Who blows the whistle — a loner or a well-liked team player? Which of them is more likely to lead a successful opposition to perceived organizational wrongdoing? The potential influence of co-worker pressures to conform on whistle-blowing activity or the likely effects of whistle-blowing on the group have not been addressed. This paper presents a preliminary model of whistle-blowing as an act of nonconformity. One implication is that the success of an opposition will depend on the characteristics of the whistle-blower (...) and how the complaint is pursued. Specific hypotheses and general suggestions for future research and practice are offered. (shrink)

Is morality rational? In this book Gauthier argues that moral principles are principles of rational choice. He proposes a principle whereby choice is made on an agreed basis of cooperation, rather than according to what would give an individual the greatest expectation of value. He shows that such a principle not only ensures mutual benefit and fairness, thus satisfying the standards of morality, but also that each person may actually expect greater utility by adhering to morality, even though the choice (...) did not have that end primarily in view. In resolving what may appear to be a paradox, the author establishes morals on the firm foundation of reason. Gauthier's argument includes an account of value, linking it to preference and utility; a discussion of the curcumstances in which morality is unnecessary; and an application of morals by agreement to relations between peoples at different levels of development and different generations. Finally, he reflects on the assumptions about individuality and community made by his account of rationality and morality. (shrink)

Adrian Stokes , long admired by a small, highly distinguished, mostly English circle, was the natural successor to Pater and Ruskin. But though his place in cultural history is important, what is of particular interest now to art historians is his theory of the presentness of painting, a theory which offers a challenging critique of the practice of artwriting. From Vasari to the present, the most familiar rhetorical strategy of the art historian is the narrative of “the form, prophet-saviour-apostles,” in (...) which the first artist poses some problem that his successors develop and their successors solve.1 Such very different books as Art and Illusion and Art and Culture deploy that plan. The three periods of naturalism in E. H. Gombrich’s narrative—antiquity, Renaissance religious narrative, nineteenth-century landscape—function like Clement Greenberg’s sequence—old master art, early French modernism, American abstract expressionism. Gombrich and Greenberg disagree about how to narrate art’s history and about which works to include in that narrative—Gombrich asserts that cubism closes the canon while for Greenberg analytical cubism anticipates Jackson Pollock—but in each case, the art historian aims, as the novelist does, to tell a satisfying story and achieve narrative closure, and so how we think of the artworks the historian discusses depends in part upon the structure of the narrative. In a certain mood, we may find this fact intolerable. Why should a mere text tell us how to see the painting we may stand before?Stokes’ attempt to respond to this mood belongs to a tradition of early twentieth-century antihistorical thinking. For Rainer Maria Rilke, Rodin’s sculpture aimed to “refer to nothing that lay beyond it.” For Ezra Pound, an image “is real because we know it directly”; Henri Gaudier-Brzeska could read Chinese ideograms without knowing that language because those ideograms are transparently meaningful images. For Wyndham Lewis, a musical piece is inferior to a statue, “always there in its entirety before you.”2 Such an artwork need not be interpreted because it contains “within itself all that is relevant to itself.”3 All art is accessible to the gifted observer, and time is, in an interesting double sense, irrelevant. We see directly the meaning of works even from distant cultures; the visual artwork is experienced all at once, outside of time. If these claims are correct, what is the artwriter to do? Speaking of the Tempio Malatestiana, Hugh Kenner points to this issue:There is no description of the Tempio in accordance with good Vorticist logic: one art does not attempt what another can do better, and the meaning of the Tempio has been fully explicated on the spot by Agostino di Duccio with his chisel.4 1. Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition 1350-1450 , p. 75.2. Rainer Maria Rilke, Rodin, trans. Jessie Lemont and Hans Trausil , p. 19; Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir , p. 86; Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man , p. 174.3. Frank Kermode, Romantic Image , p. 107.4. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era , p. 428. David Carrier, associate professor of philosophy at Carnegie-Mellon University, is coauthor, with Mark Roskill, of Truth and Falsehood in Visual Images and author of the forthcoming Artwriting, a study of recent American art criticism. He is working on a history of art history. (shrink)

