There is a wide variety of ethical arguments for public financing of health care that share a common structure built on a series of four logically related propositions regarding: the ultimate purpose of a human life or human society; the role of health and its distribution in society in advancing this ultimate purpose; the role of access to or utilisation of health care in maintaining or improving the desired level and distribution of health among members of society, and the role (...) of public financing in ensuring the ethically justified access to and utilisation of health care by members of society. This paper argues that economics has much to contribute to the development of the ethical foundations for publicly financed health care. It focuses in particular on recent economic work to clarify the concepts of access and need and their role in analyses of the just distribution of health care resources, and on the importance of economic analysis of health care and health care insurance markets in demonstrating why public financing is necessary to achieve broad access to and utilisation of health care services. (shrink)

Tens of thousands of students have learned to be more discerning at constructing and evaluating arguments with the help of Patrick J. Hurley. Hurley’s lucid, friendly, yet thorough presentation has made A CONCISE INTRODUCTION TO LOGIC the most widely used logic text in North America. In addition, the book’s accompanying technological resources, such as CengageNOW and Learning Logic, include interactive exercises as well as video and audio clips to reinforce what you read in the book and hear in (...) class. In short, you’ll have all the assistance you need to become a more logical thinker and communicator. Important Notice: Media content referenced within the product description or the product text may not be available in the ebook version. (shrink)

[ Susan Hurley] I argue that the aim to neutralize the influence of luck on distribution cannot provide a basis for egalitarianism: it can neither specify nor justify an egalitarian distribution. Luck and responsibility can play a role in determining what justice requires to be redistributed, but from this we cannot derive how to distribute: we cannot derive a pattern of distribution from the 'currency' of distributive justice. I argue that the contrary view faces a dilemma, according to whether (...) it understands luck in interpersonal or counterfactual terms. /// [Richard J. Arneson] Does it make sense to hold that, if it is bad that some people are worse off than others, it is worse if those who are worse off come to be so through sheer bad luck that it is beyond their power to control? In her contribution to this symposium, Susan Hurley cautions against a closely related fallacy: from the fact that people have come to an unequal condition through unchosen bad luck, it does not follow that, if we aim to undo the influence of unchosen luck, we ought to institute equality of condition. Forswearing the fallacy that Hurley analyses is compatible with answering the question affirmatively, and more generally with holding that principles of distributive justice should be sensitive to the distinction between chosen and unchosen bad luck. This essay explores how this might be done. (shrink)

This provocative study revives a classical idea about rationality by developing analogies between the structure of personality and the structure of society in the context of contemporary work in the philosophy of mind, ehtics, decision theory, and social choice theory.

Hurley’s is a difficult book to work through—partly because of its length and the complexity of its arguments, but also because each of the ten essays of which it is composed has a rather different starting point and focus, and because few of her arguments achieve real closure. Essay 2 discusses competing interpretations of Kant, essay 4 articulates nonconceptual forms of self-consciousness, essay 5 offers fresh interpretations of commissurotomy patients’ behavior, essay 6 develops an objection to Wittgenstein on rule (...) following, essay 8 attacks an alleged assumption of externalism, and chapter 10 explores the possibility of combining a “motor theory” and a “control theory” of perception. This is a very rich brew, and at least half the challenge this book presents consists in discerning its central argument and conclusion with enough precision to bring criticism to bear. (shrink)

This paper reports the policy-responses of different Philippine higher education institutions (HEIs) to the novel coronavirus, COVD-19 pandemic. It compares these responses with those made by HEIs in Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam. Publicly available data and news reports were used to gauge the general public’s reaction to these policies and how the Philippines’ responses fare with its Southeast Asian neighbors. The paper observes that despite the innovations made by Philippine HEIs in terms of alternative learning modes and technologies for delivering (...) education, there are still gaps and challenges in their responses. It recommends that policy-responses and learning innovations should be grounded on a deeper understanding of distance education and should be sensitive to the call of the times. (shrink)

