What is given to us in conscious experience? The Given is an attempt to answer this question and in this way contribute to a general theory of mental content. The content of conscious experience is understood to be absolutely everything that is given to one, experientially, in the having of an experience. Michelle Montague focuses on the analysis of conscious perception, conscious emotion, and conscious thought, and deploys three fundamental notions in addition to the fundamental notion of content: the (...) notions of intentionality, phenomenology, and consciousness. She argues that all experience essentially involves all four things, and that the key to an adequate general theory of what is given in experience lies in giving a correct specification of the nature of these four things and the relations between them. (shrink)

This study interrogates the Gap campaign from a political economic perspective to determine whether it goes beyond merely touting the virtuous line of social responsibility. Critics cite the irony of capitalist-based solutions that perpetuate the inequities they are trying to address. Others suggest the aid generated is problematic in and of itself because it keeps Africa from becoming self-sufficient. This research contends the purpose of the Gap’s participation is genuine, going beyond window dressing and the surface level benefit of capitalistic (...) enterprise, and is in fact linked to a higher motive of propagating ethical trade which ultimately offers African beneficiaries a path to financial independence. However, because the message of the current Gap advertising campaign does convey a false sense of doing good, another advertising approach is warranted. (shrink)

The B-theory of time holds that McTaggart’s A-series of past, present, and future is reducible to the B-series of events running from earlier to later. According to the date-theory—originally put forth by J.J.C. Smart and later endorsed by by D.H. Mellor—the truth conditions of tensed or Asentence-tokens can be given in terms of tenseless or B-sentences and, therefore, A-sentence-tokens do not ascribe any A-determinations of pastness, presentness, or futurity. However, as Nathan Oaklander has argued, the date-theory does not provide an (...) adequate analysis of the ontological truth conditions of irreducible A-propositions. I show that the co-reporting theory—which holds that for every A-sentence-token there is a B-sentence that differs in sense but reports the same event or state of affairs—escapes the objections Oaklander has addressed against the date-theory. (shrink)

My concern in this paper is with the intentionality of emotions. Desires and cognitions are the traditional paradigm cases of intentional attitudes, and one very direct approach to the question of the intentionality of emotions is to treat it as sui generis—as on a par with the intentionality of desires and cognitions but in no way reducible to it. A more common approach seeks to reduce the intentionality of emotions to the intentionality of familiar intentional attitudes like desires and cognitions. (...) In this paper, I argue for the sui generis approach. (shrink)

The development of an ethical perspective of HRM that is both employee centered and explicitly normative and, as such, distinct from dominant and criticalperspectives of HRM has progressed in recent years. Reliance on the traditional “threesome” of rights/justice theories, deontology and consequentialism, however, has limited debate to micro-level issues and the search for a “solution.” By understanding the employment relationship as a stakeholder relationship, we open the ethical analysis of HRM to the pluralism and pragmatism that stakeholder theory has to (...) offer. In doing this, we can address both the broader need for HRM to offer a more comprehensive account of our humanity and the specific requisite for HRM to treat employees as moral persons with “names and faces.”. (shrink)

Trust is a fundamental aspect of the moral treatment of stakeholders within the organization–stakeholder relationship. Stakeholders trust the organization to return benefit or protections from harm commensurate with their contributions or stakes. However, in many situations, the firm holds greater power than the stakeholder and therefore cannot necessarily be trusted to return the aforementioned duty to the stakeholder. Stakeholders must therefore rely on the trustworthiness of the organization to fulfill obligations in accordance to Phillips’ principle of fairness (Business Ethics Quarterly7(1), (...) 1997, 51–66), particularly where low-power stakeholders may not be fully consenting (Van Buren III, Business Ethics Quarterly11(3), 2001, 481–499). The construct of organizational trustworthiness developed herewith is presented as a possible solution to the problem of unfairness in organization–stakeholder relations. While organizational trustworthiness does not create an ethical obligation where none existed before, stakeholders who lack power will likely be treated fairly when organizational trustworthiness is present. (shrink)

This article presents an overview for clinician investigators on the concepts of decision-making capacity and vulnerability as related to human subjects research. Tools for capacity assessment and unacknowledged sources of vulnerability are discussed, and the practical gaps in current informed consent requirements related to impaired capacity and potential vulnerability are described. Options are suggested for research discussions when full regulatory consent is not possible and an exception from informed consent does not apply.