From a pre-publication review by the late Austrian economist, Don Lavoie, of George Mason University: -/- "The book's radical re-interpretation of property and contract is, I think, among the most powerful critiques of mainstream economics ever developed. It undermines the neoclassical way of thinking about property by articulating a theory of inalienable rights, and constructs out of this perspective a "labor theory of property" which is as different from Marx's labor theory of value as it is from neoclassicism. It traces (...) roots of such ideas in some fascinating and largely forgotten strands of the history of economics. It draws attention to the question of "responsibility" which neoclassicism has utterly lost sight of. It is startlingly fresh in its overall approach, and unusually well written in its presentation. ... It constitutes a better case for its economic democracy viewpoint than anything else in the literature." . (shrink)

I THE NATURE OF MAN To understand morals and politics, understand man. Leviathan , 'that mortal god, to which we owe under the immortal God, our peace and ...

Dramatic changes or revolutions in a field of science are often made by outsiders or 'trespassers,' who are not limited by the established, 'expert' approaches. Each essay in this diverse collection shows the fruits of intellectual trespassing and poaching among fields such as economics, Kantian ethics, Platonic philosophy, category theory, double-entry accounting, arbitrage, algebraic logic, series-parallel duality, and financial arithmetic.

The principle of alternate possibilities (PAP), making the ability to do otherwise a necessary condition for moral responsibility, is supposed by Harry Frankfurt, John Fischer, and others to succumb to a peculiar kind of counterexample. The paper reviews the main problems with the counterexample that have surfaced over the years, and shows how most can be addressed within the terms of the current debate. But one problem seems ineliminable: because Frankfurt''s example relies on a counterfactual intervener to preclude alternatives to (...) the person''s action, it is not possible for it to preclude all alternatives (intervention that is contingent upon a trigger cannot bring it about that the trigger never occurred). This makes it possible for the determined PAPist to maintain that some pre-intervention deviation is always available to ground moral responsibility. In reply, the critic of PAP can examine all the candidate deviations and argue their irrelevance to moral responsibility (a daunting prospect); or the critic can dispense with counterfactual intervention altogether. The paper pursues the second of these strategies, developing three examples of noncounterfactual intervention in which (i) the agent has no alternatives (and a fortiori no morally relevant alternatives), yet (ii) there is just as much reason to think that the agent is morally responsible as there was in Frankfurt''s original example. The new counterexamples do suffer from one liability, but this is insufficient in the end to repair PAP''s conceptual connection between moral responsibility and alternate possibilities. (shrink)

The Logic of Leviathan The Moral and Political Theory of Thomas Hobbes.

David Gauthier is one of the most outstanding and influential philosophers working in moral theory today, and his book Morals by Agreement has established him as a preeminent defender of contractarian moral theory. This volume brings together a selection of his best essays on contractarianism, many of which have become difficult to find.

The Sociosexual Orientation Inventory (SOI; Simpson & Gangestad 1991) is a self-report measure of individual differences in human mating strategies. Low SOI scores signify that a person is sociosexually restricted, or follows a more monogamous mating strategy. High SOI scores indicate that an individual is unrestricted, or has a more promiscuous mating strategy. As part of the International Sexuality Description Project (ISDP), the SOI was translated from English into 25 additional languages and administered to a total sample of 14,059 people (...) across 48 nations. Responses to the SOI were used to address four main issues. First, the psychometric properties of the SOI were examined in cross-cultural perspective. The SOI possessed adequate reliability and validity both within and across a diverse range of modern cultures. Second, theories concerning the systematic distribution of sociosexuality across cultures were evaluated. Both operational sex ratios and reproductively demanding environments related in evolutionary-predicted ways to national levels of sociosexuality. Third, sex differences in sociosexuality were generally large and demonstrated cross-cultural universality across the 48 nations of the ISDP, confirming several evolutionary theories of human mating. Fourth, sex differences in sociosexuality were significantly larger when reproductive environments were demanding but were reduced to more moderate levels in cultures with more political and economic gender equality. Implications for evolutionary and social role theories of human sexuality are discussed. Key Words: culture; gender; mating; reproduction; sex differences; sex roles; sexual strategies; sociosexuality. (shrink)

