PurposeGiven the seeming lack of research on the influence of stakeholder activities on organisations such as political parties in the online environment, the purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate how political parties use their web sites to serve and manage their relationships with stakeholders.Design/methodology/approachThis is a qualitative paper, in which a cross‐national comparative analysis has been conducted on four illustrative cases. Personal interviews and web site observations were used as the main data collection methods. Three concurrent flows of (...) activities, i.e. data reduction, data display, and conclusion drawing, have been applied in the data analysis.FindingsThe paper indicate that the stakeholders served by political parties on the web sites studied can be grouped into two categories: internal and external. This paper also revealed that another very important internal stakeholder group overlooked by previous studies is that of core party members.Originality/valueThe paper provides insights and new interesting empirical material which may help to strengthen the theoretical understanding stakeholder management in cyber politics. (shrink)

This study examined more than 2,500 war images from U.S. television news, newspapers, news magazines, and online news sites during the first five weeks of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and found that only 10% showed injury or death. The paper analyzes which media platforms were most willing to show casualties and offers insights on when journalists should use gruesome war images or keep them secret.

A number of philosophers have argued that the Holocaust is incapable of philosophical analysis and explanation. There are two arguments for this view: (1) that it is unique, and thus resists such analysis; and (2) that it is incomprehensible, and thus incapable of being understood. In this article, several versions of both of these arguments are considered and shown not to support the conclusion that the Holocaust resists philosophical explanation. An alternative route to philosophical explanation is then suggested.

This study examined more than 2,500 war images from U.S. television news, newspapers, news magazines, and online news sites during the first five weeks of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and found that only 10% showed injury or death. The paper analyzes which media platforms were most willing to show casualties and offers insights on when journalists should use gruesome war images or keep them secret.

This paper stems from an ethnographic, multidisciplinary study that explored the views and experiences of practitioners and scientists on social, ethical and clinical dilemmas encountered when working in the area of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis for serious genetic disorders. We focus here on staff perceptions and experiences of working with embryos and helping women/couples to make choices that will result in selecting embryos for transfer and disposal of 'affected' embryos, compared to the termination of affected pregnancies following prenatal diagnosis. Analysis and (...) discussion of our data led us to consider the possible advantages of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis and whether a gradualist account of the embryo's and fetus's moral status can account for all of these, particularly since a gradualist account concentrates on the significance of time (developmental stage) and makes no comment as to the significance of place (in vitro, in utero). (shrink)

_The Limits of Utilitarianism _ was first published in 1982. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. Many philosophers have argued that utilitarianism is an unacceptable moral theory and that promoting the general welfare is at best only one of the legitimate goals of public policy. Utilitarian principles seem to place no limits on the extent to which society may legitimately interfere with (...) a person's liberties - provided that such actions can be shown to promote the long-term welfare of its members. These issues have played a central role in discussions of utilitarianism since the time of Bentham and Mill. Despite criticisms, utilitarianism remains the most influential and widely accepted moral theory of recent times. In this volume contemporary philosophers address four aspects of utilitarianism: the principle of utility; utilitarianism vis-à-vis contractarianism; welfare; and voluntary cooperation and helping others. The editors provide an introduction and a comprehensive bibliography that covers all books and articles published in utilitarianism since 1930. (shrink)

This volume is a collection of essays concerned with the morality of hu man treatment of nonhuman animals. The contributors take very different approaches to their topics and come to widely divergent conclusions. The goal of the volume as a whole is to shed a brighter light upon an aspect of human life-our relations with the other animals-that has recently seen a great increase in interest and in the generation of heat. The discussions and debates contained herein are addressed by (...) the contributors to each other, to the general public, and to the academic world, especially the biological, philosophical, and political parts of that world. The essays are organized into eight sections by topics, each sec tion beginning with a brief introduction linking the papers and the sec tions to one another. There is also a general introduction and an Epilog that suggests alternate possible ways of organizing the material. The first two sections are concerned with the place of animals in the human world: Section I with the ways humans view animals in literature, philosophy, and other parts of human culture, and Section II with the place of animals in human legal and moral community. The next three sections concern comparisons between human and nonhuman animals: Section III on the rights and wrongs of killing, Section IV on the humanity of animals and the animality of humans, and Section V on questions of the conflict of human and animal interests. (shrink)

Behaving ethically depends on the ability to recognize that ethical issues exist, to see from an ethical point of view. This ability to see and respond ethically may be related more to attributes of corporate culture than to attributes of individual employees. Efforts to increase ethical standards and decrease pressure to behave unethically should therefore concentrate on the organization and its culture. The purpose of this paper is to discuss how total quality (TQ) techniques can facilitate the development of a (...) cooperative corporate culture that promotes and encourages ethical behavior throughout an organization. (shrink)

