Coexistence between livestock grazing and carnivores in rangelands is a major challenge in terms of sustainable agriculture, animal welfare, species conservation and ecosystem function. Many effective non-lethal tools exist to protect livestock from predation, yet their adoption remains limited. Using a social-ecological transformations framework, we present two qualitative models that depict transformative change in rangelands grazing. Developed through participatory processes with stakeholders from South Africa and the United States of America, the models articulate drivers of change and the essential pathways (...) to transition from routine lethal management of carnivores towards mutually beneficial coexistence. The pathways define broad actions that incorporate multiple values in grazing systems including changes to livestock management practices, financial support, industry capacity building, research, improved governance and marketing initiatives. A key finding is the new concept of ‘Predator Smart Farming’, a holistic and conscientious approach to agriculture, which increases the resilience of landscapes, animals and rural livelihoods. Implementation of these multiple pathways would lead to a future system that ensures thriving agricultural communities, secure livelihoods, reduced violence toward animals, and landscapes that are productive and support species conservation and coexistence. (shrink)

Suppose an accountant discovers evidence of shady practices while ex amining the books of a client. What should he or she do? Accountants have a professional obligation to respect the confidentiality of their cli ents' accounts. But, as an ordinary citizen, our accountant may feel that the authorities ought to be informed. Suppose a physician discov ers that a patient, a bus driver, has a weak heart. If the patient contin ues bus driving even after being informed of the (...) heart condition, should the physician inform the driver's company? Respect for patient confidentiality would say, no. But what if the driver should suffer a heart attack while on duty, causing an accident in which people are killed or seriously injured? Would the doctor bear some responsibility for these consequences? Special obligations, such as those of confidentiality, apply to any one in business or the professions. These obligations articulate, at least in part, what it is for someone to be, say, an accountant or a physician. Since these obligations are special, they raise a real possibility of con flict with the moral principles we usually accept outside of these spe cial relationships in business and the professions. These conflicts may become more accentuated for a professional who is also a corporate employee-a corporate attorney, an engineer working for a construction company, a nurse working as an employee of a hospital. (shrink)

The inconsistency between pro-environmental attitudes and behaviours, known as the “attitude-behaviour” gap, is exceptionally pronounced in scenarios associated with “green” choice. The current literature offers numerous explanations for the reasons behind the “attitude-behaviour” gap, however, the generalisability of these explanations is complex. In addition, the answer to the question of whether the gap occurs between attitudes and intentions, or intentions and behaviours is also unknown. In this study, we propose the moral dimension as a generalisable driver of the “attitude-behaviour” (...) gap and investigate its effectiveness in predicting attitudes, pro-environmental intentions and subsequent behaviours. We do so by using Hunt–Vitell’s moral philosophy-based framework of ethical decision-making, which conceptualises morality as the central decision-making parameter. The results from 557 US MTurk participants revealed that the manipulation of moral dimensions, specifically deontology and teleology, impacted ethical evaluation of presented dilemmas, however, failed to translate into subsequent intentions and behaviours. This finding suggests (i) that the moral dimension has an effect in shaping attitudes toward environmental issues, and (ii) that gap occurs between attitudes and intentions rather than intentions and behaviours. Further investigation of what strengthens and/or overrides the effects of the moral dimension would help understand the reasons why moral attitudes do not always translate into subsequent intentions and behaviours in the pro-environmental domain. (shrink)

