There has been little previous scholarship regarding the aims, options and impact of ethics education on residential care‐givers. This manuscript details findings from a pragmatic cluster trial evaluating the impact of three different approaches to ethics education. The focus of the article is on one of the interventions, an immersive simulation experience. The simulation experience required residential care‐givers to assume the profile of elderly care‐recipients for a 24‐hr period. The care‐givers were student nurses. The project was reviewed favourably by a (...) university ethics committee, and participants provided informed consent. Data from six postsimulation experience focus groups were analysed thematically and three themes were identified: the experience of vulnerability, dignity in care and the organisation of care. Findings suggest that the immersive simulation experience had a powerful immediate impact as participants described epiphanous insights relating to their care experiences. It is suggested that reflecting on and recording epiphanous events has the potential to sustain ethical care practices. Further research is required to evaluate the impact of different ethics education interventions in different cultural contexts. Exploration is also required regarding the meaning and significance of care epiphanies, those “most delicate and evanescent of moments,” for the sustainability of ethical care. (shrink)

There has been little previous research regarding the effectiveness of ethics education interventions for residential care‐givers. The Researching Interventions to Promote Ethics in social care project responded to the question: Which is the most effective ethics education intervention for care‐givers in residential social care? A pragmatic cluster trial explored the impact of three ethics education interventions for: (a) interactive face‐to‐face ethics teaching; (b) reflective ethics discussion groups; and (c) an immersive simulation experience. There was also a control arm (d). 144 (...) trial participants were recruited from 39 residential care homes for older people in southern England. Change scores compared across intervention arms showed a significant reduction in work‐related moral stress in the teaching arm compared with control group (p =.03); there were no significant differences between control and intervention arms in change scores for moral sensitivity, interpersonal reactivity (empathy) or ethical leadership. Qualitative data themes were as follows: ethical care; care challenges; and ethical care inhibitors. Overall findings stimulate reflection on the value of three different ethics education interventions and the most appropriate means to evaluate their impact. Findings suggest the complexity and diverse nature of ethical competence in care. We suggest a way forward for research evaluating ethics education. (shrink)

It might be that the phrase ‘local holism’ covers a range of explanatory possibilities spreading to consistencies of theories generally, that we can take something from Peacocke’s caution about delimiting and differentiating modes of support for abstracts to sort something in the varieties of tensions at work in settling contents of theories self-determined to be consistent (facing a barrage of neo-consistencies). The subject-matter becomes then a holism in its entirety in self-consistent self-representation underpinned by that recognition operating over items formulated (...) in a vocabulary supporting consistent representations and operations. In A Study of Concepts scenarios—described by me as ‘containers’— associate a type of primitive to a grammar worked on transitions paralleling a proposed familiar egocentric type of orientation’s handling of objects in a vicinity. The value of scenarios though is distanced from origination, it lies in the depiction of support for and delineation and record of separable coordinate valuations and conceptual transcribing. (shrink)

This paper is built around a single, simple idea. It is widely agreed that there is a distinctive kind of awareness each of us has of his own bodily actions. This action-awareness is different from any perceptual awareness a subject may have of his own actions; it can exist in the absence of such perceptual awareness. The single, simple idea around which this paper is built is that the distinctive awareness that subjects have of their own mental actions is a (...) form of action-awareness. Subjects’ awareness of their own mental actions is a species of the same genus that also includes the distinctive awareness of bodily actions. More specifically, I claim. (shrink)

We often know what we are judging, what we are deciding, what problem we are trying to solve. We know not only the contents of our judgements, decidings and tryings; we also know that it is judgement, decision and attempted problem-solving in which we are engaged. How do we know these things?

Whereas traditional nominalists accept the realist's challenge to solve a 'Problem of Universals', the Ostrich Nominalist responds that there is no such Problem to answer. I suggest that Ostrich Nominalist arguments expose a genuine flaw in the realist project. However, I argue, Ostrich Nominalism is ultimately defeated by a problem about the analysis of qualitative sameness and difference. Qualitative sameness and difference are adequately understood only as sameness or difference in some respect. The need to say what these respects of (...) sameness and difference are (if not universals) constitutes a genuine Problem of Universals; consequently—I claim—the Ostrich Nominalist is mistaken. (shrink)