In an analysis of 47 U.S. journalism ethics codes, we found that although most consider images, only 9 address a gripping issue: how to treat images of tragedy and violence, such as those produced on the battlefields of Iraq, during the 2005 London bombings, and after Hurricane Katrina. Among codes that consider violent and tragic images, there is agreement on what images are problematic and a move toward green-light considerations of ethical responsibilities. However, the special problems of violence and truth (...) telling in wartime and issues of how to handle graphic images across media platforms receive virtually no attention. (shrink)

This book assesses how Vatican II opened up the Catholic Church to encounter, dialogue, and engagement with other world religions. Opening with a contribution from the President of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue, Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, it next explores the impact, relevance, and promise of the Declaration Nostra Aetate before turning to consider how Vatican II in general has influenced interfaith dialogue and the intellectual and comparative study of world religions in the postconciliar decades, as well as the contribution (...) of particular past and present thinkers to the formation of current interreligious and comparative theological methods. Additionally, chapters consider interreligious dialogue vis-à-vis theological anthropology in conciliar documents; openness to the spiritual practices of other faith traditions as a way of encouraging positive interreligious encounter; the role of lay and new ecclesial movements in interreligious dialogue; and the development of Monastic Interreligious Dialogue. Finally, it includes a range of perspectives on the fruits and future of Vatican’s II’s opening to particular faiths such as Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. (shrink)

A morally objectionable outcome can be overdetermined by the actions of multiple individual agents. In such cases, the outcome is the same regardless of what any individual does or does not do. (For a clear example of such a case, imagine the execution of an innocent person by a firing squad.) We argue that, in some of these types of cases, (a) there exists a group agent, a moral agent constituted by individual agents; (b) the group agent is guilty of (...) violating a moral obligation; however, (c) none of the individual agents violate any of their moral obligations. We explicate and defend this view, and consider its applications to problems generated by anthropogenic climate change and electoral politics. (shrink)

Background: In biomedical research, there have been numerous scandals highlighting conflicts of interest (COIs) leading to significant bias in judgment and questionable practices. Academic institutions, journals, and funding agencies have developed and enforced policies to mitigate issues related to COI, especially surrounding financial interests. After a case of editorial COI in a prominent bioethics journal, there is concern that the same level of oversight regarding COIs in the biomedical sciences may not apply to the field of bioethics. In this study, (...) we examined the availability and comprehensiveness of COI policies for authors, peer reviewers, and editors of bioethics journals. Methods: After developing a codebook, we analyzed the content of online COI policies of 63 bioethics journals, along with policy information provided by journal editors that was not publicly available. Results: Just over half of the bioethics journals had COI policies for authors (57%), and only 25% for peer reviewers and 19% for editors. There was significant variation among policies regarding definitions, the types of COIs described, the management mechanisms, and the consequences for noncompliance. Definitions and descriptions centered on financial COIs, followed by personal and professional relationships. Almost all COI policies required disclosure of interests for authors as the primary management mechanism. Very few journals outlined consequences for noncompliance with COI policies or provided additional resources. Conclusion: Compared to other studies of biomedical journals, a much lower percentage of bioethics journals have COI policies and these vary substantially in content. The bioethics publishing community needs to develop robust policies for authors, peer reviewers, and editors and these should be made publicly available to enhance academic and public trust in bioethics scholarship. (shrink)

This paper explores how medical practice ought to be conducted, in the face of scarcity, if our objective is to maximise the benefits of health. After explaining briefly what the cost-per-QALY criterion means, a series of ethical objections to it are considered one by one. The objectors fall into four groups: a. those who reject all collective priority-setting as unethical; b. those who accept the need for collective priority-setting, but believe it is contrary to medical ethics; c. those who accept (...) the need for collective priority-setting, and do not believe that it is contrary to medical ethics, but reject the role of QALYs in it; d. those who accept the need for collective priority-setting in principle, but are unwilling to specify how it should be done in practice. -/- The purpose of this discussion paper is to give each group a hard time! (shrink)

