Background:Data representing people’s behaviour, attitudes, feelings and relationships are increasingly being harvested from social media platforms and re-used for research purposes. This can be ethically problematic, even where such data exist in the public domain. We set out to explore how the academic community is addressing these challenges by analysing a national corpus of research ethics guidelines and published studies in one interdisciplinary research area.Methods:Ethics guidelines published by Research Councils UK, its seven-member councils and guidelines cited within these were reviewed. (...) Guidelines referring to social media were classified according to published typologies of social media research uses and ethical considerations for social media mining. Using health research as an exemplar, PubMed was searched to identify studies using social media data, which were assessed according to their coverage of ethical considerations and guidelines.Results:Of the 13 guidelines published or recom... (shrink)

Introduction: A general trend in the psychological literature suggests that guilt contributes to morality more than shame does. Unlike shame-prone individuals, guilt-prone individuals internalize the causality of negative events, attribute responsibility in the first person, and engage in responsible behavior. However, it is not known how guilt- and shame-proneness interact with the attribution of responsibility to others. -/- Methods: In two Web-based experiments, participants reported their attributions of moral culpability (i.e., responsibility, causality, punishment and decision-making) about morally ambiguous acts of (...) killing in different conditions. In Study 1 the vignettes were presented in the 1st person, while in Study 2 in the 3rd person. To test proneness to guilt and shame, we utilized the GASP scale, which differentiates between the affective and behavioral components of each emotion. Statistical analyses were performed in Matlab and R. -/- Results: We found that guilt- and shame-proneness were associated with the severity of attributions in both the first and the third person, but the effect was strong only in the guilt case (both subtypes) and shame-affect case, and not in the shame-behavior case. We call this the Moralizing Effect. -/- Discussion: We wonder whether our finding that guilt-prone people tend to attribute a higher degree of culpability to others is really consistent with the view that guilt motivates people to choose the “moral paths in life”. This echoes views about the harmful aspects of guilt, which have been expressed historically in philosophy, for example, by Friedrich Nietzsche. (shrink)

This fully revised second edition suggests ways in which you can introduce philosophical enquiry to your Personal, Social and Health Education and Citizenship teaching and across the curriculum.

The discussion of good and evil must not be confined to the sterile lecture halls of academics but related instead to ordinary human feelings, needs, and desires, says noted philosopher Richard Taylor. Efforts to understand morality by exploring human reason will always fail because we are creatures of desire as well. All morality arises from our intense and inescapable longing. The distinction between good and evil is always clouded by rationalists who convert the real problems of ethics into complex (...) philosophical puzzles. In the first part of Good and Evil, Taylor looks for a more meaningful conception by reexamining and rejecting the whole rationalistic tradition that dominates philosophical ethics. The second part provides an empirical explanation of good and evil, noting that one does not have to look too far to find prime examples of the failure of fixed moral rules. Including important commentary on Joseph Fletcher's groundbreaking situation ethics, and Aristotle's virtues (e.g., magnanimity and pride), Taylor rounds out the book by developing a philosophy of aspiration--personal worth as an ethical ideal--to replace the morality of duty. He offers a modified form of situation ethics to fit the contemporary problems we face. (shrink)

A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2012! Contemporary picturebooks open up spaces for philosophical dialogues between people of all ages. As works of art, picturebooks offer unique opportunities to explore ideas and to create meaning collaboratively. This book considers censorship of certain well-known picturebooks, challenging the assumptions on which this censorship is based. Through a lively exploration of children's responses to these same picturebooks the authors paint a way of working philosophically based on respectful listening and creative and authentic interactions, rather (...) than scripted lessons. This dialogical process challenges much current practice in education. The authors propose that a courageous and critical practice of listening is central to the facilitation of mutually educative dialogue. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of education studies, philosophy of education, literacy teaching and learning, children's literature, childhood and pedagogy. (shrink)

Written specifically for education studies students, this accessible text offers a clear introduction to philosophy of education. It skilfully guides readers through this challenging and sometimes complex area bringing key philosophical ideas and questions to life in the context and practice of education. Considering the implications of educational trends and movements through a variety of philosophical lenses such as Marxism, feminism, ethics and democracy, the book explores enduring themes in philosophy of education. Features include: individual tasks and group activities to (...) promote discussion case studies notes boxes to highlight further reading; chapter overviews and summaries Drawing on readers' own experiences of education, the book reveals the connections between philosophical ideas and educational policy and practice. Part of the Foundations in Education Studies series, this timely textbook is essential reading for students coming to the study of philosophy of education for the first time. (shrink)

The author is in essential agreement with Tallis, that when we only deploy one mode of interpretation, ie the scientific mode, we lose the fundamental realities of human experience, including the experience of free will, on which, ironically, scientific practice depends. Tallis’s philosophical stance is compared to that of Owen Barfield and his work on free will is placed within the context of his other books. A sense of wonder is common to all of them.

