In diesem Aufsatz wird der jeweils mögliche Beitrag verschiedener Experten, insbesondere von Fachphilosophen und Naturwissenschaftlern, zu einer allgemeinen Diskussion derjenigen ethischen und rechtlichen Fragen erörtert, die sich in Verbindung mit dem Genomprojekt stellen. Wir kommen zu dem Ergebnis, daß man die tatsächlich schon betriebene Forschung keinesfalls wird aufhalten können, sondern allenfalls bestimmte für bedenklich gehaltene Anwendungen der neuen Techniken verzögern oder verhindern kann. Wir stellen verschiedene Probleme vor, die die Wirksamkeit der philosophischen Reflexion in solchen Fragen zweifelhaft erscheinen läßt, die (...) mit der grundsätzlichen Unzulänglichkeit der traditionellen Verfahren angewandter Ethik, aber auch mit der Pluralität der Grundnormen in einer modernen Gesellschaft zu tun haben. So fällt der empirischen Wissenschaft eine entscheidende Rolle bei der Beurteilung der Angemessenheit bestimmter Verfahren im Hinblick auf die eine Norm zu, die allgemein vorausgesetzt werden darf, nämlich die über die Bedeutung des handgreiflichen Eigeninteresses, da dieses am ehesten in der Lage ist, die voraussichtlichen Möglichkeiten und Gefahren einer bestimmten Technik einzuschätzen. Wir behaupten, daß die bisherigen Erfahrungen mit anderen Organismen innerhalb und vor allem außerhalb von Laborato-rien auf eine Komplexität der Interaktionen der Gene untereinander und der genetischen Erbmasse mit der Umgebung hindeuten, die eine Vorhersage des Resultats beim Menschen als sehr ungewiß erscheinen läßt. Angesichts dieser Ungewißheit einerseits und des entgegengesetzten finanziellen Interesses seitens des Anbieters der neuen Techniken andererseits mag das amerikanische Zivilrecht vielleicht den stärksten Anreiz für den Anbieter darstellen, die Risiken realistisch einzuschätzen und bei der Anwendung mit der angemessenen Vorsicht zu Werke zu gehen. Noch wirksamer als jeglicher moralischer Appell mögen die finanziellen Gefahren für den überoptimistischen Anbieter sein, die Menschen als seine "Kunden" vor Schaden zu bewahren. Schließlich weisen wir auf die Schwierigkeit der Kommunikation der Ergebnisse philosophischer und wissenschaftlicher Überlegungen im Zeitalter der Massenmedien hin. Die Rationalität der Diskussion muß soweit wie möglich allererst hergestellt werden, statt daß man sie voraussetzen könnte. Dafür ist eine der größten Gefahren die Einbindung der modernen Naturwissenschaft gerade in die Industrien, deren Leistungen oder Risiken sie eigentlich beurteilen soll. (shrink)

Anhand des fiktiven Falles eines jungen Mannes, dessen Leben trotz der vermeintlichen Vorteile von verbesserten genetischen Anlagen nicht so gerät, wie es sich die Eltern vorgestellt haben, fragen wir nach dem Maßstab des Erfolgs von genetischen Interventionen am Menschen. Wir kommen zu dem Schluß, daß die bisherigen Erfahrungen, die wir an anderen, weniger komplizierten Organismen wie Algen schon gesammelt haben, darauf hindeuten, daß die Resultate von Genmanipulationen viel weniger vorhersagbar sind und damit die Risiken für die Menschen viel höher und (...) unüberschaubarer sein werden, als die Optimisten aus der Genforschung bisher anzunehmen scheinen. Außerdem stellen wir die Frage, ob diese Richtung der vermeintlichen Verbesserung des menschlichen Lebens wirklich geeignet ist, tatsächlich die Leben der einzelnen Menschen oder der Menschheit insgesamt besser zu machen, oder ob sie nicht vielmehr auf einem engen Begriff des Lebenserfolgs beruht, der von den eigentlich ethischen Fragen nach dem besseren Leben für die Menschen eher ablenkt. Wenn dies der Fall wäre, würde sich die Suche nach den entscheidenden Verbesserungen des menschlichen Lebens auf dem Wege der genetischen Intervention nicht nur aus technischen, sondern auch aus ethischen Gründen als bedenklich erweisen. (shrink)

