Legal codes, such as the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) examined in this article, are good points of entry for AI and ontology work because of their more straightforward adaptability to relationship linking and rules-based encoding. However, approaches relying on encoding solely on formal code structure are incomplete, missing the rich experience of practitioner expertise that identifies key relationships and decision criteria often supplied by experienced practitioners and process experts from various disciplines (e.g., sociology, political economics, logistics, operations research). This research (...) focuses on the UCC because it transcends the limitations of a formal code, functioning essentially as a composite. AI work can benefit from real-world codes like the UCC, which are essentially formal codes enlightened from a more realistic experience-base from centuries of development in international commercial transactions settings. This paper then describes our initial work in converting an expert system on the U.S. law governing the sale of goods from Article II of the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC), into a knowledge-based system using the Web Ontology Language OWL. (shrink)

This article examines the potential for moral agency in human resource management practice. It draws on an ethnographic study of human resource managers in a global organization to provide a theorized account of situated moral agency. This account suggests that within contemporary organizations, institutional structures—particularly the structures of Anglo-American market capitalism— threaten and constrain the capacity of HR managers to exercise moral agency and hence engage in ethical behaviour. The contextualized explanation of HR management action directly addresses the question of (...) whether HRM is inherently unethical. The discussion draws on MacIntyre’s conceptualization of moral agency within contemporary social structures. In practice, HR managers embody roles that may not be wholly compartmentalized. Alternative institutional structures can provide HR managers with a vocabulary of motives for people-centred HRM and widen the scope for the exercising of moral agency, when enacted within reflective relational spaces that provide milieus for critical questioning of logics and values. This article aims to contribute to and extend debate on whether HRM can ever be ethical, and provide a means of reconnecting business ethics with longstanding concerns in critical management studies. (shrink)

DAVID WARD, in his interesting essay, advances a number of propositions: -/- That moral (including evil) behavior must be governed by a principle. That the principles involved in evil actions are unconscious. That these unconscious evil principles may be the product of malignant narcissism. And somewhat tentatively, that evil is driven "independent of any conscious desires" and by implication the evil person may be stripped of moral responsibility for their behavior. -/- To begin with common ground: Those who act in (...) an evil manner, in my experience, do not usually acknowledge that they acted on an evil principle (nor do those who commit good acts, excepting the terminally self-righteous, usually explain their behavior in terms of adherence to principles). Among serious offenders, self-justification in terms of having no choice is more common or the hapless claim that "I don't know why I did that" or even "I can't believe I did that" (which all too often becomes "I can't remember doing that" for as Nietzche (1886) wrote "I have done that—says my memory. I could not have done that—says my pride and remains inexorable. Eventually memory gives in"). Those who do appeal to principle to justify their evil actions almost inevitably cite value systems that have considerable, if not universal, acceptance. I have encountered men who proudly declared their killings to be part of the pursuit of righteous aims, such as protecting children from pedophiles, stopping the killing of the unborn child, reducing AIDS, and cleansing their city of vice. Interestingly the combination of dreadful, and in many cases repeated, violence with self-righteous superiority often attracts from fellow prisoners and prison staff a label of evil. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 10.3 (2003) 265-266 [Access article in PDF] Definition Is Limited and Values Inescapable Richard Mullen THIS IS A welcome paper that lays bare some of the presumptions of those who seek to determine the status of psychiatric disorder. At different times debate on the subject reflects stigma, prejudice, needs for coherent categorization, and occasionally just antipsychiatric resentment. As Pickering hints, much philosophical argument may (...) be selected to support a position already chosen.The article illustrates that the likeness argument is insufficient to demonstrate that mental disorders are or are not disorders in any other more profound sense. Similarly perhaps, if a debate were conducted about whether or not a bony fracture, hypertension, obesity, or bacterial infection were real illnesses, the likeness argument might be unfruitful. This is perhaps unsurprising; notions of health and illness, mental or physical, are largely abstractions. In psychiatry, so-called symptoms are themselves abstract classifications of incompletely articulated mental phenomena far more diverse than the definitions and criteria to be found in a diagnostic manual.Argument by analogy is always limited. If my car has a flat tire, the car will be dysfunctional or disordered. Its loss of performance will be the symptoms of the flat tire, which is the lesion. It is a problem quickly diagnosed and treated. If convenient, I suppose my car could have been said to be ill, but this would not lead to any particular insights into the nature of cars, mechanics, health, or anything else.A variety of concepts can be contained within terms such as illness,disease, and disorder. They include the clinicopathological approach (the disease is the organic lesion), the disease is deviance approach, disease as distress, and approaches that consider disease—particularly mental disorder—as largely socially constructed. None may resolve the questions that Pickering raises, but recognizing that our terms are not always precise or used consistently is part of formulating the problem more clearly. For the most part clinical psychiatry (and the rest of medicine) has no difficulty in properly identifying most of our patients as disordered or ill. The fact that there are some borderline instances, difficult to classify either way, does not invalidate the classification.Consideration of whether or not the features of a disorder can in themselves determine whether or not a person is disordered is timely for two reasons. As stigma about (some) psychiatric disorder lessens, and opportunities for complaint and compensation expand, an era of self-definition as mentally disordered has arrived. How are mental health practitioners to respond to someone whose mental distress appears not to be clinically significant, but who demands access to the sick role? Also of current concern for clinical psychiatry is widespread pressure to define as disordered those persons whose antisocial behavior brings them into conflict with society. Professional recognition that definitions of mental disorder are inadequate, or rather incomplete, [End Page 265] may be valid. Worryingly, there are others who are willing to define it for us.Both major international systems of classification of mental disorder offer definitions of mental disorder that turn on what is to be meant by clinical significance or clinically recognizable. In the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, mental disorder implies "clinically significant impairment or distress," and criteria for specific disorders mostly including a comment about "clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning" (APA 2000, 8). In the International Classification of Disease, disorder is used to imply "existence of a clinically recognizable set of symptoms or behavior associated in most cases with distress and with interference with personal function" (WHO 1992, 5). It seems that no definition of mental disorder is adequate for all purposes. Seeking to improve existing definitions by further defining the terms used quickly becomes an exercise in pedantry, far removed from practical utility.Pickering mentions as an example the "symptom" of delusions. Available definitions are widely recognized as incomplete or otherwise unsatisfactory (David 1999). This leads to debate about what the individual elements within the definition precisely mean. However in practice delusions are identified with remarkably high reliability (WHO 1973... (shrink)

