Animal behavior is the link between organisms and their environment and is critical for biological adaptation. Despite many studies demonstrating the sensitivity and utility of behavioral endpoints in bioassays assessing potential pollutant effects in aquatic ecosystems, behavioral toxicity testing has not, historically, been included routinely in assessments of aquatic toxicity and subsequent environmental policy formulation. The results of behavioral risk assessments may allow behavioral toxicologists to demonstrate that a chemical is not merely a potential hazard, but that it elicits a (...) functional change in an animal. In this regard, the behavioral toxicologist is on stronger ground than toxicologists recommending action based on isolated, non-functional changes such as acute or chronic mortality. Such sublethal pollutant effects should be of major interest and concern to individuals formulating environmental policies and water quality criteria because many more aquatic organisms encounter sublethal rather than acutely or chronically lethal concentrations of pollutants in nature. (shrink)

Ethics, Policy & Environment, Volume 14, Issue 3, Page 297-300, October 2011.

According to Craig Callender [2022], the ‘received view’ across the social sciences is that, when it comes to time and preference, only exponential time discounting is rational. Callender argues that this view is false, even pernicious. Here I endorse what I take to be Callender’s main argument, but only in so far as the received view is understood in a particular way. I go on to propose a different way of understanding the received view that makes it true. In (...) short: When time discounting is suitably conceived, the exponential form of the discounting function is indeed uniquely rational. (shrink)

Over 50% of the world population will develop a psychiatric disorder in their lifetime. 1 In the realm of psychiatric treatment, two primary modalities have been established: pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy. Yet, pharmacological interventions often take precedence as the initial treatment choice despite their comparable outcomes, severe side effects and disputed evidence of their efficacy. This preference for medication foregrounds a vital re-examination of what it means to be invasive in medical treatments, namely in psychiatric care. De Marco _et al_ challenge (...) the standard account of invasiveness, presenting considerations that transcend the traditional criteria of physical intrusion. 2 Through case studies centred on treatments for schizophrenia and depression, we aim to (1) reinforce De Marco _et al_’s challenge to the standard account of invasiveness and (2) extend the dialogue to the moral imperative of redefining mental invasiveness. Our aims are to broaden the definition of mental invasiveness, aligning... (shrink)

Why does time seem to flow in one direction? Can we influence the past? Is only the present real? Does relativity conflict with our common understanding of time? How does time relate to free will? Could science do away with time? These questions and others about time are among the most puzzling problems in philosophy and science. In this exciting collection of original articles, eminent philosophers propose novel answers to these and other questions. Based on the latest research in philosophy (...) and physics, these essays will be enjoyable to anyone with a speculative turn of mind. (shrink)

In 2018, William Lane Craig and Erik J. Wielenberg participated in a debate at North Carolina State University, addressing the question: "God and Morality: What is the best account of objective moral values and duties?" Craig argued that theism provides a sound foundation for objective morality whereas atheism does not. Wielenberg countered that morality can be objective even if there is no God. This book includes the full debate, as well as endnotes with extended discussions that were not (...) included in the debate. It also includes five chapters by other philosophers who have written substantive responses to the debate - J. P. Moreland, David Baggett, Mark Linville, Wes Morriston, and Michael Huemer. The book provides crucial resources for better understanding moral realism and its dependence on, or independence from, theistic foundations. Key Features A valuable debate about whether or not God is the best explanation for objective morality, bringing together theists and atheists working on the same subject who normally are not in conversation with each other. Includes clear coverage of ontological and epistemological issues in metaethical theories, focusing on Divine Command Theory and Non-natural Robust Moral Realism. Engaging and accessible throughout, making the book well suited for undergraduate and seminary classrooms. (shrink)

This book argues that the moral quality of an act comes from the agent's inner states. By arguing for the indispensable relevance of intention in the moral evaluation of acts, the book moves against a mainstream, 'objective' approach in normative ethics. It is commonly held that the intentions, knowledge, and volition of agents are irrelevant to the moral permissibility of their acts. This book stresses that the capacities of agency, rather than simply the label 'agent', must be engaged during an (...) act if its moral evaluation is to be coherent. The author begins with an ontological argument that an act is a motion or a causing of change in something else. He argues that the source of an act's moral meaning is in the agent: specifically, what the agent, if aware of relevant facts around her, aims to accomplish. He then moves to a series of critical chapters that consider arguments for mainstream approaches to act evaluation, including Thomson's dismissal of the agent knowledge and volition requirements, Scanlon's arguments for a derivative relevance of intentions to permissibility, Frowe's "causal roles" of agents in the moral evaluation of acts, and Bennett's explicit defense of the objective approach. The book concludes by offering the author's preferred replacement for the objective approach, an Aristotelian-Thomist view of acts. Acts, Intentions, and Moral Evaluation will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in ethics, just war theory, the ethics of self-defense, and philosophy of action. (shrink)