Aufgrund der Erfahrung mit der genetischen Manipulation von nicht-menschlichen Organismen, glauben wir, dass die Risiken einer gezielten Manipulation der menschlichen Erbinformation zum Zwecke der vermeintlichen Verbesserung des Menschen in absehbarer Zukunft zu hoch und die erhofften Vorteile einer solchen Manipulation zu ungewiß bleiben werden, um Eingriffe dieser Art zu rechtfertigen. In diesem Aufsatz erklären wir, warum wir meinen, dass gesetzliche Verbote solcher Experimente mit Menschen gegenwärtig gerechtfertigt wären, und warum wir gleichwohl meinen, dass solche Verbote nicht die wichtigsten Strategien zur (...) Steuerung dieser allmählich auch wirtschaftlich sehr signifikanten Forschungsrichtung darstellen. Wir argumentieren dafür, dass die Furcht vor zivilrechtlicher Haftung für die durchaus nicht auszuschließenden Schäden solcher Versuche und der bewußte Einsatz von staatlichen Forschungsgeldern nicht nur zur Entwicklung neuer genmanipulativer Techniken, sondern auch für die gründliche und unabhängige Beurteilung der Risiken solcher Techniken viel probatere und realistischere Reaktionen auf dieses neue Phänomen darstellen. (shrink)

This paper reviews and synthesizes emerging multi-disciplinary evidence toward understanding the development of social and political organization in the Last Glacial. Evidence for the prevalence and scope of political egalitarianism is reviewed and the biological, social, and environmental influences on this mode of human organization are further explored. Viewing social and political organization in the Last Glacial in a much wider, multi-disciplinary context provides the footing for coherent theory building and hypothesis testing by which to further explore human political systems. (...) We aim to overcome the claim that our ancestors’ form of social organization is untestable, as well as counter a degree of exaggeration regarding possibilities for sedentism, population densities, and hierarchical structures prior to the Holocene with crucial advances from disparate disciplines. (shrink)

Consent remains a crucial, yet challenging, cornerstone of clinical practice. The ethical, legal and professional understandings of this construct have evolved away from a doctor-centred act to a patient-centred process that encompasses the patient’s values, beliefs and goals. This alignment of consent with the philosophy of shared decision-making was affirmed in a recent high-profile Supreme Court ruling in England. The communication of information is central to this model of health care delivery but it can be difficult for doctors to gauge (...) the information needs of the individual patient. The aim of this paper is to describe ‘core information sets’ which are defined as a minimum set of consensus-derived information about a given procedure to be discussed with all patients. Importantly, they are intended to catalyse discussion of subjective importance to individuals. The model described in this paper applies health services research and Delphi consensus-building methods to an idea orginally proposed 30 years ago. The hypothesis is that, first, large amounts of potentially-important information are distilled down to discrete information domains. These are then, secondly, rated by key stakeholders in multiple iterations, so that core information of agreed importance can be defined. We argue that this scientific approach is key to identifying information important to all stakeholders, which may otherwise be communicated poorly or omitted from discussions entirely. Our methods apply systematic review, qualitative, survey and consensus-building techniques to define this ‘core information’. We propose that such information addresses the ‘reasonable patient’ standard for information disclosure but, more importantly, can serve as a spring board for high-value discussion of importance to the individual patient. The application of established research methods can define information of core importance to informed consent. Further work will establish how best to incorporate this model in routine practice. (shrink)