The aim of UK-REACH (“The United Kingdom Research study into Ethnicity And COVID-19 outcomes in Healthcare workers”) is to understand if, how, and why healthcare workers (HCWs) in the United Kingdom (UK) from ethnic minority groups are at increased risk of poor outcomes from COVID-19. In this article, we present findings from the ethical and legal stream of the study, which undertook qualitative research seeking to understand and address legal, ethical, and social acceptability issues around data protection, privacy, and information (...) governance associated with the linkage of HCWs’ registration data and healthcare data. We interviewed 22 key opinion leaders in healthcare and health research from across the UK in two-to-one semi-structured interviews. Transcripts were coded using qualitative thematic analysis. Participants told us that a significant aspect of Big Data research in public health is varying drivers of mistrust—of the research itself, research staff and funders, and broader concerns of mistrust within participant communities, particularly in the context of COVID-19 and those situated in more marginalised community settings. However, despite the challenges, participants also identified ways in which legally compliant and ethically informed approaches to research can be crafted to mitigate or overcome mistrust and establish greater confidence in Big Data public health research. Overall, our research indicates that a “Big Data Ethics by Design” approach to research in this area can help assure (1) that meaningful community and participant engagement is taking place and that extant challenges are addressed, and (2) that any new challenges or hitherto unknown unknowns can be rapidly and properly considered to ensure potential (but material) harms are identified and minimised where necessary. Our findings indicate such an approach, in turn, will help drive better scientific breakthroughs that translate into medical innovations and effective public health interventions, which benefit the publics studied, including those who are often marginalised in research. (shrink)

I first sketch an account of humility as a character trait in which we are unimpressed with our good, envied, or admired features, achievements, etc., where these lack significant salience for our image of ourselves, because of the greater prominence of our limitations and flaws. I situate this view among several other recent conceptions of humility (also called modesty), dividing them between the inward-directed and outward-directed, distinguish mine from them, pose problems for each alternative account, and show how my understanding (...) of humility captures truths present but exaggerated in several of them. Responding to some problems for my view, including what I call “Driver’s Paradox”(i.e., the strangeness of someone’s proclaiming ‘I’m humble!’), I suggest that some over-ambitious claims about our moral responsibilities may indicate a lack of proper humility. I discuss the relationship of the character trait of humility both to what humiliates and to what humbles, concluding with consideration of the background assumptions against which, and the circumstances in which, humility may reasonably be classified as a moral virtue. (shrink)

In her book Uneasy Virtue, Julia Driver presents an account of motive or trait utilitarianism, one that has been taken as “the most detailed and thoroughly defended recent formulation” of consequential virtue ethics. On Driver's account character traits are morally virtuous if and only if they generally lead to good consequences for society. Various commentators have taken Driver to task over this account of virtue, which she terms “pure evaluational externalism.” They object that, on Driver's account (...) of virtue, it could turn out that traits traditionally understood as pernicious are actually virtuous. While many writers have speculated about the forms new 'virtues' might take in a hypothetical world, I will argue that at least one trait that is seemingly pernicious but would have to be counted as virtuous by Driver already exists. (shrink)