Intentional collective action -- Collective moral responsibility -- Collective guilt -- Individual responsibility for (and in) collective wrongs -- Collective obligation, individual obligation, and individual moral responsibility -- Individual moral responsibility in wrongful social practice.

While human beings generally act prosocially towards one another — contra a Hobbesian “war of all against all” — this basic social courtesy tends not to be extended to our relations with the more-than-human world. Educational philosophy is largely grounded in a worldview that privileges human-centered conceptions of the self, valuing its own opinions with little regard for the ecological realities undergirding it. This hyper-separation from the ‘society of all beings’ is a foundational cause of our current ecological crises. In (...) this paper, we develop an ecosocial philosophy of education based on the idea of an ecological self. We aspire to consolidate voices from deep ecology and ecofeminism for conceptualizing education in terms of being responsible to and for, a complex web of interdependent relations among human and more-than-human beings. By analyzing the notion of opinions in light of Gilles Deleuze’s critique of the ‘dogmatic image of thought,’ we formulate three aspects of ESPE capable of supporting an ecological as opposed to an egoistic conception of the self: rather than dealing with fixed concepts, ESPE supports adaptable and flexible boundaries between the self and the world; rather than fixating on correct answers, ESPE focuses on real-life problems shifting our concern from the self to the world; and rather than supporting arrogance, EPSE cultivates an epistemic humility grounded in our ecological embeddedness in the world. These approaches seek to enable an education that cultivates a sense of self that is less caught up with arbitrary, egoistic opinions of the self and more attuned to the ecological realities constituting our collective life-worlds. (shrink)

The traditional view that having a personality disorder, unlike other mental disorders, is not usually reason enough to consider a person incompetent to make healthcare decisions is challenged. The example of a case in which a woman was treated for a physical disorder without her consent illustrates that personality disorder can render a person incompetent to refuse essential treatment, particularly because it can affect the doctor–patient relationship within which consent is given.

