Can an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God create humans with free will without the capacity to commit evil? Scholars have taken opposite positions on the contentious problem. Using scripture and the rules of logic, we argue that God cannot create impeccable creatures because of his ‘simplicity’. God cannot create gods, because God is uncreated. Peccable humans freely choose to disobey their creator and thus cannot blame him for the horrendous evils in this world. Concerning the belief of sinless humans with free (...) will in heaven, we suggest that such an impartation of God’s impeccability can be accomplished, not through creation, but by the marriage of Christ and the Church, for the two shall become one. Believers will become children of God and partakers of the divine nature.Contribution: Theologians and philosophers have argued whether God could create humans with free will who never commit evil, and if he could, why did he not do so? The primary contribution of this article is the argument that God could not create impeccable humans with free will for God could not create gods. (shrink)

This book addresses the theme of global sustainable development across two dimensions. First it introduces its progress and prospects in both rich and poor countries. It then outlines the major trends that will in practice influence the direction of sustainable development into the next century. It encompasses an understanding of sustainable development as both a theoretical framework for thinking about how to deal with human needs and environmental limits on the one hand, and a more material understanding of it as (...) a set of practices, on the other. The book is written by a group of internationally-recognised experts in the field, and is distinctive in offering a variety of philosophical and ethical reflections on sustainable development. Core issues covered include economic growth, poverty reduction, future generations, technology, population and diversity, making it an ideal text for students. Key Features The only available text to introduce the philosophical and ethical issues surrounding sustainable development Contributors are internationally-renowned experts in the field and include activists and policy makers, as well as academics Core areas include global equality, technology, women and population An ideal course textbook for Politics, Philosophy and International Relations students. (shrink)

This article explores the enterprising act of socially constructing fatness, or overweight and obesity, as an individual and collective problem. We argue that this process is complex and hence draw liberally on and extend an eclectic range of scholarship (e.g. the sociology of the body, moral panic theory, critical weight studies) when presenting a typology of obesity epidemic entrepreneurs, that is, those who actively make fatness into a correctable health problem. Using a variety of data, we consider six main ideal (...) typical entrepreneurs: creators, amplifiers/moralizers, legitimators, supporters, enforcers/administrators and the entrepreneurial self. We conclude with a critique of obesity epidemic entrepreneurship and underscore the broader salience of our work for the sociology of the body/embodiment. The relevance of social studies of the body for the obesity debate and critical weight studies is also highlighted. (shrink)

Drug Safety Communications are used by the Food and Drug Administration to inform health care providers, patients, caregivers, and the general public about safety issues related to FDA-approved drugs. To assess patient knowledge of the messaging contained in DSCs related to the sleep aids zolpidem and eszopiclone, we conducted a large, cross-sectional patient survey of 1,982 commercially insured patients selected by stratified random sampling from the Optum Research Database who had filled at least two prescriptions for either zolpidem or eszopiclone (...) between July 1, 2012 and June 30, 2013. Among the 594 respondents, two-thirds reported hearing generally about drug safety information prior to starting a new drug, with the remaining one-third “rarely” or “never” hearing such information. Providers and pharmacists were primary sources of drug safety information. Two-thirds of zolpidem users and half of eszopiclone users reported having heard about the related DSC messages, ability to accurately identify the major factual messages was limited. Respondents reacted to new drug safety information about their sleep aids by reporting that they would want to learn about alternative ways to help them sleep and seek out more information about the safety of their specific sleeping pill. Opportunities may exist for the FDA to work with providers and pharmacies to help ensure the DSC information is more widely received and is more fully understood by those taking the affected medications. (shrink)

This paper draws upon recent insights into the emergence of issue-focused stakeholder networks which engage in a co-creative process for constructing mutual value. It applies these insights to evaluate Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott’s “21st Century Leadership” effort to impose an ethical supply chain control system in China. The paper concludes that further institutional innovation is needed to realize the potential of 21st century transformational leadership at Wal-Mart and elsewhere.

Jerry Fodor argues, in The mind doesn't work that way (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000, that the computational theory of mind is undermined by the pervasive context sensitivity of human cognition. His objections can be easily met, however, by noting the properties of appropriately structured representation hierarchies.