The human species is more reliant on cultural adaptation than any other species, but it is unclear how observational learning can give rise to the faithful transmission of cultural adaptations. One possibility is that teaching facilitates accurate social transmission by narrowing the range of inferences that learners make. However, there is wide disagreement about how to define teaching, and how to interpret the empirical evidence for teaching across cultures and species. In this article I argue that disputes about the nature (...) and prevalence of teaching across human societies and nonhuman animals are based on a number of deep-rooted theoretical differences between fields, as well as on important differences in how teaching is defined. To reconcile these disparate bodies of research, I review the three major approaches to the study of teaching – mentalistic, culture-based, and functionalist – and outline the research questions about teaching that each addresses. I then argue for a new, integrated framework that differentiates between teaching types according to the specific adaptive problems that each type solves, and apply this framework to restructure current empirical evidence on teaching in humans and nonhuman animals. This integrative framework generates novel insights, with broad implications for the study of the evolution of teaching, including the roles of cognitive constraints and cooperative dilemmas in how and when teaching evolves. Finally, I propose an explanation for why some types of teaching are uniquely human, and discuss new directions for research motivated by this framework. (shrink)

Much human adaptation depends on the gradual accumulation of culturally transmitted knowledge and technology. Recent models of this process predict that large, well-connected populations will have more diverse and complex tool kits than small, isolated populations. While several examples of the loss of technology in small populations are consistent with this prediction, it found no support in two systematic quantitative tests. Both studies were based on data from continental populations in which contact rates were not available, and therefore these studies (...) do not provide a test of the models. Here, we show that in Oceania, around the time of early European contact, islands with small populations had less complicated marine foraging technology. This finding suggests that explanations of existing cultural variation based on optimality models alone are incomplete because demography plays an important role in generating cumulative cultural adaptation. It also indicates that hominin populations with similar cognitive abilities may leave very different archaeological records, a conclusion that has important implications for our understanding of the origin of anatomically modern humans and their evolved psychology. (shrink)

As a central organizing institution in society, marriage presents an idealized package for sociosexual relations that reproduces and intertwines gender power dynamics and heterosexual desire. This package is sustained, in part, by the ideology of romantic love—a set of beliefs that constructs only a particular configuration of sexual and gender practices as natural, normal, and right. Drawing on interviews with 45 people, this study examines how people negotiate marital relationships that do not fit into this normative configuration— mixed-orientation marriages. Participants' (...) resolutions to these situations, whether they divorced or created asexual or sexual nonmonogamous marriages, were heavily shaped by their belief in the ideology of romantic love, illustrating how heteronormative relations can be held in place by normalizing ideologies. (shrink)

Abstract:In this paper, I dispute what I callpsychological internalismabout moral responsibility, which comprises most classic accounts as well as newer neurobiological ones, and I defendpsychological externalismabout moral responsibility instead. According to psychological internalism, an agent's moral responsibility is determined solely or primarily by her intentional states. I argue that psychological internalism is empirically challenged by recent findings in social psychology and cognitive science. In light of the empirical evidence, I contend that moral responsibility depends on historical and environmental factors to (...) a much greater degree than previously appreciated. Thus, moral responsibility is not just in the head: indeed, it is much less in the head than typically assumed. (shrink)

International documents on ethical conduct in clinical research have in common the principle that potential harms to research participants must be proportional to anticipated benefits. The anticipated benefits that can justify human research consist of direct benefits to the research participant, and societal benefits, also called social value. In first-in-human research, no direct benefits are expected and the benefit component of the risks-benefit assessment thus merely exists in social value. The concept social value is ambiguous by nature and is used (...) in numerous ways in the research ethics literature. Because social value justifies involving human participants, especially in early human trials, this is problematic. (shrink)

The emergence of environmental governance practices raises a fundamental question as to whether they are substantive or symbolic. Toward that end, we analyze the relationship between a firm’s environmental governance and its environmental management as reflected in its ultimate outcome, environmental performance. We posit that substantive practices would bring changes in organizations, most notably in terms of improved environmental performance, whereas symbolic practices would portray organizations as environmentally committed without making meaningful changes to their operations. Focusing on a sample of (...) environmentally sensitive firms, results are consistent with environmental governance mechanisms being predominantly part of a symbolic approach to manage stakeholder perceptions on environmental management, having little substantial impact on organizations. Statistical analyses show mostly that there is no relation between environmental governance mechanisms and environmental performance, measured in terms of regulatory compliance, pollution prevention, and environmental capital expenditures. However, there is some indication that environmental incentives are associated with pollution prevention. Interviews with corporate directors shed further light on these results by underlining that environmental governance mechanisms are employed at the board level to protect the organization from reputational and/or regulatory harm, but are not necessarily intended to proactively improve environmental performance. (shrink)