The problem of the ‘Unity of the Proposition’ is the problem of explaining the difference between a content-expressing declarative sentence and a ‘mere list’ of referents. The prevailing view is that such a problem is to be solved metaphysically, either by reducing our ontology to exclude propositions or universals, or by explaining how it is possible for a certain kind of complex entity – the ‘proposition’– to ‘unify’ its constituents. I argue that these metaphysical approaches cannot succeed; instead the only (...) viable approach is linguistic, identifying features of the (type–) sentence itself that enable it to express a content. Thus the problem of the ‘Unity of the Proposition’ (distinguishing sentences from lists) is distinct from the problem of ‘propositional unity’ (explaining how the constituents of propositions form a unified content). I suggest that, while the latter problem is not pressing, the former does not permit of an answer which applies in generality in all languages; we can only fully explain the Unity of the Proposition for single languages or groups of similar languages. (shrink)

RésuméCet article défend une approche à la philosophic et à l'éthique environnementale qui a originalement été avancée par Aldo Leopold. Selon cet auteur, l'éthique peut être comprise, d'un point de vue biologique, comme la forme spécifiquement humaine de la symbiose. La question cruciate de notre époque est de savoir si les humains peuvent coexister avec l'environnement global en un état de symbiose. La philosophie et les sciences humaines en général peuvent contribuer grandement à l'atteinte de ce but, à cause de (...) la façon très spéciale dont le caractère même des actions et des æuvres humaines peut être amplifié par l'écosystème. Je critique un argument thermodynamique qui a été formulé contre la possibilité de la symbiose humaine; et je mets en garde contre les tendances à l'autoritarisme et è l'évasion par l'introspection qui sont typiques des cultures en état de crise écologique. (shrink)

The first edition of The Scientific Background to Modern Philosophy took the dialogue of science and philosophy from Aristotle through to Newton. This second edition adds eight chapters, taking the dialogue through the Enlightenment and up to Darwin. This anthology is an attempt to help bridge the gap between the history of science and the history of philosophy.

Imagine I hold up a Granny Smith apple for all to see. You would thereby gain justified beliefs that it was green, that it was apple, and that it is a Granny Smith apple. Under classical foundationalism, such simple visual beliefs are mediately justified on the basis of reasons concerning your experience. Under dogmatism, some or all of these beliefs are justified immediately by your experience and not by reasons you possess. This paper argues for what I call the looks (...) view of the justification of simple visual beliefs. According to the looks view, such beliefs are mediately justified on the basis of reasons concerning how the relevant things look. Unlike under classical foundationalism, under the looks view as I develop it, these reasons are public. They are public with respect to both their content and possession: with respect to content, they are not about ourselves and our experiences, and with respect to their possession, many people can have the very same looks-related reasons. (shrink)

In this paper we examine Fehr’s notions of “altruism”, “strong reciprocity” and “altruistic punishment” and query his ascription of altruism. We suggest that, pace Fehr, altruism cannot be defined behaviourally because the definition of altruism must refer to the motives of actors. We also advert to certain inconsistencies in Fehr’s usage of his terms and we question his explanation of altruism in terms of ‘social preferences’.

This chapter contains section titled: The Scope of Ecology General Description of Ecosystems History of the Term “Ecosystem” Ecosystems as Symbiotic Units Ecosystems as Dissipative Structures Ecosystems and Evolutionary Biology Skeptical Critiques of Ecosystem Theory Ecosystem Integrity and Health Sustainability from an Ecosystems Point of View Acknowledgments References Further Reading.

Normativity is both one of the most important and ubiquitous of phenomena and, despite its historical centrality to philosophy, one of the least understood. The idea that there might be objective, attitude-independent, truths about what we ought to do (morality), what we ought to believe (rationality) or what we ought to appreciate (aesthetics), has always seemed very puzzling to philosophers, even though ordinary thought seems steeped in such judgments. -/- Up until quite recently, the received view was that there was (...) no good way to make sense of such a realistic, objectivist construal of normativity, that we have to make do with one or another anti-realistic alternative, principally, Expressivism, some forms of Constructivism, or Relativism. However, the well-known difficulties with these anti-realist options have motivated philosophers, most especially younger ones, to take a fresh look at Realism and to assess and develop it in new ways. Sometimes the result is that Realism is seen to be better protected against classic objections than had been previously realized; at others, the result seems to be that Realism is even harder to defend, and perhaps even harder to understand, than traditional thinking had allowed. The upshot is a vigorous and stimulating debate that is just beginning to take shape and whose outcome is far from resolved. -/- The main impulse behind the present volume was to commission new work on Normative Realism by a mix of senior and junior scholars to give the philosophical community a useful sense of the current state of play on this central topic. ... (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Categorical Prescriptiveness Uniformity as a Moral Matter Uniformity Contrasted with Neutrality The Overridingness of Moral Principles.