By developing an absurd counterfactual history, I show that many objections launched against Bohmian mechanics could also have been made against Newtonian mechanics. This paper introduces readers to Koopman–von Neumann dynamics, an operator-based Hilbert space representation of classical statistical mechanics. Lessons for quantum foundations are drawn by replaying the battles between advocates of standard quantum theory and Bohmian mechanics in a fictional classical history.

This chapter offers an interpretation of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s idealism. Despite Leibniz’s frequent claim that the universe ultimately boils down to monads, he also sometimes appears to say that the world’s fundamental furniture includes extended, corporeal substances. Here, I examine Leibniz’s views about the relationship between monads and the material world, especially in connection with material bodies and corporeal substances.

Is philosophy of film without theory an oxymoron or a family of non-, anti-, and a-theoretical approaches with which to engage in film-involving philosophical scholarship and understanding? The goal of this collection is to argue for the latter and to do so by example. By demonstrating a mere handful of the many ways in which philosophy of film without theory might be pursued, in tandem with the insights born of these methods, the volume’s contributors both implicitly and explicitly challenge the (...) academic assumption that engaging philosophically with film must be a theoretical activity. Indeed, they indicate the potential for championing without theory scholarship across the humanities for anyone whose projects and practices seek and celebrate humanistic understanding. -/- Contributors include Lucy Bolton, Carla Carmona, James Conant, Katheryn Doran. Maximilian De Gaynesford, Rob van Gerwen, John Gibson, Eran Guter & Inbal Guter, Colin Heber-Percy, Iris Vidmar Jovanović, Andrew Klevan, David Macarthur, Rupert Read, William Rothman, Constantine Sandis, and Sebastian Sunday. Films and television programmed discussed include Gravity, Le notti di Cabiria, Dunkirk, The Handmaid's Tale, Three Colours: Red and many more. -/- In addition there is an interview with Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey. (shrink)

Despite the promise of international collaboration and sharing by bringing together bioethicists from throughout the world at the 2024 IAB conference in Qatar, I will not be attending. The authors...

Social Theory and the Political Imaginary: Practice, Critique and History is an innovative work of synthesis, critique, and analysis. It presages a social theory perspective that recognises the constitutive significance of the political imaginary in modernity. Social theory's current dilemmas are explored through a series of interlinked asssessments of some of its recent substantial strands, specifically, Luc Boltanski's pragmatism and the wider 'practical turn', the perspectives of multiple modernities and global modernity, the outlook of social and political imaginaries, and critical (...) social theory. The political imaginary's reconfigurations are evident in the tensions of global modernity and original social theory interpretations are advanced of landmark instances of twenty-first century social contestation: the Hong Kong protests conditioned by threats to civil freedoms and a lack of self-determination, the radical democratic practices of anti-austerity movements contesting capitalist globalisation's injustices, and the inverted cosmopolitanism of the 2005 French Riots challenging the oppression and inequalities experienced by immigrant communities and marginalised youth. These incisive applications of social theory and complementary conceptual innovations illuminate the vicissitudes of social struggles, political forms, and theoretical perspectives. Similarly, reflection on the political imaginary is found to enable a necessary rethinking of the interrelationship of practice, critique and history. (shrink)

Teacher Education and the Pursuit of Wisdom takes its readers into the deep waters of investigating teaching not simply as a profession but as a precious "way of life." The author begins by investigating the nature of teaching as both an "active" and a "contemplative" endeavor and inquires into the resonance between the nature of teaching on the one hand and what has been said classically about genuine philosophizing on the other hand. Having laid the groundwork for students to be (...) able to recognize this intimate connection, readers are next challenged to take up the notion of teaching as a "way of life" in the pursuit of wisdom experimentally and to record their observations in a personalized journal format. Thorough explanations are provided concerning the value of journaling for self-knowledge, and exemplar texts by master journal writers are discussed. This book is designed for use as a primary textbook in philosophy of education courses. Instructors will find it helpful as a means to organize engaging classes at both the undergraduate and graduate levels for genuine philosophic practices and inquiry. It contains a well-defined program of work that is modelled upon the latest research concerning "authentic task design." Its rich experimental approach is replete with a broad array of learning tasks, assessment tools, and practices that are aligned with the competencies-based approach taken in most professional certification and BEd Programs. (shrink)

