Forty-two students enrolled in an environmental ethics course at a medium-sized metropolitan university in the southeastern United States were asked to complete a survey identifying their environmental ethic, prior to and after the course. Students were likewise asked if they saw benefits to taking an environmental ethics course and to explain those benefits. Before the course, most students could not identify an environmental ethic. Afterwards, most had adopted an ecocentric mindset. It was determined through a simple chi-square test that the (...) course had an impact in terms of how the students identify. None of the students viewed the course as a waste of time, with most feeling strongly that the course was life-enriching. All students surveyed saw benefit, with over half of the students suggesting the major benefit was that they were now better able to understand themselves and others. The survey findings were confirmed through structured interviews. (shrink)

In this paper we analyses the work of the first century Chinese philosopher Wang Chong as in part grappling with epistemology of testimony. Often portrayed as a curmudgeonly skeptic, Wang Chong actually best seen as a demanding piecemeal non-reductionist, which is to say he believed that testimony was a basic source of evidence unless subject to a defeater (non-reductionism), but also that we should evaluate testimony on a claim-by-claim basis (piecemeal) rather than accepting a whole source on the strength of (...) its reputation or authority, and finally he thought one has a strong duty to search for defeaters (demanding). We defend each of these claims as well as the fruitfulness of applying such anachronistic terminology to an ancient thinker. We end with a discussion of how Wang Chong's epistemology relates to his rhetorical method and then consider some problems he faces because of his epistemic commitments. (shrink)

Recent dissatisfaction with individualism and the problems of religious pluralism make this an opportune time to reassess the way in which we define ourselves and conduct our relationships with others. The philosophical writings of John Macmurray are a useful resource for performing this examination, and recent interest in Macmurray's work has been growing steadily. -/- A full-scale critical examination of Macmurray's religious philosophy has not been published and this work fills this gap, sharing his insistence that we define ourselves through (...) action and through person-to-person relationships, while critiquing his account of the ensuing political and religious issues. The key themes in this work are the concept of the person and the ethics of personal relations. (shrink)

Aristotle’s account of friendship has largely withstood the test of time. Yet there are overlooked elements of his account that, when challenged by apparent threats of current and emerging communication technologies, reveal his account to be remarkably prescient. I evaluate the danger that technological advances in communication pose to the future of friendship by examining and defending Aristotle’s claim that perfect or character-friends must live together. I concede that technologically-mediated communication can aid existing character-friendships, but I argue that character-friendships cannot (...) be created and sustained entirely through technological meditation. I examine text-based technologies, such as Facebook and email, and engage a non-text based technology that poses the greatest threat to my thesis—Skype. I then address philosophical literature on friendship and technology that has emerged in the last decade in Ethics and Information Technology to elucidate and defend my account by contrast. I engage Cocking and Matthews (2000), who argue that friendship cannot be created and sustained entirely through text-based contact, Briggle (2008), who argues that friendship can be created and sustained entirely through text-based contact, and Munn (2012), who argues that friendship cannot be created and entirely sustained through text-based contact but can be created and sustained entirely in immersive virtual worlds. My account discusses a certain kind of friendship, character-friendship, and a certain kind of technology, Skype, that these accounts do not. Examination of these essays helps to demonstrate that character friendship cannot be sustained entirely by technologically-aided communication and that character-friends must live together. (shrink)

This book examines the negative power that child maltreatment has on individuals and society ethically and politically, while analyzing the positive power that parental love and healthy families have. To address how best to confront the problem of child maltreatment, it examines several policy options, ultimately defending a policy of licensing parents, while carefully examining the tension between child and adult rights and duties.

As Big Data, the Internet of Things and insurance collide, so too, do the best and the worst of our futures. Insurance is summoned as an example of the interference in our private lives that is already underway everywhere. In this paper, we pause to reflect on this argument. Can changes in the way insurance measures the value of behaviour really serve as an example of the individual and social harms of datafication? How do we know? Insurance is a mathematical (...) relationship staged between individuals and groups, between risk and uncertainty, between distribution and assessment, between the value of sharing and the sharing of value. We use the case study of Discovery International, owner of Vitality, the market leading brand in behavioural insurance to consider how behaviour is being branded and how the brand behaves. (shrink)