Over the last half century, United States debates about abortion focused at first on the question whether the fetus is a person with rights and later on whether involuntary conception—for instance, as a consequence of sexual assault—might mitigate a woman’s responsibilities toward the fetus she carries. This article argues that, whatever one’s position on these two questions, a third, morally salient dimension of most US women’s experiences of unwanted pregnancy deserves more attention: both abortion and birth burden women with their (...) inevitable moral failure to fulfill their responsibilities to persons who frequently have de facto last‐resort and unavoidable claims on them. Using Lisa Tessman’s work on moral failure and Pope Francis’s interventions on abortion and mercy, I argue that this moral anguish is not a simple emotional remainder. Structural evil, not necessity, is the primary driver of forced pregnancy choices that injure women and their children both materially and morally. Consequently, whether they abort or carry to term, women with unwanted pregnancies need mercy or forgiveness. But they also need compassionate solidarity: prophetic, active efforts to transform the social structures that make material harm and moral failure, and consequent moral anguish and moral injury, inevitable for many pregnant women. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Minds, Memes, and MultiplesStephen R. L. Clark (bio)AbstractMultiple Personality Disorder is sometimes interpreted as evidence for a radically pluralistic theory of the human mind, judged to be at odds with an older, monistic theory. Older philosophy, on the contrary, suggests that the mind is both plural (in its sub-systems or personalities) and unitary (in that there is only one light over all those lesser parts). Talk of gods and (...) demons has been a way of arranging elements of human mind and motivation. The one light, or center, is something which requires mental discipline to discover rather than being immediately obvious. This indeed is what even Descartes (sometimes blamed for introducing the notion of a simple, transparent self) really intended. Discovering or uncovering the Self is a psychotherapeutic as well as a philosophical imperative.Keywordsconsciousness, gods, Multiple Personality Disorder, passivity, thought alienationMultiple Personality 1The phenomena popularly identified as evidence of “multiple personality disorder” are strangely attractive. The stories suggest that those who provide, who are, the evidence for this disorder are usually in acute distress, but those who wish to believe in it find the idea almost exhilarating. Most of us would rather wish to think that we had undeveloped possibilities, that it would be exciting to be a married academic today, a celibate bus-driver tomorrow and a teenage hooligan on Sundays. The impulse to put aside our duties, or our habits, can be a powerful one, and only the sober thought that we would not, after all, succeed in keeping our lives separate keeps us single. The notion that there are people who take the risk, that our bodies could house a multitude, is one we would wish to believe. At the same time, we wish to remember that such divisions bring their own problems, and as easily suspect that those who apparently succeed in dividing themselves up must have suffered serious trauma in the past, and be plagued by missed appointments and self-hatred in the present. Some of us believe that “multiple personality” reveals a truth about us all, that none of us is actually the simple, heroic self that we pretend: “the self” is only an occasionally concordant swarm of impulses, easily divided. Others of us suspect that it is a wish to avoid responsibility, and guilt, that causes some of us to pretend not to be the selves that actually we are (see Rycroft 1987).On earlier occasions (notably Clark 1991b), I have myself expressed some doubt about reports of Multiple Personality Disorder, and suggested that they should be seen as fictions or dramatic representations (whether by the patient or the reporter) which should not be judged as “true” or “false,” but rather as “interesting” or “pernicious.” Stephen Braude, in a recent excellent book, seems at first to side with the true believers: it is absurd, he suggests, not to believe the many reports of fugue, discordance and fully developed multiples (Braude 1991; see also Wilkes 1984, [End Page 21] Brennan 1990). Maybe a few such reports are over-credulous: it would not be surprising that the occasional clever criminal successfully pretended not to know what an alien other did with his body. But there are, he says, too many independent records to disbelieve, and not only the distant stories of Miss Beauchamp (Prince 1908) or Eve (Thigpen & Cleckley 1954, 1957). Since the 1970s the number of reported cases has been rising again. It may be that some, many, or all the cases are artifacts, in the sense that the doctor’s expectations helped to produce or develop the varied personalities: “when a client walks into the therapist’s office and sits down, the expectation framework of the therapist immediately comes into play” (Crabtree 1985, 211; see also Hawthorn 1983). But the evidence is also compatible with the thought that psychotherapeutic fashion now allows the therapist to notice, rather than invent, the phenomena. Multiples often wish to conceal their condition, it is said, and only observers alerted to the possibility will notice them. Conscious or half-conscious role-playing, which would perhaps be less philosophically interesting, cannot explain more than a few of the cruder cases.In short... (shrink)

Higher education, a key driver of women’s empowerment, is still segregated by gender across the world. Agricultural higher education is a field that is male-dominated, even though internationally women play a large role in agricultural production. The purpose of this study was to understand the experience, including challenges and coping strategies, of women from 10 Latin American countries attending an agricultural university in Latin America. The participants were 28 women students with a mean age of 20.9 ± 1.8 years. (...) Following informed consent and assurance of confidentiality, four focus group sessions (one for each year of study with a mean duration of 81 min) were conducted in Spanish. The central question was, “what has been your experience at the university?” Sessions were recorded and transcribed. Thematic coding was performed independently by two teams of researchers (from Latin America and North America), with the resulting schemas combined through mutual discussion. Member checking, auditing, and reflexivity contributed to trustworthiness of the process. Students reported that the personal qualities needed for success included determination, persistence, and self-efficacy. Many described an empowerment process, including increased discipline and self-efficacy from the first to fourth year of study. University life encompassed six themes: university structure and discipline (part of the exosystem), two supportive microsystems (friends and classmates and institutional support) as well as three challenges (academics, peers, and machismo). Cultural influences instantiated in students’ daily experiences included familism, machismo, and religious faith. Students anticipated futures involving further education and contributions to society. We conclude that higher education in agriculture can serve as an effective means of empowering women to feed the world. (shrink)