Imitation, deliberation, and mindreading are characteristically human sociocognitive skills. Research on imitation and its role in social cognition is flourishing across various disciplines. Imitation is surveyed in this target article under headings of behavior, subpersonal mechanisms, and functions of imitation. A model is then advanced within which many of the developments surveyed can be located and explained. The shared circuits model (SCM) explains how imitation, deliberation, and mindreading can be enabled by subpersonal mechanisms of control, mirroring, and simulation. It is (...) cast at a middle, functional level of description, that is, between the level of neural implementation and the level of conscious perceptions and intentional actions. The SCM connects shared informational dynamics for perception and action with shared informational dynamics for self and other, while also showing how the action/perception, self/other, and actual/possible distinctions can be overlaid on these shared informational dynamics. It avoids the common conception of perception and action as separate and peripheral to central cognition. Rather, it contributes to the situated cognition movement by showing how mechanisms for perceiving action can be built on those for active perception.;>;>The SCM is developed heuristically, in five layers that can be combined in various ways to frame specific ontogenetic or phylogenetic hypotheses. The starting point is dynamic online motor control, whereby an organism is closely attuned to its embedding environment through sensorimotor feedback. Onto this are layered functions of prediction and simulation of feedback, mirroring, simulation of mirroring, monitored inhibition of motor output, and monitored simulation of input. Finally, monitored simulation of input specifying possible actions plus inhibited mirroring of such possible actions can generate information about the possible as opposed to actual instrumental actions of others, and the possible causes and effects of such possible actions, thereby enabling strategic social deliberation. Multiple instances of such shared circuits structures could be linked into a network permitting decomposition and recombination of elements, enabling flexible control, imitative learning, understanding of other agents, and instrumental and strategic deliberation. While more advanced forms of social cognition, which require tracking multiple others and their multiple possible actions, may depend on interpretative theorizing or language, the SCM shows how layered mechanisms of control, mirroring, and simulation can enable distinctively human cognitive capacities for imitation, deliberation, and mindreading. (shrink)

This is an introduction to a Filipino virtue ethics which is a relationship-oriented virtue ethics. The concepts to be discussed are the result of the unique history of the Philippines, namely a Southeast Asian tribal and animist tradition mixed with a Spanish Catholic tradition for over 300 years. Filipino virtue ethics is based on two foundational concepts in Filipino culture. The first is loób, which can easily be misunderstood when literally translated into English as ‘inside’ but which is better translated (...) as ‘relational will’, and the second is kapwa, which is literally translated as ‘other person’ but is better understood as ‘together with the person’. These serve as pillars for a special collection of virtues which are not individualistic virtues in the same way as most of the cardinal virtues of the Western tradition but are all directed towards the preservation and st.. (shrink)

Imitation, deliberation, and mindreading are characteristically human sociocognitive skills. Research on imitation and its role in social cognition is flourishing across various disciplines; it is here surveyed under headings of behavior, subpersonal mechanisms, and functions of imitation. A model is then advanced within which many of the developments surveyed can be located and explained. The shared circuits model explains how imitation, deliberation, and mindreading can be enabled by subpersonal mechanisms of control, mirroring and simulation. It is cast at a middle, (...) functional level of description, between the level of neural implementation and the level of conscious perceptions and intentional actions. The shared circuits model connects shared informational dynamics for perception and action with shared informational dynamics for self and other, while also showing how the action/perception, self/other and actual/possible distinctions can be overlaid on these shared informational dynamics. It avoids the common conception of perception and action as separate and peripheral to central cognition. Rather, it contributes to the situated cognition movement by showing how mechanisms for perceiving action can be built on those for active perception. (shrink)

I distinguish two different senses in which philosophers speak of moral verdicts, senses that in turn invite two different senses of moral overridingness. Although one of these senses, that upon which moral verdicts are taken to reflect decisive reasons from a distinctively moral standpoint, currently dominates the moral overridingness debate, my focus is the other sense, upon which moral verdicts are taken to reflect decisive reasons that are distinctively moral. I demonstrate that the recent tendency to emphasize the now dominant (...) sense to the exclusion of the alternative, couple with the failure to disambiguate the two senses, has fundamentally skewed central debates in moral theory. (shrink)

Panentheism is the position that the world is in some sense ‘in’ God, and God ‘in’ the world, without the world being identical to God. Thus, it tries, like what I call mainstream theism and against pan- theism, to protect the transcendence of God, while giving greater emphasis to his immanence in creation than the former. I aim to explicate an approach that I call Orthodox Panentheism. The word ‘orthodox’ is to be read in two ways. First, the picture is (...) derived from the writings of some of the most important figures in Eastern Christian thought, so that it is Orthodox in the ‘big “O” sense’. Second, I hope to show that it is a legitimate Christian picture of the God–world relation which is both distinctive and worthy of being called ‘panentheism’ – an orthodox panentheism in the ‘little “o” sense’. (shrink)

