One of the most legendary educational books ever written is Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “Émile ou de l’Education”. Most obviously Rousseau wrote this book guided by diverse more or less conscious purposes and one of the main problems it presents is paradoxical: Does education have to promote freedom by force? In this article I will, firstly, present several aims that might have triggered Rousseau to write “Émile”. Secondly, I will discuss Rousseau’s view of the so called “educational paradox”. Since this quandary touches (...) the topic of many other of his books, I will discuss “Émile” along with Rousseau’s other works and thus place his educational story in his “great narrative”. (shrink)

This article discusses the way humans value nature, with a focus on the way they value nature aesthetically. Of particular interest are the values of children and adolescents and the role of aesthetics in scientific studies. The discussion is based on philosophical writings, especially aesthetic sources, and current environmental education empirical research. Our aim is to show the necessity the science lessons have of an unambiguous aesthetic dimension. With flexible teaching methods that partly take place outdoor, the students' own values (...) and aesthetic experiences become a prompting starting point for understanding humankind’s role in nature. (shrink)

Cultural diversity between residents and staff is significant in aged care homes in many developed nations in the context of international migration. This diversity can be a challenge to achieving effective cross‐cultural communication. The aim of this study was to critically examine how staff and residents initiated effective cross‐cultural communication and social cohesion that enabled positive changes to occur. A critical hermeneutic analysis underpinned by Giddens’ Structuration Theory was applied to the study. Data were collected by interviews with residents or (...) their family and by focus groups with staff in four aged care homes in Australia. Findings reveal that residents and staff are capable of restructuring communication via a partnership approach. They can also work in collaboration to develop communication resources. When staff demonstrate cultural humility, they empower residents from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds to engage in effective communication. Findings also suggest that workforce interventions are required to improve residents’ experiences in cross‐cultural care. This study challenges aged care homes to establish policies, criteria and procedures in cross‐cultural communication. There is also the challenge to provide ongoing education and training for staff to improve their cross‐cultural communication capabilities. (shrink)

How would feminist concerns fare in the debate between Confucian role ethics and virtue ethics? Ann Pang-White sketches the contours of a non-dichotomous, role-based virtue ethics that is illuminated by a Confucian feminist account as one possible answer to this query. By reimagining the virtues of chastity and filiality that are indispensable to Confucian contexts, Pang-White seeks to develop a reading that can be useful in defending feminist values and replacing outdated understandings of gender roles in societies informed by Confucian (...) thought today. In continuing the conversation with her, Stephen Angle asks whether a modernized, relational, role-based virtue ethics can really suffice to respond to feminist concerns. Sarah Mattice proposes that Pang-White center intersectional perspectives on feminism for the latter’s project, while Lily Zhang invites her to analyze how certain ethical conflicts that arise within the framework of Confucian ethics between roles and virtues can be resolved from Pang-White’s perspective. Pang-White’s reply to the panel reiterates different aspects of her relational role-based virtue ethical reading of Confucian feminism to argue that a better appreciation of the situatedness and imperfections of morality is needed to understand the imperfections that come in with it. _ _. (shrink)

Background Recent publications reveal shortcomings in evidence review and summarization methods for patient decision aids. In the large-scale "Share to Care (S2C)" Shared Decision Making (SDM) project at the University Hospital Kiel, Germany, one of 4 SDM interventions was to develop up to 80 decision aids for patients. Best available evidence on the treatments' impact on patient-relevant outcomes was systematically appraised to feed this information into the decision aids. Aims of this paper were to (1) describe how PtDAs are developed (...) and how S2C evidence reviews for each PtDA are conducted, (2) appraise the quality of the best available evidence identified and (3) identify challenges associated with identified evidence. Methods The quality of the identified evidence was assessed based on GRADE quality criteria and categorized into high-, moderate-, low-, very low-quality evidence. Evidence appraisal was conducted across all outcomes assessed in an evidence review and for specific groups of outcomes, namely mortality, morbidity, quality of life, and treatment harms. Challenges in evidence interpretation and summarization resulting from the characteristics of decision aids and the type and quality of evidence are identified and discussed. Conclusions Evidence reviews in this project were carefully conducted and summarized. However, the evidence identified for our decision aids was indeed a "scattered landscape" and often poor quality. Facing a high prevalence of low-quality, non-directly comparative evidence for treatment alternatives doesn't mean it is not necessary to choose an evidence-based approach to inform patients. While there is an urgent need for high quality comparative trials, best available evidence nevertheless has to be appraised and transparently communicated to patients. (shrink)