Islamist rhetoric about the humiliation of Islam and American rhetoric about national humiliation have been energized by disparate events in recent years, from the photographs of American soldiers in Mogadishu, Somalia to the invasion of Iraq, the “Innocence of Muslims” video to the attacks on 9/11. At the same time, there’s been an explosion of scholarship on humiliation as a driver of international conflict and political violence in general, and in relation to the bodies and minds of Muslims in (...) particular. The link between humiliation and Muslims is thus a co-production between Islamists who continually invoke it and scholars from various disciplines and regions who regularly posit it. Yet there’s been very little analysis of humiliation in Islamist discourse; minimal effort to anatomize the ways in which this experience of humiliation is constructed to necessitate particular kinds of retaliatory action; and no attempt to theorize more broadly about patterns and discontinuities in how different rhetorics construct humiliation. This article takes up the following questions: What is the substantive content of humiliation in such rhetoric and analysis? Do these different rhetorics of humiliation articulate the same understanding of it, as an act and an experience? What does close analysis of Islamist discourse on humiliation in comparative perspective reveal about the political stakes and affective resonances articulated and energized by it in this particular moment in history? Finally, what do the answers to these questions say about the reach and limits of the dominant account of humiliation as the violated dignity or injured self-respect of a generic individual? (shrink)

The Unknowable, arguably the greatest Russian philosophical work of the 20th century, was the culmination of S. L. Frank's intellectual and spiritual development, the boldest and most imaginative of all his writings, containing a synthesis of epistemology, ontology, social philosophy, religious philosophy, and personal spiritual experience.

Political and social commentators regularly bemoan the decline of morality in the modern world. They claim that the norms and values that held society together in the past are rapidly eroding, to be replaced by permissiveness and empty hedonism. But as Edward Rubin demonstrates in this powerful account of moral transformations, these prophets of doom are missing the point. Morality is not diminishing; instead, a new morality, centered on an ethos of human self-fulfillment, is arising to replace the old one. (...) As Rubin explains, changes in morality have gone hand in hand with changes in the prevailing mode of governance throughout the course of Western history. During the Early Middle Ages, a moral system based on honor gradually developed. In a dangerous world where state power was declining, people relied on bonds of personal loyalty that were secured by generosity to their followers and violence against their enemies. That moral order, exemplified in the early feudal system and in sagas like The Song of Roland, The Song of the Cid, and the Arthurian legends has faded, but its remnants exist today in criminal organizations like the Mafia and in the rap music of the urban ghettos. When state power began to revive in the High Middle Ages through the efforts of the European monarchies, and Christianity became more institutionally effective and more spiritually intense, a new morality emerged. Described by Rubin as the morality of higher purposes, it demanded that people devote their personal efforts to achieving salvation and their social efforts to serving the emerging nation-states. It insisted on social hierarchy, confined women to subordinate roles, restricted sex to procreation, centered child-rearing on moral inculcation, and countenanced slavery and the marriage of pre-teenage girls to older men. Our modern era, which began in the late 18th century, has seen the gradual erosion of this morality of higher purposes and the rise of a new morality of self-fulfillment, one that encourages individuals to pursue the most meaningful and rewarding life-path. Far from being permissive or a moral abdication, it demands that people respect each other's choices, that sex be mutually enjoyable, that public positions be allocated according to merit, and that society provide all its members with their minimum needs so that they have the opportunity to fulfill themselves. Where people once served the state, the state now functions to serve the people. The clash between this ascending morality and the declining morality of higher purposes is the primary driver of contemporary political and cultural conflict. A sweeping, big-idea book in the vein of Francis Fukuyama's The End of History, Charles Taylor's The Secular Age, and Richard Sennett's The Fall of Public Man, Edward Rubin's new volume promises to reshape our understanding of morality, its relationship to government, and its role in shaping the emerging world of High Modernity. (shrink)