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Higher education is seeing renewed calls for strengthening ethics education, yet there remains a dearth of research on the state of ethics education across undergraduate curricula. Research about ethics in higher education tends to be localized and often isolated to fields of graduate study. In contribution to a contemporary, landscape understanding of ethics education, we collected data on the placement and prevalence of ethics instruction within the general education curricula at 507 major U.S. colleges and universities. Our findings suggest that (...) 1) most schools in our study’s population do not explicitly require ethics as a part of their general education curricula; and 2) a school’s religiosity and research status are positively associated with explicitly requiring ethics instruction for its undergraduate student body. (shrink)

In this important book, Susan Hurley sheds new light on consciousness by examining its relationships to action from various angles. She assesses the role of agency in the unity of a conscious perspective, and argues that perception and action are more deeply interdependent than we usually assume. A standard view conceives perception as input from world to mind and action as output from mind to world, with the serious business of thought in between. Hurley criticizes this picture, and (...) considers how the interdependence of perceptual experience and agency at the personal level (of mental contents and norms) may emerge from the subpersonal level (of underlying causal processes and complex dynamic feedback systems). Her two-level view has wide implications, for topics that include self-consciousness, the modularity of mind, and the relations of mind to world. The self no longer lurks hidden somewhere between perceptual input and behavioral output, but reappears out in the open, embodied and embedded in its environment. Hurley traces these themes from Kantian and Wittgensteinian arguments through to intriguing recent work in neuropsychology and in dynamic systems approaches to the mind, providing a bridge from mainstream philosophy to work in other disciplines. Consciousness in Action is unique in the range of philosophical and scientific work it draws on, and in the deep criticism it offers of centuries-old habits of thought. (shrink)

Hurley here revives a classical idea about rationality in a modern framework, by developing analogies between the structure of personality and the structure of society in the context of contemporary work in philosophy of mind, ethics, decision theory and social choice theory. The book examines the rationality of decisions and actions, and illustrates the continuity of philosophy of mind on the one hand, and ethics and jurisprudence on the other. A major thesis of the book is that arguments drawn (...) from the philosophy of mind may be used to undermine widely-held subjectivist positions in ethics and politico-economic theory. The work is inspired by the philosophies of Wittgenstein and Davidson, but goes on to connect their arguments about interpretation with formal work in decision theory and social choice theory, and with the theory of adjudication. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.3 (2002) 208-222 [Access article in PDF] Writing, Illness and Affirmation Jeremiah Dyehouse My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely to bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendaciousness in the face of what is necessary—but love it. —Friedrich Nietzsche In (...) her widely circulated book On Death and Dying, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, M.D., addresses herself to a changed historical context for work in medicine. In societies with increasingly effective medical care, she argues, doctors and nurses find themselves working with patients whose health problems range from imperceptible yet terminal sicknesses to psychosomatic ailments. Today, especially, it is easy to see the reality of her description of this situation: forms of terminal cancer can be detected earlier and earlier in a patient's life, rendering the disconcerting reality of a terminal illness with few or no symptoms. Equally strange for doctors and patients today are forms of environmental illness like chronic fatigue syndrome, a condition suffered by many but still disputed by doctors and researchers. To this situation of medical risk, personal suffering, and therapeutic care, Kübler-Ross prescribes a communicative engagement with the dying. This engagement, she argues, not only teaches doctors about death and dying, but it also provides respite for those who must experience these events.The problem of communicating with the dying, the main focus of Kübler-Ross's book, is nevertheless eclipsed by the other, more notable aspect of On Death and Dying. For out of this book emerged the now very popular understanding of the stages of death, the normal sequence of an individual's emotional reconciliation to dying: the processes of denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression—the whole series of intrapsychic processes leading up to a final acceptance of death and dying. Now we live amongst a whole panoply of staged progresses towards the acceptance of trauma: trauma associated not only with death and dying but also with substance abuse, catastrophe, and forms of violence. It is perhaps worth recalling, however, that the most famous of these stage models, the five stages [End Page 208] of death, emerged out of Kübler-Ross's attempt to learn what the dying can teach the living about communication.In what follows, I assume that writing about illness is another, more popular form of Kübler-Ross's descriptive and communicative project. To write pathography, as Anne Hunsaker Hawkins calls narratives of illness and dying in her survey of these texts, Reconstructing Illness: Studies in Pathography, is to engage with what sickness and dying teach about life and writing. As might be guessed, most pathographies orbit familiar centers of gravity: agency for the dying, reconciliation for the living, the whole leaden project of acceptance. Even so, pathography is not always and everywhere engaged in such projects. Pathography, as Hawkins demonstrates, is a highly variable project. Literary pathography is quite different from popular pathography, and texts within these categories differ with respect to the purpose of their writing. Pathography is conceived as a communicative engagement with sickness and dying, with the sick and the dying, but is hardly unified in its aims or its functions. It is a form of writing that not just potentially but actually admits a diversity of purposes and produces a variety of effects.It is my purpose here to propose a typology for pathographies. Although pathography as a genre of writing takes a bewildering variety of forms, these writings can be grouped according to their effects. I divide pathography into three types, according to the kind of response they offer to sickness and dying, to the sick and the dying. First, I treat pathography as a process of passive acceptance, the bearing of a burden proposed by the necessities of illness and death. Next, I characterize pathographies that approach the writing of illness or dying as a process of active acceptance. This type of pathography uses writing about illness and dying as a process for the... (shrink)