For much of the twentieth century, plant physiologists considered themselves in an ideal position to study and explain the functions and processes of plants. Much of that authority stemmed from plant physiologists’ long-standing commitment to experimental control and the integration of the physical sciences into biological practice. This article places plant physiology back in the center of the story of the recent life sciences. It shows the development of parallel experimental research programs into environmental as well as genetic effects on (...) growth and development in plant physiology and genetics, and notes that the pursuit of an experimental environment was celebrated as much as a molecular vision of life throughout most of the twentieth century by much of the plant science community. Thus, this article concludes that the history of the recent life sciences needs new complementary narratives of plant physiology with genetics, new concepts with technological tools, and plant-sized scales with the molecular. The history of the ‘Age of Biology,’ as the plant scientists saw it, helps confront the issue first posed by Evelyn Fox Keller, namely that the history of genetics has overshadowed a larger history of experimental life science. My answer here is through a larger narrative of the rise of the complementary experimental sciences of genes and environments in the life sciences. (shrink)

Instead of the half-century old foundational feud between set theory and category theory, this paper argues that they are theories about two different complementary types of universals. The set-theoretic antinomies forced naïve set theory to be reformulated using some iterative notion of a set so that a set would always have higher type or rank than its members. Then the universal u_{F}={x|F(x)} for a property F() could never be self-predicative in the sense of u_{F}∈u_{F}. But the mathematical theory of categories, (...) dating from the mid-twentieth century, includes a theory of always-self-predicative universals--which can be seen as forming the "other bookend" to the never-self-predicative universals of set theory. The self-predicative universals of category theory show that the problem in the antinomies was not self-predication per se, but negated self-predication. They also provide a model (in the Platonic Heaven of mathematics) for the self-predicative strand of Plato's Theory of Forms as well as for the idea of a "concrete universal" in Hegel and similar ideas of paradigmatic exemplars in ordinary thought. (shrink)

Gorgeous black and white photographs of machines built to unlock the secrets of the universe.

The World Health Assembly adopted the new International Health Regulations on May 23, 2005. The new IHR represent the culmination of a decade-long revision process and an historic development for international law and public health. The new IHR appear at a moment when public health, security, and democracy have become intertwined, addressed at the highest levels of government. The United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, for example, identified IHR revision as a priority for moving humanity toward “larger freedom.” This article analyzes (...) the new IHR and their implications for global health and security in the 21st century.The WHA instructed the WHO Director-General to revise the IHR in 1995 because the Regulations did not provide an effective framework for addressing the international spread of disease. Doubts about the IHR's effectiveness had, however, been present long before 1995. The critiques identified the narrow scope of the regulations, the lack of compliance by states, and the absence of a strategy for responding to rapid changes in public health's global economic and technological environments. (shrink)

Spirituality and storytelling can be resources in aging successfully and in dying well given the constraints of modern day Western culture. This paper explores the relationship of aging to time and the dynamic process of the life course and discusses issues related to confronting mortality, including suffering, finitude, spirituality, and spiritual closure in regard to death. And, finally, the role of narrative in this process is taken up.

Here a group of philosophers, economists and political theorists discuss the work of David Gauthier, which seeks to show that rational individuals would accept certain moral constraints on their choices. The possibilities and limitations of a contractarian approach to issues of justice is analyzed.