A major difficulty for currently existing theories of inductive inference involves the question of what to do when novel, unknown, or previously unsuspected phenomena occur. In this paper one particular instance of this difficulty is considered, the so-called sampling of species problem.The classical probabilistic theories of inductive inference due to Laplace, Johnson, de Finetti, and Carnap adopt a model of simple enumerative induction in which there are a prespecified number of types or species which may be observed. But, realistically, this (...) is often not the case. In 1838 the English mathematician Augustus De Morgan proposed a modification of the Laplacian model to accommodate situations where the possible types or species to be observed are not assumed to be known in advance; but he did not advance a justification for his solution. (shrink)

Joachim Schulte’s introduction provides a distinctive and masterful account of the full range of Wittgenstein’s thought. It is concise but not compressed, substantive but not overloaded with developmental or technical detail, informed by the latest scholarship but not pedantic. Beginners will find it accessible and seasoned students of Wittgenstein will appreciate it for the illuminating overview it provides.

Inducing the rubber hand illusion (RHI) requires that participants look at an imitation hand while it is stroked in synchrony with their occluded biological hand. Previous explanations of the RHI have emphasized multisensory integration, and excluded higher cognitive functions. We investigated the relationship between the RHI and higher cognitive functions by experimentally testing task switch (as measured by switch cost) and mind wandering (as measured by SART score); we also included a questionnaire for attentional control that comprises two subscales, attention-shift (...) and attention-focus. To assess experience of RHI, the Botvinick and Cohen (1998) questionnaire was used and illusion onset time was recorded. Our results indicate that rapidity of onset reliably indicates illusion strength. Regression analysis revealed that participants evincing less switch cost and higher attention-shift scores had faster RHI onset times, and that those with higher attention-shift scores experienced the RHI more vividly. These results suggest that the multi-sensory hypothesis is not sufficient to explain the illusion: higher cognitive functions should be taken into account when explaining variation in the experience of ownership for the rubber hand. (shrink)

Among various cases that equally admit of evidentialist reasoning, the supposedly evidentialist solution has varying degrees of intuitive attractiveness. I suggest that cooperative reasoning may account for the appeal of apparently evidentialist behavior in the cases in which it is intuitively attractive, while the inapplicability of cooperative reasoning may account for the unattractiveness of evidentialist behaviour in other cases. A collective causal power with respect to agreed outcomes, not evidentialist reasoning, makes cooperation attractive in the Prisoners' Dilemma. And a natural (...) though unwarranted assumption of such a power may account for the intuitive appeal of the one-box response in Newcomb's Problem. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to make a simple observation regarding the Johnson -Carnap continuum of inductive methods. From the outset, a common criticism of this continuum was its failure to permit the confirmation of universal generalizations: that is, if an event has unfailingly occurred in the past, the failure of the continuum to give some weight to the possibility that the event will continue to occur without fail in the future. The Johnson -Carnap continuum is the mathematical consequence (...) of an axiom termed Johnson 's sufficientness postulate, the thesis of this paper is that, properly viewed, the failure of the Johnson -Carnap continuum to confirm universal generalizations is not a deep fact, but rather an immediate consequence of the sufficientness postulate; and that if this postulate is modified in the minimal manner necessary to eliminate such an entailment, then the result is a new continuum that differs from the old one in precisely one respect: it enjoys the desideratum of confirming universal generalizations. (shrink)

Part 1 reviews the general question of when elimination of an entity orproperty is warranted, as opposed to revision of our view of it. Theconnections of this issue with the distinction between context-drivenand theory-driven accounts of reference and essence are probed.Context-driven accounts tend to be less hospitable to eliminativism thantheory-driven accounts, but this tendency should not be overstated.However, since both types of account give essences explanatory depth,eliminativist claims associated with supposed impossible essences areproblematic on both types of account.Part 2 applies (...) these considerations to responsibility in particular. Theimpossibility of regressive choice or control is explained. It is arguedthat this impossibility does not support the claim that no one is everresponsible on either context-driven or theory-driven accounts of`responsibility'. (shrink)