There is a long history in science and technology studies of tracking problematic objects, such as controversies, matters of concern, and issues, using various digital tools. But what happens when public problems do not play out in these familiar ways? In this paper, we will think through the methodological implications of studying “problems” in relation to recent events surrounding the sharing of patient data in the National Health Service in the United Kingdom. When a data sharing agreement called care.data was (...) announced in 2013, nearly 1.5 million citizens chose to opt out. Yet, in subsequent years, there has been little evidence of a robust public mobilising around data sharing. We will attempt to track this elusive ‘non problem’ using some digital tools developed in STS for the purpose of mapping issues and problem definitions within science. Although we find these digital tools are unable to capture the “problem,” the process of searching helps us map the terrain of the case and forces us to consider wider definitions. (shrink)

Many state that they have a friend in Jesus, but close analysis reveals that this claim is difficult to defend. Furthermore, only once does Jesus claim that humans can be friends with him. This essay explores whether humans can be friends with Jesus. In arguing that this is possible, attention is given to what kind of friendship is possible in Aristotle’s taxonomy of utility, pleasure, and character-friendships. None of these describes the kind of friendship possible between humans and Jesus, but (...) holy-friendship (developed from character-friendship) suffices to demonstrate how such friendship is possible. (shrink)

This paper sets out to review the role accorded to advertising in recent critical work. This work, I suggest, has been underscored by an ‘epochalist’ concern to map distinctions in the form of the culture/ economy relationship between the contemporary era and earlier periods. Significance has been accorded to the particular transformative potential of advertising and this is often related to research which emphasises the increasingly symbolic, persuasive and pervasive nature of advertising. In what follows, I make three central propositions. (...) Firstly, I argue that writers on advertising share a number of concerns particularly about the effect the evolving nature of advertising has on the relationship between people and objects and between culture and economy. Secondly I suggest that these writers share with certain other critical theorists a very particular approach to the definition of key entities like meaning, culture and economy. These very particular definitions are pivotal to the epochalist explanation of advertising's role in the transformation of the culture/ economy relation. Finally, I attempt to show, through a brief look at historical uses of persuasion in advertising, that the problem with epochalist theory lies in a tendency to overgeneralise a wide range of specific forces. (shrink)

In The Elusive God: Reorienting Religious Epistemology, Paul Moser argues that Jesus’s love commands have important implications for how philosophy should be done by Christian philosophers. He calls for a reorientation of the questions that philosophers pursue, requiring that questions lead to agape-oriented ministry. Yet Moser omits discussion of an important duty of philosophers—teaching. Once the duty of teaching is considered, this essay argues that few philosophers could meet Moser’s ideal. Instead of abandoning Moser’s project to reorient philosophy, though, this (...) essay takes it one step further and argues that many, though not all, Christian philosophers should leave academia to become clergy. Examination of these meta-pedagogical issues, including that of Christian calling and vocational choice, transitions to pedagogical speculation of what Moser’s demands might require in the classroom. Moser’s obedience mode of philosophy is then compared with competing models in the advocacy-neutrality classroom debate. (shrink)

Mealey's sociopathy model is an exemplar of popular diathesis-stress models. Although such models, when presented in descriptive language, offer the illusion of integrative explanation, their actual scientific value is very limited because they fail to make specific, quantitative, falsifiable predictions. Conceptual and quantitative weaknesses of such diathesis-stress models are discussed and the requirements for useful models are outlined.

When should we judge that a person is leading or has led a happy life? By what standard? What legitimate criticism can be brought to bear on individual ideals? ;I argue that we have three conceptions of longterm happiness: the contentment conception , the affirmation conception , and the justified affirmation conception . The relation between them is one of inclusion. All three have been proposed as ideals: as candidates for . Evaluative happiness is a comprehensive good, i.e., sufficient for (...) realizing the good life. ;The happy life is one in which a person is disposed to affirm his or her life justifiaby. So the best standard of justification, consistent with our concept of a person and affirmation, will provide the best account of evaluative happiness. ;To affirm one's life is to judge that it is good: that one's important desires are satisfied and successful , and to be satisfied as a consequence. The capacity for affirmation is necessary for personhood, i.e., every person holds some individual ideal. ;Contentment is possible without affirmation. So the contentment conception is inadequate as a conception of evaluative happiness. ;Coherence is a minimal requirement for any adequate standard of justification. Affirmation is consistent with incoherence. So the affirmation conception is not defensible. ;Rationality is necessary for realizing the good life. The subjectivist standard of justification is too strong and/or too weak . Subjectivism is thus discredited. ;I argue for an account of happiness as rational affirmation. This standard is neither subjective nor objective . There are some things one has reason to value if one values anything: the goods of rational affirmation. Every person holds some individual ideal. So every person has reason to value the goods of rational affirmation. ;'Radical objectivism' is incoherent: there could be no good objective standard of justification. What is important is what is important to persons. (shrink)