Four studies explore the role of perceptual fluency in attenuating bullshit receptivity, or the tendency for individuals to rate otherwise meaningless statements as “profound”. Across four studies, we presented participants with a sample of pseudoprofound bullshit statements in either a fluent or disfluent font and found that overall, disfluency attenuated bullshit receptivity while also finding little evidence that this effect was moderated by cognitive thinking style. In all studies, we measured participants’ cognitive reflection, need for cognition, faith in intuition, and (...) superstitious beliefs. Superstition strongly predicted bullshit receptivity regardless of fluency. Inconclusive results were found for the remaining scales. Potential links for the role of perceptual disfluency in promoting analytic thinking are discussed. (shrink)

Although many of the congenital syndromes that used to be lethal no longer are, they are still routinely referred to as “lethal anomalies.” But the label is not only inaccurate, it is also dangerous: by portraying as a medical determination what is in fact a judgment about the child's quality of life, it wrests from the parents a decision that only the parents can make.

This paper explores a philosophical praxis of paying attention, and the importance of bodily comportment, in human-animal interactions. It traces some of the beginnings of the notion of attentiveness as it has arisen in contemporary Western environmental and animal ethics, and its further development into both a philosophical approach and actual practice as a kind of interspecies etiquette. It is informed by the kinds of comportments of openness and responsivity found in diverse examples of practical phenomenology. Through a wide-ranging interdisciplinary (...) discussion, I suggest that a praxis of attentiveness can inspire practical applications of ethical interactions between species. (shrink)

In this paper we consider the prospects for an account of good argument that takes the character of the arguer into consideration. We conclude that although there is much to be gained by identifying the virtues of the good arguer and by considering the ways in which these virtues can be developed in ourselves and in others, virtue argumentation theory does not offer a plausible alternative definition of good argument.

Mentoring literature explores the dark side of mentoring as factors such as gender and race and how they affect the overall mentoring experience. The sociocultural context of the nursing and midwifery professions presents unique characteristics warranting a qualitative exploration of negative mentoring experiences. We aimed to characterise the dark side of mentoring based on informal mentoring relationships occurring among nurses and midwives working in hospitals. Utilising semistructured interviews in a qualitative descriptive design and reflexive thematic analysis, we examined the perceptions (...) of 35 nurses and midwives from three public hospitals located in the Western, Northern and North‐western regions of Uganda. Findings emerged in four overarching themes mentoring process deficits, mentoring relational problems, organisational challenges in mentoring and implications of negative mentoring experiences. Our study findings underscore that, while mentoring is frequently beneficial, it can also be interspersed with negative experiences arising from relational dynamics, particular mentoring processes and the overarching hospital environment. Notably, nurses and midwives actively transformed these challenges into opportunities for growth and self‐improvement, while introspectively examining their roles in contributing to these negative experiences. Such a proactive approach highlights their resilience and steadfast commitment to professional development, even in the face of adversity. (shrink)

In my professional role as anatomy administrator and bequeathal secretary at a large surgical training centre, I am the first point of contact both for people wishing to donate their body, and for newly bereaved relatives telling us that their registered loved-one has died. I am involved in every stage of the process from that first phone call, through to eventual funeral service, cremation of the body and return of the ashes to the family. I am also a registered body (...) donor myself, as I strongly believe in the value of cadaveric training having seen it first hand. When prospective donors and relatives find out that I am also a registered body donor they find this to be very reassuring to know that having ‘behind the scenes’ access has not put me off, and is a good endorsement for the process, …. (shrink)

The book makes a new contribution to the contemporary debates on nihilism and the sacred. Drawing on an original interpretation of Richard Rorty’s writings, it challenges the orthodox treatment of nihilism as a malaise that human beings must overcome. Instead, nihilism should be framed as a problem for human culture to outgrow through pragmatism.

This study examines business students’ ethical awareness for two virtues needed to maintain academic integrity, respect, and responsibility. Using the multidimensional ethics survey, five dimensions were measured for six scenarios representing student behaviors using Information Technology . The results indicate that students are ethically aware in respect situations, but are more neutral in responsibility situations. Of the five ethical dimensions, moral equity and relativism appear to be the strongest influences in academic integrity scenarios utilizing IT. This study provides guidance for (...) business professors in their pursuit of ethical excellence in the classroom and for researchers in search of greater understanding of ethical judgments of students. (shrink)

_Critical Thinking_ is a much-needed guide to thinking skills and above all to thinking critically for oneself. Through clear discussion, students learn the skills required to tell a good argument from a bad one. Key features include: *jargon-free discussion of key concepts in argumentation *how to avoid confusions surrounding words such as 'truth', 'knowledge' and 'opinion' *how to identify and evaluate the most common types of argument *how to spot fallacies in arguments and tell good reasoning from bad *topical examples (...) from politics, sport, medicine, music *chapter summaries, glossary and exercises _Critical Thinking_ is essential reading for anyone, student or professional, seeking to improve their reasoning and arguing skills. (shrink)

We review evidence of the psychological and social costs associated with punishing. We propose that these psychological and social costs should be considered (in addition to material costs) when searching for evidence of costly punishment.