The recent discovery of the Higgs at 125 GeV by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the LHC has put significant pressure on a principle which has guided much theorizing in high energy physics over the last 40 years, the principle of naturalness. In this paper, I provide an explication of the conceptual foundations and physical significance of the naturalness principle. I argue that the naturalness principle is well-grounded both empirically and in the theoretical structure of effective field theories, and (...) that it was reasonable for physicists to endorse it. Its possible failure to be realized in nature, as suggested by recent LHC data, thus represents an empirical challenge to certain foundational aspects of our understanding of QFT. In particular, I argue that its failure would undermine one class of recent proposals which claim that QFT provides us with a picture of the world as being structured into quasi-autonomous physical domains. (shrink)

Imperative sentences like Dance! do not seem to represent the world. Recent modal analyses challenge this idea, but its intuitive and historical appeal remain strong. This paper presents three new challenges for a non-representational analysis, showing that the obstacles facing it are even steeper than previously appreciated. I will argue that the only way for the non-representationalist to meet these three challenges is to adopt a dynamic semantics. Such a dynamic semantics is proposed here: imperatives introduce preferences between alternatives. This (...) characterization of meaning focuses on what function a sentence serves in discourse, rather than what that sentence refers to (e.g., a state of the world). By representing the meaning of imperatives, connectives and declaratives in a common dynamic format, the challenges posed for non-representationalism are met. (shrink)

Quine (1960, "Word and object". Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, ch. 2) claims that there are a variety of equally good schemes for translating or interpreting ordinary talk. 'Rabbit' might be taken to divide its reference over rabbits, over temporal slices of rabbits, or undetached parts of rabbits, without significantly affecting which sentences get classified as true and which as false. This is the basis of his famous 'argument from below' to the conclusion that there can be no fact of the (...) matter as to how reference is to be divided. Putative counterexamples to Quine's claim have been put forward in the past (see especially Evans (1975, "Journal of Philosophy", LXXII(13), 343-362. Reprinted in McDowell (Ed.), "Gareth Evans: Collected papers." Oxford: Clarendon Press.), Fodor (1993, "The elm and the expert: Mentalese and its semantics." Cambridge, MA: Bradford)), and various patches have been suggested (e. g. Wright (1997, The indeterminacy of translation. In C. Wright & B. Hale (Eds.), "A companion to the philosophy of language" (pp. 397-426). Oxford: Blackwell)). One lacuna in this literature is that one does not find any detailed presentation of what exactly these interpretations are supposed to be. Drawing on contemporary literature on persistence, the present paper sets out detailed semantic treatments for fragments of English, whereby predicates such as 'rabbit' divide their reference over four-dimensional continuants (Quine's rabbits), instantaneous temporal slices of those continuants (Quine's rabbitslices) and the simple elements which compose those slices (undetached rabbit parts) respectively. Once we have the systematic interpretations on the table, we can get to work evaluating them. (shrink)

(A) I went to the pictures last Tuesday but I don’t believe that I did (1942, p. 543) or (B) I believe that he has gone out. But he has not (1944, p. 204) would be “absurd” (1942, p. 543; 1944, p. 204). Wittgenstein’s letters to Moore show that he was intensely interested in this discovery of a class of possibly true yet absurd assertions. Wittgenstein thought that the absurdity is important because it is “something similar to a contradiction, thought (...) it isn’t one” (1974, p. 177). What is the explanation of the absurdity of saying or believing something about myself that might be true? Wittgenstein thought that although the explanation will say “something about the logic of assertion” it will also show that “logic isn’t as simple as logicians think it is”. So although the explanation should.. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine various popular notions concerning the ethics of investing. I first consider and reject the absolutist view that it is always wrong to invest in evil companies and the view that what makes investments in evil companies morally objectionable is the fact that by making such investments, investors are taking steps to benefit from the wrongdoing of others. I then defend the view that what makes certain investments morally objectionable is the fact that by making such (...) investments, investors enable others to do wrong. According to this view, when weighing the purchase of a certain company's stock, investors should ask themselves the following question: Would this sort of investment, if made by many people, enable others to do wrong? If the answer to this question is yes, and if an investor nevertheless makes the investment in question, he can justifiably be accused of moral wrongdoing. (shrink)

There has been little previous research regarding the effectiveness of ethics education interventions for residential care‐givers. The Researching Interventions to Promote Ethics in social care project responded to the question: Which is the most effective ethics education intervention for care‐givers in residential social care? A pragmatic cluster trial explored the impact of three ethics education interventions for: (a) interactive face‐to‐face ethics teaching; (b) reflective ethics discussion groups; and (c) an immersive simulation experience. There was also a control arm (d). 144 (...) trial participants were recruited from 39 residential care homes for older people in southern England. Change scores compared across intervention arms showed a significant reduction in work‐related moral stress in the teaching arm compared with control group (p =.03); there were no significant differences between control and intervention arms in change scores for moral sensitivity, interpersonal reactivity (empathy) or ethical leadership. Qualitative data themes were as follows: ethical care; care challenges; and ethical care inhibitors. Overall findings stimulate reflection on the value of three different ethics education interventions and the most appropriate means to evaluate their impact. Findings suggest the complexity and diverse nature of ethical competence in care. We suggest a way forward for research evaluating ethics education. (shrink)