The decision to get married, as well as choosing whom to marry, is of the utmost importance to most people. This decision consists of many amoral considerations, but an ethical relationship arises when a promise is made, especially a vow that binds for a lifetime and affects oneself, one’s spouse, one’s children, and society. This essay provides an account of ideal romantic marriage, arguing that John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty provides an excellent foundation for constructing such an account. Neither dead (...) dogma nor living truth is a healthy model for marriage, so a hybrid model of marriage, living dogma, is developed. The importance of the marital vow becomes apparent as the living dogma account is revealed, and this examination yields a model for how to decide when and whom to marry. (shrink)

Norvin Richards, The Ethics of Parenthood Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-2 DOI 10.1007/s10677-011-9298-3 Authors Michael McFall, Department of Philosophy, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH 43403, USA Journal Ethical Theory and Moral Practice Online ISSN 1572-8447 Print ISSN 1386-2820.

Abstract[I] want to single out one phenomenon that could be called the ‘politics of sources’. It points to the extent to which the histories that both scientists and historians can write are artifacts of the available sources. The Rockefeller Foundation not only opened its archives very early on for historical work but also invested a lot in making the archives readily available for historical exploration. During the 1980s, many young historians took advantage of this opportunity. Thus, in a relatively early (...) phase of the professional historiography of molecular biology, one could have gained the impression that the development of the new biology as a whole was a bio‐politically directed enterprise of the Rockefeller Foundation sustained by the vision that social processes could ultimately be controlled by biological processes. (shrink)

The introduction, Thinking about lines: a new research field, asks how lines, i.e., something so seemingly simple, so common, and so widely used, can be analysed: it does not ask what a line is, but rather what lines are to us. Lines may be conceptualized as cultural techniques, but they can also call into question the (Western) dichotomy between culture and nature. They share many features with such media as writing or images, but they are also more than that: concrete (...) practices linked to a certain knowledge and, in mathematics, they are specific concepts. Away from mathematics, the concept of the line is epistemically polyvalent, i.e., it cannot be clearly separated from metaphor. Our proposal is to study lines as elementary ways of world-understanding and world-making. To this end, our book presents texts that think about lines in five different fields: philosophy, mathematics, ethnology/anthropology, geography/cartography, the theory and the history of art. Each of the five chapters contains an essay on the significance of lines in the given field and presents pertinent texts accompanied by a short introduction and research references. (shrink)

The Wisdom of the Christian Faith joins philosophy and New Testament theology to offer a unique product: an anthology of accessible essays by prominent Christian philosophers on topics of religious and philosophical interest.

The overall goal of this target article is to demonstrate a mechanism for an embodied cognition. The particular vehicle is a much-studied, but still widely debated phenomenon seen in 7–12 month-old-infants. In Piaget's classic “A-not-B error,” infants who have successfully uncovered a toy at location “A” continue to reach to that location even after they watch the toy hidden in a nearby location “B.” Here, we question the traditional explanations of the error as an indicator of infants' concepts of objects (...) or other static mental structures. Instead, we demonstrate that the A-not-B error and its previously puzzling contextual variations can be understood by the coupled dynamics of the ordinary processes of goal-directed actions: looking, planning, reaching, and remembering. We offer a formal dynamic theory and model based on cognitive embodiment that both simulates the known A-not-B effects and offers novel predictions that match new experimental results. The demonstration supports an embodied view by casting the mental events involved in perception, planning, deciding, and remembering in the same analogic dynamic language as that used to describe bodily movement, so that they may be continuously meshed. We maintain that this mesh is a pre-eminently cognitive act of “knowing” not only in infancy but also in everyday activities throughout the life span. Key Words: cognitive development; dynamical systems theory; embodied cognition; infant development; motor control; motor planning; perception and action. (shrink)