"... Fraser and Bartky have brought the encounter between U.S. and French feminism to a new level of seriousness." —Ethics In the last decade, elements of French feminist discourse have permeated and transformed the larger feminist culture in the United States. This volume is the first sustained attempt to revalue French feminism and answer the question: What has been gained and what has been lost as a result of this intercultural encounter? Interviews with Simone de Beauvoir open the book; essays (...) by French feminists Sarah Kofman and Luce Irigaray follow; the North American contributors are Judith Butler, Nancy Fraser, Diana J. Fuss, Nancy J. Holland, Eleanor H. Kuykendall, Dorothy Leland, Diana T. Meyers, Andrea Nye, and Margaret A. Simons. (shrink)

We read commentaries on our feature article ‘The ethics of consent during labour and birth: episiotomies’1 with gratitude and interest. Nearly all commenting authors agree that consent for in-labour procedures is necessary and ideally given at the point of intervening. Both Shalowitz & Ralston and Stirrat note that this is already required by professional statements and guidelines in the USA2 and UK3, respectively, but also note that practice does not yet conform. The Americans authors helpfully emphasise the importance of multilevel (...) institutional measures for closing this gap, including consent policies and reporting mechanisms, as well as ongoing education.2 The UK writer seconds the role for education within wider shared decision-making and informed choice approaches, and generously commends our paper for close study by all maternity care providers. Others add a cautionary note. Lee applauds all our recommendations, but notes our proposals cannot fully secure autonomy because of, among others, epistemic injustice and other power differentials.4 Kumar-Hazard and Dahlen worry that opt-out consent is equal to substitute decision-making; weakens women’s rights; and is open to abuse.5 Nelson and Clough object to our willlingness to work within a flawed conceptual framework, which ought to be challenged.6 We agree that there are limits to what our proposal can do. It cannot rectify unequal distributions of epistemic credibilities, either in general or in any particular interaction. Risk communication is never neutral;7 “even the most well-meaning healthcare professionals could unwittingly wield influence over birthing women’s …. (shrink)

In chapters 9 and 10 of their book Roman but Not Catholic, Kenneth Collins and Jerry Walls criticize the Roman Catholic positions on the Eucharist as a sacrifice and on the ministerial priesthood. I reply to their historical and theological objections, and defend the belief that the Eucharistic sacrifice, the Mass, is a re-presentation, or making present, of Jesus’s redemptive sacrifice on Calvary, and a key component in God’s incarnational strategy for redeeming us.

A bedrock assumption made by cognitivist philosophers such as Noam Chomsky, and, more recently, Jerry Fodor and Steven Pinker is that the contexts within which children acquire a language inevitably exhibit a irremediable poverty of whatever stimuli are necessary to condition such acquisition and development. They argue that given this poverty, the basic rudiments of language must be innate; the task of the cognitivist is to theorize universal grammars, languages of thought, or language instincts to account for it. My argument, (...) however, is that this assumption is philosophically suspect in that it assumes an untenably Cartesian conception of "stimulus" which itself presupposes a rigid dualism of subject-user and context and hence confuses the underdetermination of stimulus for its lack. I argue that the former does in fact provide the necessary conditions for language acquisition. I then go on to develop a Wittgensteinian—Dennettian model within which underdetermination plays a key role. (shrink)

Is a human more conscious than an octopus? In the science of consciousness, it’s oftentimes assumed that some creatures (or mental states) are more conscious than others. But in recent years, a number of philosophers have argued that the notion of degrees of consciousness is conceptually confused. This paper (1) argues that the most prominent objections to degrees of consciousness are unsustainable, (2) examines the semantics of ‘more conscious than’ expressions, (3) develops an analysis of what it is for a (...) degreed property to count as degrees of consciousness, and (4) applies the analysis to various theories of consciousness. I argue that whether consciousness comes in degrees ultimately depends on which theory of consciousness turns out to be correct. But I also argue that most theories of consciousness entail that consciousness comes in degrees. (shrink)

This paper examines the idea of "objective phenomenology," or a way of understanding the phenomenal character of conscious experiences that doesn’t require one to have had the kinds of experiences under consideration. My central thesis is that structural facts about experience—facts that characterize purely how conscious experiences are structured—are objective phenomenal facts. I begin by precisifying the idea of objective phenomenology and diagnosing what makes any given phenomenal fact subjective. Then I defend the view that structural facts about experience are (...) objective. I also argue that structural facts about experience, despite being objective, nevertheless still give rise to an explanatory gap. (shrink)