Research on human cadavers is an important mechanism of scientific progress and comprises a large industry in the United States. However, despite its importance and influence, there is little ethical or regulatory oversight of cadaver-based research. This lack of transparency raises important ethical questions. Thus, this paper serves as a call for ethicists and regulators to pay increased attention to cadaver research. I argue that cadaver research ought to be considered a subset of human subjects research and held accountable to (...) higher ethical standards. After describing current practices, I argue that oversight of cadaver research as a form of human subjects research is appropriate because cadaver research is similar to other types of human research, participants in cadaver research incur risks of harm, and a current lack of oversight has allowed the cadaver industry to entice research participation through ethically questionable practices. This paper urges greater dialogue among human subjects research ethicists and regulators about what constitutes appropriate protections for participants in cadaver research. (shrink)

Philosophical suspicions about the place of shame in the psychology of the mature moral agent are in tension with the commonplace assumption that to call a person shameless purports to mark a fault, arguably a moral fault. I shift philosophical suspicions away from shame and toward its absence in the shameless by focusing attention on phenomena of shamelessness. In redirecting our attention, I clarify the nature of the failing to which ascriptions of shamelessness might refer and defend the thought that, (...) as an evasion of moral self-censure, shamelessness can be morally pernicious. Far from foregoing shame, I conclude, we should be mindful of its moral importance and unapologetic in its defense. (shrink)

There are studies on the normative ethical frameworks used by long-term care staff and studies proposing how staff should reason, but few studies explore how staff actually reason. This study reports on the ethical reasoning process and experiences of moral distress of long-term care staff in the provision of social care. Seven interdisciplinary focus groups were conducted with twenty front-line staff. Staff typically did not have difficulty determining the ethical decision and/or action; however, they frequently experience moral distress. To manage (...) these experiences of moral distress in making ethical decisions, staff 1) comply with being told what to do out of fear of consequences, 2) defer decisions to family, 3) “have a meeting,” 4) socialization into and acceptance of workplace culture. Findings suggest that to better understand how and why staff make ethical decisions and improve quality and ethical care, we must explore the interaction between front-line practice and organizational and public policy. (shrink)

The development of an ethical perspective of HRM that is both employee centered and explicitly normative and, as such, distinct from dominant and criticalperspectives of HRM has progressed in recent years. Reliance on the traditional “threesome” of rights/justice theories, deontology and consequentialism, however, has limited debate to micro-level issues and the search for a “solution.” By understanding the employment relationship as a stakeholder relationship, we open the ethical analysis of HRM to the pluralism and pragmatism that stakeholder theory has to (...) offer. In doing this, we can address both the broader need for HRM to offer a more comprehensive account of our humanity and the specific requisite for HRM to treat employees as moral persons with “names and faces.”. (shrink)

The surface grammar of reports such as ‘I have a pain in my leg’ suggests that pains are objects which are spatially located in parts of the body. We show that the parallel construction is not available in Mandarin. Further, four philosophically important grammatical features of such reports cannot be reproduced. This suggests that arguments and puzzles surrounding such reports may be tracking artefacts of English, rather than philosophically significant features of the world.

Lee emphasizes the need to better understand the moral relationship between researchers and participants connoted by precision medicine, with the framework of “the gift” offering bioethics a...

Philosophers disagree about what the folk concept of pain is. This paper criticises existing theories of the folk concept of pain, i.e. the mental view, the bodily view, and the recently proposed polyeidic view. It puts forward an alternative proposal – the polysemy view – according to which pain terms like “sore,” “ache” and “hurt” are polysemous, where one sense refers to a mental state and another a bodily state, and the type of polysemy at issue reflects two distinct but (...) related concepts of pain. Implications with respect to issues in philosophy of pain are also drawn. (shrink)

Emmanuel Levinas’s work on the ethical responsibility of the face-to-face relation offers an illuminating context or clearing within which we might better appreciate the work of Simone Weil. Levinas’s subjectivity of the hostage, the one who is responsible for the other before being responsible for the self, provides us with a way of re-encountering the categories of gravity and grace invoked in Weil’s original account. In this paper I explore the terrain between these thinkers by raising the question of eating (...) as, in part, an ethical act. Weil’s conception of grace refers to the state of decreation in which the utter humility of the self moves toward a kind of disintegration and weightlessness. This weightlessness, which Weil contrasts to the gravity of terrestrial weight, might be thought of in terms of the subject’s fundamental responsibility for the other, especially in terms of the injunction “Thou shalt neither kill nor take the food of thy neighbour.” Taking the place of the other, taking the food from the mouth of the other, is the ethical dilemma facing the subject as hostage and an elaboration of this situation may provide us with steps toward a radical questioning of anorexia as—at least inpart—an ethical rather than purely medical condition. (shrink)

