ETHICS: DISCOVERING RIGHT AND WRONG, 8E is a conversational and non-dogmatic overview of ethical theory. Written by one of contemporary philosophy's top teachers and revised by a best selling author, this textbook even-handedly raises important ethical questions and challenges readers to develop their own moral theories by applying them. This revision also presents an even broader presentation of various positions, featuring more feminist and multicultural perspectives as well. ETHICS: DISCOVERING RIGHT AND WRONG, 8E begins with easy to read chapters that (...) introduce questions of meta-ethics and major moral theories. Later chapters address special topics in personal and religious ethics as well as the most recent developments in moral theory, including a new chapter on Biology and Ethics. Study questions for each chapter, along with useful bibliographies, make grasping the material more accessible than ever. Important Notice: Media content referenced within the product description or the product text may not be available in the ebook version. (shrink)

For many religious people there is a problem of doubting various credal statements contained in their religions. Often propositional beliefs are looked upon as necessary conditions for salvation. This causes great anxiety in doubters and raises the question of the importance of belief in religion and in life in general. It is a question that has been neglected in philosophy of religion and theology. In this paper I shall explore the question of the importance of belief as a religious attitude (...) and suggest that there is at least one other attitude which may be adequate for religious faith even in the absence of belief. (shrink)

Covering the major issues of the field succinctly and lucidly, this text takes an analytically rigorous approach and makes it accessible in presentation. Pojman writes from an impartial perspective, presenting various options and points of view while guiding students in their own search for truth over these often emotion-laden, crucial issues.

The central claim of Kant's political philosophy is that rational agents sharing a territory can justifiably be forced to live under a state; they have, in Kant's words, a duty of right to leave the state of nature. Perhaps something along these lines is entailed by any theory of state legitimacy, but the point raises special difficulties for Kant. He believes that rational agents have a right to freedom; that is, he believes that a rational agent's external freedom - her (...) ability to set and pursue ends for herself without being subject to the choices of others - can justifiably be restricted only for the sake of external freedom itself. To establish that human beings can be forced to join a civil condition, it will therefore not do to show that the state promotes security, prosperity or any other such value: Kant has to show that human beings living side by side need a state to be free. (shrink)

Affirmative Action is becoming the most controversial social issue of our day. In this essay I examine nine arguments on the moral status of Affirmative Action. I distinguish between weak Affirmative Action, which seeks to provide fair opportunity to all citizens from strong Affirmative Action, which enjoins preferential treatment to groups who have been underrepresented in social positions. I conclude that while weak Affirmative Action is morally required, strong Affirmative Action is morally wrong.

This paper offers a phenomenological or hermeneutic reading—employing Heidegger's notion of the 'ontological difference'—of certain central aspects of schizophrenic experience. The main focus is on signs and symptoms that have traditionally been taken to indicate either 'poor reality-testing' or else 'poverty of content of speech' (defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders III-R as: “speech that is adequate in amount but conveys little information because of vagueness, empty repetitions, or use of stereotyped or obscure phrases"). I argue (...) that, at least in some cases, the tendency to attribute these signs of illness to the schizophrenic patient results from a failure to recognize that such patients—as part of a quasi-solipsistic orientation and alienation from more normal, pragmatic concerns—may be grappling with issues of what Heidegger would call an ontological rather than an ontic type, issues concerned not with entities but with Being (i.e. not with objects in the world but with the overall status of the world itself). An application of the Heideggerian concept of the ontological difference has the potential to alter one's sense of the lived-worlds of such patients, of what they may be attempting to communicate, and of why communication with them so often breaks down. (shrink)

Here we consider interpersonal experience in schizophrenia, melancholia, and mania. Our goal is to improve understanding of similarities and differences in how other people can be experienced in these disorders, through a review of first-person accounts and case examples and of contemporary and classic literature on the phenomenology of these disorders. We adopt a tripartite/dialectical structure: first we explore main differences as traditionally described; next we consider how the disorders may resemble each other; finally we discuss more subtle but perhaps (...) foundational ways in which the phenomenology of these disorders may nonetheless be differentiated. These involve disruptions of common sense and conventionality, abnormalities of empathy, distinct forms of paranoia and the sense of personal centrality, and altered perceptions of intentionality, deadness, and artificiality. We end by considering some neurocognitive research relevant to these abnormal forms of subjectivity, including work on theory of mind, experience of human movement, and perception of faces. (shrink)