À travers l'analyse de la correspondance entre Leibniz et Wolff, l'article cherche à restituer les modalités démonstratives utilisées par Leibniz pour transmettre sa dynamique ainsi que le dispositif métaphysique qui lui est inhérent. Il est question ici de l'ambivalence du vocable d'action, à la fois objet du principe de conservation et essence de la substance. C'est en étudiant sa réception par Wolff qu'il est possible de mettre en évidence, dès 1705, la singularité d'un cadre métaphysique wolffien qui accueille (...) la dynamique leibnizienne de l'action, puis la publicise, tout en proposant une acception irréductiblement différente de la substance. (shrink)

Anne-Lise Rey’s account of Maupertuis’s physical theology challenges the efforts on the part of commentators to align his work with Newton, Leibniz, or critics of Leibniz by examining the innovative epistemological principles that inform his Essay on Cosmology (1750). Through an analysis of his proofs of the existence of God in this work, she investigates Maupertuis’s view on how we can obtain certain knowledge of nature and the place he affords to experimentation and contingency in this regard. Rey claims that (...) Maupertuis, despite his hostility toward Descartes, Leibniz, and Wolff, did not abolish the idea of a metaphysics of nature per se, but tried to strike a new balance between, on the one hand, the deduction of laws from the nature of bodies and, on the other hand, experimentation. More specifically, she argues that Maupertuis in the Essay on Cosmology affirms our epistemic incapacity to grasp the whole system of nature and, hence, argues that the probable truths we can obtain in physics by means of experiments are superior to the geometrical truths that Descartes and his followers aimed to establish in both physics and metaphysics. (shrink)

Taking Parenting Public makes a compelling case that parenting has become dangerously undervalued in America today. It calls for a new investment—both personal and public—into the work of raising children and argues that we are all "stockholders" in the next generation. With a foreword by Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Cornel West, Taking Parenting Public crosses boundaries to bring together thinkers from diverse fields spanning the political spectrum. It features contributions from distinguished experts in economics, political science, public policy, child development, (...) public health, history, and the media. While recent books have focused on working mothers or absent fathers, Taking Parenting Public is the first volume to take a comprehensive look at the common struggles of parents. These essays go beyond the usual chest-beating about busy parents torn between work and family demands to suggest bold solutions. Instead of the typical call for "parent replacement"—more child care, more after school programs and more mentors—the contributors offer fresh strategies for "parent replenishment," ways to put mothers and fathers back into the lives of their children not only as economic providers, but also as emotional and moral providers. (shrink)

Freundschaft, so Arendt in ihrem Denktagebuch,gehört zu den ”tätigen Modi des Lebendigseins“, und Briefe sind deren herausragende Zeugnisse. Dieser Band versammelt weitgehend unveröffentlichte Briefwechsel der politischen Philosophin mit ihren langjährigen Freundinnen Charlotte Beradt, Rose Feitelson, Hilde Fränkel, Anne Weil-Mendelsohn und Helen Wolff. Neben den gemeinsamen Projekten prägte die Freundschaften auch, dass alle Frauen die Wirklichkeiten von Emigration und Immigration kannten. Die Briefwechsel führen mitten hinein in Arendts Gedanken- und Arbeitswelt, sie erzählen Privates und Alltägliches aus fünf sehr unterschiedlichen, intensiv (...) gelebten Freundschaften. (Quelle: www.buchhandel.de). (shrink)