Totalitarianism is perhaps unanimously regarded as one of the greatest political evils of the last century and has been the grounds for much of Anglo-American political theory since. Confucianism, meanwhile, has been gaining credibility in the past decades among sympathizers of democratic theory in spite of criticisms of it being anti-democratic or authoritarian. I consider how certain key concepts in the classical Confucian texts of the Mencius and the Xunzi might or might not be appropriated for ‘legitimising’ totalitarian regimes. Under (...) an Arendtian approach to understanding totalitarianism, it is precisely an unproblematised relation to a normative History and Nature that underlies the potential compatibility or incompatibility. I argue against a longstanding prejudice that if any form of Confucianism would be totalitarian, it would have to be Xunzian. Against this, I hope to show that if any form of Confucianism would be totalitarian, it might well be a naturalistic Mencian Confucianism instead of a constructivist Xunzian one. (shrink)

Social philosophers often invoke the concept of false consciousness in their analyses, referring to a set of evidence-resistant, ignorant attitudes held by otherwise sound epistemic agents, systematically occurring in virtue of, and motivating them to perpetuate, structural oppression. But there is a worry that appealing to the notion in questions of responsibility for the harm suffered by members of oppressed groups is victim-blaming. Individuals under false consciousness allegedly systematically fail the relevant rationality and epistemic conditions due to structural distortions of (...) reasoning or knowledge practices, undermining their status as responsible moral agents. But attending to the constitutive mechanisms and heterogeneity of false consciousness allows us to see how having it does not eo ipso render someone an inappropriate target of blame. I focus here on the 1889 anti-suffragist manifesto “An Appeal Against Female Suffrage,” arguing that its signatories, despite false consciousness, satisfy both conditions for ordinary blameworthiness. I consider three prominent signatories, observing that the irrationality characterisation is unsustainable beyond group-level diagnoses, and that their capacity to respond appropriately to reasons was not compromised. Following recent work on epistemic injustice, I also argue that culpable mechanisms constituted their false consciousness, rendering them blameworthy for the Appeal. (shrink)

False consciousness requires a general explanation for why, and how, oppressed individuals believe propositions against, as opposed to aligned with, their own well-being in virtue of their oppressed status. This involves four explanatory desiderata: belief acquisition, content prevalence, limitation, and systematicity. A social constructionist approach satisfies these by understanding the concept of false consciousness as regulating social research rather than as determining the exact mechanisms for all instances: the concept attunes us to a complex of mechanisms conducing oppressed individuals to (...) mistake social understandings of themselves as natural self-understandings—the limits lie where these overlap (sometimes), or are entirely absent. (shrink)

Shun Kwong-loi argues that the distinction between first- and third-person points of view does not play as explanatory a role in our moral psychology as has been supposed by contemporary philosophical discussions. He draws insightfully from the Confucian tradition to better elucidate our everyday experiences of moral emotions, arguing that it offers an alternative and more faithful perspective on our experiences of anger and compassion. However, unlike the distinction between first- and third-person points of view, Shun’s descriptions of anger and (...) compassion leave unarticulated what would be necessary to differentiate these responses from non-moral responses. Here, I make a friendly suggestion on how this explanatory gap might be filled, providing complementary grounding for Shun’s observations by way of K. C. Bhattacharyya’s phenomenological analysis of feeling. It fills the gap by means of a gradation in the possible depth of emotional responses found in the a priori structure of a feeling experience for any subject. The payoff of such a comparison between Shun’s explication of Confucian moral psychology and Bhattacharyya’s explication of rasa theory is not only a possible phenomenological grounding for the former but also a potential way to articulate a missing ethics in Bhattacharyya’s thought. (shrink)

Dorothy Edgington’s work has been at the centre of a range of ongoing debates in philosophical logic, philosophy of mind and language, metaphysics, and epistemology. This work has focused, although by no means exclusively, on the overlapping areas of conditionals, probability, and paradox. In what follows, I briefly sketch some themes from these three areas relevant to Dorothy’s work, highlighting how some of Dorothy’s work and some of the contributions of this volume fit in to these debates.

Psychiatry today is mainly practised within a curative framework. However, many mental disorders are persistent and negatively affect quality of life as well as life expectancy. This tension between treatment goals and the actual illness trajectory has evoked a growing academic interest in ‘palliative psychiatry’, namely the application of a palliative care approach in patients with severe persistent mental illness. Recently, Trachsel et al presented a working definition of palliative psychiatry. This first official attempt to capture the concept is based (...) on WHO’s widely accepted definition of palliative care but modified and limited to include only severe persistent psychiatric illness. While this is a welcome step in the discussion on palliative care approaches in psychiatry, it also opens up for new questions. One of the most evident is whether psychiatry actually needs its own definition of palliative care or, put differently, whether there is something about mental disorders that differs so radically from other medical conditions that it calls for a separate definition. We acknowledge the need to discuss the goals of psychiatric care in patients with severe persistent psychiatric illness. However, we question whether a separate definition of palliative care exclusive to psychiatry is the right way to go. In this paper, we discuss why. (shrink)