This book addresses how people and organisations sometimes respond to uncertainty in making decisions. Those decisions are rooted in beliefs and behaviours that are not always rational, especially in response to perceived randomness, chaos and unexpected circumstances. The author uses a transdisciplinary approach to the study of superstition in the context of business and management, taking care to acknowledge that what is regarded as superstition to one person may well be constructed as a spiritual belief by another. Respect and sensitivity (...) in explicating individual and social constructions of spirituality is a core value in structuring the narrative of the text. The work also explores the interwoven relationships amongst superstition, religion, spirituality and empiricism and how cultural, political, economic and environmental factors are likely to influence organisations and those who are employed by them. Further, it examines the influence of beliefs related to topics such as feng shui, astrology, phrenology and the I Ching in recruitment. This comprehensive treatment of the role of superstition in business will advance the scholarly conversation on uncertainty in decision making. It points to the power of belief that defies empirical validation and how it can be used in a variety of contexts, such as the marketing of products and images to manipulate unwary consumers or inhibit the implementation of health advice in times of COVID-19. (shrink)

Conferring legal personhood on purely synthetic entities is a very real legal possibility, one under consideration presently by the European Union. We show here that such legislative action would be morally unnecessary and legally troublesome. While AI legal personhood may have some emotional or economic appeal, so do many superficially desirable hazards against which the law protects us. We review the utility and history of legal fictions of personhood, discussing salient precedents where such fictions resulted in abuse or incoherence. We (...) conclude that difficulties in holding “electronic persons” accountable when they violate the rights of others outweigh the highly precarious moral interests that AI legal personhood might protect. (shrink)

The place of religion in society has changed profoundly in the last few centuries, particularly in the West. In what will be a defining book for our time, Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean, and what, precisely, happens when a society becomes one in which faith is only one human possibility among others.

Exercise-based rehabilitation forms a key part of the UK National Health Service patient-care pathway for cardiac rehabilitation (CR). Only around half of all eligible patients attend core CR, however, with social inequalities affecting participation. Few qualitative studies have explored in-depth the key factors influencing engagement with CR, specifically from a sociological theoretical, and ethnographic perspective. Utilising an ethnographic approach allowed us to get a sense of the embodied experiences of 10 participants attending or declining core CR, together with a further (...) seven family members/significant others. This provided in-depth appreciation of participants’ lifeworld contexts as key influences on CR participation. The article draws on these qualitative data and focuses on 1) participants’ initial thoughts about CR; and 2) navigating the field of CR, analysed via thematic analysis. We utilise a Bourdieusian theoretical perspective to theorise the findings, including salient socio-cultural factors influencing attendance/non-attendance and (non)adherence. The article findings highlight how perceptions of CR and the ability to navigate the field are strongly influenced by habitus and capital, and how personal biographies and socio-material conditions affect adherence to CR programmes. The study provides original insights into embodied experiences of exercise-based CR, and novel understandings of the reasons for drop-out/poor adherence, theorised from a Bourdieusian perspective. (shrink)

The notion of proof is central to mathematics yet it is one of the most difficult aspects of the subject to teach and master. In particular, undergraduate mathematics students often experience difficulties in understanding and constructing proofs. Understanding Mathematical Proof describes the nature of mathematical proof, explores the various techniques that mathematicians adopt to prove their results, and offers advice and strategies for constructing proofs. It will improve students’ ability to understand proofs and construct correct proofs of their own. The (...) first chapter of the text introduces the kind of reasoning that mathematicians use when writing their proofs and gives some example proofs to set the scene. The book then describes basic logic to enable an understanding of the structure of both individual mathematical statements and whole mathematical proofs. It also explains the notions of sets and functions and dissects several proofs with a view to exposing some of the underlying features common to most mathematical proofs. The remainder of the book delves further into different types of proof, including direct proof, proof using contrapositive, proof by contradiction, and mathematical induction. The authors also discuss existence and uniqueness proofs and the role of counter examples. (shrink)