Academic programs in the medical/health humanities have proliferated widely in recent years, and the professional, academic, and cultural drivers of this growth promise sustained new program development. In this article, we present the results of a survey sent to representatives of one hundred twenty-four baccalaureate and ten graduate programs in the medical/health humanities to assess the experiences and needs of existing programs. Survey results confirm the interest in and need for a descriptive toolkit as opposed to a prescriptive manual; indicate (...) what data and materials are most needed to support the successful development of new academic programs in the field; and identify areas for future research. Recognizing a need for program development resources, the Health Humanities Consortium has initiated the creation of a comprehensive online toolkit. We discuss survey results and the toolkit in relation to the drivers of new program growth. Finally, we describe resources now available through the HHC’s new online program toolkit, including existing programs; sample syllabi; sample curricula templates; program rationale; proposal templates; and graduation data. (shrink)

S. L. Hurley; VIII*—Kant on Spontaneity and the Myth of the Giving, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 94, Issue 1, 1 June 1994, Pages 137–164, htt.

The coronavirus pandemic has necessitated extraordinary human resilience in order to preserve and prolong life and social order. Risks to health and even life are being confronted by workers in health and social care, as well as those in roles previously never defined as “frontline,” such as individuals working in community supply chain sectors. The strategy adopted by the United Kingdom government in facing the challenges of the pandemic was markedly different from other countries. The present study set out to (...) examine what variables were associated with resilience, burnout, and wellbeing in all sectors of frontline workers, and whether or not these differed between the UK and Republic of Ireland. Individuals were eligible if they were a frontline worker in the UK or RoI during the pandemic. Part of a larger, longitudinal study, the participants completed an online survey to assess various aspects of their daily and working lives, along with their attitudes toward their government’s handling of the crisis, and measurement of psychological variables associated with heroism. A total of 1,305 participants provided sufficient data for analysis. UK-based workers reported lower wellbeing than the RoI-based participants. In multivariate models, both psychological and pandemic-related variables were associated with levels of resilience, burnout, and wellbeing in these workers, but which pandemic-related variables were associated with outcomes differed depending on the country. The judgment of lower timeliness in their government’s response to the pandemic appeared to be a key driver of each outcome for the UK-based frontline workers. These findings provide initial evidence that the different strategies adopted by each country may be associated with the overall wellbeing of frontline workers, with higher detriment observed in the UK. The judgment of the relatively slow response of the UK government to instigate their pandemic measures appears to be associated with lower resilience, higher burnout, and lower wellbeing in frontline workers in the UK. (shrink)

What fundamental aim should be seen as animating egalitarian views of distributive justice? I want to challenge a certain answer to this question: namely, that the basic aim of egalitarianism is to neutralize the effects of luck on the distribution of goods in society. I shall also sketch part of a different answer, which I think does a better job of supporting egalitarianism.My arguments here are not presented in a way that is intended to win over those who have no (...) sympathy with egalitarianism to begin with; they move within the compass of egalitarian concern. Moreover, it is difficult, for familiar reasons, to separate the question of what the basic aim of egalitarianism is from the question of what it should be. If one aim does a better job of supporting egalitarian results than another, then, even if few egalitarians recognize this, it may be regarded as a stronger candidate for what the basic aim of egalitarianism is. As with other essentially contested concepts, a new conception does not change the subject. (shrink)

Business ethics scholars have proposed strategies for mitigating the ill effects brought on by a wealth maximization business strategy by urging managers to either embrace corporate social responsibility (CSR) or to manage according to stakeholder theory. In this article I argue that these strategies are often ineffective in bringing about the behavior they promote because it is antithetical to the nature and logic of capitalism. I examine the organizing principles of capitalism and the role it assigns to capitalists, and juxtapose (...) these with the behavior prescribed by three normative frameworks: strategic management theory (SMT), the CSR initiative, and stakeholder theory. Unlike the behaviors prescribed by the CSR initiative and stakeholder management theory, the behavior prescribed by SMT is consistent with the role of capitalists as defined by the organizing principles of capitalism, and SMT's “rules” have instilled habits that have, in turn, been able to mold managers’ aspirations and purposes. CSR and stakeholder theory must not only combat the habits instilled by the entrenched SMT, they must also find some way of instilling habits that run contrary to those defined by the nature and logic of capitalism itself. (shrink)