Objectives To explore attitudes and reasoning among Swedish physicians and the general public regarding the withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment at a competent patient's request. Design A vignette-based postal questionnaire including 1202 randomly selected individuals in the county of Stockholm and 1200 randomly selected Swedish physicians with various specialities. The vignettes described patients requesting withdrawal of their life-sustaining treatment: (1) a 77-year-old woman on dialysis; (2) a 36-year-old man on dialysis; (3) a 34-year-old ventilator-dependent tetraplegic man. Responders were asked to classify (...) the act of terminating treatment and to prioritise arguments for/against. Results A majority in both groups prioritised arguments in favour of terminating treatment and classified the act as defensible in all vignettes. However, among the general public, 16% classified the act as euthanasia in all vignettes; among physicians this view was most expressed regarding ventilator treatment (26%). Some who classified the act as euthanasia prioritised arguments in favour of terminating treatment: among physicians 18% in vignette 1, 19% in vignette 2 and 34% in vignette 3; among the general public 35% in vignette 1, 20% in vignette 2 and 48% in vignette 3. Conclusion There is a widespread consensus regarding competent patients' right to abstain from life-sustaining treatment. An association between the hastening of death, caused by the withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment and the concept of euthanasia is proposed. The results also suggest that classifying the withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment as ‘euthanasia’ does not necessarily mean that the act is interpreted as ethically unacceptable. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Because of the existence of severely defective humans it is commonly held that whatever consideration is due to all humans is also due to many other animals, and that therefore speciesism, or the readiness to prefer the interest of humans to those of other animals, is unjustified. After criticism of this reasoning a ‘naturalised’ speciesism, acknowledging, for example, the affinities between species, is articulated and defended. A key to this defence is the separation of the task of specifying morally (...) significant differences between humans and other animals from the task of justifying the extension of consideration to defective humans. The conclusion is that more traditional vices than speciesism are chiefly to blame for the shabby treatment of animals by humans. (shrink)

The Rule of Double Effect (RDE) holds that it may be permissible to harm an individual while acting for the sake of a proportionate good, given that the harm is not an intended means to the good but merely a foreseen side-effect. Although frequently used in medical ethical reasoning, the rule has been repeatedly questioned in the past few decades. However, Daniel Sulmasy, a proponent who has done a lot of work lately defending the RDE, has recently presented a reformulated (...) and more detailed version of the rule. Thanks to its greater precision, this reinvented RDE avoids several problems thought to plague the traditional RDE. Although an improvement compared with the traditional version, we argue that Sulmasy's reinvented RDE will not stand closer scrutiny. Not only has the range of proper applicability narrowed significantly, but, more importantly, Sulmasy fails to establish that there is a morally relevant distinction between intended and foreseen effects. In particular, he fails to establish that there is any distinction that can account for the alleged moral difference between sedation therapy and euthanasia. (shrink)

Coherence in conversations and in texts can be partially characterized by a set of coherence relations, motivated ultimately by the speaker's or writer's need to be understood. In this paper, formal definitions are given for several coherence relations, based on the operations of an inference system; that is, the relations between successive portions of a discourse are characterized in terms of the inferences that can be drawn from each. In analyzing a discourse, it is frequently the case that we would (...) recognize it as coherent, in that it would satisfy the formal definition of some coherence relation, if only we could assume certain noun phrases to be coreferential. In such cases, we will simply assume the identity of the entities referred to, in what might be called a “petty conversational implicature,” thereby solving the coherence and coreference problems simultaneously. Three examples of different kinds of reference problems are presented. In each, it is shown how the coherence of the discourse can be recognized, and how the reference problems are solved, almost as a by‐product, by means of these petty conversational implicatures. (shrink)

Counter to the popular impression that Adam Smith was a champion of selfishness and greed, Jerry Muller shows that the Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations maintained that markets served to promote the well-being of ...

At a time when the label "conservative" is indiscriminately applied to fundamentalists, populists, libertarians, fascists, and the advocates of one or another orthodoxy, this volume offers a nuanced and historically informed presentation of ...

This volume is a collection of original contributions about the core knowledge in fundamental domains. It includes work on naive physics, such as formal specifications of intuitive theories of spatial relations, time causality, substance and physical objects, and on naive psychology.