Abstract I provide an account of the nature of seemings that explains why they are necessary for justification. The account grows out of a picture of cognition that explains what is required for epistemic agency. According to this account, epistemic agency requires (1) possessing the epistemic aims of forming true beliefs and avoiding errors, and (2) having some means of forming beliefs in order to satisfy those aims. I then argue that seeming are motives for belief characterized by their role (...) of providing us with doxastic instructions guided by our epistemic aims. Understanding the nature of seemings allows us to underwrite recent epistemological work by Michael Huemer, and shows why he was right to claim that seemings are the source of all justification. I then look at some objections both to my arguments regarding the connection between seemings and justification, and to Huemer’s related “Principle of Phenomenal Conservatism”. Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-21 DOI 10.1007/s11098-011-9830-2 Authors Matthew Skene, Syracuse University, 8330 E. Quincy Ave., I-307, Denver, CO 80237, USA Journal Philosophical Studies Online ISSN 1573-0883 Print ISSN 0031-8116. (shrink)

We regularly appeal to claims of the form it seems that p in defense of a claim p. When we do so, we typically take it seems that p to be a reason for thinking that p but also a reason that “gets at” a relevant body of facts and its support for p. Other things being equal, we should want to vindicate our ordinary beliefs on this matter. We should want to vindicate the claim that facts about things seeming (...) certain ways can be reasons to think that things are that way while at the same time being somehow derivative reasons, that is, reasons only because they “get at” support from a certain body of facts. However, on the dominant view of how things seem—subjectivism—it is hard to see how to secure this result. Subjectivism takes how things seem to be a matter of how things do or would seem to some relevant subject. What we need is a defensible, nonsubjectivist account of how things seem. I propose and defend an account according to which, roughly, it seems that p iff the body of facts in the relevant perspective supports that p. (shrink)

An important theme in recent experimental philosophy is that certain judgements (e.g. our judgements involving intentional action and causation) exhibit a kind of normative penetration whereby, in spite of a not-obviously-normative subject matter, they turn out to be sensitive to, and co-vary with, our normative attitudes in interesting and surprising ways. We present the results of several new experimental studies that suggest that our judgements about feasibility also appear to exhibit this kind of normative penetration in at least some cases; (...) that the best explanation of it involves attributing to subjects a certain kind of extensional error that results from conflating the question at hand with another question that is more salient given their normative attitudes; and that these conclusions have significant, though not straightforward, implications for our understanding of both normative penetration and feasibility, respectively. (shrink)

In Measuring the Immeasurable Mind: Where Contemporary Neuroscience Meets the Aristotelian Tradition, Matthew Owen argues that despite its nonphysical character, it is possible to empirically detect and measure consciousness. -/- Toward the end of the previous century, the neuroscience of consciousness set its roots and sprouted within a materialist milieu that reduced the mind to matter. Several decades later, dualism is being dusted off and reconsidered. Although some may see this revival as a threat to consciousness science aimed at (...) measuring the conscious mind, Owen argues that measuring consciousness, along with the medical benefits of such measurements, is not ruled out by consciousness being nonphysical. Owen proposes the Mind-Body Powers model of neural correlates of consciousness, which is informed by Aristotelian causation and a substance dualist view of human nature inspired by Thomas Aquinas, who often followed Aristotle. In addition to explaining why there are neural correlates of consciousness, the model provides a philosophical foundation for empirically discerning and quantifying consciousness. En route to presenting and applying the Mind-Body Powers model to neurobiology, Owen rebuts longstanding objections to dualism related to the mind-body problem. With scholarly precision and readable clarity, Owen applies an oft forgotten yet richly developed historical vantage point to contemporary cognitive neuroscience. (shrink)

The aim in this paper is to focus on one of the proposals about successful perception that has led its adherents to advance some kind of disjunctive account of experience. The proposal is that we should understand the conscious sensory experience involved in successful perception in relational terms. I first try to clarify what the commitments of the view are, and where disagreements with competing views may lie. I then suggest that there are considerations relating to the conscious character of (...) our perception of events that speak in its favour. (shrink)

This paper argues that there is reason to distinguish between moral responsibility and blameworthiness and, in particular, that we can acknowledge that a person is responsible for the negative outcomes of their behavior without this necessarily informing our judgments about the person’s blameworthiness. This general theme is elaborated in the context of a discussion of some of Björn Petersson’s work on collective moral responsibility.