I defend the view that we should not overintellectualize the mind. Nonhuman animals can occupy islands of practical rationality: they can have contextbound reasons for action even though they lack full conceptual abilities. Holism and the possibility of mistake are required for such reasons to be the agent's reasons, but these requirements can be met in the absence of inferential promiscuity. Empirical work with animals is used to illustrate the possibility that reasons for action could be bound to symbolic or (...) social contexts, and connections are made to simulationist accounts of cognitive skills. (shrink)

Lovers often disagree. We may reject the specific goals our loved ones pursue or the broad values they hold. Some philosophers suggest that such evaluative conflict makes romantic love in its ideal form deficient. I argue that this is mistaken. On the contrary, our ideal of love holds that we can love people for ‘who they are’ (as we say), even as we profoundly disagree with them. My argument draws on intuitive cases from screwball comedy about love amid conflict, love (...) across political party lines, as well as ‘forbidden’ love across religions and cultures. At a deeper level, I sketch an ideal of love I call intimate independence and argue that this ideal is (i) fully compatible with any evaluative conflict, (ii) embedded in our ordinary attitudes towards mature love between equals, and (iii) an ideal worth achieving. As long as intimate independence is a compelling ideal, deep conflict will not seem like an obstacle to true love. The ideal reminds us that love can bring together people with radically different points of view, and that to insist on shared ends or values is thus to miss a part of the meaning and power of love. (shrink)

We all know about the vehicle/content distinction (see Dennett 1991a, Millikan 1991, 1993). We shouldn't confuse properties represented in content with properties of vehicles of content. In particular, we shouldn't confuse the personal and subpersonal levels. The contents of the mental states of subject/agents are at the personal level. Vehicles of content are causally explanatory subpersonal events or processes or states. We shouldn't suppose that the properties of vehicles must be projected into what they represent for subject/agents, or vice versa. (...) This would be to confuse the personal and subpersonal levels. (shrink)

I defend the view that we should not overintellectualize the mind. Nonhuman animals can occupy islands of practical rationality: they can have context‐bound reasons for action even though they lack full conceptual abilities. Holism and the possibility of mistake are required for such reasons to be the agent's reasons, but these requirements can be met in the absence of inferential promiscuity. Empirical work with animals is used to illustrate the possibility that reasons for action could be bound to symbolic or (...) social contexts, and connections are made to simulationist accounts of cognitive skills. (shrink)

In an 1896 article for Kindergarten Magazine, John Dewey explained that the "child comes to school to do; to cook, to sew, to work with wood and tools in simple constructive acts; within and about these acts cluster the studies—writing, reading, arithmetic, etc."1 With this statement, Dewey encapsulated a key principle in the elementary education pedagogy he was at that time developing at the University of Chicago's Laboratory School. This school, which Dewey founded in 1896, explicitly experimented with new pedagogical (...) techniques. Ultimately, the Laboratory School's emphasis on occupations would become the most distinctive aspect of Dewey's and his colleagues' experimentation with educational... (shrink)

Most scholars suggest that Plato's academy served as a training ground for future statesmen in order that philosophy might influence politics. Yet scholars deny that later Platonic academies maintained this same political focus. It is assumed that they transformed into monastic asylums, allowing philosophers to escape worldly affairs. This article challenges the conventional reading through an interpretation of a commentary on Plato's Gorgias, written by an Alexandrian Neoplatonist who upholds his predecessor's political focus. He argues that the philosopher must be (...) concerned with the health of regimes and should accomplish this task by teaching statesmen, who can either advise those in power or pursue their own political ambitions. (shrink)

