ABSTRACT This is a guest editorial introducing a special issue on ‘Exemplars and Emulation in Moral Education’ which contains contributions from 10 multidisciplinary authors. Representing the state of the art in the discourse, this editorial elucidates several new themes pertaining to it, before outlining each contribution in relation to said themes. In light of David Carr’s recent objections to role modelling, it is then argued that these contributions provide a possible collective response.

Ofsted requires UK schools to help students understand the working world and gain employability skills. However, the aims of education are much broader: Education should enable flourishing long after leaving school. Therefore, students’ career decisions should be conducive to long-term flourishing beyond career readiness and educational attainment. In this mixed-methods study, we asked a representative sample of UK adults to reflect on their career decision-making processes at school and at university. We also measured current levels of self-reported objective (e.g., financial (...) security) and subjective (e.g., subjective well-being) flourishing. The open-ended career decision reflections were coded for three moral reasoning strategies: virtue ethical, consequentialist, and deontological. Using correlations and structural equation modelling, we examined the association between the propensity for using each moral reasoning strategy in past career decisions and current flourishing. Virtue ethical moral reasoning in relation to career decision-making predicted aspects of flourishing most strongly and frequently. Consequentialist reasoning weakly and infrequently positively predicted aspects of flourishing. Deontological reasoning either did not predict flourishing at all, or negatively predicted flourishing. Our results suggest that the reasoning strategy behind career decisions people take in school or university is important to consider in UK careers provision, and current best practice. (shrink)

The first decade of the twenty-first century introduced a cultural shift where terrorism is concerned by making new technologies such as computers and networks available as both tools and targets for exploitation. The current rise in the number of attempts at launching a cyber attack may represent a new generation of “terrorists” and their discontent with governments, private companies, or with other non-governmental groups. Using cyber technologies has many benefits for the user and the potential of causing more damage by (...) a keystroke than a bomb is increasing daily. Despite much recent scholarship on cyber terrorism, however, there continue to be problems not only in defining what cyber terrorism means but in identifying both who are the actors and the panoply of choices actors confront. In this essay, I attempt to clarify these problems by defining key terms and by analyzing the recent escalation in cyber use in the European context. (shrink)

The dictum ‘“ought” implies “can”’ has a status in moral philosophy in some respects like that of ‘a good player needs good co-ordination’ in talk about ball-games. Clearly, you say something important but not conclusive about proficiency in playing a ball-game when you say that it requires good co-ordination: similarly, you say something important but not conclusive about obligation when you say that it implies a certain possibility or power or ability. Each dictum is a reminder: the one about such (...) courses of physical instruction, the other about such exhortations to duty, as are worth persevering with. It would be hopeless to keep on teaching a boy the moves and tricks of rugby football if he could never co-ordinate well enough to get his eye in, so to speak. Correspondingly, it would be meaningless to recommend that someone ought to do something the specification of which involved a contradiction, and pointless to suggest that he ought to do something which, for quite general reasons, was not, and was certain to remain not, within his power. So each dictum expresses a bluff, no-nonsense wisdom which we should count on before involving ourselves in certain more detailed commitments. But probably this is as far as the comparison between the two sayings can well be taken. (shrink)

This essay deals with plague and plagues in renaissance and early modern Europe over the longue durée, principally from a methodological perspective. I shall combine an historiographical approach with an historical account of developing reactions to plague and in passing compare measures to cope in the early sixteenth century with reactions to the impact of the Great Pox or the Mal de Naples. I shall concentrate on southern Europe and in particular on Italy and my aim is to re-assess the (...) historiography of plague through the lens of some of the more recent Anglo-Saxon literature in this field. In the process I shall outline some of the debates within the field and end with some general methodological observations drawn from early modern Italy. (shrink)

Doctors’ survival predictions for terminally ill patients have been shown to be inaccurate and there has been an argument for less guesswork and more use of carefully constructed statistical indices. As statisticians, the authors are less confident in the predictive value of statistical models and indices for individual survival times. This paper discusses and illustrates a variety of measures which can be used to summarise predictive information available from a statistical model. The authors argue that models and statistical indices can (...) be useful at the group or population level, but that human survival is so uncertain that even the best statistical analysis cannot provide single-number predictions of real use for individual patients. (shrink)

This paper examines three medical student poems about death to explore how medical students use poetry to understand their encounters with dying patients and to discuss how these poems function as elegies in the context of medical culture.