In this paper I contest Ian Hacking’s claim that astronomers do not experiment. Riding on this thesis is a re-evaluation of his view that astronomers are less justified than other natural scientists in believing in the existence of the objects they study, and that astronomers are not proper natural scientists at all. The defense of my position depends upon carefully examining what, exactly, is being manipulated in an experiment, and the role of experimental effects for Hacking’s experimental realism. I argue (...) that Hacking’s experimental realism is not adequately defended, and even if we accept it in good grace, the case can be still made that astronomers experiment by Hacking’s account. (shrink)

Philosophers have traditionally conceived of discovery in terms of internal cognitive acts. Close consideration of Rosalind Franklin's role in the discovery of the DNA double helix, however, reveals some problems with this traditional conception. This article argues that defining discovery in terms of mental operations entails problematic conclusions and excludes acts that should fall within the domain of discovery. It proposes that discovery be expanded to include external acts of making visible. Doing so allows for a reevaluation of Franklin's role (...) in the discovery of the structure of DNA. (shrink)

Previously conducted research has determined that physiological and psychophysiological communications evident during pregnancy are vital to the bond formed prenatally. These innate biological responses are further enhanced through psychophysiological factors, such as maternal prenatal stress, which attest to the essential communication between a mother and child in maternal–fetal attachment. A consideration of these factors is necessary with the increase in assisted reproductive technology, such as in vitro fertilization, surrogacy, and elective cesarean section, as this may affect the development of the (...) maternal–fetal bond. It would be of benefit to the child, the mother, and every society to seek a more complete understanding of the intricate maternal–fetal bond, as the first friendship developed at the beginning of human life. (shrink)

There is growing concern that decision-making informed by machine learning (ML) algorithms may unfairly discriminate based on personal demographic attributes, such as race and gender. Scholars have responded by introducing numerous mathematical definitions of fairness to test the algorithm, many of which are in conflict with one another. However, these reductionist representations of fairness often bear little resemblance to real-life fairness considerations, which in practice are highly contextual. Moreover, fairness metrics tend to be implemented in narrow and targeted toolkits that (...) are difficult to integrate into an algorithm’s broader ethical assessment. In this paper, we derive lessons from ethical philosophy and welfare economics as they relate to the contextual factors relevant for fairness. In particular we highlight the debate around acceptability of particular inequalities and the inextricable links between fairness, welfare and autonomy. We propose Key Ethics Indicators (KEIs) as a way towards providing a more holistic understanding of whether or not an algorithm is aligned to the decision-maker’s ethical values. (shrink)

Roughly 1.7 million people died in Cambodia from untreated disease, starvation, and execution during the Khmer Rouge reign of less than four years in the late 1970s. The regime’s brutality has come to be symbolized by the multitude of black-and-white mug shots of prisoners taken at the notorious Tuol Sleng prison, where thousands of “enemies of the state” were tortured before being sent to the Killing Fields. In Archiving the Unspeakable, Michelle Caswell traces the social life of these photographic (...) records through the lens of archival studies and elucidates how, paradoxically, they have become agents of silence and witnessing, human rights and injustice as they are deployed at various moments in time and space. From their creation as Khmer Rouge administrative records to their transformation beginning in 1979 into museum displays, archival collections, and databases, the mug shots are key components in an ongoing drama of unimaginable human suffering. Winner, Waldo Gifford Leland Award, Society of American Archivists Longlist, ICAS Book Prize, International Convention of Asia Scholars. (shrink)

According to Jeff McMahan, a person is liable to be killed in self-defense if the person has acted in such a way that to kill him would neither wrong him nor violate his rights. This account of self-defense has spawned something of a cottage industry in the philosophical literature of such “liability-based accounts.” Liability-based accounts of self-defense, however, are deficient for two reasons. First, they fail to account for the moral residue that remains in the wake of the justified killing (...) of another human being. Second, they are incapable of explaining cases in which people rationally opt not to kill in cases of justified self-defense. As an alternative, the chapter offers a reasons-based account of self-defense and demonstrates its capacity both to avoid counterintuitive views regarding the moral position of those who kill in self-defense and to explain a wider range of salient considerations regarding the morality of self-defense. (shrink)

