bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Hobbes, Thomas
Authors: Lloyd S. A.
Published: January 2013

Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), the famed English philosopher often taken to be the father of modern social contract theory (seeSocial Contract), is best known for his absolutist political philosophy. But does he have a distinct and genuinely moral philosophy? Scholars are divided on this point, for there are several plausible ways of interpreting Hobbes' remarks concerning such concepts of morality as good and evil, right and wrong, obligation, duty, and sin. Hobbes can be read as having attempted to reduce morality to personal prudence (seePrudence), thus effectively eliminating it as a distinctive element of practical reasoning (seePractical Reasoning). Alternatively, he can be read as having endorsed ethical egoism (seeEgoism), or a divine command theory of morality (seeDivine Command), or an agency‐centered natural law theory (seeNatural Law). The arena of contention is Hobbes' laws of nature. Hobbes tells us explicitly that the laws of nature are the one and only true moral philosophy. Scholars, then, are concerned to understand the meaning and status of Hobbes' laws of nature. Are these merely prudential recommendations to the agent concerning how best to preserve his own life? Or are they commands from God the moral status of which depends on their having been so commanded? Or are they rules for the preservation of human communities – rules derived from the necessary desire of any rational agent to secure an environment in which her agency may be effectively exercised?
Public Reason
Authors: Laden Anthony Simon
Published: January 2013

“Public reason” has come to be a term of art in deliberative democratic theory (seeDemocracy). To understand it and the debates over its precise characterization, we can start from the problem it addresses. Governing, as opposed to merely counseling, involves the use or at least the possibility of coercion. For a democratic government to govern legitimately, its license to use coercion cannot itself be acquired coercively. The noncoercive acquisition of a license to coerce can be achieved if citizens accept the reasons for granting the license. However, in any free society, citizens accept and reject different reasons to grant such a license. When a government's license to coerce is based on reasons that some citizens reasonably reject, then that license has been acquired coercively from those citizens, and so the government fails the test of democratic legitimacy. The idea of public reason, then, is the idea of a shared set of reasons on the basis of which a democratic society could govern itself legitimately. As John Rawls puts it, public reason “concerns how the political relation is to be understood” (Rawls 1999a: 574;seeCitizenship).
Reconciliation
Authors: Murphy Colleen
Published: January 2013

Reconciliation broadly refers to one kind of response to conflict among ideas, memories, and/or individuals. It involves aprocessthrough which a certaingoalorend‐stateis achieved. Below I survey two general kinds of reconciliation. The first is reconciliation as the process of rendering intelligible seemingly incompatible ideas, accounts, or memories. The second is reconciliation as the process of repairing and rebuilding damaged relationships. A central ethical question surrounding reconciliation concerns the justifiability of its pursuit. Accounts of reconciliation must distinguish it from, for example, resignation or acquiescence to injustice and oppression.
Rousseau, Jean‐Jacques
Authors: Simpson Matthew
Published: January 2013

Alone among modern European thinkers, Rousseau (1712–78) was both a great moralist and a significant moral philosopher. As a moralist, he developed an original vision of human nature and human fulfillment along with an analysis of the forces hindering people from achieving happiness in the modern world; as a moral philosopher, he presented a theory of right action and the grounds of moral obligation that has shaped centuries of debate about rights, duties, and authority. Both aspects of his ethical thought have provoked widely divergent interpretations and they remain controversial, both as to their meaning and the soundness of their argumentation. Born in Geneva but living most of his adult life in France, Rousseau identified the decay beneath the glittering facade both of theancien régimeand of the intellectual culture of the Enlightenment. In the end, he was persecuted by both camps and was inspired to create, as one scholar put it, “a dazzling one‐man alternative Enlightenment” (Hulliung 1994: 4). His works remain notable for their originality, depth, influence, and style.
Homosexuality
Authors: Corvino John
Published: January 2013

Homosexuality is romantic or sexual attraction toward, or activity with, members of one's own sex or gender. There are many ways to approach homosexuality and ethics. Traditional discussions typically focus on the morality of homosexual conductper se. Alternatively, one might focus on the morality of society's treatment of gay, lesbian, and bisexual persons, or one might look at moral challenges that are unique to, or at least typical of, such persons – for instance whether, when, and how to “come out“ as gay, lesbian, or bisexual.
Levinas, Emmanuel
Authors: Bernasconi Robert
Published: January 2013