The word “beautiful” plays a surprisingly unimportant part in the language of sophisticated artistic appreciation; I mean in the informed criticism and comparison of specific works of art. Though in ordinary conversation it can be used naturally and easily, it does not serve readily as a technical term in expert writing or discussion. To become a technical term of this kind it would have to be definable, and definable in terms which commanded sufficient agreement: but attempts to define “beauty” and (...) “beautiful” may well have become restrained by the popularity of philosophical discussion about the significance of these words. No philosophical question is discussed more commonly or from more firmly held opposite positions than the question whether beauty is “objective” or not. Discussion of this and related topics, however, not being the monopoly of professed philosophers but being familiar amongst artists and art critics themselves, tends to remove all shadow of technicality from the crucial terms discussed. Other terms come to serve for the “objective” features of works of art, and others again for the impressions which works of art may make upon us: “beauty” and “beautiful” tend to fall away between these two classes. (shrink)

I want to explore the possibility of an a posteriori approach to the elucidation of certain moral notions. These are: (a) the notion of a duty, some specific thing which it is incumbent on me to do, and (b) the notion of something that is a good thing for me to do. I want to consider these notions, so far as I can, independently of rules. There is a certain sense in which having a duty to do this or that (...) is a function of circumstances, and in which this or that's being a good thing to do is likewise a function of circumstances. I shall suggest specific examples in which this is a conspicuous feature of ‘my duty’ or of what I can, beneficially, do. In these examples what I ought to do, and what it is good to do, can be represented as special ways in which what I am to do presents itself. (shrink)

In the course of his life a man surrounds himself with questions, much as he surrounds himself with furniture, books or pictures. Personality is expressed not only by the selection of a Chippendale chair, the amassing of early colour-plate books, or the purchase of a Renoir, but also by the kind of questions which a man “collects”-raises, without necessarily solving. Some questions, like some books, are to be brooded over and studied; some are introduced only to be contemplated from time (...) to time, like fine bindings; and some occur so casually as hardly to rouse any attention at all. There is an obvious difference between a man who bids carefully at a book auction or forces himself on to his knees to identify a dust-covered quarto in a slum bookshop, and a man whose library is inherited from parents or grandparents; acceptances and not choices will distinguish the casual possessor from the bookman. Similarly, there are many questions which sit lightly on a man's mind, which are as little the object of sustained wondering or bafflement as his ancestors” well bound volumes of theology or game-shooting are the reflection of his own tastes or interests. These may be questions of any sort: they may be factual questions, important or trivial, or they may be theoretical questions, philosophical perhaps, or religious or scientific. A student of literature, for instance, has been known to congratulate himself on his ignorance of modern science, ignorance so deliberate that any scientific question raised in his presence fails even to make him wonder. For any person, however, there are ranges of questions which barely touch his mind: he may be aware that he does not know how to derive answers to them for himself, but his inability will not cause him concern. The memory, the practical or the reasoning skill of the kind that would be required are perhaps so much out of proportion to what he possesses that to bemoan the lack of them is unrealistic -as it is often idle and merely conventional for one who is tone-deaf to say how much he wishes he could sing an aria . Other questions altogether, important or trivial, he takes seriously and troubles to answer, because they touch his own special interests directly: he may pride himself on never neglecting a newspaper problem in bridge or chess, or he may never fail to answer correctly a question about the construction of some instrument or machine. The same person, however, will also get the length of raising many questions which remain mere questions. He may be troubled and puzzled about certain political or social question which circumstances do not compel him to answer: but he will not be hypocritical in professing an interest in them. Some of these questions, of course, may become solved after a fashion, if he listens to the voice of politician, statistician, priest or psychologist and is lucky enough to get an answer which satisfies him. But many will survive with just enough recurrences of wondering about them to make them, as you might say, chronic. This is the intermediate class of questions. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:What more can be said about COVID-19 and the social determinants of health? This article describes neglected perspectives that derive from the history of social epidemiology, a field that identifies the social etiology of disease and variations in disease incidence among people differentially located in the social structure. The "discovery" of social determinants of diseases like COVID-19 is nothing new for epidemiology: debate over how to analyze structural determinants versus individual-level risk factors persisted throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. By (...) the late 20th century, research had highlighted fundamental causes of health disparities, such as social conditions and structural racism; these are structural factors, embedded in the social fabric of life. Measurement of structured inequalities within systems faces complex and challenging problems, as research aims to better account for these lived realities at different levels of analysis and as multiple factors merge to influence outcomes (revealed in intersectionality theory). At each of these intersections, there are opportunities for bioethicists to consider their ethical implications. It is imperative to understand the social and ethical roots of our present conversations about health inequalities, in order to partner intelligently with researchers on the forefront of advocating for change. (shrink)

