This essay focuses on the drafts and discussions which went into the first edition of the Perambulation. Lambarde’s autograph drafts and letters set his work in dialogue with other contemporary efforts to study the English past, in particular Matthew parker’s De antiquitate Britannicae ecclesiae. This book developed in tandem with Lambarde’s. Lambarde and parker created and shared drafts in manuscript and print as they delved into Kentish church history. Remnants of their conversations about sources like the Textus Roffensis can be (...) found in their books and even in the manuscripts under discussion. Revision, like reading, was a particular social enterprise with its own conventions. The line between a finished, printed presentation copy and a manuscript draft was completely blurred: both constituted a ‘beare whelpe that lacketh licking’. (shrink)

Marginalized people have used body aesthetic practices, such as clothing and hairstyles, to communicate their worth to the mainstream. One such example is respectability politics, a set of practices developed in post-Reconstruction black communities to prevent sexual assault and convey moral standing to the white mainstream. Respectability politics is an ambivalent strategy. It requires assimilation to white bourgeois aesthetic and ethical standards, and so guides practitioners toward blandness and bodily erasure. Yet, it is an aesthetic practice that cultivates moral agency (...) and helps communities avoid violence and meet social and economic goals. I contrast respectability politics with the anti-assimilationist body aesthetics of Chike Jeffers and Janell Hobson. Because these accounts do not seek to neutralize or erase the body, they fundamentally value black people. As such, they more effectively convey personhood than assimilationist strategies do and also demonstrate the positive role that body aesthetics can play in everyday ethical projects. (shrink)

Genome editing enables very accurate alterations to DNA. It promises profound and potentially disruptive changes in healthcare, agriculture, industry, and the environment. This paper presents a multidisciplinary analysis of the contemporary development of genome editing and the tension between continuity and change. It draws on the idea that actors involved in innovation are guided by “sociotechnical regimes” composed of practices, institutions, norms, and cultural beliefs. The analysis focuses on how genome editing is emerging in different domains and whether this marks (...) continuity or disruption of the established biotechnology regime. In conclusion, it will be argued that genome editing is best understood as a technology platform that is being powerfully shaped by this existing regime but is starting to disrupt the governance of biotechnology. In the longer term is it set to converge with other powerful technology platforms, which together will fundamentally transform the capacity to engineer life. (shrink)

In developing artificial intelligence (AI), researchers often benchmark against human performance as a measure of progress. Is this kind of comparison possible for moral cognition? Given that human moral judgment often hinges on intangible properties like “intention” which may have no natural analog in artificial agents, it may prove difficult to design a “like‐for‐like” comparison between the moral behavior of artificial and human agents. What would a measure of moral behavior for both humans and AI look like? We unravel the (...) complexity of this question by discussing examples within reinforcement learning and generative AI, and we examine how the puzzle of evaluating artificial agents' moral cognition remains open for further investigation within cognitive science. (shrink)

Background Over the last decade, the return of results (ROR) in precision medicine research (PMR) has become increasingly routine. Calls for individual rights to research results have extended the “duty to report” from clinically useful genetic information to traits and ancestry results. ROR has thus been reframed as inherently beneficial to research participants, without a needed focus on who benefits and how. This paper addresses this gap, particularly in the context of PMR aimed at increasing participant diversity, by providing investigator (...) and researcher perspectives on and questions about the assumed value of ROR in PMR.Methods Semi-structured interviews with a purposive sample of investigators and researchers across federally funded PMR studies in three national consortia, as well as observations of study activities, focused on how PM researchers conceptualize diversity and implement inclusive practices across research stages, including navigating ROR.Results Interviewees (1) validated the value of ROR as a benefit of PMR, while others (2) questioned the benefit of clinically actionable results to individuals in the absence of sufficient resources for translating findings into health care for diverse and disadvantaged populations; (3) expressed uncertainties in applying the presumed value of ROR as a benefit for non-clinical results; and (4) and debated when the promise of the value of ROR may undermine trust in PMR, and divert efforts to return value beyond ROR.Conclusions Conceptualizations of diversity and inclusion among PM researchers and investigators raise unique ethical questions where unexamined assumptions of the value of ROR inform study recruitment efforts to enroll minoritized and under-represented populations. A lack of consideration for resources and infrastructure necessary to translate ROR into actionable information may hinder trustworthy community-research relationships. Thus, we argue for a more intentional interrogation of ROR practices as an offer of benefit and for whom. (shrink)