A knowledge of Emmanuel Levinas' life is more helpful for understanding his philosophy than is usually the case with philosophers, because he understood his life as dominated by the “presentiment and memory of the Nazi horror” (Levinas 1990a: 291), and the same could be said of his philosophy. He was witness to some of the most violent events of the twentieth century as well as some of its intellectual high points. Born into a Jewish family in Kovno, Lithuania, Levinas (1906–95) was a refugee during World War I and the Russian Revolution. He went to Strasbourg University in France in 1923, but a year at Freiburg University in Germany beginning in 1928, which enabled him to study phenomenology first with Edmund Husserl (seeHusserl, Edmund) and then with Martin Heidegger (seeHeidegger, Martin), had the most impact on him. In the 1930s Levinas was the foremost interpreter in France of both these thinkers, although after 1933 he took a critical distance from Heidegger because of the latter's association with National Socialism. Levinas was a prisoner of war in Germany for five years during World War II, saved by his status as a soldier from the Holocaust in which he lost almost all his relatives. He is perhaps the foremost of the philosophers identified as post‐Holocaust thinkers.
Rawls, John
Authors: Reidy David A.
Published: January 2013

John Rawls (1921–2002) was born and raised in Baltimore. He earned his undergraduate degree in philosophy from Princeton. After graduating he served in the infantry in World War II, earning the Bronze Star. The war behind him, he returned to Princeton in 1946 to pursue a PhD in philosophy, earning his degree in 1950. After a pivotal year (1952–3) at Oxford University, he joined the philosophy department at Cornell. He spent the academic year 1959–60 visiting the Harvard philosophy department and then left Cornell to help establish the newly founded philosophy department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 1962 he left MIT to join the philosophy faculty at Harvard on a permanent basis. He published his magnum opus,A Theory of Justice, in 1971. It was eventually translated into dozens of languages and has been widely studied around the world. He retired from Harvard in 1991 but continued to teach for several more years. He wrote and published until shortly before his death in 2002.
Guilt
Authors: Anderson Scott A.
Published: January 2013

The concept of guilt enters into ethics with two different but related referents. It can refer to anormative state or status, contrasted with “innocence,” that is predicated most often of agents and/or actions. In this framework, “guilt” is frequently discussed in terms of its relationships to concepts such as “responsibility,” “blame,” “intention,”and “conscience,”and related to the justification for punishment (seeBlame; Conscience; Intention; Punishment; Responsibility). “Guilt”can also refer to apsychologicalelement in a human being (or conceivably in other animals), most often described as an emotion (seeEmotion; Sentiments, Moral), and contrasted with other emotions such as shame (seeShame and Honor), pride (seePride), or anger. The two referents are frequently thought to be nonaccidentally related, and hence conceptually intertwined: the psychological feeling of guilt may be hoped to track the normative concept, and the normative concept believed to warrant feelings of guilt on the part of a guilty party. But the two referents may occur individually without the other, as guilt is sometimes felt in circumstances where there is no evident breach of normative duty (seeDuty and Obligation); and people do sometimes violate laws and morality without feeling guilt for it. Philosophers have been particularly interested in guilt (in respect of both sorts of referents) for its functional properties as well as for giving an account of its content and place in normative theory.
Frondizi, Risieri
Authors: MacMullan Terrance
Published: January 2013

Risieri Frondizi (1910–83) was an Argentinean philosopher and educational reformer whose work on axiology (
see
Aesthetics and Ethics; Value Pluralism), process metaphysics, political philosophy (
see
Political Ethics), and gestalt theory (
see
Organic Unities) earned him great international acclaim. His wide global influence can be attributed to his travels across the globe as well as his ability to write and converse in the fields of philosophy, psychology, and educational reform in English, Spanish, and Italian. While his work is too stylistically varied and topically diverse to categorize easily, the most salient features of his scholarship include an emphasis on praxis, or the merging of theory and action in lived experience, as well as an attempt to use a careful analysis of lived experience to reconcile long‐standing philosophical arguments and debates (
see
Praxis).
Dual‐Use Research
Authors: Selgelid Michael J.
Published: January 2013

Dual‐use research is research that leads (or might be expected to lead) to the generation of information and/or technology that can be used for both good and bad purposes. Of particular concern is well‐intentioned life science research that aims to promote advancements in medicine but might also facilitate development of biological weapons of mass destruction (
see
Weapons Research and Development). During the first decade of the twenty‐first century, dual‐use life science research has been one of the most controversial issues regarding the bioterrorist threat (
see
Terrorism), and a central topic of debate about science policy. Attention to this topic is associated with recent rapid advances in genetics and heightened fears of bioterrorism that resulted from the terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001 and the anthrax attacks that occurred soon afterwards. Given the potentially severe consequences that could result from malicious use of dual‐use life science research, it has been argued that increased oversight of dual‐use research and/or publication of dual‐use discoveries may be necessary, that science codes of conduct for scientists (explicitly addressing dual‐use issues) should be adopted (
see
Codes of Ethics), and/or that scientists should be further educated about ethics.
Mandeville, Bernard
Authors: Brown Charlotte R.
Published: January 2013

