierten Welt das Versprechen einer Volksherrschaft oder stehen sie unter dem Einfluss einer Elite aus Politik und Wirtschaft? Von dieser Frage ausgehend entwickelt die vorliegende Monographie ein Demokratiemodell, das sich auf das Verhältnis zwischen Macht und Ohnmacht in der Gesellschaft bezieht und darauf eine moralische Verpflichtung in der Politik zurückführt. Der Text untersucht, unter welchen Bedingungen in Demokratien die individuelle Autonomie und Selbstbestimmung maximiert und die Androhung und Anwendung von Gewalt minimiert werden kann. Im Zentrum (...) steht die kritische Auseinandersetzung mit dem von Jürgen Habermas mitbegründeten Modell der deliberativen Demokratie. Der Autor entwickelt dazu ein alternatives Demokratiemodell, das aus einer pragmatischen Sichtweise die historischen und sozialen Ungleichheiten in der Gesellschaft berücksichtigt. Dies setzt allerdings eine kritische Auseinandersetzung mit den von Habermas entwickelten Grundbegriffen der kommunikativen Vernunft, der kommunikativen Rationalität und des kommunikativen Handelns voraus. (shrink)

This book studies how the relationship between philosophy, morality, politics, and science was conceived in the Vienna Circle and how this group of philosophers tried to position science as an antidote to totalitarianism and irrationalism. This leads to investigation of the still understudied views of the Vienna Circle on moral philosophy, meta-ethics, and the relationship between philosophy of science and politics. Including papers from an international group of scholars, The Socio-ethical Dimension of Knowledge: The Mission of Logical Empiricism addresses these (...) topics and makes them available to scholars in the field of history of philosophy of science. (shrink)

The standard of proof in criminal trials should require that the evidence presented by the prosecution is robust. This requirement of robustness says that it must be unlikely that additional information would change the probability that the defendant is guilty. Robustness is difficult for a judge to estimate, as it requires the judge to assess the possible effect of information that the he or she does not have. This article is concerned with expert witnesses and proposes a method for reviewing (...) the robustness of expert testimony. According to the proposed method, the robustness of expert testimony is estimated with regard to competence, motivation, external strength, internal strength and relevance. The danger of trusting non-robust expert testimony is illustrated with an analysis of the Thomas Quick Case, a Swedish legal scandal where a patient at a mental institution was wrongfully convicted for eight murders. (shrink)

Distributed cognition refers to processes which are (i) cognitive and (ii) distributed across multiple agents or devices rather than performed by a single agent. Distributed cognition has attracted interest in several fields ranging from sociology and law to computer science and the philosophy of science. In this paper, I discuss distributed cognition from a social-choice-theoretic perspective. Drawing on models of judgment aggregation, I address two questions. First, how can we model a group of individuals as a distributed cognitive system? Second, (...) can a group acting as a distributed cognitive system be ‘rational’ and ‘track the truth’ in the outputs it produces? I argue that a group’s performance as a distributed cognitive system depends on its ‘aggregation procedure’ – its mechanism for aggregating the group members’ inputs into collective outputs – and I investigate the properties of an aggregation procedure that matter. (shrink)

A provocative exploration of how computers are reshaping ideas about what it means to be human profiles the annual Turing Test to assess a computer's capacity for thought while analyzing related philosophical, biological and moral issues.

The article draws a connection between three items preserved at the von Wright and Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Helsinki (WWA), namely a book by Wilhelm Busch and two copies of the photos of von Wright and Wittgenstein in Cambridge taken by Knut Erik Tranøy in 1950, by suggesting that the photos contain an allusion by Wittgenstein.

In diesem Beitrag werden einige wissenschaftstheoretische Thesen u.a. von Paul K. Feyerabend hinsichtlich ad-hoc-Hypothesen untersucht. Es wird dabei gezeigt, dass Feyerabends Empfehlungen dafür, ad-hoc-Hypothesen zu akzeptieren oder abzulehnen, vom Einfluss dieser Hypothesen auf die Entwicklung von Technik abhängen. In einem weiteren Schritt wird angedeutet, dass eine derartige Relativierung auch in gängigen Bestätigungstheorien nahegelegt wird, dass man also gängigen Bestätigungstheorien und Feyerabend zufolge ad-hoc-Hypothesen nur hinsichtlich ihres Einflusses auf die Technikentwicklung akzeptieren oder ablehnen sollte.