The concept of desert, which once enjoyed a central place in political and ethical theory, has been relegated to the margins of much of contemporary theory, if not excluded altogether. Recently a renewed interest in the topic has emerged, and several philosophers have argued that the notion merits a more central place in political and ethical theory. Some of these philosophers contend that justice exists to the extent that people receive exactly what they deserve, while others argue that desert should (...) replace such considerations as rights, need, and equality as the basis for distributions. Still others argue that morality involves a fitting match between one's moral character and a degree of happiness. All of these positions have encountered opposition from egalitarians, libertarians, and those who are skeptical about the coherence of the concept of desert. The first anthology of its kind, What Do We Deserve? is a balanced collection of readings that brings sharply opposing positions and arguments together and stimulates debate over the meaning and significance of desert in current thought. The book begins with eight classical readings on desert (by Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Smith, Kant, Mill, Sidgwick, and Ross), and later turns to contemporary interpretations of the issue. The selections examine the concept itself, analyze its relationship to the ideas of freedom and responsibility, engage in the debate between John Rawls and his critics on the merits of desert, and, finally, study the wider role and significance of desert in political and ethical theory. (shrink)

The Greeks are on trial. They have been for generations, if not millennia, from Rome in the first century, to Romanticism in the nineteenth. We debate the place of the Greeks in the university curriculum, in New World culture--we even debate the place of the Greeks in the European Union. This book notices the lingering and half-hidden presence of the Greeks in some strange places--everywhere from the US Supreme Court to the Modern Olympic Games--and in so doing makes an important (...) new contribution to a very old debate. (shrink)

The moral right to privacy consists of the power to determine who may gain access to information about oneself. Individual human beings need some measure of privacy in order to develop a sense of self and to avoid manipulation by the state. Journalists who respect the privacy rights of those on whom they report should especially be careful not to intrude unduly when gathering information, in publishing they should be able to demonstrate a public need to know private information. Individual (...) journalists should establish their own guidelines for reporting on the private lives of different categories of people in the news. (shrink)

Ideal for introductory ethics courses, The Moral Life: An Introductory Reader in Ethics and Literature, Fifth Edition, brings together an extensive and varied collection of ninety-one classical and contemporary readings on ethical theory and practice. Integrating literature with philosophy in an innovative way, this unique anthology uses literary works to enliven and make concrete the ethical theory or applied issues addressed. It also emphasizes the personal dimension of ethics, which is often ignored or minimized in ethics anthologies. The readings are (...) enhanced by chapter introductions, study questions, suggestions for further reading, and biographical sketches. The fifth edition adds ten new readings, eight of which appear in two new chapters: Feminist Ethics and the Ethics of Care and Global Economic Justice. An updated Companion Website at www.oup.com/us/pojman provides self-quizzes, essay questions, and helpful links for students and reading summaries, a test bank, and PowerPoint-based lecture slides for instructors. (shrink)

Abstract A unique aspect of human communication is the utilization of sets of well- delineated entities, the morphology of which is used to encode the letters of the alphabet. In this paper, we focus on Braille as an exemplar of this phenomenon. We take a Braille cell to be a physical artifact of the human environment, into the structure of which is encoded a representation of a letter of the alphabet. The specific issue we address in this paper concerns an (...) examination of how the code that is embedded in the structure of a Braille cell is transferred with fidelity from the environment through the body and into the Braille reader’s brain. We describe four distinct encoding steps that enable this transfer to occur. (shrink)

Engaging a listener’s trust imposes moral demands upon a presenter in respect of truthtelling and completeness. An agent lies by an utterance that satisfies what are herein defined as signal and mendacity conditions; an agent deceives when, in satisfaction of those conditions, the agent’s utterances contribute to a false belief or thwart a true one. I advert to how we may fool ourselves in observation and in the perception of our originality. Communication with others depends upon a convention or practice (...) of presumed nonuniversal truthfulness. In support of an asserted duty of nondeceptiveness, I offer a reconciliation of pertinent Kantian passages, a sketch of arguments within utilitarianism, contractarianism, and other views, and an account arguing for application of that duty to assertions, implicatures, omissions, equivocation, prevarication, and sophistry insofar as they affect listeners’ doxastic states. For scholarship, this duty is exceptionless. I describe the kernel of intellectual honesty as a virtuous disposition such that when presented with an incentive to deceive, the agent will not deceive. Intellectual honesty delivers candor when it counts. I contrast this with complementary virtues and the surpassing virtue of ingenuousness. An account is given of the connection between intellectual honesty and an influential physical model of integrity. (shrink)