Anesthesiology training programs are tasked with equipping trainees with the skills to become medically and ethically competent in the practice of anesthesia and to be prepared to obtain board certification, yet there is currently no standardized ethics curriculum within anesthesia training programs in the United States. To bridge this gap, and to provide a validated ethics curriculum to meet the aforementioned needs, in July 2021, a survey was sent to anesthesia scholars in the field of biomedical ethics to identify key (...) areas that should be included in such an ethics curriculum. The responses were rated on a Likert scale and ranked. This paper identifies the top ten topics identified as high priority for inclusion in an anesthesiology training program and consequently deemed most relevant to meet the educational needs of graduates of an anesthesiology residency: (1) capacity to consent; (2) capacity to refuse elective versus lifesaving treatment; (3) application of surrogate decisionmaking; (4) approach to do not resuscitate (DNR) status in the operating room; (5) patient autonomy and advance directives; (6) navigating patient beliefs that may impair care; (7) “futility” in end-of-life care: when to withdraw life support; (8) disclosure of medical errors; (9) clinical criteria for “brain death” and consequences of this definition; and (10) the impaired anesthesiologist. (shrink)

A model is “any representation or concept that helps us to understand the world whenever common sense or direct observations are inadequate.” Common sense and direct observation often prove inadequate to the complexities of the twenty-first-century cities. Thus, models abound in urban life and governance. However, a model is not only a tool for control but a way of defining a situation. Framing the city so as to render it susceptible to interpretation and intervention is an exercise not merely with (...) scientific or technological value but with rhetorical power. The tradition of comprehensive urban models, beginning with the advent of computers and culminating in the self-analyzing “smart city,” I argue, sidelines this rhetorical power in favor of a tone of scientific authority that, while justifiable in technical domains, does not legitimately scale to the level of a political community. Making good on the civic potential of Big Data thus requires recontextualizing properly scientific enterprises within an adequate political philosophy of the city, allowing for the construction of cultural urban models that set human freedom at the core of its inner workings. (shrink)

Nineteenth-century psychiatrists ascribed to a model of health that was predicated on the existence of objective and strictly defined laws of nature. The allegedly “natural” rules governing the production of consumption of food, however, were structured by a set of distinctively bourgeois moral values that demonized over-indulgence and intemperance, encouraged self-discipline and productivity, and treated gentility as an index of social worth. Accordingly, the asylum acted not only as a therapeutic instrument but also as a moral machine that was designed (...) to remake lazy, indolent transgressors into useful, “decorous” citizens. Because the theory and mechanics underlying this machine seemed straightforward and self-evident to psychiatrists, they were confounded when the asylum failed to translate its ideals into reality. While psychiatrists tended to blame this failure on the intractable immorality and weakness of individual patients, particularly paupers and immigrants, a review of the various meanings and uses of food in the hospital reveals the fault lines that ran through the asylum’s ideological structure. (shrink)

This volume offers evidence for a more classical and philosophically-optimistic interpretation of Wallace Stevens than former studies have made. It examines his collected essays, his letters, journals and poems, existing scholarship, and the philosophic tradition in which he should be located.

Westworld calls attention to the fact that freedom comes in kinds as well as in degrees, something philosophers have been trying to explain for as long as people can remember. This chapter explains how distinct Westworld's characters are from each other, and how fresh and real their agonies feel despite reliance on well‐worn tropes. As monstrous humans and hosts play out their hideous fictions but shed tears as they meet their even more horrible fates. One of the premises that makes (...) Westworld work is that hosts are programmed to ignore anything that might disrupt their continued belief in who they are meant to be. The most salient moral of Westworld is that agency and purpose come in endless varieties, wondrous to behold. The constraints upon Westworld's residents and guests remind us that humans live in inherited institutions and internalize one another's ideas. (shrink)