Machine learning algorithms bring out an under-appreciated puzzle of discrimination, namely figuring out when a decision made on the basis of a factor correlated with race is a decision made on the basis of race. I argue that prevailing approaches, which are based on identifying and then distinguishing among causal effects of race, in their metaphysical timidity, fail to get off the ground. I suggest, instead, that adopting a constructivist theory of race answers this puzzle in a principled manner. On (...) what I call a “thick constructivist” account of race, to be raced is to be socially positioned in the way indicated by a certain set of statistical regularities on the basis of particular phenotypical traits. A thick constructivist sees that acting on the basis of correlations that constitute race qua social position just is acting on the basis of race, because races just are social positions that subject their member individuals to a particular matrix of social relations that define the raced position. This conclusion has considerable ramifications for our understanding of discrimination, algorithms and beyond. (shrink)

The revised edition of this highly successful text provides a clear and accessible introduction to some of the most important questions of political philosophy. Organized around major issues, Wolff provides the structure that beginners need, while also introducing some distinctive ideas of his own.

How could ectogestative technology disrupt gender roles, parenting practices, and concepts such as ‘birth’, ‘body’, or ‘parent’? In this chapter, we situate this emerging technology in the context of the history of reproductive technologies and analyse the potential social and conceptual disruptions to which it could contribute. An ectogestative device, better known as ‘artificial womb’, enables the extra-uterine gestation of a human being, or mammal more generally. It is currently developed with the main goal of improving the survival chances of (...) extremely premature neonates. We argue that the intended use of the technology in neonatal intensive care units, as an alternative to current incubators (’partial-ectogestation’), challenges concepts such as ‘birth’, ‘fetus’, and ‘neonate’, and has several ethico-legal implications. We moreover address a more futuristic scenario where the entire embryological and fetal development could happen within an artificial womb (’full-ectogestation’). Such a scenario reveals the disruption of gender roles, parenting practices, and concepts such as ‘mother’, ‘father’, and ‘parent’. Both full- and partial-ectogestation would have implications for engineering and design, law-making, ethics, and philosophical anthropology. (shrink)

Wolff's book defends the Kantian idea of a "general logic" whose principles underlie special systems of deductive logic. It thus undermines "logical pluralism," which tolerates the co-existence of divergent systems of modern logic without asking for consistent common principles. Part I of Wolff’s book identifies the formal language in which the most general principles of logic must be expressed. This language turns out to be a version of syllogistic language already used by Aristotle. The universal validity of logical (...) principles, as well as the translatability of other logical languages into this language, are shown to depend only on the meanings of its logical vocabulary. Part II of the book answers the metalogical question concerning the deductive relation between general logic and special logical systems, which also have their own (less general) principles. This part identifies the rules according to which logical rules can be derived from principles. The main result of the book is that the highest principles of logic and metalogics are provided by the syllogistic, when properly understood. (shrink)

Much of the research on theory of mind (ToM) approaches ToM as a unitary construct; on such an account, mental state understanding across different contexts reflects the same cognitive process. Some researchers, however, suggest that ToM can be separated into different components that contribute differently to the understanding of people's minds. Evidence from developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience supports the notion that ToM consists of at least two components. Three different componential views are discussed: (1) early‐ versus late‐developing components, (2) (...) social‐perceptual versus social‐cognitive components, and (3) affective versus cognitive components. (shrink)

"The work is on an important topic that has been oft debated but rarely systematically studied – the political, cultural, and moral effects of distant news coverage of suffering. [The book] is extremely well steeped in the relevant literature, including semiotics, discourse analysis, meda and social theory and makes a fresh methodological contribution by looking at the codes and formats of news about suffering. It has a fresh vision and answer to some of the stickiest moral and media problems of (...) our time … and deserves to find its place among important books about the moral aspects of media and society in our times." —John D. Peters, F. Wendell Miller Distinguished Professor, University of Ohio This book is about the relationship between the spectators in countries of the west, and the distant sufferer on the television screen; the sufferer in Somalia, Nigeria, Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, but also from New York and Washington DC. How do we relate to television images of the distant sufferer? The question touches on the ethical role of the media in public life today. They address the issue of whether the media can cultivate a disposition of care for and engagement with the far away other; whether television can create a global public with a sense of social responsibility towards the distant sufferer. (shrink)