Bruno Latour (2004) claims that modernist critique, the kind that removes the false veils of ideology, ‘has run out of steam’. Despite its theoretical variety, it often consists in pointing out how...

This volume maps the areas of ethical concern in the debate regarding the governance of genetic information, and suggests alternative ethical frameworks and models of regulation in order to inform its restructuring. Genetic governance is at the heart of medical and scientific developments, and is connected to global exploitation, issues of commodification, commercialisation and ownership, the concepts of property and intellectual property and concerns about individual and communal identity. Thus the decisions that are made in the next few years about (...) appropriate models of genetic governance will have knock-on effects for other areas of governance. In short the final answer to 'Who Decides?' in the context of genetic governance will fundamentally shape the ethical constructs of individuals and their networks and relationships in the public sphere. (shrink)

There are significant problems involved in determining the ontology of quantum field theory. An ontology involving particles seems to be ruled out due to the problem of defining localized position operators, issues involving interactions in QFT, and, perhaps, the appearance of unitarily inequivalent representations. While this might imply that fields are the most natural ontology for QFT, the wavefunctional interpretation of QFT has significant drawbacks. A modified field ontology is examined where determinables are assigned to open bounded regions of spacetime (...) instead of spacetime points. (shrink)

The rhetorical function of whataboutism is to redirect attention from the specific case at hand. Although commonly used as a rhetorical move, whataboutisms can appear in arguments. These tend to be weak arguments and are often instances of the tu quoque fallacy or other fallacies of relevance. In what follows, I show that arguments involving a whataboutist move can take a wide variety of forms, and in some cases, they can occur in good arguments. I end by considering how whataboutist (...) arguing in social justice contexts can be harmful to arguers and to the audiences for their arguments. (shrink)

This article tracks how group egotists disavow their hate group identity. Group egotists are individuals born and raised in hate groups. The well-documented exit cases of Megan Phelps-Roper (Westboro Baptist Church) and Derek Black (White Nationalism) prove that hate group indoctrination can be undermined. A predominantly epistemic approach, which focuses on argument and conversational virtues, falls short in capturing the complexity of their apostasies. I turn to pragmatism for conceptual support. Using the work of Richard Rorty and William James, I (...) explain how redemptive relationships and alternative lifeworlds participate in weakening belief-systems, leading to the disavowal of the hate group. (shrink)

Coral bleaching has impacted reefs worldwide and the predictions of near‐annual bleaching from over two decades ago have now been realized. While technology currently provides the means to predict large‐scale bleaching, predicting reef‐scale and within‐reef patterns in real‐time for all reef users is limited. In 2020, heat stress across the Great Barrier Reef underpinned the region's third bleaching event in 5 years. Here we review the heterogeneous emergence of bleaching across Heron Island reef habitats and discuss the oceanographic drivers that (...) underpinned variable bleaching emergence. We do so as a case study to highlight how reef end‐user groups who engage with coral reefs in different ways require targeted guidance for how, and when, to alter their use of coral reefs in response to bleaching events. Our case study of coral bleaching emergence demonstrates how within‐reef scale nowcasting of coral bleaching could aid the development of accessible and equitable bleaching response strategies on coral reefs. Also see the video abstract here: https://youtu.be/N9Tgb8N-vN0. (shrink)

Embryo adoption is an act of artificial impregnation. Artificial impregnation is analogous to artificial insemination. The conditions under which artificial impregnation is ethically acceptable may therefore be the same as the conditions under which artificial insemination is ethically acceptable. But artificial insemination is ethically acceptable only when it assists conjugal union to attain its natural purpose. If artificial impregnation is likewise ethically acceptable only insofar as it assists and does not replace conjugal union, then the presence or absence of the (...) conjugal act itself is the fundamental moral criterion by which to judge whether to permit or exclude artificial impregnation. National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly 10.1 (Spring 2010): 111–122. (shrink)