One strategy in recent discussions of theological fatalism is to draw on Harry Frankfurt’s famous counterexamples to the principle of alternate possibilities (PAP) to defend human freedom from divine foreknowledge. For those who endorse this line, “Frankfurt counterexamples” are supposed to show that PAP is false, and this conclusion is then extended to the foreknowledge case. This makes it critical to determine whether Frankfurt counterexamples perform as advertised, an issue recently debated in this journal via a pair of articles by (...) David Widerker and John Martin Fischer. I suggest that this debate can be avoided: divine foreknowledge is itself aparadigmatic counterexample to PAP, requiring no support from suspect Frankfurt counterexamples. (shrink)

Criticism of Locke's account of personal identity has proceeded cumulatively. Three years after the publication of the chapter “Of Identity and Diversity”, John Sergeant raised an objection which, in Bishop Butler's hands, was to become famous as the dictum that “one should really think it self-evident that consciousness of personal identity presupposes, and therefore cannot constitute, personal identity: any more than knowledge, in any other case, can constitute truth, which it presupposes”. Berkeley added, in effect, that when consciousness is taken (...) to be the criterion of personal identity, one must admit that a man conscious of segments of his life at some times and not at others both is — because “conscious of” states a transitive relation — and is not — because of lack of consciousness—the same person. (shrink)

The incident in May-June 2007 involving a U.S. citizen traveling internationally while infected with drug-resistant tuberculosis involved the U.S. federal government's application of its quarantine and isolation powers. The incident and the isolation order raised numerous important issues for public health governance, law, and ethics. This article explores many of these issues by examining how the exercise of quarantine powers provides a powerful lens through which to understand how societies respond to and attempt to govern threats posed by dangerous, contagious (...) pathogens. The article considers historical aspects of governmental power to quarantine and isolate individuals and groups; analyzes the current state of quarantine and isolation law in the United States in light of the recent incident with drug-resistant tuberculosis; and explores global aspects of public health governance and law highlighted by this incident. (shrink)

Given the current concern in the Soviet Union and East Europe to emancipate public education from its Stalinist past, it is understandable that educators have called for the “humanizing” of education. Yet “humanization” is a none too clear idea and must be approached, I propose, through its opposite: dehumanization. Dehumanization, itself, can be understood as the denial of the dignity of the individual — a cardinal principle of the philosophies that comprise classical and contemporary liberal theory. This principle of the (...) dignity of the individual in turn implies duties for the liberal democratic state to treat all citizens (and for all citizens to treat each other) with equal respect as ends in themselves and equally as choosers of ends, as being, at least in principle, capable of choosing and acting on the ultimate ends in their own lives and as potential “sayers of great words and doers of great deeds” in the common public enterprise. Now in claiming that the principle of the dignity of the individual is central to an understanding of a just and humane society, we do not thereby commit ourselves to those doctrines long associated with liberalism, viz., ontological and moral individualism. The form of political, or united-reformed, liberalism argued for in this paper is clearly compatible with strong forms of community, even authoritarian types of community insofar as they do not transgress the principle of the dignity of the individual as regards informed choice. As decidedly non-perfectionist and agnostic about ultimate goods (tempered by the ban on all public forms of dehumanizing behavior and treatment), this form of political liberalism is neither individualistic nor communitarian, neither capitalist nor socialist (though the state is not indifferent to their fortunes). This rendering of the liberal democratic state sets the requirements for a deep and thorough political education that goes well beyond any familiar example today. In seeking to develop, to “humanize” individuals for a world of thought and action in the common public enterprise, political education — the premier form of education — in a liberal democratic state seeks to develop individuals who are theoretically informed and practically wise — thus the emphasis on the development of rationality in all of its forms. Moreover, despite the formal agnosticism of the state concerning ultimate human ends, a political education requires deep student exposure to and critical assessment of religion, possible ways of life, and those views of the human good that humans throughout history have found worthy of pursuit. And this even if it means that students will come to reject the principle of the dignity of the individual. (shrink)