Crisis standards of care are a significant change in the standard level of medical care that can be given compared to normal healthcare operations. CSC are implemented when a healthcare facility is overrun due to catastrophic events like earthquakes, or in the case of SARS-CoV-2, a global pandemic. Especially in disasters, resources like hospital beds, pharmaceuticals, and staff become stretched thin, and facilities must adapt their allocation strategies for distributing scarce resources. Inevitably, a question arises: How do we allocate scarce (...) resources justly? During the coronavirus pandemic, bioethicists, healthcare practitioners, and policymakers have asked this question. A recurring worry among them... (shrink)

This paper explores how transformative experience generates decision-making problems of particular seriousness in medical settings. Potentially transformative experiences are especially likely to be encountered in medicine, and the associated decisions are confronted jointly by patients and clinicians in the context of an imbalance of power and expertise. However in such scenarios the principle of informed consent, which plays a central role in guiding clinicians, is unequal to the task. We detail how the principle’s assumptions about autonomy, rationality and information handle (...) transformative experiences poorly, appealing to several difficult cases for medical decision-making to illustrate the resulting problem, and we consider how the existing literature on complications with consent fails to offer a resolution. We argue that recognition of the problem has a role to play in achieving a more effective response to transformative decisions. In Sect. 1 we introduce several representative cases of challenging patient decision-making that clinicians might face. In Sect. 2 we detail how transformative experience has been analysed in the recent literature, before outlining in Sect. 3 the theoretical basis of the principle of informed consent, which plays a central role in how clinicians are expected to support decision-making. In Sect. 4, having laid the groundwork for a clear description, we return to the cases given in Sect. 1 to confirm how their transformative nature presents a problem: either clinicians treat the decisions faced by these patients as ‘normal’, encouraging them to focus on information provision that patients may be unable to act on, or they treat them as transformative, in which case they lack the resources to recognise whether they are helping patients make (subjectively) good decisions. In Sect. 5 we argue that the existing literature does not offer any escape from this problem. We close in Sect. 6 by noting the significant impact that appreciating the problem of transformative experience could have on supporting transformative decisions in medicine and briefly suggesting how we might aim to develop new approaches to dealing with these. (shrink)

We used a multi-dimensional framework to assess current stereotypes of men and women. Specifically, we sought to determine (1) how men and women are characterized by male and female raters, (2) how men and women characterize themselves, and (3) the degree of convergence between self-characterizations and charcterizations of one’s gender group. In an experimental study, 628 U.S. male and female raters described men, women, or themselves on scales representing multiple dimensions of the two defining features of gender stereotypes, agency and (...) communality: assertiveness, independence, instrumental competence, leadership competence (agency dimensions), and concern for others, sociability and emotional sensitivity (communality dimensions). Results indicated that stereotypes about communality persist and were equally prevalent for male and female raters, but agency characterizations were more complex. Male raters generally descibed women as being less agentic than men and as less agentic than female raters described them. However, female raters differentiated among agency dimensions and described women as less assertive than men but as equally independent and leadership competent. Gender stereotypes also were evident in self-ratings, with female raters rating themselves as less agentic than male raters and male raters rating themselves as less communal than female raters, although there were exceptions (e.g., no differences in independence and sociability self-ratings for men and women). Comparisons of self-ratings and ratings of men and women in general indicated that women tended to characterize themselves in more stereotypic terms – as less assertive and less competent in leadership – than they characterized others in their gender group. Men, in contrast, characterized themselves in less stereotypic terms – as more communal. Overall, our results show that a focus on facets of agency and communality can provide deeper insights about stereotype content than a focus on overall agency and communality. (shrink)

Our editorial introduces this Special Issue devoted to exploring the ethics of youth work practice in the twenty-first century. The call for papers for this Special Issue went out in October 2022 w...