It's often thought that when we reason to new judgments in inference, we aim at believing the truth, and that this aim of ours can explain important psychological and normative features of belief. I reject this picture: the structure of aimed activity shows that inference is not guided by a truth‐aim. This finding clears the way for a positive understanding of how epistemic goods feature in our doxastic lives. We can indeed make sense of many of our inquisitive and deliberative (...) activities as undertaken in pursuit of such goods; but the evidence‐guided inferences in which those activities culminate will require a different theoretical approach. (shrink)

It has been argued that nonreductive physicalism’s problems with mental causation disappear if we abandon the intuitive but naïve production-based conception of causation in favor of one based on counterfactual dependence and difference-making. In recent years, this response has been thoroughly developed and defended by James Woodward, who contends that Kim’s causal exclusion argument, widely thought to be the most serious threat to nonreductive mental causation, cannot even be given a coherent formulation within Woodward’s preferred interventionist framework. But Woodward has, (...) even more recently, defended a pair of necessary conditions on mental causation and higher-order causation more generally, and it is here that the interventionist framework proves less friendly to nonreductive mental causation. Functionalism is arguably the most important species of nonreductive physicalism concerning specifically mental properties, but, as I argue, functional properties fail both of Woodward’s tests of causal relevance, one of them in two different ways. The problem, moreover, seems unique to functionalism, for other types of higher-order properties appear to pass Woodward’s tests. If functionalism faces defeat even in such friendly territory, its problems with mental causation are not an artifact of naïve metaphysics. They run deep. (shrink)

Citizenship, with its presumptive rights, privileges and obligations, has been a fundamental challenge confronting the state since the classical Greek era and the transformation and reorganization of the centralized medieval Holy Roman Empire after the Thirty Years War. With the changing patterns of state formation from the large and unwieldy empires organized into absolutist states to the more nationalistic/linguistic formations a recurring issue has been the constitutional or legal guarantees of the rights of the citizen as well as his/her obligations (...) to the state. This paper engaged in a nuanced study of Plato’s Crito as it relates the contradictions of citizenship as social membership and as participation in the modern state. The primary objective was to adapt Socrates’ experience to discuss the citizenship challenge in the modern state and driven by the research question on the implications of the emergence of new challenges to the contradictions of citizenship. Social contract theory by Thomas Hobbes served as the theoretical framework. Data collection was mainly from secondary sources such as academic journals, books, newspapers and internet sources, and data analysis based on the content and textual analysis of extant and relevant literature on the subject matter. Conclusively, the study realized that citizenship in the modern state is determined largely by the protection, in various ramifications, given to the citizen by the state, but that given a change in the circumstances many would decline to die for the state. Accordingly, it recommended a mutualism in the relationship and responsibilities between that state and the citizen of the modern state, particularly the underdeveloped states of the Third World. (shrink)

MacIntyre argues that management embodies emotivism, and thus is inherently amoral and manipulative. His claim that management is necessarily Weberian is, at best, outdated, and the notion that management aims to be neutral and value free is incorrect. However, new forms of management, and in particular the increased emphasis on leadership which emerged after MacIntyre’s critique was published, tend to support his central charge. Indeed, charismatic and transformational forms of leadership seem to embody emotivism to a greater degree than do (...) more Weberian, bureaucratic forms of management; hence, MacIntyre’s central contention about our emotivistic culture seems to be well founded. Having criticised the details but defended the essence of MacIntyre’s critique of management, this paper sketches a MacIntyrean approach to management and leadership by highlighting the affinities between MacIntyre’s political philosophy and Greenleaf’s concept of servant leadership. (shrink)