Recent advances in machine learning methods have created opportunities to eliminate unfairness from algorithmic decision making. Multiple computational techniques (i.e., algorithmic fairness criteria) have arisen out of this work. Yet, urgent questions remain about the perceived fairness of these criteria and in which situations organizations should use them. In this paper, we seek to gain insight into these questions by exploring fairness perceptions of five algorithmic criteria. We focus on two key dimensions of fairness evaluations: distributive fairness and procedural fairness. (...) We shed light on variation in the potential for different algorithmic criteria to facilitate distributive fairness. Subsequently, we discuss procedural fairness and provide a framework for understanding how algorithmic criteria relate to essential aspects of this construct, which helps to identify when a specific criterion is suitable. From a practical standpoint, we encourage organizations to recognize that managing fairness in machine learning systems is complex, and that adopting a blind or one-size-fits-all mentality toward algorithmic criteria will surely damage people’s attitudes and trust in automated technology. Instead, firms should carefully consider the subtle yet significant differences between these technical solutions. (shrink)

The development of highly humanoid sex robots is on the technological horizon. If sex robots are integrated into the legal community as “electronic persons”, the issue of sexual consent arises, which is essential for legally and morally permissible sexual relations between human persons. This paper explores whether it is conceivable, possible, and desirable that humanoid robots should be designed such that they are capable of consenting to sex. We consider reasons for giving both “no” and “yes” answers to these three (...) questions by examining the concept of consent in general, as well as critiques of its adequacy in the domain of sexual ethics; the relationship between consent and free will; and the relationship between consent and consciousness. Additionally we canvass the most influential existing literature on the ethics of sex with robots. (shrink)

Who gets to decide what it means to live a healthy lifestyle, and how important a healthy lifestyle is to a good life? As more governments make preventing obesity and diet-related illness a priority, it's become more important to consider the ethics and acceptability of their efforts. When it comes to laws and policies that promote healthy eating--such as special taxes on sugary drinks and the banning of food deemed unhealthy--critics argue that these policies are paternalistic, and that they limit (...) individual autonomy over food choices. In Healthy Eating Policy and Political Philosophy: A Public Reason Approach, Anne Barnhill and Matteo Bonotti show that both paternalistic justifications for healthy eating efforts and anti-paternalistic arguments against them can be grounded in perfectionist views that overly prioritize some values over others. The authors therefore propose a more inclusive, public reason approach to healthy eating policy that will be appealing to those who take pluralism and cultural diversity seriously, by providing a framework through which different kinds of values, including but not limited to autonomy and health, can be factored into the public justification for healthy eating efforts. Additionally, the book adopts a 'farm to fork' approach to the ethics of healthy eating efforts: it engages with theories and debates in political philosophy, considers the implications of different theoretical positions for healthy eating efforts, and then develops a concrete tool for assessing policies that will be of interest to both scholars and policymakers. As well as offering a novel normative analysis of healthy eating policy, the authors offer a new theoretical framework that will be applicable to a wide range of public policy scenarios. (shrink)

本书是以其著作《庄子喃哗》、《孟子旁通》、《易经杂说》、《老子他说》、《论语别裁》中撷取的对国学思想的点滴感悟,结合古今中外的例证加以扩展,将人生的智慧娓娓道来.

