Aboriginal Australians have an intrinsic relationship to Country, kinship and community. The processes related to colonisation have decimated traditional lifestyles, ecology and even families. The challenge for energy engineers lies in the ability to reconcile the profession of engineering with the contemporary and traditional cultural and physical needs of Aboriginal people. A discussion around Aboriginal peoples’ most deeply held values will be linked to both global and professional ethical canons. This discussion has implications for Aboriginal and Indigenous peoples globally. A (...) fictitious case study—the ‘Warrigal Downs Energy Hub’—provides us with a hypothetical project to which we can link both examples and frameworks. Our team of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal educators and engineers provides us with a right, wrong and even better way to work sensitively, meaningfully and reciprocally with Aboriginal people in Australia and, indeed, globally. (shrink)

Brain activity in the action observation network is lateralized during action execution, with greater activation in the contralateral hemisphere to the side of the body used to perform the task. However, it is unknown whether the AON is also lateralized when watching another person perform an action. In this study, we use fNIRS to measure brain activity over the left and right cortex while participants completed actions with their left and right hands and watched an actor complete action with their (...) left and right hands. We show that while activation is lateralized when the participants themselves are moving, brain lateralization is not affected by the side of the body when the participant is observing another person’s action. In addition, we demonstrate that individual differences in hand preference and dexterity between the right and left hands are related to brain lateralization patterns. (shrink)

In "Antania: A World Without Rights" I argue against attempts to model moral rights on legal rights because they make moral rights appear as accidental rather than necessary features of a moral system. The device of constructing a hypothetical model of a moral system, Antanla, is used to show that crucial features of a moral system, individual moral responsibility, and praise and blame are conceptually related to Individual moral rights and hence that any moral system must contain moral rights as (...) well as moral agency. (shrink)

In Speech Acts John Searle reframed his derivation of 'ought' from 'is' in order to eliminate the controversial ceteris paribus premises. I argue that the elimination of the first ceteris paribus (3a) is satisfactory but that the elimination of (4a) renders questionable his claim that an 'ought' statement follows from the premises categorically. Further I argue that the use of dilemma in the proof will enable us to show that an 'ought' statement follows from the premises whether everything (at step (...) 4a) is equal or not. Thus Searle's original and clearer conclusion can be saved. Moreover, this proof technique allows us to more clearly illustrate some important features of obligation. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to consider the frequently held view that since obligation is a rule-dependent concept it can be explicated by reference to rules. H.L.A. Hart's attempt to explicate the normative character of a legal system in terms of rules is examined and it is shown that (A) the notion that obligation is rule-dependent necessitates that there be an ultimate rule in the legal system, that (B) if obligation is rule-dependent and there is an ultimate rule in (...) the legal system it is mysterious, indeed unintelligible how rules themselves can oblige and (C) the attempt to capture the normative character if the legal system fails. The appeal of this analysis of obligation is traced to the tempting but ill-founded supposition that rationality always consists in applying a general rule to a specific case. (shrink)