It is an open question when procreation is justified. Antinatalists argue that bringing a new individual into the world is morally wrong, whereas pronatalists say that creating new life is morally good. In between these positions lie attempts to provide conditions for when taking an anti or pronatal stance is appropriate. This paper is concerned with developing one of these attempts, which can be called qualified pronatalism. Qualified pronatalism typically claims that while procreation can be morally permissible, there are constraints (...) on when it is justified. These constraints often concern whether an individual is motivated to procreate for the right reasons. For instance, if someone is not sufficiently concerned with the child’s future welfare, the qualified pronatalist will say that procreation is not justified. Moreover, David Wasserman says that this concern forms a role-based duty. That is, prospective parents have special duties to be concerned for the child’s future welfare by virtue of the role they occupy. In this paper, I argue that a proper examination of a prospective parent’s role-based duties entails that more is needed to justify procreation. Bringing a new person into the world leaves fewer resources for people who already need them, and the current size of the human population is unsustainable from a planetary point of view. Therefore, even if there is nothing wrong with procreation per se, the external condition of overpopulation, and its ensuing public health issues, plausibly gives rise to a role-based duty that prospective parents must account for when deciding whether to procreate. (shrink)

Der Verfasser legt einen Kommentar vor, der allen Lesern von Humes erkenntnistheoretischen Schriften hilfreich sein wird; auch werden zentrale Aspekte seiner Moral- und Religionsphilosophie vorgefuhrt und diskutiert. Dabei wird ein Gesamtbild der Philosophie Humes entwickelt und in den Zusammenhang des zeitgenossischen europaischen Denkens gestellt. Hier bekampft der Verfasser die gelaufige Interpretation, derzufolge Hume als der konsequente Zerstorer des Empirismus gilt; Humes Ziel sei eher die Widerlegung einer Weltauffassung, die fast allen Philosophen seiner Epoche, Empiristen und Rationalisten, gemeinsam war. In einem (...) Anhang wird sein Verhaltnis zur kritischen Philosophie Kants eingehender behandelt. Auf diese Weise soll nicht nur Studenten eine Einfuhrung in die Philosophie Humes, sondern auch Spezialisten grundsatzlich neues Material geboten werden. (shrink)

The Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks: Philosophy series serves undergraduate college students who have had little or no exposure to philosophy, as well as the curious lay reader. Following this first primer volume, which introduces both the discipline and the topics of the remaining nine volumes, each handbook will usher the reader into a subfield of philosophy (see list of titles below), and explore fifteen to thirty topics in that subfield. Every chapter in each volume will use vehicles such as film to (...) facilitate understanding of philosophical issues; for example, the film Dead Man Walking may be used as an introduction to issues related to the death penalty. (shrink)

How can we talk meaningfully about the past if it does not exist to be talked about? What gives time its direction? Is time travel possible? This defence of presentism - the view that only the present exists - makes an original contribution to a fast growing and exciting debate.

The farms in the LEGO Farm theme are immaculate. They feature sparkling clean tractors, pristine fences, and the complete absence of dirt. Whether it is on purpose, or a limitation based on the number of pieces that can be placed inside a box, LEGO Farm presents an agricultural utopia. The farms are smaller, less dependent on toxic inputs, and friendlier to animals than real‐life commercial farms. LEGO Farm often features animals that are clean and well fed. Some animals even appear (...) to be smiling, and that's appropriate considering that they are viewed as living creatures rather than commodities. With LEGO, kids and adults can imagine farms as they would ideally make them. The beauty of LEGO is that anyone can be a Master Builder, building their own MOCs. As a Master Farmer the possibilities for representing environmentally friendly agriculture are endless. (shrink)

The idea that human beings have a distinct moral worth—a moral significance over and above any moral worth, such as that may be, possessed by other animals—has a long history and has traditionally been taken for granted by philosophers and theologians. However, in a variety of quarters in recent philosophy, this idea has come into disrepute, seeming to indicate a mere prejudice in favour of our own species. For example, Peter Singer has argued that such a position is mere speciesism, (...) a prejudice of a kind with racism and sexism in that it involves making moral distinctions between our own and other species that cannot be morally justified. What on such views is needed to justify any such distinction is a difference in terms of the morally relevant properties possessed by our own species as compared with other species. I will call this view the moral property view. Insofar as other species share with us morally relevant properties, for example the capacity to suffer cognitive ability and so on, it is mere prejudice not to accept moral requirements with respect to them as we do with respect to our own species. While on the surface such a view may seem morally enlightened, it indicates what will seem to many problematic moral judgments with respect to severely disabled human beings. In this paper, I will respond to these concerns by suggesting a different basis for the idea of human moral distinctiveness, one that draws on recent work by Wittgensteinian moral philosophers and which denies what I called above the property view. According to this view, while our shared life with other animals involves the recognition of their moral significance, our shared life with other human beings involves recognising that human beings as human beings have a distinctive moral value. (shrink)