In einer philosophischen Inhaltsangabe und Interpretation versuche ich, die Doppeldeutigkeit der Vergeltungsmetapher im Ijob-Buch herauszuarbeiten. Entgegen den geläufigen theologischen oder pessimistischen Deutungsvarianten ist dabei streng zwischen einer vorreflexiv-moralischen und metaphysischen Sinnebene zu unterscheiden. Während Ijobs Freunde über das Referat einer noch nicht vernünftig angeeigneten Tradition nicht hinauskommen, entwickelt sich der ,,Angefeindete" zweifelnd und philosophisch suchend zu einem geistigen Individuum, indem er die Einschränkungen eines endlichen Daseins letztlich als ermöglichende Bedingungen seiner Freiheit erkennt, sich aus dem Seinsgrund der Gerechtigkeit Gottes selbst (...) zu gestalten. (shrink)

Tugendhats Versuch, die Möglichkeit einer freien Handlung des Menschen in einer als deterministisch angenommenen Natur aufzuzeigen, war von Anbeginn zum Scheitern verurteilt. Denn ein kausaler Naturmechanismus lässt per definitionem zu jedem Zeitpunkt nur ein einziges reales Ereignis zu, dessen Ursache Natur und nicht der freie Mensch ist. Unter dieser Voraussetzung kann die gefühlte und im Moralurteil vorausgesetzte Wahlfreiheit des Menschen, hier und jetzt A und nicht-A tun zu können, nur noch als, wenn auch unvermeidlicher, moralischer Schein, der trügt, in den (...) Blick treten. Tugendhat spürt diese Konsequenz und gerät in den nihilistischen Sog eines Denkens, das aus ,,intellektueller Redlichkeit" nicht mehr an seine Verantwortlichkeit glauben kann. Ich zeichne diesen für das Individuum ,Mensch' verheerenden psychologischen Prozess in groben Zügen nach. Erst in einer Prinzipienreflexion, so meine These gegen Tugendhats Ansatz: ,,Anthropologie statt Metaphysik", werden die Einschränkungen einer wesenhaft nichtkausalen Natur als Möglichkeitsbedingung der Freiheit des Menschen, der im Text dieser Welt allein die auf endliche Weise sich selbst erwirkende Ur-Sache ,Grund' ist, evident. (shrink)

The author examines the logical structure of religious inquiry and discourse and the various meanings of religious utterances, and then develops principles of judgment and types of argument by which claims can be supported or challenged. Originally published in 1964. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and (...) hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to introduce the theory of judgment aggregation, a growing interdisciplinary research area. The theory addresses the following question: How can a group of individuals make consistent collective judgments on a given set of propositions on the basis of the group members' individual judgments on them? I begin by explaining the observation that initially sparked the interest in judgment aggregation, the so-called "doctinal" and "discursive paradoxes". I then introduce the basic formal model of judgment aggregation, (...) which allows me to present some illustrative variants of a generic impossibility result. I subsequently turn to the question of how this impossibility result can be avoided, going through several possible escape routes. Finally, I relate the theory of judgment aggregation to other branches of aggregation theory. Rather than offering a comprehensive survey of the theory of judgment aggregation, I hope to introduce the theory in a succinct and pedagogical way, providing an illustrative rather than exhaustive coverage of some of its key ideas and results. (shrink)

In this paper Dennett's method of heterophenomenology is discussed. After a brief explanation of the method, three arguments in support of it are considered in turn. First, the argument from the possibility of error and self-delusion of the subject is found to ignore the panoply of intermediate position that one can take with regard to the epistemic status of first-personal knowledge. The argument is also criticized for employing an epistemic double-standard. Second, the argument from the neutrality of heterophenomenology is found (...) to be defeated by the fact that, contrary to Dennett's claims, third-person, functionalist and instrumentalist assumptions substantially underpin and inform the method. Similarities between heterophenomenology and the Turing Test are furthermore explored, and it is shown that a weaker version of the neutrality claim also fails. Third, the argument from the appeal to the standard practice of science is shown to substantially rest on an equivocation on the term 'heterophenomenology' and is therefore rejected. Finally, it is suggested that the use of introspective reports is not inherently at odds with sound scientific procedures. (shrink)

Book synopsis: The five volumes contain the main papers and lectures of invited speakers that were presented at the X. International Kant Congress in Sao Paolo in 2005.