The predominance of patriarchally-based structures in Kristeva's work sets up an uncomfortable dichotomy for feminist critics. Her 1979 essay `Le temps des femmes' (translated as `Women's Time' in 1981) most explicitly articulates her own approach to feminism, addressing women's troubled relationship to patriarchy in terms of time and space. Kristeva identifies three distinct positions in feminist thought: `equality', `difference' and an anticipated `third generation' feminism that integrates the previous two attitudes, representing what she defines as a new `signifying space'. The (...) value of the `third space' is that it offers a method for proceeding beyond the either/or status offered by previous stages of feminist thought and analysis, challenging gender identity per se and bringing out the singularity of each individual subject. I explore ways of reading from the third space through examples of the `Cassandra' myth and H.D.'s epic poem Helen in Egypt (1974), looking specifically at women's relationship to patriarchal language. (shrink)

This important volume looks back to 1890 and -- 100 years later -- asks some of the same questions William James was asking in his Principles of Psychology. In so doing, it reviews our progress toward their solutions. Among the contemporary concerns of 1990 that the editors consider are: the nature of the self and the will, conscious experience, associationism, the basic acts of cognition, and the nature of perception. Their findings: Although the developments in each of these areas during (...) the last 100 years have been monumental, James' views as presented in the Principles still remain viable and provocative. To provide a context for understanding James, some chapters are devoted primarily to recent scholarship about James himself -- focusing on the time the Principles was written, relevant intellectual influences, and considerations of his understanding of this "new" science of psychology. The balance of this volume is devoted to specific topics of particular interest to James. One critical theme woven into almost every chapter is the tension between the role of experience (or phenomenological data) within a scientific psychology, and the viability of a materialistic (or biologically reductive) account of mental life. Written for professionals, practitioners, and students of psychology -- in all disciplines. (shrink)

Written in the intense political and intellectual tumult of the early years of the Weimar Republic, Political Theology develops the distinctive theory of sovereignty that made Carl Schmitt one of the most significant and controversial ...

According to policy makers, telemedicine offers “huge opportunities to improve the quality and accessibility of health services.” It is defined as diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring, with doctors and patients separated by space but mediated through information and communication technologies. This mediation is explored through an ethnography of a U.K. teledermatology clinic. Diagnostic image transfer enables medicine at a distance, as patients are removed from knowledge generation by concentrating their identities into images. Yet that form of identity allows images and the (...) expert gaze to be brought into potentially lifesaving proximity. Following Latour’s thread, images must be captured and then mobilized to the knowledge base, where they must be stabilized into standard diagnoses, then combined with different images, waiting lists, skin lesions, dermatologists, paper records, and beds, so that ultimately, outcomes are produced. This huge task requires new knowledges and a widening of agency that, if unacknowledged, may see telemedicine projects continue to founder. (shrink)

Genetic variability is considered a key to the evolvability of species. The conversion of an adenosine (A) to inosine (I) in primary RNA transcripts can result in an amino acid change in the encoded protein, a change in secondary structure of the RNA, creation or destruction of a splice consensus site, or otherwise alter RNA fate. Substantial transcriptome and proteome variability is generated by A‐to‐I RNA editing through site‐selective post‐transcriptional recoding of single nucleotides. We posit that this epigenetic source of (...) phenotypic variation is an unrecognized mechanism of adaptive evolution. The genetic variation introduced through editing occurs at low evolutionary cost since predominant production of the wild‐type protein is retained. This property even allows exploration of sequence space that is inaccessible through mutation, leading to increased phenotypic plasticity and provides an evolutionary advantage for acclimatization as well as long‐term adaptation. Furthermore, continuous probing for novel RNA editing sites throughout the transcriptome is an intrinsic property of the editing machinery and represents the molecular basis for increased adaptability. We propose that higher organisms have therefore evolved to systems with increasing RNA editing activity and, as a result, to more complex systems. (shrink)

People frequently make ethical choices they later regret. Causal Loop Archetypes offer a basic systems framework for analyzing the unintended consequences of personal and professional ethical decisions. Pressure or enticement or defensiveness can stymie individuals’ rational sensemaking. Causal Loop Thinking, and in particular the “Fixes That Fail” Archetype, draw on the familiar decision model of identifying the problem, specifying the alternative courses of action andtheir consequences, to guide our final choice. As students grapple with their own conflicts and business school (...) faculty look for tools to anticipate professional ethical dilemmas, Causal Loop Thinking can expand our awareness of the context of choices and actions, thus leading to a more fully assessed decision. (shrink)