Who is morally permitted to tell jokes about Jews? Poles? Women? Only those in the group? Only those who would be punching up? Anyone, since they are just jokes? All of the standard approaches are too broad or too narrow. In on the Joke provides a more sophisticated approach according to which each person possesses "joke capital" that can serve as "comic insurance" covering certain jokes in certain contexts. When Bob tells a joke about Jews, we can never know exactly (...) what Bob is intending since we cannot see inside Bob’s mind. But we could reasonably infer, if we knew Bob himself was Jewish, if he worked tirelessly for Jewish causes, or was a card-carrying Neo-Nazi. Each would affect his joke capital, and, in certain circumstances, we would have a moral standing to demand to see his ledger to see how much joke capital he had with respect to Jews. The permissibility of that joke depends upon four factors: the joke, the teller of the joke, the audience, and the setting. The view developed in In on the Joke is the only view that clearly explains how each of these components work together in an integrated, effective ethic of humor. (shrink)

This is the first wide-ranging, multi-authored handbook in the field of philosophy of medicine, covering the underlying conceptual issues of many important social, political and ethical issues in health care. It introduces and develops over 70 topics, concepts, and issues in the field. It is written by distinguished specialists from multiple disciplines, including philosophy, health sciences, nursing, sociology, political theory, and medicine. Many difficult social and ethical issues in health care are based on conceptual problems, most prominently on the definitions (...) of health and disease, or on epistemological issues regarding causality or diagnosis. Philosophy is the discipline that deals with such conceptual, metaphysical, epistemological, methodological, and axiological matters. This handbook covers all the central concepts in medicine, such as ageing, death, disease, mental disorder, and well-being. It is an invaluable source for laypeople, academics with an interest in medicine, and health care specialists who want be informed and up to date with the relevant discussions. The text also advances these debates and will set the agenda for years to come. (shrink)

In the last two decades, there has been a pronounced growth of CSR rating agencies that assess corporations based on their social and environmental performance. This article investigates the impact of CSR ratings on the behavior of individual corporations. To what extent do corporations adjust their behavior based on how they rank? Our primary finding is that being dropped from a CSR ranking appears to do little to encourage firms to acknowledge and address problems related to their social and environmental (...) performance. Specific rankings appear not to have a widespread effect of influencing firms to acknowledge negative CSR events and publicly present plans and actions to address them. Whether firms are well or poorly ranked, they appear to focus on and publicly discuss their “positive” CSR activities. We discuss the wider significance of these results as well as the overall significance of CSR rankings for a global economy. (shrink)

Innovation leads to new products, business models and even changes to socio-economic systems. However, it is important that innovation has the ‘right impacts’. Responsible innovation can help to achieve this; however, it is unclear how to introduce responsible innovation to real-world, competitive, industry settings. We explore this challenge in the context of sustainability orientated start-up enterprises, developing innovations within agriculture, food or energy. We develop a tool that provides innovators with a systematic way to identify socio-ethical issues. Using the concept (...) of experiential learning, we track the impact of the tool across 12 cases. For the tool to install responsible innovation, we propose that a full learning cycle must be completed. We find evidence that the tool can enable a full learning cycle and provide a method to identify socio-ethical factors. We contribute by articulating and operationalising an approach to introduce responsible innovation principles into real-world contexts. (shrink)

The understanding of emergent, self-organizing phenomena has been immensely deepened in recent years on the basis of simulation-based theoretical research. We discuss these new ideas, and illustrate them using examples from several fields. Our discussion serves to introduce equivalent self-organized phenomena in social interaction. Interaction systems appear to be structured partly by virtue of such emergents. These appear under specific conditions: When cognitive buffering is inadequate relative to the levels of stress persons are subjected to, anxiety-spreading has the potential of (...) pushing their interaction into nonlinear conditions. Arousal in these conditions produces effects on behavior arising from biological sources-indeed, behavior can come under the control of reflex patterns. When this occurs, psychological activity no longer screens off biological controls over behavior. As the direct effects of biological activity spill into interaction, attachment behavior introduced into an interaction system can produce effects that are transmitted beyond dyads to produce global social patterns. These effects illustrate how strong interactions based in biological activity can produce an architecture for social systems. (shrink)