We take it that Brandom’s sense of the geography is that our way of proceeding is more or less the first and his is more or less the second. But we think this way of describing the situation is both unclear and misleading, and we want to have this out right at the start. Our problem is that we don’t know what “you start with” means either in formulations like “you start with the content of words and proceed to the (...) content of sentences” or in formulations like “you start with the content of sentences and you proceed to the content of words.” Brandom’s official view seems to be that he’s talking about explanatory priorities (see the preceding quote); but we think that can’t really be what he has in mind, and we can’t find any alternative interpretation that seems plausible. Speaking just for ourselves, we’re inclined towards a relatively pragmatic view of explanation; what explanation we should “start with” depends, inter alia, on what it’s an explanation of and whom it’s an explanation for. But, in any case, we would have thought that explanatory priority is of more than heuristic interest only if it reflects a priority of some other kind: ontological, semantical, psychological, or whatever. In talking about what one “starts with”, Brandom must be claiming more than. (shrink)

Background Traditionally, palliative care has focused on patients suffering from life-threatening somatic diseases such as cancer or progressive neurological disorders. In contrast, despite the often chronic, severely disabling, and potentially life-threatening nature of psychiatric disorders, there are neither palliative care units nor clinical guidelines on palliative measures for patients in psychiatry. Main text This paper contributes to the growing literature on a palliative approach in psychiatry and is based on the assumption that a change of perspective from a curative to (...) a palliative approach could help promote patient-centeredness and increase quality of life for severely ill patients in psychiatry as well as in somatic medicine. To exemplify this, we offer three different clinical scenarios: severe and enduring anorexia nervosa, treatment-refractory schizophrenia, and chronic suicidality and persistent self-injury in borderline personality disorder. Conclusion We emphasize that many typical interventions for treatment-refractory psychiatric disorders may indeed be of a palliative nature. Furthermore, introducing traditional features of palliative care, e.g. so-called goals of care conversations, could aid even further in ensuring that caregivers, patients, and families agree on which treatment goals are to be prioritized in order to optimize quality of life in spite of severe, persistent mental disorder. (shrink)

Three negative affective dispositions—anger, anxiety, and depression—are hypothesized to increase physical disease risk and have been the subject of epidemiological studies. However, the overlap among the major negative affective dispositions, and the superordinate construct of trait negative affectivity are only beginning to be tested. Presented here is a narrative review of recent prospective studies that simultaneously tested anger, anxiety, depression, and trait NA as risk factors for cardiac outcomes. Anxiety and depression emerged as independent risk factors for premature heart disease (...) in population studies of persons nominally healthy at baseline, and for recurrence/mortality among patients with existing heart disease. General trait NA also was a cardiac risk factor in population samples. (shrink)

Jerry L. Walls aims to demonstrate in his book Hell: The Logic of Damnation that some traditional views of hell are still defensible and can be believed with intellectual and moral integrity. Focusing on the issues from the standpoint of philosophical theology, Walls explores the doctrine of hell in relation to both the divine nature and human nature. He argues, with respect to the divine nature, that some traditional versions of the doctrine are compatible not only with God's omnipotence and (...) omniscience, but also with a strong account of His perfect goodness. The concept of divine goodness receives special attention since the doctrine of hell is most often rejected on moral grounds. (shrink)

I agree with the commentators that study of physical disease risk conferred by affective dispositions such as anger/hostility, anxiety, and sadness, should be more cognizant of developments in emotion theory. Emotions differ in their functional value depending on the person’s lifespan trajectory. Discrete emotions have different psychophysiological signatures; and emotional competence, including production, regulation, and knowledge, may be critical in determining whether specific negative affects, or general negative affectivity, are toxic for physical health. Emotion researchers, however, have mainly focused on (...) acute affective experiences and ignored the general effects of negative affectivity, which subsumes the discrete negative affects. Most diseases develop over years so more needs to be known about the biological signatures of chronic specific affects and negative affectivity. (shrink)

Two questionnaires directed to Swedish physicians and a sample of the Swedish population investigated attitudes towards physician-assisted suicide (PAS). The aim of the present work was to analyse qualitative data from these questionnaires in order to explore how respondents reason about PAS. Data were analysed in two steps. First, we categorized different kinds of responses and identified pro and con arguments. Second, we identified general conclusions from the responses. The data reflect the differences in attitudes towards PAS among the public (...) and physicians, with the former mainly in favour of PAS and the latter mainly against. There was, however, considerable agreement about what requirements must be met before PAS could be considered ethical. Many arguments against PAS concerned the professional role of physicians, which indicates that it may not be assisted suicide as such that many PAS opponents disagree with, but rather that it is handled by physicians in the regular health-care system. (shrink)