The question of whether AI systems such as robots can or should be afforded moral agency or patiency is not one amenable either to discovery or simple reasoning, because we as societies constantly reconstruct our artefacts, including our ethical systems. Consequently, the place of AI systems in society is a matter of normative, not descriptive ethics. Here I start from a functionalist assumption, that ethics is the set of behaviour that maintains a society. This assumption allows me to exploit the (...) theoretical biology of sociality and autonomy to explain our moral intuitions. From this grounding I extend to consider possible ethics for maintaining either human- or of artefact-centred societies. I conclude that while constructing AI systems as either moral agents or patients is possible, neither is desirable. In particular, I argue that we are unlikely to construct a coherent ethics in which it it is ethical to afford AI moral subjectivity. We are therefore obliged not to build AI we are obliged to. (shrink)

How leaders and managers respond to not knowing is highly relevant given the complex, ambiguous, and chaotic business environment of the twenty-first century. Drawing on the literature from a variety of disciplines, the paper explores the dominant, unfavorable conceptualization of not knowing. The authors present some potential ethical implications of a negative view of not knowing and suggest how organizations would benefit from identifying any unhelpful aspects of the culture that may encourage unethical, undesirable, and/or hasty actions in situations of (...) not knowing. The paper specifically illustrates how patience, courage, honesty, integrity, and humility are integral to negative capability in the contexts of not knowing. Finally, the paper calls for deeper inquiry into the role of virtue ethics in preparing managers and leaders for not knowing and urges organizations to embrace negative capability in not knowing rather than engaging in damaging delusion. (shrink)

In this paper, we discuss the processes of racialisation on the example of biomedical research. We argue that applying the concept of racialisation in biomedical research can be much more precise, informative and suitable than currently used categories, such as race and ethnicity. For this purpose, we construct a model of the different processes affecting and co-shaping the racialisation of an individual, and consider these in relation to biomedical research, particularly to studies on hypertension. We finish with a discussion on (...) the potential application of our proposition to institutional guidelines on the use of racial categories in biomedical research. (shrink)

Everyone knows what is feels like to be in pain. Scraped knees, toothaches, migraines, giving birth, cancer, heart attacks, and heartaches: pain permeates our entire lives. We also witness other people - loved ones - suffering, and we 'feel with' them. It is easy to assume this is the end of the story: 'pain-is-pain-is-pain', and that is all there is to say. But it is not. In fact, the way in which people respond to what they describe as 'painful' has (...) changed considerably over time. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example, people believed that pain served a specific (and positive) function - it was a message from God or Nature; it would perfect the spirit. 'Suffer in this life and you wouldn't suffer in the next one'. Submission to pain was required. Nothing could be more removed from twentieth and twenty-first century understandings, where pain is regarded as an unremitting evil to be 'fought'. Focusing on the English-speaking world, this book tells the story of pain since the eighteenth century, addressing fundamental questions about the experience and nature of suffering over the last three centuries. How have those in pain interpreted their suffering - and how have these interpretations changed over time? How have people learnt to conduct themselves when suffering? How do friends and family react? And what about medical professionals: should they immerse themselves in the suffering person or is the best response a kind of professional detachment? (shrink)

There is an abundance of enthusiasm and optimism about how governments at all levels can make use of big data, algorithms and artificial intelligence. There is also growing concern about the risks that come with these new systems. This article makes the case for greater government transparency and accountability about uses of big data through a Government of Canada qualitative research case study. Adapting a method from critical cartographers, I employ counter-mapping to map government big data practices and internal discussions (...) of risk and challenge. I do so by drawing on interviews and freedom of information requests. The analysis reveals that there are more concerns and risks than often publicly discussed and that there are significant areas of silence that need greater attention. The article underlines the need for our democratic systems to respond to our new datafied contexts by ensuring that our institutions make changes to better protect citizen rights, uphold democratic principles and ensure means for citizen intervention. (shrink)

When artificial intelligence (AI) is used to make high-stakes decisions, some worry that this will create a morally troubling responsibility gap—that is, a situation in which nobody is morally responsible for the actions and outcomes that result. Since the responsibility gap might be thought to result from individuals lacking knowledge of the future behavior of AI systems, it can be and has been suggested that deploying explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) techniques will help us to avoid it. These techniques provide humans (...) with certain forms of understanding of the systems in question. In this paper, I consider whether existing XAI techniques can indeed close the responsibility gap. I identify a number of significant limits to their ability to do so. Ensuring that responsibility for AI-assisted outcomes is maintained may require using different techniques in different circumstances, and potentially also developing new techniques that can avoid each of the issues identified. (shrink)

Stimulated by late-1990s debate in the UK on quality, effectiveness and usefulness of educational research (reports by OFSTED, DFEE and NFER), this book shows ...