Résumé Cet article retrace les changements multiples et rapides apparus au cours des quinze dernières années dans la théorisation des rapports entre sexe et genre. Il porte, en deuxième lieu, sur la réception, l’application et par-dessus tout la modification de ces théories par certains spécialistes de la production culturelle dans l’Europe médiévale, où la différence s’exprime sous des formes variées qui n’existent pas nécessairement dans les sociétés modernes. La déconstruction du système binaire masculin/féminin (qu’il soit considéré comme une différence sexuelle (...) ou de genre) fit son apparition parmi les penseuses féministes dans les années quatre-vingt dix et aboutit à la « queerisation » des discours universitaires en déstabilisant les étiquettes qui avaient été naturalisées, notamment l’identité genrée systématiquement attribuée à l’individu dans la société médiévale ou moderne. Nous montrerons que les théories queer et post-coloniale, loin d’être aux antipodes de la théorie féministe, en émanent et existent parallèlement à elle. Les partisans de chacune de ces théories s’intéressent aux forces sociétales, y compris notre propre discours, qui maintiennent la différence et créent des communautés d’oppression. Cependant, il est également nécessaire de soulever une question, à savoir quand se produira la prochaine rupture radicale et comment elle engendrera de nouvelles théories. (shrink)

Is the possession of taste relevant to the practice of moral and political judgement? For Mary Wollstonecraft and many of her contemporaries, the formation of taste was increasingly significant for...

Cultivating an understanding of ethical responsibilities and the societal impacts of technology is increasingly recognized as an important component in undergraduate engineering curricula. There is growing research on how ethics-related topics are taught and outcomes are attained, especially in the context of accreditation criteria. However, there is a lack of theoretical and empirical understanding of the role that educators play in ethics and societal impacts instruction and the factors that motivate and shape their inclusion of this subject in the courses (...) they teach and co-curricular activities they mentor. The goal of this research was to explore the role of faculty’s personal influences on their inclusion of ESI instruction in these settings. Personal influences are distinguished from external or environmental drivers such as teaching assignments, university policies, and department curriculum decisions. This research employed a grounded theory methodology and extracted data from interviews with 19 educators who teach ESI to engineering students to develop an emergent conceptualization of personal influences. Four categorie were identified: intrapersonal, interpersonal, academic, and professional. The findings suggested a wide range of entry points into ESI instruction for faculty members who do not currently teach ESI and for those looking to expand the inclusion of ESI in their courses. Based on these findings, departments and administrators are encouraged to foster educators’ agency, support access to professional development and engagement, facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration, and broaden hiring decisions to account for the impact of educators’ holistic identity on their instruction. (shrink)

The Barber of Damascus: Nouveau Literacy in the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Levant. By Dana Sajdi. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2012. Pp. xv + 293. $60.

The Chief Eunuch of the Ottoman Harem: From African Slave to Power-Broker. By Jane Hathaway. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. xvi + 323. $105, £75.

When is an ideal of a ring radical or prime? By examining its generators, one may in many cases definably and uniformly test the ideal’s properties. We seek to establish such definable formulas in rings of p-adic power series, such as $\mathbb Q_{p}\langle X\rangle $, $\mathbb Z_{p}\langle X\rangle $, and related rings of power series over more general valuation rings and their fraction fields. We obtain a definable, uniform test for radicality, and, in the one-dimensional case, for primality. This builds (...) upon the techniques stemming from the proof of the quantifier elimination results for the analytic theory of the p-adic integers by Denef and van den Dries, and the linear algebra methods of Hermann and Seidenberg.prepared by Madeline G. Barnicle.E-mail: [email protected]: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6t02q9s4. (shrink)

Should the democratic exercise of authority that we take for granted in the realm of government be extended to the managerial sphere? Exploring this question, Christopher McMahon develops a theory of government and management as two components of an integrated system of social authority that is essentially political in nature. He then considers where in this structure democratic decision making is appropriate. McMahon examines the main varieties of authority: the authority of experts, authority grounded in a promise to (...) obey, and authority justified as facilitating mutually beneficial cooperation. He also discusses the phenomenon of managerial authority, the authority that guides nongovernmental organization, and argues that managerial authority is best regarded not as the authority of a principal over an agent, but rather as authority that facilitates mutually beneficial cooperation among employees with different moral aims. Viewed in this way, there is a presumption that managerial authority should be democratically exercised by employees. Originally published in 1994. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