Dramatic events involving dangerous microbes often focus attention on isolation and quarantine as policy instruments. The incident in May-June 2007 involving Andrew Speaker and drug-resistant tuberculosis joins other communicable disease crises that have forced contemplation or actual application of quarantine powers. Implementation of quarantine powers, which encompasses authority for both isolation and quarantine actions, is important not only for the handling of a specific event but also because the use of such authority provides a window on broader issues of public (...) health and the legal rules, ethical principles, and governance systems that support it. Debates about quarantine powers reflect political and social attitudes about public health that often tell us more about this policy endeavor than acts of isolation and quarantine themselves. (shrink)

The adoption of the new International Health Regulations in May 2005 represents an historic development for international law and public health. This article describes the IHR revision process and analyzes why the new IHR constitute an advance in global health governance.

The computational genomics community has come increasingly to rely on the methodology of creating annotations of scientific literature using terms from controlled structured vocabularies such as the Gene Ontology (GO). We here address the question of what such annotations signify and of how they are created by working biologists. Our goal is to promote a better understanding of how the results of experiments are captured in annotations in the hope that this will lead to better representations of biological reality through (...) both the annotation process and ontology development, and in more informed use of the GO resources by experimental scientists. (shrink)

War has broken out in the technological global economy, principally in battles over intellectual property. A particularly fierce aspect ofthis battle sets people who guard proprietary software against hackers, who want information to be free. The key challenge today is to produce an adequate conceptual lens for seeing what ethically is at stake in this battle. Toward this end, this paper uses the just war tradition to analyze differences between proponents of Free Software and proponents of Open Source Software. This (...) paper’s use of three just war criteria—Just Cause, Right Intention, and Discrimination—illustrates how the just war tradition can raise the level of ethical awareness about the intellectual property wars that continue to rage in the technological global economy. (shrink)

War has broken out in the technological global economy, principally in battles over intellectual property. A particularly fierce aspect ofthis battle sets people who guard proprietary software against hackers, who want information to be free. The key challenge today is to produce an adequate conceptual lens for seeing what ethically is at stake in this battle. Toward this end, this paper uses the just war tradition to analyze differences between proponents of Free Software and proponents of Open Source Software. This (...) paper’s use of three just war criteria—Just Cause, Right Intention, and Discrimination—illustrates how the just war tradition can raise the level of ethical awareness about the intellectual property wars that continue to rage in the technological global economy. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine how advocates seek to improve the well-being of recipients who reside in organizations or systems of care in which factors influencing risk and jeopardy prevail. I use data from multiple action research projects to frame what I call ‘the advocate's compromise’: in systems and organizations regulating people who are considered vulnerable or dependent the advocate must advance collaborative relationships with care providers and supervisors so they become allies in advancing the well being of their charges. (...) I place the advocate's compromise in context by amplifying a theory of diminished status, which offers a rationale for advocacy in social work. By identifying variation in its forms I illuminate the richness of advocacy practice in which the compromise is readily observable. In considering the context influencing the practice of advocacy in social work, I elaborate central aspects of the compromise, and reveal some of its ethical demands. Finally, I delineate principal strategies and tactics I have observed advocates employ to make the compromise a useful tool, particularly in total institutions, so incremental and limited advancements can make marginal improvements to a recipient's well-being without threatening the regulatory regime of care or supervision. (shrink)

This paper seeks to rehabilitate St. Augustine’s widely dismissed response to the alleged incompatibility of divine foreknowledge and free will. This requires taking a fresh look at his analysis in On Free Choice of the Will, and arguing its relevance to the current debate. Along the way, mistaken interpretations of Augustine are rebutted, his real solution is developed and defended, a reason for his not anticipating Boethius’s a temporalist solution is suggested, a favorable comparison with Ockham is made, rival solutions (...) are rejected, and the aporetic nature of the problem is explained. (shrink)