Bill New's (1999) thoughtful paper has performed the valuable service of clarifying the meaning and the policy implications of paternalism. His careful formulation delimits the domain of justified state paternalism. Having argued successfully, in our view, for a narrow ambit, New proceeds to identify situations that justify paternalism. This comment is written in the spirit of a friendly reformulation that refines and improves the specification of when paternalism is justified. Our argument is two-fold. First, we argue that New's formulation, properly (...) understood, will not readily permit the paternalistic interventions he argues are justified. Second, we identify a class of potentially justified interventions that have paternalistic aspects, but which are neither strictly paternalistic nor market-failure remedies. (shrink)

Conscious perception, like the sight of a coffee cup, seems to involve the brain identifying a stimulus. But conscious input activates more brain regions than are needed to identify coffee cups and faces. It spreads beyond sensory cortex to frontoparietal association areas, which do not serve stimulus identification as such. What is the role of those regions? Parietal cortex support the ‘first person perspective’ on the visual world, unconsciously framing the visual object stream. Some prefrontal areas select and interpret conscious (...) events for executive control. Such functions can be viewed as properties of the subject, rather than the object, of experience – the ‘observing self’ that appears to be needed to maintain the conscious state. (shrink)

Focal adhesion kinase (FAK) is a nonreceptor protein‐tyrosine kinase implicated in controlling cellular responses to the engagement of cell‐surface integrins, including cell spreading and migration, survival and proliferation. Aberrant FAK signaling may contribute to the process of cell transformation by certain oncoproteins, including v‐Src. Progress toward elucidating the events leading to FAK activation following integrin‐mediated cell adhesion, as well as events downstream of FAK, has come through the identification of FAK phosphorylation sites and interacting proteins. A signaling partnership is formed (...) between FAK and Src‐family kinases, leading to tyrosine phosphorylation of FAK and associated ‘docking’ proteins Cas and paxillin. Subsequent recruitment of proteins containing Src homology 2 domains, including Grb2 and c‐Crk, to the complex is likely to trigger adhesion‐induced cellular responses, including changes to the actin cytoskeleton and activation of the Ras‐MAP kinase pathway. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAt its core, corporate social responsibility concerns the impacts of businesses on their surroundings. Despite their significant economic and geographic presence, and despite the varied disciplinary and conceptual lenses used to study CSR, there is very little existing work looking at law firms and their own CSR policies. This paper fills part of that gap. In August 2014, we reviewed the websites of the top 100 English law firms, as ranked by the trade publication The Lawyer. We were interested in (...) public disclosures made by those law firms on CSR. These were widespread. The majority of the top 100 firms say something to the wider world about CSR. However, what is said varies significantly. This is, perhaps, unsurprising. What is more surprising is that so few firms explain why they are committed to CSR. Where firms do make disclosures on CSR, these tend to group around the following three areas: pro bono and community giving; (ii... (shrink)

It has long been shown that medieval builders primarily used geometrical constructions to design medieval architecture. The thought processes involved, however, have been considered to be remote from the natural philosophical speculations of the Scholastics, who, following Aristotle, had taken the basis of physics to be the study of dynamics, or change. However, investigations of the Expertises of Chartres, Florence, Milan, and other documents related to medieval building suggest that medieval architects, in speaking of their work, resort to recognizable dynamic (...) arguments, structured similarly to the speculations of Scholastic philosophers. These dynamic explanations of structural behaviour persist at least into the 17th century, but thereafter lost out to the arguments based on statics made by modern scholars attempting to explain the endurance of these structures. (shrink)