Contemporary republicanism is characterized by three main ideas: free persons, who are not subject to the arbitrary power of others; free states, which try to protect their citizens from such power without exercising it themselves; and vigilant citizenship, as a means to limit states to their protective role. This book advances an economic model of such republicanism that is ideologically centre-left. It demands an exit-oriented state interventionism, one that would require an activist government to enhance competition and resource exit from (...) dominating relationships within markets of all types, be they marital, labour, or residential. The substantial intervention and redistribution necessitated by such an approach make it leftist, while its tendency to work with rather than against the grain of markets makes it centrist. It is, in short, a contribution to progressive republican political thought, but one that is less social-democratic than market-democratic in character. (shrink)

A person who is liable to defensive harm has forfeited his rights against the imposition of the harm, and so is not wronged if that harm is imposed. A number of philosophers, most notably Jeff McMahan, argue for an instrumental account of liability, whereby a person is liable to defensive harm when he is either morally or culpably responsible for an unjust threat of harm to others, and when the imposition of defensive harm is necessary to avert the threatened unjust (...) harm. Others may favour a purely noninstrumental account of liability: one that looks only to the past behaviour of the potentially liable person. We argue that both views are vulnerable to serious objections. Instead we develop and defend a new view of liability to defensive harm: the pluralist account. The pluralist account states that liability to defensive harm has at least two bases. First, if an attacker is morally or culpably responsible for an unjust attack then he has forfeited what we call his agency right, and in doing so he has made himself partially liable to defensive harm. Whether the attacker is fully liable to defensive harm depends, however, on whether the imposition of defensive harm would infringe a different right held by the attacker: his humanitarian right. Humanitarian rights are rights to be provided with urgently needed resources or to be protected from serious harms when others can do so at reasonably low cost. We argue the pluralist account avoids the objections to which the instrumental and noninstrumental views are vulnerable, coheres with our intuitive reactions in a wide range of cases, and sheds new light on the way different rights combine to determine a person's liability to suffer harm. (shrink)

Iris Murdoch and moral philosophy -- Understanding the other: a Gadamerian view on conceptual schemes -- Language not mysterious? -- Celan and the recovery of language -- Nationalism and modernity -- Conditions of an unforced consensus on human rights -- Democratic exclusion (and its remedies?) -- Religious mobilizations -- Themes from a secular age -- The immanent counter-enlightenment -- Notes on the sources of violence: perennial and modern -- The future of the religious past -- Disenchantment-re-enchantment -- What does secularism (...) mean? -- Die blosse Vernunft ("reason alone") -- Perils of moralism -- What was the Axial revolution? (shrink)

In the recent philosophical literature, several counterexamples to the interpretative principle that symmetry-related models are physically equivalent have been suggested The Oxford handbook of philosophy of physics, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013, Noûs 52:946–981, 2018; Fletcher in Found Phys 50:228–249, 2020). Arguments based on these counterexamples can be understood as arguments from scientific practice of roughly the following form: because in scientific practice such-and-such symmetry-related models are treated as representing distinct physical situations, these models indeed represent distinct physical situations. In (...) this paper, a strategy for analysing arguments of this type is presented and applied to the examples that can be found in the literature. I argue that if we are exclusively interested in models understood as representing entire possible worlds, arguments from scientific practice should involve some additional assumptions to guarantee they are relevant for models understood in this way. However, none of the examples presented in the literature satisfy all these additional assumptions, which leads to the conclusion that arguments from scientific practice based on these examples do not undermine the interpretative principle that different symmetry-related models represent the same possible world. (shrink)