This essay argues for the necessity of a phenomenological perspective on mind and mental disorder while also emphasizing the inherent difficulty of adopting such an orientation. Here I adopt a via negativa approach—by considering three forms of error that the phenomenologists Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty recognize as needing to be guarded against, lest they subvert the project of attaining an adequate understanding of consciousness or subjectivity: namely (1) prejudices deriving from theory and common sense, (2) distorting effects (...) of reflection, and (3) what Heidegger termed the forgetting of the ontological difference. Phenomenology insists on the importance of studying subjective life while also acknowledging the epistemological paradoxes inherent to this domain—a domain whose very self-evidence is inseparable from mystery, whose visibility conceals a deeper invisibility. I consider these issues in light of phenomenology’s relevance for certain issues in psychopathology and literary representation. (shrink)

The current revival of communitarian thinking, alongside public journalism as its journalistic counterpart, is one response to thefractures that characterize modern society. I identifyfive symptoms/causes ofthefractured world. I then show, briefly, some contrasts between the communitarian ideal and that of liberal democracy. The conclusion calls for journalists to undertake the task of reworking our basic conceptual framework in ways that avoid the twin extreme, and naive anthropologies of individualism and collectivism in favor o f a communitarian view based upon acknowledgment (...) of human interdependence. (shrink)

Theories of equal human rights have experienced an exponential growth during the past thirty or forty years. From declarations of human rights, such as the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to arguments about the rights of fetuses versus the rights of women, to claims and counter claims about the rights of minorities to preferential hiring, the rights of animals to life and well-being, and the rights of trees to be preserved, the proliferation of rights affects every phase of (...) our socio-political discourse. Hardly a month goes by without a new book appearing on the subject. (shrink)

Utopics has two parts. The first is a study of Thomas More's Utopia, where the noun "utopia" appears for the first time. It attempts to provide the elements for a theoretical reflection on utopic signifying practice. The second part can be seen as an application of the first: It is an analysis of utopic and pseudo-topic spaces. Marin's analysis shows how utopian texts open the way to an alternative future.

We dispute Penn et al.'s claim of the sharp functional discontinuity between humans and nonhumans with evidence in bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus) of higher-order generalizations: spontaneous integration of previously learned rules and concepts in response to novel stimuli. We propose that species-general explanations that are in approach are more plausible than Penn et al.'s innatist approach of a genetically prespecified supermodule.

Reading both philosophical and theological texts, this book presents an argument against nostalgia: against the myth of a Golden Age, against the posture that sees "modernity" as a problem to be solved.

Much has been made of the ‘Southern difference’ in cultural and sociological images of the North American landscape. Everything isdifferent there: the cuisine, the music, the religion, and the politics. Moreover, the South was the crucible in which two of the definitive North American experiences were formed: the Civil War (1861–5) and the Civil Rights Movement a century later. This article poses another important category, in addition to ‘race and space’ – namely, the concept of tragedy, and the correlative rendering (...) of the South as ‘America's tragic landscape’. (shrink)

In this essay I begin with Aristotle’s perplexing observation that a tragic drama is a “whole,” one identified by a clear beginning, middle and ending. I pause to wonder how Aristotle imagines such ends, given his contention that a play concludes in such a way that “nothing can follow from it.” On the face of it, it is very difficult to imagine what Aristotle has in mind here. I suggest that one clue may be found in his title, Poetics, with (...) its clear suggestion that a dramatic event is in fact a making, a poiesis. I develop this idea to suggest that the end of a story, any story, tends to be something the reader imposes, often in the interest of generating a specific moral. I then display these readerly dynamics by providing a close reading of the famous story from Genesis, concerning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. I explore a number of different ways in which this story may be thought to “end,” as well as the implications of each such ending. (shrink)

Comprehensive and accessible, Moral Reasoning introduces students to the historical foundations of moral theory and contemporary ethics. Beginning with Aristotle, the text offers a careful, in-depth introduction to the many schools of moral thought that have contributed to Western philosophy, exploring such topics as utilitarianism, deontology, liberalism, human rights, virtue, and religious ethics. With contemporary examples incorporated throughout, this innovative new book fosters critical reflection on topical moral issues, encouraging students to develop a personal moral compass that transcends peer pressure (...) and ideology. (shrink)

De l’art, on peut poser la définition la plus large qu’il est production de formes. Et, dans cette perspective, on précisera que si toute production, bien au-delà de l’art, est une production de formes, celles auxquelles se confronte l’art, seraient celles destinées à recevoir toutes les autres formes : la forme réceptacle. Celle-ci, forme de la forme ou forme matricielle que les produc­tions dérivées déclinent jusqu’à l’épuisement, s’inscrit en un temps et en un lieu sous forme de norme. C’e...