The application of machine learning algorithms to healthcare data can enhance patient care while also reducing healthcare worker cognitive load. These algorithms can be used to detect anomalous physiological readings, potentially leading to expedited emergency response or new knowledge about the development of a health condition. However, while there has been much research conducted in assessing the performance of anomaly detection algorithms on well-known public datasets, there is less conceptual comparison across unsupervised and supervised performance on physiological data. Moreover, while (...) heart rate data are both ubiquitous and noninvasive, there has been little research specifically for anomaly detection of this type of data. Considering that heart rate data are indicative of both potential health complications and an individual’s physical activity, this is a rich source of largely overlooked data. To this end, we employed and evaluated five machine learning algorithms, two of which are unsupervised and the remaining three supervised, in their ability to detect anomalies in heart rate data. These algorithms were then evaluated on real heart rate data. Findings supported the effectiveness of local outlier factor and random forests algorithms in the task of heart rate anomaly detection, as each model generalized well from their training on simulated heart rate data to real world heart rate data. Furthermore, results support that simulated data can help configure algorithms to a degree of performance when real labeled data are not available and that this type of learning might be especially helpful in initial deployment of a system without prior data. (shrink)

BackgroundChildhood abuse increases risk for high levels of distress in response to future stressors. Interpersonal social support is protective for health, particularly during stress, and may be particularly beneficial for individuals who experienced childhood abuse.ObjectiveInvestigate whether childhood abuse predicts levels of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms related to the COVID-19 pandemic, and test whether the perceived availability of social companionship preceding the pandemic moderates this relationship.MethodsDuring Phase 1, adults (N= 120; AgeM[SD] = 19.4 [0.94]) completed a retrospective measure of childhood (...) adversity along with a measure of perceived availability of opportunities for social engagement immediately preceding the pandemic. Two weeks after the COVID-19 pandemic declaration, participants completed the Impact of Event Scale-Revised (IES-R) with respect to the pandemic. Hierarchical linear regression analyses examined the interaction between childhood abuse and the perceived availability of social companionship preceding the pandemic as a predictor of PTSD symptoms.ResultsAdjusting for covariates, the interaction between childhood abuse and perceived availability of others to engage with before the onset of the pandemic was a significant predictor of IES-hyperarousal (β = −0.19,t= −2.06,p= 0.04, ΔR2= 0.032, CI: [−0.31 to −0.01]).ConclusionLevels of perceived opportunities for social companionship before the pandemic associates with levels of hyperarousal related to the pandemic, particularly for individuals who experienced high levels of childhood abuse. More research is needed to understand how to mitigate the higher levels of distress related to the pandemic for these individuals in order to reduce risk for future psychiatric disorders. (shrink)