According to theories of wrongful life (WL), the imposition upon a child of an existence of poor quality can constitute an act of harming, and a violation of the child’s rights. The idea that there can be WLs may seem intuitively compelling. But, as this paper argues, liberals who commit themselves to WL theories may have to compromise some of their other beliefs. For they will thereby become committed to the claim that some women are under a stringent moral duty (...) to have an abortion: a duty that could, without injustice, at least sometimes be enforced by the state. WL theories in other words imply that some women will lack a right to choose, under which both the decision to abort, and the decision to carry the fetus to term, are protected against interference. The paper exposes a dilemma, then, for liberals who are committed both to (a) the rights of future people not to be subjected to a harmful existence, and (b) the rights of women to refuse an abortion. (shrink)

Most people do not think to observe geology from the sidewalks of a major city, but all David B. Williams has to do is look at building stone in any urban center to find a range of rocks equal to any assembled by plate tectonics. In Stories in Stone, he takes you on explorations to find 3.5-billion-year-old rock that looks like swirled pink-and-black taffy, a gas station made of petrified wood, and a Florida fort that has withstood three hundred (...) years of attacks and hurricanes, despite being made of a stone that has the consistency of a granola bar. Williams also weaves in the cultural history of stone, explaining why a white fossil-rich limestone from Indiana became the only building stone used in all fifty states; how in 1825, the construction of the Bunker Hill Monument led to America’s first commercial railroad; and why when the same kind of marble used by Michelangelo clad a Chicago skyscraper it warped so much after nineteen years that all 44,000 panels of it had to be replaced. This love letter to building stone brings to life the geology you can see in the structures of every city. (shrink)

A uniform theory of conditionals is one which compositionally captures the behavior of both indicative and subjunctive conditionals without positing ambiguities. This paper raises new problems for the closest thing to a uniform analysis in the literature (Stalnaker, Philosophia, 5, 269–286 (1975)) and develops a new theory which solves them. I also show that this new analysis provides an improved treatment of three phenomena (the import-export equivalence, reverse Sobel-sequences and disjunctive antecedents). While these results concern central issues in the study (...) of conditionals, broader themes in the philosophy of language and formal semantics are also engaged here. This new analysis exploits a dynamic conception of meaning where the meaning of a symbol is its potential to change an agent’s mental state (or the state of a conversation) rather than being the symbol’s content (e.g. the proposition it expresses). The analysis of conditionals is also built on the idea that the contrast between subjunctive and indicative conditionals parallels a contrast between revising and consistently extending some body of information. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Wilfrid Sellars and Phenomenology: Intersections, Encounters, Oppositions ed. by Daniele De Santis and Danilo MancaHeath WilliamsDE SANTIS, Daniele and Danilo Manca, editors. Wilfrid Sellars and Phenomenology: Intersections, Encounters, Oppositions. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2023. xiv + 272 pp. Cloth, $95.00This is an eminently readable and engaging collection of essays. There is much more here than merely comparing and contrasting two disparate thinkers. There are important contributions to metaphysics, (...) epistemology, thought about the relation between science and culture, and the future of phenomenology and pragmatism. It has what one wants from a collection of edited papers: very few contributions that are obscure or tangential, with nearly every one addressing a broadly relevant philosophical topic.The two major motifs running through the various works in this edited book are epistemologically orientated questions on the myth of the given, and metaphysically orientated questions arising from the contrasting scientific and manifest images. As Landfredi states, these "are two main theoretical dimensions in which phenomenology and Sellars's approach critically confront each other."To the metaphysical motifs firstly. Husserl's thoughts on the relation between the scientific and manifest image is outlined in his Crisis of the European Sciences and Sellars's in Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man. In contemporary metaphysics, the competition between the manifest and scientific image has been heightened thanks to the aggressive scientific realism of works like Ladyman and Ross's Everything Must Go, coupled as it is with a dismissal of our commonsense perceptual and cognitive capacities.Both Lanfredi and Manca take a conciliatory approach, aiming to minimize incompatibility between Husserl's manifest and Sellars's scientific images. Manca's attentive and judicious reading makes apparent the origins of the metaphysical commitments of both thinkers. The former accepts the power of the scientific method of mathematization but warns that its ontology remains forever incomplete until the lifeworld is considered. The latter's scientific realism ultimately affords science the final say on what exists. The difference between them comes down to whether the emergent properties of a system are ultimately reducible to parts and the arrangement between them. Sellars thinks they are, while for Husserl "the parts are not juxtaposed from without but integrated with each other in such a way that they become able to generate new [End Page 546] properties." A thematically related analysis is found in the contribution of De Santis, who argues that Simons's adaptation of Husserlian mereology fails to provide a solution on how to build complex particulars out of basic ones.Hopp's article connects our two domains of critical encounter as he suggests that you can get from a phenomenological epistemology to a metaphysical reification of items in manifest image, because fulfilled perceptual knowledge claims presuppose the existence of that which is perceived. He thinks there are resources within Husserl not only to defend this position but to use it to critique many of the claims that undergird Sellars's prosecution of the myth. Hopp ends by asking what current experimental evidence the scientific realist has to rule out the existence of macrosized phenomenologically given objects. One might refer to the above-mentioned work by Ladyman and Ross by way of reply.Epistemological themes include the claim that aspects of phenomenology can be imported or modified to forge a coherent account of perceptual knowledge that (a) affords perception a role in epistemology and (b) explains the concomitant, vexing relation between the space of reasons of causes while (c) avoiding the myth of the given.Two authors who demonstrate close parallel between Husserl and Sellars are Nunziante and Rump. Nunziante shows that one of Sellars's attempts at (a) comes via his account of "perceptual takings," which is influenced by, and homologous to, Husserl's account of the passive synthesis of prepredicative perception in Experience and Judgement, as handed to Sellars by Farber. These prove to be essential stepping stones in Sellars's thinking about how the perceptual realm marries to the intellectual one.Rump shows that Sellars's attempt to solve the regress problem for coherentism in order to solve (a) stumbles on the problem of how causal, nonconceptual, noncategorial, and nonpropositionally structured protoperceptual experiences furnish... (shrink)