Gareth Matthews suggests that we can better understand the nature of philosophical inquiry if we recognize the central role played by perplexity. The seminal representation of philosophical perplexity is in Plato's dialogues; Matthews examines the intriguing shifts in Plato's attitude to perplexity and suggests that these may represent a course of philosophical development that philosophers follow even today.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On David Bentley Hart's Account of TraditionMatthew LeveringIn Tradition and Apocalypse, David Hart argues that "the concept of 'tradition' in the theological sense, however lucid and cogent it might appear to the eyes of faith, is incorrigibly obscure and incoherent."1 This claim coheres with the New Testament scholar Ernst Käsemann's notion of apocalyptic, as set forth in Käsemann's well known rhetorical questions—to which he answers in the negative—"Has there (...) ever been a theological system which has not collapsed? Have we been promised that we should know ourselves to be in possession of a theologia perennis?"2 For Käsemann, Christian theological "continuity" (if such there is) consists in "the hope of the manifestation of the Son of Man on his way to enthronement"3—Easter hope. Hart follows his own version of this path.Hart contends that he does not intend to overthrow the truth of the Nicene Creed.4 But he bemoans the claims of various Christian communities—Catholic, [End Page 215] Orthodox, Protestant—to have faithfully communicated the Gospel: "All Christian communions of any size or duration have their distinctive traditionalisms, their myths of continuity amidst rupture and rupture amidst continuity, their claims of doctrinal pedigree and of allegiance to the authority of the Christian past."5 Hart rejects all such ecclesial claims of dogmatic continuity and fidelity. Theologically, he deems it impossible for anyone "to say with absolute finality what the one true tradition is."6 Historically, he thinks it impossible to discern any "rational unity within the course of Christian tradition that one could confidently claim has been sustained intact amid the flux of times and cultures."7There are certain rhetorical emphases that stand out as Hart describes his own constructive view of Christian "tradition." He states that tradition is "the constant creative recollection of a promise whose fulfillment and ultimate meaning are yet to be unveiled"—not in the sense that the Church awaits the fullness that is to come and that dogmatic propositions, while true, are always inadequate to divine realities, but in the stronger sense of appealing to "a future apocalyptic horizon where the tradition's ultimate meaning is to be found" and rejecting "any reduction of that final revelation to whatever formulations of belief happen to be available at any given stage of doctrinal development." Hart depicts Christian tradition as an active transmission of a gift that remains fundamentally hidden and unknown. He invokes the image of "the impartation of a gift that remains sealed, a giving always deferred toward a future not yet known." There is a giving, but this giving is "always deferred," its future is "not yet known," and the gift itself "remains sealed." Hart argues that the "gift must remain sealed until the very end, so that the glory will not dissipate into ordinary time, whose atmosphere is incapable of sustaining and nourishing it." Time—history—cannot sustain or nourish the divine gift, and so it must be "sealed" until the end of time; and yet it can be known "in and as" ever-changing, historical tradition.8Tradition accomplishes this handing on of the sealed gift, says Hart, through its "ceaseless flow of... intertwining variations." Hart adds with regard to historicity and to "the animating impulse of the tradition": "Once that vital force has moved on to assume new living configurations, the attempt unnaturally to preserve earlier forms can achieve nothing but... the perfumed repose of a cadaver."9 The "earlier forms" that once [End Page 216] contained the "vital force" must constantly be reconfigured within tradition's "ceaseless flow."Hart pictures a destabilizing "play of tension and resolution, stability and disintegration," and he holds that we must possess a "positive desire for moments of dissolution" if we are to be faithful to "whatever is most original and most final in a tradition." Only thus can whatever is "most imperishable in a tradition... be fitfully perceived, or at least sensed," by those few persons spiritually and intellectually able to do so. By comparison, I would suggest that the core realities of faith can be much more than "fitfully perceived" or "sensed"; I think dogmatic formulations serve... (shrink)

A recent movement within political philosophy called luck egalitarianism has attempted to synthesize the right’s regard for responsibility with the left’s concern for equality. The original motivation for subscribing to luck egalitarianism stems from the belief that one’s success in life ought to reflect one’s own choices and not brute luck. Luck egalitarian theorists differ in the decision procedures that they propose, but they share in common the general approach that we ought to equalize individuals with respect to brute luck (...) so that differences in distribution are only a consequence of the responsible choices that individuals make. I intend to show that through the application of its own distributive procedures, the interpersonal luck egalitarian approach actually undermines its original motivation by making the lives of individuals subject to brute luck. I propose two alternative methods that the luck egalitarian could use to prevent the problems suffered by the interpersonal luck egalitarian standard. (shrink)

Evolutionary psychologists attempt to infer our evolved psychology from the selection pressures present in our ancestral environments. Their use of this inference strategy—often called “adaptive thinking”—is thought to be justified by way of appeal to a rather modest form of adaptationism, according to which the mind's adaptive complexity reveals it to be a product of selection. I argue, on the contrary, that the mind's being an adaptation is only a necessary and not a sufficient condition for the validity of adaptive (...) thinking, and that evolutionary psychology's predictive project is in fact committed to an extremely strong and highly implausible form of adaptationism. According to this “strong adaptationism,” the macroevolutionary trajectory of a population is determined by, and therefore predictable on the basis of, the selection pressures acting upon it. Not only is this form of adaptationism prima facie highly implausible, it requires making a number of naïve and likely false assumptions concerning the nature of heritable phenotypic variation in natural populations. In particular, it assumes that phenotypic variation is inevitably small in its extent, unbiased in its direction, and copious in its quantity. Because it is unlikely that these conditions obtain as a general rule, and even more unlikely that they obtained in early human populations, I conclude that there is little reason to believe that adaptive thinking can be used to infer the current structure of our minds from evidence of past selection pressures. (shrink)