In _Aesthetics and Material Beauty_, Jennifer A. McMahon develops a new aesthetic theory she terms Critical Aesthetic Realism - taking Kantian aesthetics as a starting point and drawing upon contemporary theories of mind from philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science. The creative process does not proceed by a set of rules. Yet the fact that its objects can be understood or appreciated by others suggests that the creative process is constrained by principles to which others have access. According to her (...) update of Kantian aesthetics, beauty is grounded in indeterminate yet systematic principles of perception and cognition. However, Kant’s aesthetic theory rested on a notion of indeterminacy whose consequences for understanding the nature of art were implausible. McMahon conceptualizes "indeterminacy" in terms of contemporary philosophical, psychological, and computational theories of mind. In doing so, she develops an aesthetic theory that reconciles the apparent dichotomies which stem from the tension between the determinacy of communication and the indeterminacy of creativity. Dichotomies such as universality and subjectivity, objectivity and autonomy, cognitivism and non-cognitivism, and truth and beauty are revealed as complementary features of an aesthetic judgment. (shrink)

The rash of high-profile accounting frauds involving internal corporate accountants calls into question the individual accountant’s perceptions of the ethical climate within their organization and the limits to which these professionals will tolerate unethical behavior and/or accept it as the norm. This study uses social cognitive theory to examine the antecedents of individual corporate accountant’s perceived personal fit with their organization’s ethical climate and empirically tests how these factors impact organizational attitudes. A survey was completed by 203 corporate accountants to (...) assess their perception of relevant variables. The results of the structural equation model indicate three significant antecedents relating to ethical climate fit: higher internal levels of locus of control; greater numbers of prior job changes; and higher perceptions of an increasingly better fit with the firm’s ethical climate. Our results also indicate that higher levels of perceived fit to the ethical climate of a firm are associated with higher levels of perceived job satisfaction and organizational commitment. We also theorize that perceptions of an organization’s ethical climate may be reflections of client narcissism and serve a potential indicator of fraud risk. This is an important topic of study, since current auditing standards call for auditors to examine organizational attitudes toward fraud, but offer minimal guidance in doing so. (shrink)

This book examines the ways in which reasonable people can disagree about the requirements of political morality. Christopher McMahon argues that there will be a 'zone of reasonable disagreement' surrounding most questions of political morality. Moral notions of right and wrong evolve over time as new zones of reasonable disagreement emerge out of old ones; thus political morality is both different in different societies with varying histories, and different now from what it was in the past. McMahon explores (...) this feature of his theory in detail and traces its implications for the possibility of making moral judgments about other polities, past or present. His study sheds light on an important and often overlooked aspect of political life, and will be of interest to a wide range of readers in moral and political philosophy and in political theory. (shrink)

Fear is a common and potentially distressful psychological response to the current COVID-19 pandemic. The factors associated with such fear remains relatively unstudied among older adults. We investigated if fear of COVID-19 could be associated with a combination of psychological factors such as anxiety and depressive symptoms, and risk perception of COVID-19, and demographic factors in a community sample of older adults. Older adults completed measures of fear of COVID-19, anxiety and depressive symptoms, and risk perception of COVID-19, during a (...) COVID-19 lockdown. These variables, together with demographics, were fitted to a structural equation model. Anxiety and depressive symptoms were highly correlated with each other and were combined into the higher order latent variable of affective symptoms for analyses. The final model revealed that fear of COVID-19 was positively associated with psychological factors of affective symptoms and risk perception. Older age was associated with greater fear of COVID-19. Our findings showed that fear of COVID-19 can be a projection of pre-existing affective symptoms and inflated risk perceptions and highlighted the need to address the incorrect risk perceptions of COVID-19 and socio-affective issues among older adults in the community. (shrink)

Hope for persons with disabilities is most often associated with the possibility of cure. When cure is not achievable, there remains a dire lack in our socio-cultural imagination around and construction of hopeful disabled futurity. This paper explores Karl Rahner’s eschatology as a means of both deconstructing narrow visions of curative hope and affirming the presence of theological hope that already exists in the lives of disabled people. Ultimately, this paper argues that “crip time”—the time embodied by persons with disabilities—witnesses (...) to a prophetic relationship with time in its openness to the life-giving possibilities of the absolute future. (shrink)