As journalist, satirist, social critic, and moral philosopher, Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733) aimed to be provocative and he succeeded. He attracted the attention of almost every thinker in the eighteenth century because his doctrines were thought to be offensive and dangerous. He was regarded as an advocate for immorality and irreligion as well as a more cynical reincarnation of Hobbes. He endorses government‐run brothels, argues that Christianity is useful for making good soldiers, and seems to defend the idea that vice makes a nation flourish and prosper. Moral philosophers were repelled by his depiction of human beings as selfish and unruly creatures and were shocked by his claim that morality is nothing but an invention used by clever politicians to tame us. Many took Mandeville to be denying the reality of virtue.
Sexual Equality
Authors: Brennan Samantha
Published: January 2013

Inequalities between men and women are of concern for moral and political philosophers, especially feminist philosophers, inasmuch as the ideal of equality (seeEquality) has shaped much of the history of ethics, and inasmuch as the inequalities between men and women remain so striking. Some political theorists, such as Will Kymlicka (1990), think of equality astheshared value at the core of a wide range of theories from Kantian deontology to utilitarianism and from Rawlsian liberalism (seeRawls, John) to libertarianism. While sexual equality as a normative (seeNormativity) ideal has proven more controversial than the notion of equality more generally, it too has guided much of our thinking in moral and political philosophy. Getting clarity on just what the ideal of sexual equality demands has been a matter of controversy among both advocates and critics of equality between the sexes. Some theorists opt for a very abstract notion of equality, such as equal moral worth or equal respect, while other theorists argue for a more robust, substantive account of equality which includes equality of treatment and/or equality of outcomes. Just as with the value of equality more generally, we see versions of sexual equality that are consequentialist (seeConsequentialism) in nature, where we evaluate states of affairs on the basis of inequality, and versions which are closer to deontological principles (seeDeontology), where sexual equality is seen as equal treatment and respect.
Islamic Ethics
Authors: Kelsay John
Published: January 2013

If we think of ethics in an Aristotelian sense – that is, as a discourse on the good life – then we might consider
al‐akhlaq
, the study of character, as the best candidate for an equivalent in Islamic tradition (
see
Aristotle; Character; Virtue; Virtue Ethics). And certainly one should consider the body of literature Muslims associate with this term, along with the related discourse on wisdom, virtue, and self‐formation associated with
falsafa
(philosophy),
adab
(letters), and a variety of Sufi texts.
Political Obligation
Authors: McCabe David
Published: January 2013

To have a political obligation is to have a duty to one's political community (perhaps to follow its laws, to defend it, to ensure its thriving, and so on) simply by virtue of one's membership in it. The central questions in the debates over political obligation are whether there are any such requirements and what grounds might justify them. Many approach this general issue through the question whether one has a duty to obey the law simply because the state has commanded it, a natural approach if one views political obligation as the flip side of state authority and holds that a state has authority if and only if its commands give rise to obligations (perhaps defeasible) that citizens act in certain ways. But as Knowles (2010) has argued, the idea of political obligation has greater extension than the question of the duty to obey law and touches on issues broader than that of political authority (
see
Authority). For example, if one's country is invaded one may have an obligation to enlist in its armed services even if no law compels one to do so. Indeed, membership in a political community may impose on one a duty to oppose certain decisions and policies of one's government. So even if questions about the duty to obey law are the most common and important way whereby citizens confront the issue of political obligation, we misunderstand the latter if we see it as just another way of asking about the former.
Criminal Law
Authors: Gardner John , Edwards James
Published: January 2013

Philosophical scholarship on the criminal law explores many questions and this essay deals with just four. First, what is criminal law? Any answer to this question will have something to say about criminal prosecution and punishment. If we are realistic about the damage both of these may do, we must also ask whether we are justified in having criminal law at all. If our answer to this second question does not entail abolition, we must face up to two more. We must ask what scope can permissibly be given to the criminal law, and we must ask which principles should determine whether and when we are criminally responsible for our actions.
Stevenson,C.L.
Authors: Tresan Jon
Published: January 2013

Charles Leslie Stevenson (1908–79), a moral philosopher located primarily at the University of Michigan (1946–77), had a significant influence on the development of twentieth‐century moral thought. He exhibited and promoted three increasingly prominent characteristics in Anglo‐American philosophy: careful attention to ordinary uses of language, avoidance of posits beyond those supportable by ordinary scientific methods, and a focus on the “non‐cognitive” – emotional, motivational, social‐practical – features of morality. Early in the century, especially in the wake of Moore'sPrincipia Ethica(1903), many philosophers took moral discourse to be about a metaphysically distinctive subject matter: a realm of simple, nonnatural properties, implicated by terms like “good” and “right,” and known by direct intuition (seeMoore, G. E.; Nonnaturalism, Ethical; Intuitionism, Moral). By the 1960s that view had been eclipsed by the fundamentally different idea that moral discourse is not best understood by its subject matter but by its practical role: for expressing or evoking attitudes, telling people to do things, or promoting social coordination (seeNon‐Cognitivism). Stevenson was, with Ayer and Hare, among those most responsible for this intellectual revolution (seeAyer, A. J.; Hare, R. M.). His most influential works were “The Emotive Meaning of Moral Terms” (1937), andEthics and Language(1944). Some of his papers are collected inFacts and Values(1963).
Contractualism
Authors: Kumar Rahul
Published: January 2013