Rape is an important topic in feminist philosophy and the real world. This paper argues that three influential feminists understate the gravity and brutality of rape. They are Andrea Dworkin, Catharine MacKinnon, and Rae Langton. I also propose an alternative analysis of rape that captures its appalling nature. Dworkin and MacKinnon construe rape as something that actors in pornography, with notoriously poor acting skills, can portray as pleasurable. Langton construes rape as a kind of sex act: as sex that is (...) “unwanted,” “unconsensual,” “refused,” or “forced.” I argue that rape and sex are categorically distinct. Rape is an act of violence, not an act of sex. I argue that rape occurs when 1) the genitals, fingers, or hands of one subject, or a foreign object, penetrate the genitals or anus of another subject and 2) one subject (the victim): (a) refuses to penetrate the other’s genitals or anus with one’s genitals, (b) refuses to have one’s genitals or anus penetrated by the other’s genitals, fingers, or hands, or a foreign object; or (c) is incapable of thus refusing (e.g., because one is unconscious, dissociating, or suffering debilitating fear). (shrink)

For horribilesque we need something better than Haupt's horribile aequor ; and Mr. E. L. B. Meurig Davies comes near the truth, I think, with his proposal horribilem niue. A noun in the ablative indicating cold to define horribilem is just what we require. That noun does not seem to me, however, likely to be niue. Read rather horribilem gelu; cf. Luc. 2. 570 ‘ Rheni gelidis … fugit ab undis’, Claud. Rapt. 3. 321 ‘non Rheni glacies, non me Rhipaea (...) tenebunt’, Paneg. 7. 6 ‘duratus gelu Rhenus’. (shrink)

At Theaetetus 163d-164b Socrates objects to the thesis that knowledge is perception by pointing out that a man who has seen something can still remember it, and so has knowledge of it; but this is impossible, if knowledge is perception, since he is no longer perceiving it.To this Protagoras is made to reply with two sentences at 166b 1–4:.Cornford translates ‘ For instance, do you think you will find anyone to admit that one's present memory of a past impression is (...) an impression of the same character as one had during the original experience, which is now over? It is nothing of the sort’.Cornford understands this as the suggestion that the memory and the original perception are of different things: ‘ All that the objection in fact established was that “ perception” must be stretched to include awareness of memory images’. So too Lee: ‘Protagoras’ “way out”… appears to be to say that what we now know is not properly X but rather our memory trace of X - some present πά θ ο ς quite distinct from X and very different from that ’. McDowel. (shrink)