Under the terms of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which Australia has ratified, children have a right to know who their genetic parents are. As a result, we have a duty to establish these facts and to make this information available for children to access should they wish to know. Introducing mandatory DNA testing of newborns and their alleged genetic parents is one viable option to ensure that this information is available for children to access. Indeed, (...) it may be the only viable option to address childrens' right to the fulfilment of Article 7 of the CRC. There are a number of benefits to obtaining this benefit for children. For one, mandatory DNA testing could solve all disputed paternity cases and finalise them early in the lives of children, thus making life more financially secure for those children in the long term. This could reduce or eliminate the need for fathers to secretly carry out DNA tests in order to disestablish paternity. The large number of benefits gained from identifying genetic parents for children and the small possible risks that they may suffer when this information is withheld give us good reasons to support mandatory DNA testing. (shrink)

This book offers a new theory of property and distributive justice derived from Talmudic law, illustrated by a case study involving the sale of organs for transplant. Although organ donation did not exist in late antiquity, this book posits a new way, drawn from the Talmud, to conceive of this modern means of giving to others. Our common understanding of organ transfers as either a gift or sale is trapped in a dichotomy that is conceptually and philosophically limiting. Drawing on (...) Maussian gift theory, this book suggests a different legal and cultural meaning for this property transfer. It introduces the concept of the 'divine lien', an obligation to others in need built into the definition of all property ownership. Rather than a gift or sale, organ transfer is shown to exemplify an owner's voluntary recognition and fulfilment of this latent property obligation. (shrink)

In the paper, titled ‘Choosing death in unjust conditions: hope, autonomy and harm reduction,’ Wiebe and Mullin argue that people living in unjust social conditions are sufficiently autonomous to request medical assistance in dying (MAiD). The ethical issue is that some people may request MAiD primarily because of unjust social conditions, not their illness, disease, disability or decline in capability. It is easily agreed that people living in unjust social conditions can be autonomous. Nevertheless, Wiebe and Mullin fail to appreciate (...) that autonomy is only a necessary condition for MAiD. In addition to autonomy, one must decide that providing assisted dying to a patient because they are living in unjust social conditions is ethical. Central to making this ethical decision is the principle of non-maleficence, famously articulated as ‘do no harm.’ The authors admit that performing MAiD in response to unjust social circumstances is harmful, but they justify this harmful action by appealing to the principle of harm reduction. A fundamental flaw of their approach is that it relies on the legislative definition of intolerable suffering, which is based on circular reasoning and given that 99.2% of patients that have applied for MAiD satisfied this criterion, it is essentially equivalent to no standard/criterion. Canadian society is struggling with the ethical implications of its permissive MAiD programme, and, fundamental to this debate, will be determining the proper balance between autonomy and non-maleficence for people living in unjust social conditions. (shrink)

This is an 18,500 word bibliography of philosophical scholarship on Beauty which was published online in the Oxford Bibliographies Online. The entry includes an Introduction of 800 words, 21 x 400-word sub-themes and 168 annotated references. INTRODUCTION Philosophical interest in beauty began with the earliest recorded philosophers. Beauty was deemed to be an essential ingredient in a good life and so what it was, where it was to be found and how it was to be included in a life were (...) prime considerations. The way beauty has been conceived has been influenced by an author’s other philosophical commitments, metaphysical, epistemological and ethical and such commitments reflect the historical and cultural position of the author. For example, beauty is a manifestation of the divine on earth to which we respond with love and adoration; beauty is a harmony of the soul which we achieve through cultivating feeling in a rational and tempered way; beauty is an idea raised in us by certain objective features of the world; beauty is a sentiment which can nonetheless be cultivated to be appropriate to its object; beauty is the object of a judgment by which we exercise the social, comparative and inter-subjective elements of cognition and so on. Such views on beauty not only reveal underlying philosophical commitments but also reflect positive contributions to understanding the nature of value and the relation of mind and world. One way to distinguish between beauty theories is according to the conception of the human being that they assume or imply, for example, where they fall on the continuum from determinism to free will, ungrounded notions of compatibilism notwithstanding. For example, theories at the latter end might carve out a sense of genuine innovation and creativity in human endeavours while at the other end of the spectrum authors may conceive of beauty as an environmental trigger for consumption, procreation or preservation in the interests of the individual. Treating beauty experiences as in some respect intentional, characterises beauty theory prior to the twentieth century and since, mainly in historically inspired writing on beauty. On the other hand, treating beauty as affect or sensation has always had its representatives and is most visible today in evolutionary inspired accounts of beauty (though not all evolutionary accounts fit this classification). Beauty theory falls under some combination of metaphysics, epistemology, meta-ethics, aesthetics and psychology. While in the twentieth century beauty was more likely to be conceived as an evaluative concept for art, recent philosophical interest in beauty can again be seen to exercise arguments pertaining to metaphysics, epistemology, meta-ethics, philosophy of meaning and language in addition to philosophy of art and environmental aesthetics. (shrink)