Contractualist moral theories aim to clarify the basis of familiar considered convictions concerning how it is and is not permissible for individuals to relate to one another. They are frequently identified with the view that how it is and is not permissible for individuals to relate to one another is fixed by principles for the general regulation of conduct, the principles in question being those that all persons within the moral domain would agree to were they to consider the matter under suitably specified conditions.
Trust
Authors: Jones Karen
Published: January 2013

We are finite social beings who depend on each other for many different things, from information, to the food we eat, the health care we receive, and our physical safety as we go about our daily life. Dependency inevitably brings with it risk, but, when well placed, it also enables us to achieve what we cannot achieve alone. The value of trust is not merely instrumental: trust is constitutive of morally significant relationships that make life meaningful, such as love and friendship. Trust is thus vital for human flourishing and so it is important to understand it. On the surface, trust is a two‐place relation: A trusts B. But this surface grammar belies a deeper three‐place structure, for the trust that we have in another is seldom global but is instead restricted to a domain or an action. Thinking of trust as a three‐place relation captures this tacit restriction: A trusts B to do Z (Baier 1986; Holton 1994). On some accounts of trust anything at all – people, machinery, animals – can fill the role of B; while on other accounts, only agents, whether human or artificial, such as corporations, are proper objects for trust. Central questions in the philosophy of trust to be addressed in this essay are: What is the value of trust? What is trust? What is trustworthiness? What sort of reasons can provide grounds to trust? When is trust justified?
Suicide
Authors: Cholbi Michael
Published: January 2013

Suicide is a controversial ethical issue in large part because the reasonings of (a) and (b) above appear plausible but support contradictory conclusions. (a) in effect asks: Why should we be granted an exemption to the prohibition on human killing when the person we kill is ourselves? What makes killing
oneself
so special? (b) on the other hand starts from the intuition that there is something special or distinctive about the moral relationship we stand in to ourselves, a relationship that can at least sometimes morally justify suicide. The reasoning of (a) and (b) thus establishes the contours of the ethical debate concerning the permissibility of suicide and explains why suicide is one of the most hotly debated issues in bioethics (
see
Bioethics).
Biocentrism
Authors: Attfield Robin
Published: January 2013

Biocentrism holds that all living things are morally considerable (seeMoral Status), whereas many people hold that only human beings are so (seeAnthropocentrism). Certain Eastern religions, such as Jainism (seeJain Ethics), are biocentrist, but the first prominent Western thinker to advocate biocentrism was Albert Schweitzer, who, in his bookCivilization and Ethics(1923), coined the phrase “reverence for life.” For Schweitzer, everything that lives has a will to live (or an inbuilt drive toward self‐preservation and living its own life), and the reverence that one feels toward one's own “will‐to‐live” ought, morally, to be extended to all. However, no philosophically sophisticated version of biocentrism appeared until 1981, when Paul Warren Taylor published his article “The Ethics of Respect for Nature,” the themes of which he later developed in his bookRespect for Nature(1986).
Marcuse, Herbert
Authors: Pfeifer Geoff
Published: January 2013

Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) was a German‐born philosopher, social theorist, member of the Frankfurt School (
see
Critical Theory), and one of the leaders of the New Left movement in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. His conception of the ethical can best be understood in relation to his conception of politics and political liberation (
see
Political Ethics). Marcuse claims in
An Essay on Liberation
: “Political radicalism … implies moral radicalism: The emergence of a morality which might precondition man for freedom. This radicalism activates the elementary, organic foundation of morality in human beings” (Marcuse 1969: 10). He goes on to argue that morality itself is to be distinguished from various (and varying) historical and social conceptions of what it is to be a good person. The proper moral orientation is not relative (
see
Relativism, Moral) to history or culture but is rather “a ‘disposition’ of the organism perhaps rooted in the erotic drive to counter aggressiveness, to create and preserve ‘ever greater unities’ of life” (Marcuse 1969: 10). Morality is then, according to Marcuse, based in our biology, in our fundamental human nature, and is ultimately “an instinctual foundation for solidarity among human beings” (Marcuse 1969: 10). It is, however, according to Marcuse, the case that this biologically founded solidarity (
see
Solidarity) has been “repressed” and reconstructed by the structures of modern social, economic, and political life. For this reason, ethics and politics are inseparably linked. Ethical action requires that one must work to end the repressive political and social processes that have come to exist in order to free this biologically grounded solidarity among humans from its repression in modern society. Thus, Marcuse endorses a type of humanistic ethics in which ethical norms are founded on human nature (
see
Normativity).
Equality
Authors: Young Robert
Published: January 2013