Moral bioenhancement, nudge-designed environments, and ambient persuasive technologies may help people behave more consistently with their deeply held moral convictions. Alternatively, they may aid people in overcoming cognitive and affective limitations that prevent them from appreciating a situation’s moral dimensions. Or they may simply make it easier for them to make the morally right choice by helping them to overcome sources of weakness of will. This paper makes two assumptions. First, technologies to improve people’s moral capacities are realizable. Second, such (...) technologies will actually help people get morality right and behave more consistently with whatever the ‘real’ right thing to do turns out to be. The paper then considers whether or not humanity loses anything valuable, particularly opportunities for moral progress, when being moral is made much easier by eliminating difficult moral deliberation and internal moral struggle. Ultimately, the worry that moral struggle has value as a catalyst for moral progress is rejected. Moral progress is understood here as the discovery and application of new values or sensitization to new sources of harm. (shrink)

Examines how violence has been conceptually and rhetorically put to use in continental social theory.

In this chapter we take stock of some of the complexities of the sprawling field of AI ethics. We consider questions like "what is the proper scope of AI ethics?" And "who counts as an AI ethicist?" At the same time, we flag several potential uses and abuses of AI ethics. These include challenges for the AI ethicist, including what qualifications they should have; the proper place and extent of futuring and speculation in the field; and the dilemmas concerning how (...) we use our public and academic resources. (shrink)

_Examines how violence has been conceptually and rhetorically put to use in continental social theory._.

There are countless circumstances under which random individuals COULD act together to prevent something morally bad from happening or to remedy a morally bad situation. But when OUGHT individuals to act together in order to bring about a morally important outcome? Building on Philip Pettit’s and David Schweikard’s account of joint action, I will put forward the notion of joint duties: duties to perform an action together that individuals in so-called random or unstructured groups can jointly hold. I will show (...) how this account of joint duties is preferable to one which defends individual duties to cooperate. I then discuss the limits of joint duties and the ways in which one can fail to comply with them. It will become apparent that the circumstances under which individuals in random collectives acquire such joint duties are rare. (shrink)

This book discusses comprehensively the use of Flipped Classrooms in the context of legal education. The Flipped Classroom model implies that lecture modules are delivered online to provide more time for in-class interactivity. This book analyses the pedagogical viability, costs and other resource-related implications, technical aspects as well as the production and online distribution of Flipped Classrooms. It compares the Flipped Classroom concept with traditional law teaching methods and details its advantages and limitations. The findings are tested by way of (...) a case study which serves as the basis for the development of comprehensive guidelines for the concept's practical implementation. As Flipped Classrooms have become a very hot topic across disciplines in recent years, this book offers a unique resource for law teachers, law school managers as well as researchers in the field of legal education. It is a must-have for anyone interested in innovative law teaching methodologies. (shrink)

Metaphor has a double life. It can be described as a directional process in which a stable, familiar base domain provides inferential structure to a less clearly specified target. But metaphor is also described as a process of finding commonalities, an inherently symmetric process. In this second view, both concepts may be altered by the metaphorical comparison. Whereas most theories of metaphor capture one of these aspects, we offer a model based on structure-mapping that captures both sides of metaphor processing. (...) This predicts (a) an initial processing stage of symmetric alignment; and (b) a later directional phase in which inferences are projected to the target. To test these claims, we collected comprehensibility judgments for forward (e.g., “A rumor is a virus”) and reversed (“A virus is a rumor”) metaphors at early and late stages of processing, using a deadline procedure. We found an advantage for the forward direction late in processing, but no directional preference early in processing. Implications for metaphor theory are discussed. (shrink)

Addiction appears to be a deeply moralized concept. To understand the entwinement of addiction and morality, we briefly discuss the disease model and its alternatives in order to address the following questions: Is the disease model the only path towards a ‘de-moralized’ discourse of addiction? While it is tempting to think that medical language surrounding addiction provides liberation from the moralized language, evidence suggests that this is not necessarily the case. On the other hand non-disease models of addiction may seem (...) to resuscitate problematic forms of the moralization of addiction, including, invoking blame, shame, and the wholesale rejection of addicts as people who have deep character flaws, while ignoring the complex biological and social context of addiction. This is also not necessarily the case. We argue that a deficit in reasons responsiveness as basis for attribution of moral responsibility can be realized by multiple different causes, disease being one, but it also seems likely that alternative accounts of addiction as developed by Flanagan, Lewis, and Levy, may also involve mechanisms, psychological, social, and neurobiological that can diminish reasons responsiveness. It thus seems to us that nondisease models of addiction do not necessarily involve moralization. Hence, a non-stigmatizing approach to recovery can be realized in ways that are consistent with both the disease model and alternative models of addiction. (shrink)