The Evolving Social Responsibilities of Internet Corporate Actors: Pointers Past and Present Content Type Journal Article Category Commentary Pages 455-461 DOI 10.1007/s13347-011-0049-0 Authors Robert Madelin, Directorate General Information Society and Media, European Commission, BU25 06/183, 1049 Brussels, Belgium Journal Philosophy & Technology Online ISSN 2210-5441 Print ISSN 2210-5433 Journal Volume Volume 24 Journal Issue Volume 24, Number 4.

In this paper, we locate a general rhetorical strategy employed in theoretical discourse wherein philosophers argue from the mere existence of internalized oppression to some kind of epistemic, moral, political, or cognitive deficiency of oppressed people. We argue that this strategy has harmful consequences for oppressed people, breaking down our analysis in terms of individual and structural harms within both epistemic and moral domains. These harms include attempting to undermine the self-trust of oppressed people, reinforcing unjust epistemic power hierarchies, undermining (...) the moral agency of oppressed people, and obscuring real issues of oppression. In light of these many harms, we conclude that there are pro tanto reasons not to employ this strategy, and instead offer a series of suggestions for those considering adopting such a rhetorical move. (shrink)

In 1991, Jones developed an issue-contingent model of ethical decision making in which moral intensity is posited to affect the four stages of Rest's 1986 model. Jones claimed that moral intensity, which is "the extent of issue-related moral imperative in a situation", consists of six characteristics: magnitude of consequences, social consensus, probability of effect, temporal immediacy, proximity, and concentration of effect. This article reports the findings of two studies that analyzed the factor structure of moral intensity, operationalized by a 12-item (...) Perceived Moral Intensity Scale adapted from the work of Sing-hapakdi et al. [1996, Journal of Business Research, 36, 245-255] and Frey [2000, Journal of Business Ethics, 26, 181-195]. The two items that were purported to measure CE were dropped due to their inability to effectively tap into the characteristic proposed by Jones. Factor analyses of the remaining 10 items supported a 3-factor structure, with the MC, PE, and TI items loading on the first factor, the PX items loading on the second factor, and the SC items loading on the third factor. These factors were labeled: Probable Magnitude of Consequences, Proximity, and Social Consensus. The authors conclude that moral intensity consists of three characteristics, rather than the six posited by Jones. (shrink)

Following an extensive review of the moral intensity literature, this article reports the findings of two studies (one between-subjects, the other within-subject) that examined the effect of manipulated and perceived moral intensity on ethical judgment. In the between-subjects study participants judged actions taken in manipulated high moral intensity scenarios to be more unethical than the same actions taken in manipulated low moral intensity scenarios. Findings were mixed for the effect of perceived moral intensity. Both probable magnitude of consequences (a factor (...) consisting of magnitude of consequences, probability of effect, and temporal immediacy) and social consensus had a significant effect; proximity did not. In the within-subject study manipulated moral intensity had a significant effect on ethical judgment, but perceived moral intensity did not. Regression of ethical judgment on age, gender, major, and the three perceived moral intensity factors was significant between-subjects, but not within-subject. Ethical judgment was found to be a more robust predictor of intention than perceived moral intensity using a within-subject design. (shrink)