Inaccurate body size judgements are associated with body image disturbances, a clinical feature of many eating disorders. Accordingly, body related stimuli have become increasingly important in the study of estimation inaccuracies and body image disturbances. Technological advancements in the last decade have led to an increased use of computer generated (CG) body stimuli in body image research. However, recent face perception research has suggested that CG face stimuli are not recognised as readily and may not fully tap facial processing mechanisms. (...) The current study assessed the effectiveness of using CG stimuli in an established body size estimation task (the ‘bodyline’ task). Specifically, we examined whether employing CG body stimuli alters body size judgments and associated estimation biases. One hundred and six 17- to 25-year-old females completed the CG bodyline task, which involved estimating the size of full-length CG body stimuli along a visual analogue scale. Our results show that perception of body size for CG stimuli was non-linear. Participants struggled to discriminate between extreme bodies sizes and overestimated the size change between near to average bodies. Furthermore, one of our measured size estimation biases was larger for CG stimuli. Our collective findings suggest using caution when employing CG stimuli in experimental research on body perception. (shrink)

Przedwczesna śmierć samoświadomej istoty, nawet całkowicie bezbolesna, nie jest obojętna moralnie. I nie ma znaczenia, czy istota ta jest człowiekiem. Stanowisko to, nierzadkie dziś na gruncie animal studies, jako jeden z pierwszych przyjął i uzasadnił Tom Regan. W niniejszym artykule przedstawiono jego argumentację – opisano dwie najważniejsze zasady Stanowiska praw: Zasadę szacunku i Zasadę krzywdy oraz relacje między kategoriami podmiotów moralnych, obiektów moralnej troski i podmiotów życia. Zrekonstruowano i przeanalizowano problem etycznego wymiaru śmierci zwierzęcia, jako jednostki, naszkicowano też konsekwencje hipotetycznego (...) przyjęcia Stanowiska Praw dla dopuszczonych dziś prawnie i powszechnie stosowanych praktyk wobec zwierząt pozaludzkich. (shrink)

Although task-unrelated thinking has been increasingly investigated in recent years, the content and correlates of everyday off-task thought in clinical d...

The analysis of Political Action Committee activities is dominated by the perspective that PAC contributions are a rational investment in political candidates; they yield valuable short-term payoffs. PACs buy access to officeholders and their votes on important legislation. Despite broad acceptance of this morally suspect theory, the evidence upon which it is based is weak. An alternative perspective — what we call the principled approach — both fits the evidence and rejects the morally repugnant interpretation of the relationship between business (...) and politics that permeates the rational investment perspective. (shrink)

After nearly three decades of discussion about sustainable development are we any nearer to achieving it? And do we even know what a sustainable world will look like for future generations? Early definitions of sustainable development were so broad as to allow a range of interpretations based largely on individual interests and anthropocentric needs. We are measuring the performance of countless indicators of sustainable development, but is this more an exercise in applying data than meaningful progress? This article explores the (...) ultimate goals of sustainable development and the most important means of achieving this by analyzing and comparing two frameworks designed to direct attention to the fundamental means and the ends of sustainable development. (shrink)

In the decades since the Science Wars of the 1990s, climate science has become a crucible for the negotiation of claims about reality and expertise. This negotiation, which has drawn explicitly on the ideas and techniques of science and technology studies, has taken place in genres of fiction as well as non-fiction, which intersect in surprising ways. In this case study, I focus on two interwoven strands of this history. One follows Michael Crichton’s best-selling 2004 novel, State of Fear and (...) its reception by neo-conservatives as a commentary on the mis-uses of facts to stoke fear about anthropogenic climate change. The other considers Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway’s 2010 publishing success Merchants of Doubt as the inverse, a demonstration of the forms of disinformation that have been used to undermine scientific consensus around climate change. I show that both Crichton’s as well as Oreskes and Conway’s approaches were critiqued by academic STS even as their accounts constituted the most high-profile performances of its stakes and the politics of knowledge since the Science Wars. In highlighting the STS practices deployed by each, as well as how those practices were differently linked to accusations of fear-mongering and a perversion of the purity of STS, I demonstrate the need for a reflexive history of STS. Such an approach, I argue, can better consider the social life of STS ideas and practices amidst calls for more politically-engaged approaches to knowledge production. (shrink)

Since its advent in the 20th century, informed consent has become a cornerstone of ethical healthcare, and obtaining it a core obligation in medical contexts. In my dissertation, I aim to examine the theoretical underpinnings of informed consent and identify what values it is taken to protect. I will suggest that the fundamental motivation behind informed consent rests in something I’ll call bodily self-sovereignty, which I argue involves a coupling of two groups of values: autonomy and non-domination on the one (...) hand, and self-ownership and personal integrity on the other. I will then go on to consider two 'case studies' I take to shed light on what is at stake in securing informed consent - consent in psychiatrically ill populations, and consent to interventions that involve the modification of the genetic germline. (shrink)