The following three papers focus on compassion, an issue well worth our consideration in our contemporary age, and most especially during our recent national tragedy. It is hoped that these philosophical discussions of compassion may help us as we, on personal and societal levels, come to grips with immense human suffering. The topic of compassion brings us into an exploration of a cluster of related philosophical issues and is thus a good stepping off point for inquiry. The role of the (...) first paper is that of stage setting, to simply layout an approach to compassion presented by Aristotle and developed by Martha Nussbaum. This approach served as the introductory consideration in a course on compassion, taught by the first two commentators. Initially we wondered if we could sustain discussion on this narrow topic over fourteen weeks, but found the course left students with numerous questions worth their further consideration. So too in these papers, a number of issues will remain untouched, such as the relation of compassion and public policy and specific approaches to the cultivating of compassion, both of which are explored at length by Martha Nussbaum. This first paper frames our discussion, by presenting in outline form key points addressed in Martha Nussbaum’s Aristotelian discussion of the emotion of compassion, and touches upon issues developed in the next two papers. (shrink)

it has recently been discovered that propranolol — a beta-blocker traditionally used to treat cardiac arrhythmias and hypertension — might disrupt the formation of the emotionally disturbing memories that typically occur in the wake of traumatic events and consequently prevent the onset of trauma-induced psychological injuries such as Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. One context in which the use of propranolol is generating interest in both the popufor and scientific press is sexual violence. Nevertheless, feminists have so far not weighed in on (...) propranolol. I suggest that the time is ripe for a careful feminist analysis of the moral and political implications of propranolol use in the context of sexual violence. In this paper, I map the feminist issues potentially raised by providing propranolol to victims of sexual assault, focusing in particufor on the compatibility of propranolol use and avaüability with an understanding of the social and systematic dimensions of rape s harms. I do not deliver a final verdict on propranolol; in fact, I show that we do not yet have enough information about propranolol's effects to do so. Rather, 1 provide a feminist framework for evaluating the possibilities and penis opened up by therapeutic memory manipuktion in the context of sexual violence against women. (shrink)

In Education After Dewey, Paul Fairfield advocates a philosophy of education that combines John Dewey’s thinking with ideas drawn from continental European philosophy and 20th century social theory. In particular, Fairfield argues that putting Dewey in conversation with philosophers such as Hans-Georg Gadamer and Martin Heidegger can lead to needed improvements in contemporary ideas about education. Education after Dewey seeks to rehabilitate Dewey’s thought for students of European philosophy and for humanities educators. It argues for the merits, and concedes the (...) limitations, of Dewey’s educational emphasis on experience. The many connections that Fairfield establishes between Dewey’s educational thinking and .. (shrink)

In his fortieth anniversary commemoration of the Cooper Union Museum for the Arts and Decoration in 1937, John Dewey wrote confidently about the development of museums as educational institutions. As Dewey argued, “[o]ne of the most striking features of recent American culture has been the rapid growth of museums in all lines, artistic, commercial and industrial; of natural history, anthropology and antiquities.” Dewey explained that it “has become generally recognized” that museums “occupy as necessary a place in popular education as (...) do public libraries,” arguing that “[v]ision of [museums’] educational function has kept pace with their material expansion.” In general, Dewey contended, a “museum that is directed... (shrink)

We attempt to shed light on property rights by examining the case of conjoined twins. We do so since their situation is perhaps among the most challenging of all cases of separating “mine” from “thine.”.

Animal welfare science has advanced greatly in the last several decades. This trend is also evident in the zoo and aquarium community, where resources are increasingly being dedicated to better understanding how captivity impacts animals and how best to assess and improve the welfare of individual animals living in the care of humans. In this book, Chapter One examines how far the zoo community has come in addressing the welfare needs of animals in varying housing conditions and highlights areas in (...) need of further attention and research. Chapter Two discusses animal welfare from the viewpoints of cruelty, conservation of wild animals and veterinary attention. Chapter Three examines the justifications for the criminalisation of bestiality and argues that bestiality should be placed within the confines of animal welfare legislation and the focus should be on the animal and respecting the animal and its need to be able to exhibit normal behaviour patterns and its need to be protected from sexual abuse. Chapter Four analyzes from a legal perspective the European Unions (EU) measures and strategies for animal welfare in its external relations and highlights the development of the concept of animal welfare in the EU and in its relationships with the rest of the world. Chapter Five studies the growing demand for healthier animal products and the improvement of animal well-being. (shrink)

Recently research on imitation and its role in social cognition has been flourishing across various disciplines. After briefly reviewing these developments under the headings of behavior, subpersonal mechanisms, and functions of imitation, I advance the _shared circuits_.

S. L. Hurley's ambitious work brings these two areas of lively debate into overdue contact with each other.

In their paper, “Conversational Artificial Intelligence in Psychotherapy: A New Therapeutic Tool or Agent?” Sedlakova and Trachsel (2023) claim that therapeutic insights and therapeutic changes are...