In 21st century America, personhood is under daily assault, sometimes with dire consequences. Scientist, ethicist, and ordained minister Craig C. Malbon encourages the reader to consider such assaults on personhood endured by victims of abortion, ageism, Alzheimer's disease, drug addiction, mental and physical disabilities, gender, gender orientation, racism, sexual preference, identity politics, and our will-to-power over the "other." In exploring personhood status, Malbon poses difficult questions for us. Is personhood assigned as all-or-nothing, or is it a sliding scale based (...) upon criteria arbitrarily aimed at our vulnerabilities? Does the voiceless embryo and fetus have advocates who can speak to the moral question of abortion? Is the personhood of an economically insecure pregnant woman degraded to the point where lack of access to early termination of pregnancy results in "coercive childbearing?" Does being a member of the LGBTQI+ community target one for assaults on personhood, to the extreme of being killed? In delving into the biology and psychology of assaults of "self" upon the "other," Malbon sees powerful linkages of everyday assaults on personhood to darker, profound "original sins" that are foundational to the rise of the American empire, i.e., assaults on the indigenous Native Americans and assaults derivative to the institution of slavery upon Africans, African Americans, and their descendants. (shrink)

How can we talk meaningfully about the past if it does not exist to be talked about? What gives time its direction? Is time travel possible? This defence of presentism - the view that only the present exists - makes an original contribution to a fast growing and exciting debate.

The counterfactual mental state of negligent criminal activity invites skepticism from those who see mental states as essential to responsibility. Here, I offer a revision of the mental state of criminal negligence, one where the mental state at issue is actual and not merely counterfactual. This revision dissolves the worry raised by the skeptic and helps to explain negligence’s comparatively reduced culpability.

Memory and the Political Art in Plato's Statesman provides a novel reading of Plato's Statesman, while arguing that the philosophic and practical dimensions of memory create a framework for political life.

Racism in Psychology examines the history of racism in psychological theory, practice and institutions. The book offers critical reviews by scholars and practising therapists from the US, Africa, Asia, Australia and Europe on racism on the couch and in the wider socio-historical context. The authors present a mixed experience of the success of efforts to counter racism in theory, institutions and organizations and differing views on the possibility of institutional change. Chapters discuss the experience of therapists, anti-Semitism, inter-sectionality and how (...) psychological praxis is part of a colonialist project. The book will appeal to practising psychologists and counsellors, socially minded psychotherapists, social workers, sociologists and students of psychology, social studies and race relations. (shrink)

Drunk drivers and other culpably incapacitated wrongdoers are often taken to pose a problem for reasons-responsiveness accounts of moral responsibility. These accounts predicate moral responsibility upon an agent having the capacities to perceive and act upon moral reasons, and the culpably incapacitated wrongdoers lack exactly those capacities at the time of their wrongdoing. Many reasons-responsiveness advocates thus expand their account of responsibility to include a tracing condition: The culpably incapacitated wrongdoer is blameworthy despite his incapacitation precisely because he is responsible (...) for becoming incapacitated. As some skeptics have suggested, it is not clear that we need tracing. Here, however, I make a stronger case against tracing: I show that tracing gets things wrong. I consider a new sort of case, the case of the Odysseus agent, whose incapacitation is non-culpable (sometimes merely permissible and sometimes praiseworthy). Tracing would have us hold responsible and therefore blame unlucky Odysseus agents, Odysseus agents who commit a wrongdoing in the throes of their non-culpably induced incapacitation. But we should not hold these unlucky Odysseus agents responsible for their incapacitated wrongdoing. Because tracing gets these cases wrong, we should reject tracing. (shrink)

A framework for pragmatic analysis is proposed which treats discourse as a game, with context as a scoreboard organized around the questions under discussion by the interlocutors. The framework is intended to be coordinated with a dynamic compositional semantics. Accordingly, the context of utterance is modeled as a tuple of different types of information, and the questions therein — modeled, as is usual in formal semantics, as alternative sets of propositions — constrain the felicitous flow of discourse. A requirement of (...) Relevance is satisfied by an utterance (whether an assertion, a question or a suggestion) iff it addresses the question under discussion. Finally, it is argued that the prosodic focus of an utterance canonically serves to reflect the question under discussion (at least in English), placing additional constraints on felicity in context. (shrink)