Equality is a relational notion: thus, for example, there is equality between two people in relation to a benefit (or a burden) when each receives the same benefit (or shoulders the same burden). This relational (or comparative) feature is common to all claims about equality, whether equality is considered afoundational value(e.g., in proclamations of “the equality of every person”), aformal value(e.g., in principles like “the equality of all before the law,” and in proscriptions against discrimination of various kinds), or asubstantive value(e.g., in the contention that the welfare of each person in a specific group should be equalized).
Brentano, Franz
Authors: Simons Peter
Published: January 2013

Franz Brentano (1838–1917) was one of the most influential philosophers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His students included many famous philosophers such as Edmund Husserl and Alexius Meinong, political leaders, and Sigmund Freud. He is a key figure for understanding phenomenology, object theory, gestalt psychology, and Polish analytic philosophy. His views on ethics influenced not only his students but also philosophers abroad like G. E. Moore (
see
Moore, G. E.). His Vienna lectures on ethics or “practical philosophy,” delivered many times between 1876 and 1894, were hugely popular and well attended. They remained unpublished during his lifetime, appearing in German only in 1952, and in English translation as
The Foundation and Construction of Ethics
(Brentano 1973a). For this reason his ethics have been important mainly for their influence on others. This includes the one important ethical work published in his lifetime, an 1889 address to lawyers,
The Origin of Our Knowledge of Right and Wrong
(Brentano 1969), a distillation of his thinking whose English translation Moore (1903) hailed with the words, “This is a far better discussion of the most fundamental principles of Ethics than any others with which I am acquainted.”
Moral Judgment
Authors: DePaul Michael
Published: January 2013

Here are examples of things ordinary people might say that normally would express moral judgments:
Courage
Authors: Wallace James D.
Published: January 2013

Courage and cowardice are of considerable intrinsic interest. A number of the philosophical discussions of the topic, moreover, raise fundamental philosophical problems about ethics, the nature of Emotion (
see
Emotion), Practical Reasoning (
see
Practical Reasoning), and Action (
see
Action), and about the relationships of these things to one another. Plato's and Aristotle's discussions of courage set many of the topics and issues pursued by later writers.
Wollaston, William
Authors: Tilley John J.
Published: January 2013

William Wollaston (1659–1724) was one of several early modern British moral theorists known today as “moral rationalists” (seeRationalism In Ethics). Others in this group included Ralph Cudworth, Samuel Clarke, John Balguy, and Richard Price (seeCudworth, Ralph; Clarke, Samuel; Balguy, John; Price, Richard). They were foils or opponents of such “moral sentimentalists” as Lord Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, and David Hume (seeShaftesbury, Third Earl of; Hutcheson, Francis; Hume, David), their disagreements with whom anticipated and influenced many later debates over moral cognitivism and moral intuitionism (seeCognitivism; Non‐Cognitivism; Intuitionism, Moral). Uniting the rationalists was the view that reason, rather than feeling, sentiment, or a moral sense, is the source of moral perceptions. Many rationalists held also that what we detect when we perceive moral rightness is some sort of “fitness,” reasonableness, or agreement with truth.
Health Surveillance, Ethics of
Authors: Fairchild Amy L. , Johns David Merritt
Published: January 2013

Ethics in the context of public health surveillance can be understood as the principles and values that guide the collection and use of names for the surveillance of infectious and chronic diseases (seeInfectious Diseases). The practice of public health traditionally has been animated by a concern for the well‐being of populations. Public health ethics (seePublic Health Ethics) reflects that orientation, providing a foundation for the affirmative duty to monitor threats to health, intervene to promote the public good, engage in research activities that produce generalizable knowledge, and promptly disseminate findings from such efforts to health officials, other stakeholders, and the public at large (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 1986). At the same time, there is consensus that surveillance activities designed to safeguard the public's health must be subject to some limits involving individual rights (Childress et al. 2002). Thus, even while prioritizing affirmative duties to promote population health, public health ethics has been characterized as a “code of restraint” that strives to fairly preserve the rights of individuals to noninterference (Kass 2001: 1777). In the case of surveillance, individual concerns and subsequent restraints typically involve claims to privacy (seePrivacy).
Civil Rights
Authors: Shin Patrick S.
Published: January 2013

The notion of civil rights encompasses a cluster of individual entitlements that protect individual dignity and collectively constitute basic, minimum requirements for free and equal membership in democratic society. These entitlements are generally understood to include rights against discrimination and subordinating segregation in employment, education, and housing, the freedom of speech and assembly, rights pertaining to religious exercise and liberty, voting rights, and an array of protections against abuses in the context of criminal law enforcement, trials, and punishments (seeDiscrimination; Speech, Freedom of; Liberty).
Business Ethics
Authors: Norman Wayne
Published: January 2013