In this article, I will consider whether, and in what way, doxastic states can harm. I’ll first consider whether, and in what way, a person’s doxastic state can harm her, before turning to the question of whether, and in what way, it can harm someone else.

In this chapter we identify three potentially morally problematic behaviours that are common among users of dating and hook-up apps (DHAs) and provide arguments as to why they may or may not be considered (a) in a category of their own, distinct from similar behaviours outside of DHAs; (b) caused or facilitated by affordances and business logic of DHAs; (c) as indeed morally wrong. We also consider ways in which morally problematic behaviours can be anticipated, mitigated, or even prevented by (...) analysis of the ethical and moral dimensions of technologies and their afforded uses. Finally, we offer some possible directions for future work on these topics in particular and on the ethical consequences of DHAs in general. (shrink)

Why equality cannot be conditional on a shared human “nature” but has to be for all For centuries, ringing declarations about all men being created equal appealed to a shared human nature as the reason to consider ourselves equals. But appeals to natural equality invited gradations of natural difference, and the ambiguity at the heart of “nature” enabled generations to write of people as equal by nature while barely noticing the exclusion of those marked as inferior by their gender, race, (...) or class. Despite what we commonly tell ourselves, these exclusions and gradations continue today. In Unconditional Equals, political philosopher Anne Phillips challenges attempts to justify equality by reference to a shared human nature, arguing that justification turns into conditions and ends up as exclusion. Rejecting the logic of justification, she calls instead for a genuinely unconditional equality. Drawing on political, feminist, and postcolonial theory, Unconditional Equals argues that we should understand equality not as something grounded in shared characteristics but as something people enact when they refuse to be considered inferiors. At a time when the supposedly shared belief in human equality is so patently not shared, the book makes a powerful case for seeing equality as a commitment we make to ourselves and others, and a claim we make on others when they deny us our status as equals. (shrink)

Demeurer fidèle à la singularité et à la richesse de l'expérience humaine en y introduisant le plus de raison possible, telle est la tâche première de la philosophie. De livre en livre, depuis près de trente ans, Francis Wolff s'attelle sereinement à élaborer une philosophie au sens classique du terme, ni une simple exégèse des Classiques ni la déconstruction des systèmes. Une philosophie qui englobe une métaphysique, une théorie de la connaissance, une définition de l'être humain et toutes leurs (...) conséquences morales, politiques et esthétiques. Dans ce dialogue passionnant, amical et sans concession avec André Comte-Sponville, Francis Wolff invite à une traversée de son œuvre dans un style accessible et allègre. Il montre les liens qui unissent sa vision du monde à son esthétique (l'universalité de la musique, des images et des récits), en passant par l'anthropologie (l'homme, « animal dialogique »), l'éthique (l'existence de la liberté et l'objectivité du bien) et la politique (de la démocratie au cosmopolitisme). Donnant corps à une philosophie généreuse et résolument contemporaine, le livre dévoile un autoportrait attachant ainsi qu'un itinéraire familial singulier croisant une des grandes tragédies du siècle dernier. André Comte-Sponville note dans son Avant-Propos : « Je ne connais pas, à notre époque et dans notre pays, de philosophe dont la pensée soit plus forte, plus savante et plus rigoureuse que la sienne. ». (shrink)

People hold wildly opposing and very strong views on the question whether mental disorders are brain disorders, and the disagreement is primarily a conceptual one, not one about whether there are,...