This third book in a series of successful introductory textbooks by Craig Bartholomew and Michael Goheen builds on their previous projects, The Drama of Scripture and Living at the Crossroads, to offer a comprehensive narrative of philosophical thought from a distinctly Christian perspective. After exploring the interaction among Scripture, worldview, theology, and philosophy, the authors tell the story of philosophy from ancient Greece through postmodern times, positioning the philosophers in their historical contexts and providing Christian critique along the way. (...) The authors emphasize the Reformed philosophical tradition without neglecting other historical trajectories and show how philosophical thought relates to contemporary life. (shrink)

For many philosophers, bad-history wrongdoers are primarily interesting because of what their cases might tell us about the interaction of moral responsibility and history. However, philosophers focusing on blameworthiness have overlooked important questions about blame itself. These bad-history cases are complicated because blame and sympathy are both fitting. When we are careful to consider the rich natures of those two reactions, we see that they conflict in several important ways. We should see bad-history cases as cases about whether and how (...) we should blame, rather than as cases giving us ready insight into the nature of moral responsibility. (shrink)

Duress is a defense in both law and morality. The bank teller who provides an armed robber with the bank vault combination, the innocent suspect who fabricates a story after hours of interrogation, the Good Samaritan who breaks into a private cabin in the woods to save a stranded hiker, and the father who drives at high speed to rush his injured child to the hospital—in deciding how to respond to agents like these, we should take into account that they (...) have acted under duress. In this paper, I offer a new duress defense, which I call “distinctive duress.” The distinctive-duress defense is neither ordinary justification nor ordinary excuse. Rather, it is a defense available to agents who act wrongly because they are appropriately insensitive to certain reasons. In the distinctive-duress cases, an agent’s normative sensitivities are rightly directed elsewhere, leading them awry. (shrink)

Although Ricoeur and Taylor are often grouped together, their conceptions of language, literature, and practical reason are very different. The first half of this essay focuses on Ricoeur's theory of triple mimesis and narrative, showing how his attempt to synthesize Kant, Husserl, and structuralism results in a formalism that blocks out the ontological, hermeneutical, and historical dimensions of literature and practical reason. The second half of the essay develops Taylor's ontological conception of public imagination and illustrates the dynamics of this (...) conception of language and interpretation by showing how literary works debate with each other over language, subjectivity, and reference. Narrative does not just order; it argues. (shrink)

To the surprise of many readers, Jürgen Habermas has recently made religion a major theme of his work. Emphasizing both religion's prominence in the contemporary public sphere and its potential contributions to critical thought, Habermas's engagement with religion has been controversial and exciting, putting much of his own work in fresh perspective and engaging key themes in philosophy, politics and social theory. Habermas argues that the once widely accepted hypothesis of progressive secularization fails to account for the multiple trajectories of (...) modernization in the contemporary world. He calls attention to the contemporary significance of "postmetaphysical" thought and "postsecular" consciousness - even in Western societies that have embraced a rationalistic understanding of public reason. Edited by Craig Calhoun, Eduardo Mendieta, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen, _Habermas and Religion_ presents a series of original and sustained engagements with Habermas's writing on religion in the public sphere, featuring new work and critical reflections from leading philosophers, social and political theorists, and anthropologists. Contributors to the volume respond both to Habermas's ambitious and well-developed philosophical project and to his most recent work on religion. The book closes with an extended response from Habermas - itself a major statement from one of today's most important thinkers. (shrink)

Given his view that the modern world is ‘radically evil’, Adorno is an unlikely contributor to business ethics. Despite this, we argue that his work has a number of provocative implications for the field that warrant wider attention. Adorno regards our social world as damaged, unfree, and false and we draw on this critique to outline why the achievement of good work is so rare in contemporary society, focusing in particular on the ethical demands of roles and the ideological nature (...) of management’s self-understanding. Nevertheless, we show that Adorno’s comments on activities such as art and philosophy mean that it is possible to draw on his work in a way that contributes constructively to the conversation about good and meaningful work within business ethics. (shrink)

Some platonists truly agonize over the ontological commitments which their platonism demands of them. Peter van Inwagen, for example, confesses candidly,I am happy to admit that I am uneasy about believing in the existence of ‘causally irrelevant’ objects. The fact that abstract objects, if they exist, can be neither causes or [sic] effects is one of the many features of abstract objects that make nominalism so attractive. I should very much like to be a nominalist, but I don't see how (...) to be one …. (shrink)