Quand, en 1808, Fourier publie son premier ouvrage, la Théorie des Quatre mouvements, en Allemagne, se profile l’opposition Schopenhauer, Hegel. Celle-ci prend corps autour de la question de la représentation. Tandis que Hegel en dessine le dépassement avec la Phénoménologie de l’esprit, Schopenhauer la structure en fondement de sa philosophie dans sa thèse de la Quadruple racine du principe de Raison suffisante, avant d’en faire le maître mot qui définit les conditions du déplo...

Dans la perspective ouverte par Schopenhauer, la représentation tient son sens et sa limite, d’être la visibilité de la volonté. Mais, ce qui s’ouvre avec lui, est désormais pris dans la perspective de la logique de la déconsidération de toute transcendance, et s’inscrit dans la perspective de l’immanence absolue. Jean Baudrillard interroge ce moment du décrochage de la représentation d’avec son essence porteuse, qui ne laisse plus cours qu’à une représentation réduite à n’être qu’un simulacr...

Cet article étudie l’étendue de la convergence réelle entre les nanotechnologies et la biologie de synthèse, symbole des technosciences biologiques. Pour traiter la question de la dichotomie entre le niveau des objets auquel on observe un processus de pluralisation plutôt qu’une convergence, et le niveau des discours, où le scénario de la convergence semble rester l’explication dominante, nous développons une analyse des disciplines comme dispositifs au sens de Foucault. Cela permet de décrire précisément les différentes strates composant les dispositifs et (...) leurs dynamiques. La convergence des Nanotechnologies, des Biotechnologies, des technologies de l’Information et des sciences Cognitives apparaît alors comme l’interprétation réductrice d’un contexte scientifique et technologique complexe. (shrink)

Cet article étudie l’étendue de la convergence réelle entre les nanotechnologies et la biologie de synthèse, symbole des technosciences biologiques. Pour traiter la question de la dichotomie entre le niveau des objets auquel on observe un processus de pluralisation plutôt qu’une convergence, et le niveau des discours, où le scénario de la convergence semble rester l’explication dominante, nous développons une analyse des disciplines comme dispositifs au sens de Foucault. Cela permet de décrire précisément les différentes strates composant les dispositifs et (...) leurs dynamiques. La convergence des Nanotechnologies, des Biotechnologies, des technologies de l’Information et des sciences Cognitives (convergence NBIC) apparaît alors comme l’interprétation réductrice d’un contexte scientifique et technologique complexe. (shrink)

Do the demands of egalitarian justice extend to the international realm? Some believe that a positive answer follows from a simple line of reasoning: where a child happens to be born is a morally arbitrary fact; accordingly, it shouldn’t unduly influence her life prospects, as will inevitably be the case unless economic inequalities between countries are ironed out. I argue that this style of argument overlooks an important problem concerning the extent to which a person can unilaterally impose enforceable obligations (...) on others by choosing to have a child. I maintain that properly egalitarian duties of distributive justice only arise when this problem of unilateral imposition has been solved. I further argue that solving the problem requires robust political institutions that do not exist in the international context—institutions instantiating a version of what John Rawls calls pure procedural justice, to ensure that the aggregate result of individual reproductive choices is acceptable to all. (shrink)

The moral dimensions of undercover investigations by reporters are explored for their deception characteristics, using disclosures about a clinic in which doctors told women they were pregnant when they were not as an example. Three test questions are posed for the justifying of deceptive tactics in gathering information. In addition to undercover investigations, the morality of surreptitious taping is also discussed.

This essay by the director of Washington & Lee University's applied ethics program for Society and the Professions argues that journalists must begin taking themselves seriously as members of a profession if journalism is to gain the respect it needs to function effectively in society. Journalism, argues the author, may not possess all the classical attributes of professionalism, but it does possess the most important ones. The essay maintains that professionalism in journalism is important for the welfare of both the (...) media audience and the journalist. Journalists are asked to look at journalism through the audience's eyes, to experience the reward of being true and humble servants of other human beings, and to help make people whole?in short, to be professionals, not mere technicians. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2017 Heft: 214 Seiten: 331-350.