“Business ethics” is a concise, but in many ways misleading, label for an interdisciplinary field covering a vast range of normative issues in the world of commerce. The label lends itself most directly to a core set of questions about how individuals in the business world ought to behave, or what principles they might appeal to in order to negotiate moral dilemmas at work. But if we consider the array of topics covered in the leading business ethics journals or textbooks, we see that these core issues aboutindividualvirtues and ethical decision‐making are surrounded by layers of issues involvingorganizationsandinstitutions. In other words, business ethics in the broadest sense also inquires about the most appropriate or just designs for firms, markets, market regulations, and political oversight in a democratic society and a globalized economy.
Parents' Rights and Responsibilities
Authors: Brighouse Harry , Swift Adam
Published: January 2013

As early theories of rights developed in the seventeenth century, the idea that parents had extensive and strongly protected rights over their children was largely unquestioned. In Europe children were, mostly, treated by the law as the property of parents. But the basic paradigm of the “right” is a right to control over‐ or non‐interference with oneself, and, of course, children are not their parents, nor are they mere extensions of them. They are individuals in their own right, with their own separate interests, which they are, when young, ill‐positioned to protect and promote. So it is natural to question whether parents have rights over their children, and, if so, what those rights are, and what responsibilities they have to their children (seeAssociative Duties). By having a child one alters the environment for other people: one adds another person to the set of people to whom each other person has an obligation. One also alters the environment by raising a child: one can raise it to be cooperative or conflictual, friendly or hostile, someone who respects or harms others. So what responsibilities to other people accompany parenthood?
Hare, R. M.
Authors: Hare John E.
Published: January 2013

Richard Mervyn Hare (henceforth RMH) lived from 1919 to 2002. He went to Oxford, where he studied classics and philosophy. In 1938, at the time of the Munich Agreement, he decided against pacifism and joined the Officer Training Corps. He was captured by the Japanese at the fall of Singapore, and was sent to work on the Burma–Thailand railway. While a prisoner, he wrote a book,An Essay on Monism, which was never published, but is now available in the library of Balliol College, Oxford. After the war, RMH returned to Oxford to finish his degree, but, as he writes in his autobiography, there had been a revolution in philosophy as a whole in Britain, and nowhere was this more apparent than in moral philosophy. Emotivism (seeemotivism), prefigured before the war by A. J. Ayer'sLanguage, Truth and Logic(1936;seeayer, a. j.), had been developed in a less belligerent form in Charles Stevenson'sEthics and Language(1944;seestevenson, c. l.). In RMH's first published book,The Language of Morals(1952), he proposed a return to a rational ethics in the Kantian mold (seekant, immanuel), acknowledging the recent developments in the philosophy of language associated with J. L. Austin and the “ordinary language” school of philosophy. It is striking that all three of the titles just mentioned contain the word “Language.” John Austin, after the war, had assembled a group of like‐minded philosophers, including RMH, who worked together to produce an account of the use in ordinary language of terms that constantly arise in philosophical discussion. Austin did not suppose that ordinary language was infallible, but he did think that it preserved a great deal of wisdom that had passed the test of centuries of experience, and that traditional philosophical discussions had ignored this resource. In his most influential book,How to Do Things with Words(1965), published after his death, he identified, as one fruit of his method, the diagnosis of what he called the “descriptive” fallacy, which is to hold that all utterances that look like statements are intended to record or impart straightforward information about the facts.
Methods of Practical Ethics
Authors: Arras John D. , Brody Howard
Published: January 2013

Scholars working in the field of practical ethics rightly tend to focus most of their attention on the practical problem at hand, whether it concerns the proper treatment of trees, duties to stockholders, protection of clinical research subjects, or promoting the health of populations. From time to time, however, such scholars become self‐reflective regarding the methods they use to reach their normative conclusions. Practical ethics has witnessed a robust debate regarding the proper method or methods that should be deployed in attempting to reach normative conclusions about cases or public policy. Some conceive this debate as a contest for methodological supremacy. To paraphrase Tolkien, there must be one method to rule them all. Others believe that some degree of methodological reflection is both unavoidable and salutary, but that the search for a single “best method” is a misguided enterprise. The latter group might counter that the interesting question is not “Which method?” but rather “What does self‐consciousness about method contribute to practical ethics?”
Moral Development
Authors: Wren Thomas E.
Published: January 2013

The term “moral development” is sometimes used in a very general way to refer to any sort of formative process leading to a robust sense of morality or a well‐formed conscience. In such cases the process is usually understood as a sequence of increasingly adequate cognitive, affective, or motivational dispositions toward moral or ethical issues. For instance, the development of moral virtue was a familiar theme in classical and medieval philosophy, and modern philosophers such as Adam Smith, Thomas Reid, and Dugald Stewart (
see
Smith, Adam; Reid, Thomas; Stewart, Dugald) wrote extensively in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries about the development of the “moral sentiments.” But “moral development” is now a technical or quasi‐technical term of art, often used in the literature of Anglo‐American philosophy but having its origins in the cognitive developmental psychology of James Mark Baldwin (1906), Jean Piaget (1932), and Lawrence Kohlberg (1984). Although the term is sometimes also used by Freudians and social learning theorists (see Hoffman 1970), within the cognitive developmental paradigm “development” is understood as denoting a movement from one set of relatively well‐integrated cognitive competencies or “stages” to the next. Progress through the stages depends in large part on the social environment, but developmental psychologists usually postulate some universal, in effect innate sequence.
Specifically moral
development is understood as a passage through increasingly adequate stages of moral competence, the basic structures (though not necessarily the contents) of which are universal even though their surface manifestations vary from culture to culture.
Ultrafast magnetization dynamics of nanostructures
Authors: Bigot Jean‐Yves , Vomir Mircea
Published: January 2013