We examine whether mindfulness can neutralize the negative impact of COVID-19 stressors on employees’ sleep duration and work engagement. In Study 1, we conducted a field experiment in Wuhan, China during the lockdown between February 20, 2020, and March 2, 2020, in which we induced state mindfulness by randomly assigning participants to either a daily mindfulness practice or a daily mind-wandering practice. Results showed that the sleep duration of participants in the mindfulness condition, compared with the control condition, was less (...) impacted by COVID-19 stressors (i.e., the increase of infections in the community). In Study 2, in a 10-day daily diary study in the United Kingdom between June 8, 2020, and June 19, 2020, we replicate our results from Study 1 using a subjective measure of COVID-19 stressors and a daily measure of state mindfulness. In addition, we find that mindfulness buffers the negative effect of COVID-19 stressors on work engagement mediated by sleep duration. As the COVID-19 pandemic is ongoing and the number of reported cases continues to rise globally, our findings suggest that mindfulness is an evidence-based practice that can effectively neutralize the negative effect of COVID-19 stressors on sleep and work outcomes. The findings of the present study contribute to the employee stress and well-being literature as well as the emerging organizational research on mindfulness. (shrink)

The paradox of pain refers to the idea that the folk concept of pain is paradoxical, treating pains as simultaneously mental states and bodily states. By taking a close look at our pain terms, this paper argues that there is no paradox of pain. The air of paradox dissolves once we recognize that pain terms are polysemous and that there are two separate but related concepts of pain rather than one.

The gender order is subject to challenge and change, particularly when situations arise in which existing inequalities become apparent and therefore must be managed. This study examines one such situation by analyzing how conservative Christian women, who were married to gay men, negotiated feminine identities in marital situations that challenged the legitimacy of traditional gender ideologies and practices. To investigate how these women coped, in-depth interviews were conducted with 15 participants of Christian support groups for wives of homosexual men. Through (...) support group participation, these wives learned two key strategies, redefining homosexuality and submitting to God, to transform the meanings and emotional experiences associated with their marital situations. An analysis of the use and the consequences of these strategies shows how they empowered the wives to positively redefine their marriages and themselves while justifying the existing pattern of gender relations. (shrink)

This major study of Kant provides a detailed examination of the development and function of the doctrine of transcendental illusion in his theoretical philosophy. The author shows that a theory of 'illusion' plays a central role in Kant's arguments about metaphysical speculation and scientific theory. Indeed, she argues that we cannot understand Kant unless we take seriously his claim that the mind inevitably acts in accordance with ideas and principles that are 'illusory'. Taking this claim seriously, we can make much (...) better sense of Kant's arguments and reach a deeper understanding of the role he allots human reason in science. (shrink)

An allergy is commonly understood to be an overreaction of the immune system to harmless substances that are misrecognised as foreign. This concept of allergy as an abnormal, misdirected immune response—a biological fault—stems from the idea that the immune system is an inherently defensive operation designed to protect the individual through an innate capacity to discriminate between the benign and toxic, or self and nonself. However, this definition of allergy represents a radical departure from its original formulation. Literally meaning ‘altered (...) reactivity’, the term was coined in 1906 by Austrian paediatrician Clemens von Pirquet, to describe the fundamentally mutable nature of the immune response.This paper argues that the conventional interpretation of allergy-as-pathology derives from specific concepts of ‘organism’, ‘response’, and ‘normal’ immune function that have—for over a century—governed the perception and study of immune phenomena within immunology. Through an examination of Louis Pasteur’s conceptualisation of the host body/microorganism relationship, I argue that immunology is founded on a view of the organism as a discrete, autonomous entity, and on a concomitant notion of the immune response as essentially reactive. Revisiting the concept of ‘altered reactivity’, this paper points to the fact that allergy was initially posited as a general theory of immune responsiveness and, importantly, one that poses a significant challenge to orthodox notions of immunopathology. It suggests that Pirquet’s unique view of immune responsiveness presents an account of organismic or biological identity that encapsulates, rather than reduces, its ecological complexity. (shrink)

This is the first full-length biography in more than fifty years of Immanuel Kant, one of the giants amongst the pantheon of Western philosophers as well as the one with the most powerful and broad influence on contemporary philosophy. It is well known that Kant spent his entire life in an isolated part of Prussia living the life of a typical university professor. This has given rise to the view that Kant was a pure thinker with no life of his (...) own, or at least none worth considering seriously. In this biography, Manfred Kuehn debunks that myth once and for all. Taking account of the most recent scholarship Professor Kuehn allows the reader to follow the same journey that Kant himself took in emerging as a central figure in modern philosophy. (shrink)