“I am not mad, most noble Festus, but speak the words of truth and soberness.” In this cry of Paul's we hear the idealist in all ages making his agonized claim to realism in face of the Powers that Be. Festus and Agrippa represent the ex-officio history-makers in this scene. Paul is proclaiming fundamental facts and possibilities that those who have power fail to see. And so, in claiming to be sane, he becomes the spokesman for all who see the (...) Not-Yet as stronger than the Now, and behold What is Meant to Be as more powerful than What Is. (shrink)

He upon whom has descended the “amor intellectualis Dei” must make up his mind to walk much alone. In the world of “intellectuals” he is at present “out of the swim,” and his work must be done against the prevailing current. And among the generality of religious people, he is regarded as rather a disturbing presence in matters of faith, apt to fall short, apparently, of their own standards in the service of God. “The love of the mind for God” (...) has little popular esteem in English-speaking Christianity. The nineteenth century valued feeling as the chief element in religion, and the emphasis of to-day is on the practical service of the will. But in our tradition, from Colet and the Cambridge Platonists to Westcott and von Hiigel, the “amor intellectualis Dei” has produced a line of great men of God, and surely will never be without its witnesses. Their message is a two-fold one. First that every experience of life can be “produced” into an experience of God by an effort of personality in which creative thought and constructive imagination has its part, second that this “love of the mind” is natural in some degree to all men, and an end in itself, giving to each lover an original vision. “It is Origen,” writes Dean Inge, “who in words thrilling alike by their humility and confidence, proclaims that ‘as the eye seeks the light, as our body craves for food, so our mind is impressed with the natural desire of knowing the truth of God and the causes of what we observe.’”. (shrink)

The last decades have seen major advances in the study of gestures both in humans and non-human primates. In this paper, we seriously examine the idea that there may be gestural form types that are shared across great ape species, including humans, which may underlie gestural universals, both in form and meaning. We focus on one case study, the hand fling gesture common to chimpanzees and humans, and provide a semantic analysis of this gesture.

What is honor? Is it the same as reputation? Or is it rather a sentiment? Is it a character trait, like integrity? Or is it simply a concept too vague or incoherent to be fully analyzed? In the first sustained comparative analysis of this elusive notion, Frank Stewart writes that none of these ideas is correct. Drawing on information about Western ideas of honor from sources as diverse as medieval Arthurian romances, Spanish dramas of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and (...) the writings of German jurists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and comparing the European ideas with the ideas of a non-Western society—the Bedouin—Stewart argues that honor must be understood as a right, basically a right to respect. He shows that by understanding honor this way, we can resolve some of the paradoxes that have long troubled scholars, and can make sense of certain institutions that have not hitherto been properly understood. Offering a powerful new way to understand this complex notion, _Honor_ has important implications not only for the social sciences but also for the whole history of European sensibility. (shrink)