The study and control of magnetic materials using ultrashort laser pulses is of great interest both from a fundamental point of view and for potential applications in the technology of information and communication. In this review the state of the art experimental and theoretical works in the field of Ultrafast Magnetization Dynamics is described, with a particular emphasis on the dynamics of nanostructures. The elementary physical mechanisms involving the spin dynamics when exciting magnetic nanostructures with femtosecond optical pulses are considered. The variety of experimental methods and theoretical approaches used to study the magnetic properties of the materials on a broad range of temporal and spatial scales are examined. The concepts of coherent photon‐spin coupling, spin thermalization, precession dynamics and damping, magneto‐acoustic interactions, are discussed. Some general trends and prospective works are also envisaged.
Clerical Abuse and Laicisation: Rhetoric and Reality in the Catholic Church in England and Wales
Authors: Gilligan Philip
Published: January 2013

Discussion of the declared policies of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, since 2001, with regard to the ongoing status of priests convicted in criminal courts of offences against children is presented. The extent to which these policies have followed recommendations 77 and 78 of A Programme for Action (Nolan, 2001a) and the extent to which they have resulted in the laicisation (removal from the clerical state) of priests are both explored, using national data and with reference to two particular cases from the Diocese of Salford. The potentially adverse impact on victims and survivors of any mismatch between the rhetoric of policy and the reality of practice by the Church is emphasised. Data presented demonstrate that, between November 2001 and September 2010, a majority (64%) of relevantly convicted and sentenced priests had not been laicised as would be expected. Suggestion is made that the Church is inhibited in carrying out its declared policies because it is attempting to serve legitimacy communities beyond victims and survivors of clerical abuse. Full commitment to the paramountcy principle by the Church and genuinely independent external scrutiny of its relevant decision‐making processes are recommended. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

‘Discussion of the declared policies of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, since 2001’

‘Suggestion is made that the Church is inhibited in carrying out its declared policies’

Key Practitioner Messages

Public declarations from the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales regarding responses to priests convicted of offences against children cannot be relied on to indicate action taken in particular cases.

The mismatch between policy rhetoric and the reality of practice has potentially adverse impacts on victims and survivors.

The Church appears inhibited in carrying out declared policies because it attempts to serve legitimacy communities beyond victims and survivors of clerical abuse.

‘Mismatch between policy rhetoric and the reality of practice has potentially adverse impacts on victims and survivors’
Survival after lumpectomy and mastectomy for early stage invasive breast cancer
Authors: Hwang E. Shelley , Lichtensztajn Daphne Y. , Gomez Scarlett Lin , Fowble Barbara , Clarke Christina A.
Published: January 2013

BACKGROUND:

Randomized clinical trials (RCT) have demonstrated equivalent survival for breast‐conserving therapy with radiation (BCT) and mastectomy for early‐stage breast cancer. A large, population‐based series of women who underwent BCT or mastectomy was studied to observe whether outcomes of RCT were achieved in the general population, and whether survival differed by surgery type when stratified by age and hormone receptor (HR) status.

METHODS:

Information was obtained regarding all women diagnosed in the state of California with stage I or II breast cancer between 1990 and 2004, who were treated with either BCT or mastectomy and followed for vital status through December 2009. Cox proportional hazards modeling was used to compare overall survival (OS) and disease‐specific survival (DSS) between BCT and mastectomy groups. Analyses were stratified by age group (< 50 years and ≥ 50 years) and tumor HR status.

RESULTS:

A total of 112,154 women fulfilled eligibility criteria. Women undergoing BCT had improved OS and DSS compared with women with mastectomy (adjusted hazard ratio for OS entire cohort = 0.81, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 0.80‐0.83). The DSS benefit with BCT compared with mastectomy was greater among women age ≥ 50 with HR‐positive disease (hazard ratio = 0.86, 95% CI = 0.82‐0.91) than among women age < 50 with HR‐negative disease (hazard ratio = 0.88, 95% CI = 0.79‐0.98); however, this trend was seen among all subgroups analyzed.