Danny Boyle's film Yesterday is a contemporary morality play in which the main character, Jack Malik, a failing singer-songwriter, is magically sent to a different possible world in which the Beatles never existed. Possessing his memory of the Beatles’ catalogue in the new possible world, he is now in sole possession of an extremely valuable artifact. Recording and performing the songs of the Beatles and passing them off as his own, he becomes rich, famous, and deeply unhappy. Once he confesses (...) his wrong-doing, however, he is redeemed and his life becomes wonderful. The presupposition that underlays the plot is that in claiming authorship of the songs of the Beatles in a world in which the Beatles never existed, he is acting immorally. But on what theoretical grounds can this intuitive judgment be justified? Can one plagiarize work for which there is no author in one's world? Saul Kripke, in Naming and Necessity, dubs terms that refer in all possible worlds to be “rigid designators” and considers the metaphysics necessary to support them. In this case, it is not reference but moral responsibility that is invariant under changes of possible world and so we must ask a similar question for “rigid obligators.” We argue that a virtue ethics approach is the only way to support the foundational moral intuition. (shrink)

This paper examines the role of power structures and strategic decisions in trajectories toward war and peace. Part I introduces a fuzzy inference engine for computationally simulating balance of power. Part II compares simulation results from hegemonic, bi-polar, and multi-polar system structures, each with three actors. Part III explores strategies for maximizing peace under each of these system structures. Part IV applies these lessons to real-world event chronologies.

During the short span of a few months in 2008, 14 trillion dollars of highly rated bonds fell into junk status, surprising the global financial system and accelerating an economic decline. The result was the worst fracture of the US financial system since the Great Depression. Credit rating agencies (CRAs) in particular have come under intense scrutiny as a result of this latest disaster, both domestically and internationally, including many congressional inquiries and government investigations. Most of the public and scholarly (...) discussions about CRAs focus on reforming the financial system so that the crisis of the magnitude of the 2008 disaster will not happen again. An important overtone of industry criticisms includes a sense of ethical impropriety on the part of CRAs and ethical uncertainty about the institutional mechanisms that are currently in place. Rarely, however, are the ethics of the industry the explicit subject of analysis. In this article, we discuss the lessons from the policy debates and recent legislation to develop an account of the ethics of the CRA industry. (shrink)

This collection of original essays explores the connections between the philosophies of Alfred North Whitehead and the classical American pragmatists.

Is art only art insofar as it refuses to be useful? How do people understand art's ability to know the world, to develop ethics, to express sense of historical belonging and to be, in different ways to different people, useful? Starting with the premise that art is best understood in dialogue with the social sphere, publication examines how the exchange between art, knowledge and use has historically been set up and played out. Theorists and artists included in this volume seek (...) an answer to the question: how can art know, and change, the world? (shrink)

In this book philosophers, scholars of religion, and activists address the theme of responsibility. Barbara Darling-Smith brings together an enlightening collection of essays that analyze the ethics of responsibility, its relational nature, and its global struggle.

_The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy_ provides an annual international forum for phenomenological research in the spirit of Husserl's groundbreaking work and the extension of this work by such figures as Scheler, Heidegger, Sartre, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty and Gadamer.

We apply Benacerraf’s distinction between mathematical ontology and mathematical practice to examine contrasting interpretations of infinitesimal mathematics of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, in the work of Bos, Ferraro, Laugwitz, and others. We detect Weierstrass’s ghost behind some of the received historiography on Euler’s infinitesimal mathematics, as when Ferraro proposes to understand Euler in terms of a Weierstrassian notion of limit and Fraser declares classical analysis to be a “primary point of reference for understanding the eighteenth-century theories.” Meanwhile, scholars like (...) Bos and Laugwitz seek to explore Eulerian methodology, practice, and procedures in a way more faithful to Euler’s own. Euler’s use of infinite integers and the associated infinite products are analyzed in the context of his infinite product decomposition for the sine function. Euler’s principle of cancellation is compared to the Leibnizian transcendental law of homogeneity. The Leibnizian law of continuity similarly finds echoes in Euler. We argue that Ferraro’s assumption that Euler worked with a classical notion of quantity is symptomatic of a post-Weierstrassian placement of Euler in the Archimedean track for the development of analysis, as well as a blurring of the distinction between the dual tracks noted by Bos. Interpreting Euler in an Archimedean conceptual framework obscures important aspects of Euler’s work. Such a framework is profitably replaced by a syntactically more versatile modern infinitesimal framework that provides better proxies for his inferential moves. (shrink)