Two of the most influential theories about scientific inference are inference to the best explanation and Bayesianism. How are they related? Bas van Fraassen has claimed that IBE and Bayesianism are incompatible rival theories, as any probabilistic version of IBE would violate Bayesian conditionalization. In response, several authors have defended the view that IBE is compatible with Bayesian updating. They claim that the explanatory considerations in IBE are taken into account by the Bayesian because the Bayesian either does or should (...) make use of them in assigning probabilities to hypotheses. I argue that van Fraassen has not succeeded in establishing that IBE and Bayesianism are incompatible, but that the existing compatibilist response is also not satisfactory. I suggest that a more promising approach to the problem is to investigate whether explanatory considerations are taken into account by a Bayesian who assigns priors and likelihoods on his or her own terms. In this case, IBE would emerge from the Bayesian account, rather than being used to constrain priors and likelihoods. I provide a detailed discussion of the case of how the Copernican and Ptolemaic theories explain retrograde motion, and suggest that one of the key explanatory considerations is the extent to which the explanation a theory provides depends on its core elements rather than on auxiliary hypotheses. I then suggest that this type of consideration is reflected in the Bayesian likelihood, given priors that a Bayesian might be inclined to adopt even without explicit guidance by IBE. The aim is to show that IBE and Bayesianism may be compatible, not because they can be amalgamated, but rather because they capture substantially similar epistemic considerations. 1 Introduction2 Preliminaries3 Inference to the Best Explanation4 Bayesianism5 The Incompatibilist View : Inference to the Best Explanation Contradicts Bayesianism5. 1 Criticism of the incompatibilist view6 Constraint - Based Compatibilism6. 1 Criticism of constraint - based compatibilism7 Emergent Compatibilism7. 1 Analysis of inference to the best explanation7. 1. 1 Inference to the best explanation on specific hypotheses7. 1. 2 Inference to the best explanation on general theories7. 1. 3 Copernicus versus Ptolemy7. 1. 4 Explanatory virtues7. 1. 5 Summary7. 2 Bayesian account8 Conclusion. (shrink)

In recent decades, scholars have come to see 1 Corinthians as a rhetorically unified response to the problem of divisions among Corinthian believers. This essay explores the ways in which Paul presents the cross as the organizing principle that can bind together three different forms of community division: the cult of the personality ; the freedom to eat idol meat ; and economic disparities when gathered for a meal. In each case, Paul appeals implicitly or explicitly to the cross as (...) a remedy for the all-too-familiar strains on the fractured community. In the end, Paul’s countercultural message about the cross offers a word of exhortation for the American church today, as it navigates a society that shares much in common with first-century Corinth. (shrink)

The author argues that the fourth-century philosophers used protreptic discourses to market philosophical practices and to define and legitimize the school of higher learning.

One of the central points of contention in the epistemology of testimony concerns the uniqueness (or not) of the justification of beliefs formed through testimony--whether such justification can be accounted for in terms of, or 'reduced to,' other familiar sort of justification, e.g. without relying on any epistemic principles unique to testimony. One influential argument for the reductionist position, found in the work of Elizabeth Fricker, argues by appeal to the need for the hearer to monitor the testimony for credibility. (...) Fricker (1994) argues, first, that some monitoring for trustworthiness is required if the hearer is to avoid being gullible, and second, that reductionism but not anti-reductionism is compatible with ascribing an important role to the process of monitoring in the course of justifiably accepting observed testimony. In this paper we argue that such an argument fails. (shrink)

Over the past 30 years, the Australian state of Victoria has made numerous reforms to a set of jury directions purporting to address concerns that rape trials do not adequately respond to the reality of sexual offending in the community. Building on work identifying the predominant narratives mobilised in rape trials, in this article we consider whether the way in which a jury consumes information during a trial explains why the jury directions, positioned and utilised as they are, appear to (...) have been inadequate to the task of enabling juries to re-imagine evidence through alternative narrative frameworks. (shrink)

Kelly Aguirre, Phil Henderson, Cressida J. Heyes, Alana Lentin, and Corey Snelgrove engage with different aspects of Robert Nichols’ Theft is Property! Dispossession and Critical Theory. Henderson focuses on possible spaces for maneuver, agency, contradiction, or failure in subject formation available to individuals and communities interpellated through diremptive processes. Heyes homes in on the ritual of antiwill called “consent” that systematically conceals the operation of power. Aguirre foregrounds tensions in projects of critical theory scholarship that aim for dialogue (...) and solidarity with Indigenous decolonial struggles. Lentin draws attention to the role of race in undergirding the logic of Anglo-settler colonial domination that operates through dispossession, while Snelgrove emphasizes the link between alienation, capital, and colonialism. In his reply to his interlocutors, Nichols clarifies aspects of his “recursive logics” of dispossession, a dispossession or theft through which the right to property is generated. (shrink)