CONCLUSIONS:

Among patients with early stage breast cancer, BCT was associated with improved DSS. These data provide confidence that BCT remains an effective alternative to mastectomy for early stage disease regardless of age or HR status. Cancer 2013. © 2012 American Cancer Society.
Color‐Tunable Luminescent Films Based on the Hybrid Assemblies of [EuW10O36]9–, Bis(N‐methylacridinium) Nitrate, and Layered Double Hydroxide
Authors: Han Zhenzhen , Guo Ying , Tsunashima Ryo , Song Yu‐Fei
Published: January 2013

Ordered luminescent ultrathin films (UTFs) have been fabricated by means of layer‐by‐layer assembling of Na9[EuW10O36]·32H2O (abbreviated as EuW10), the photoactive organic molecule of bis(N‐methylacridinium) nitrate (denoted BNMA), and exfoliated Mg2Al‐LDH (layered double hydroxide). The assembly process has been monitored by UV/Vis absorption and fluorescence spectroscopy to obtain a stepwise and regular growth of the UTFs upon increasing the deposited cycles. The alternative intercalation of EuW10 and BNMA into LDHs results in the formation of well‐ordered UTFs with tunable color. Each LDH monolayer with rigid structure provides a confined and protective microenvironment for BNMA and EuW10, and the guest molecules exhibit orientation effect.
Local and Electronic Structure of Americium‐Bearing PuO2
Authors: Prieur Damien , Carvajal‐Nunez Ursula , Vitova Tonya , Somers Joseph
Published: January 2013

X‐ray diffraction and X‐ray absorption spectroscopy have shown that a material composed of two (Pu,Am)O2–x substoichiometric fluorite‐type structures is obtained by sintering in moisturized Ar/H2. The Pu oxidation state is strictly +IV, whereas Am exhibits a +III/+IV mixed valence. Thus, the Am–O system and particularly the Am oxidation state play a major role in the sintering behavior of the Pu–Am–O system. The heating of this compound in air leads to the formation of a fluorite Pu0.80Am0.20O1.98 solid solution. The transition from a one‐phase to a two‐phase structure takes place at a temperature lower than 800 °C. The results were compared with previous studies on Am‐bearing UO2 and ThO2, which have evidenced different behaviors.
RB1 in cancer: Different mechanisms of RB1 inactivation and alterations of pRb pathway in tumorigenesis
Authors: Di Fiore Riccardo , D'Anneo Antonella , Tesoriere Giovanni , Vento Renza
Published: January 2013

Loss of RB1 gene is considered either a causal or an accelerating event in retinoblastoma. A variety of mechanisms inactivates RB1 gene, including intragenic mutations, loss of expression by methylation and chromosomal deletions, with effects which are species–and cell type‐specific. RB1 deletion can even lead to aneuploidy thus greatly increasing cancer risk. The RB1gene is part of a larger gene family that includes RBL1 and RBL2, each of the three encoding structurally related proteins indicated as pRb, p107, and p130, respectively. The great interest in these genes and proteins springs from their ability to slow down neoplastic growth. pRb can associate with various proteins by which it can regulate a great number of cellular activities. In particular, its association with the E2F transcription factor family allows the control of the main pRb functions, while the loss of these interactions greatly enhances cancer development. As RB1 gene, also pRb can be functionally inactivated through disparate mechanisms which are often tissue specific and dependent on the scenario of the involved tumor suppressors and oncogenes. The critical role of the context is complicated by the different functions played by the RB proteins and the E2F family members. In this review, we want to emphasize the importance of the mechanisms of RB1/pRb inactivation in inducing cancer cell development. The review is divided in three chapters describing in succession the mechanisms of RB1 inactivation in cancer cells, the alterations of pRb pathway in tumorigenesis and the RB protein and E2F family in cancer. J. Cell. Physiol. 228: 1676–1687, 2013. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Nocturia and overnight polysomnography in Parkinson disease
Authors: Vaughan Camille P. , Juncos Jorge L. , Trotti Lynn Marie , Johnson Theodore M. , Bliwise Donald L.
Published: January 2013

Aim

Characterize clinical factors related to nocturia and sleep disruption in Parkinson disease (PD) using polysomnography (PSG).

Methods

Sixty‐three PD patients were recruited regardless of sleep or voiding complaints from a university‐based movement disorders clinic for a 48 hr inpatient PSG protocol. Nocturia frequency and bother related to urinary symptoms were assessed using the International Prostate Symptom Score (IPSS) and were corroborated by measurements of PSG‐defined sleep made immediately preceding and subsequent to each in‐lab voiding episode. PSG measures included whole‐night total sleep time (TST), sleep efficiency (SE), apnea/hypopnea index (AHI), and time to PSG‐defined sleep following nocturia episodes. Differences between groups were assessed using Mantel–Haenszel chi‐square, t‐tests, or Wilcoxon signed rank tests. Linear regression was used to assess factors associated with reported nocturia frequency.

Results

Sixty patients completed the IPSS. Thirty‐seven (61%) reported at least two nocturia episodes nightly; those individuals demonstrated lower PSG‐defined SE (P = 0.01) and TST (P = 0.02) than patients with 0–1 episodes. Participants reporting 2–3 episodes of nocturia with high bother on the IPSS (n = 12) demonstrated lower whole‐night TST (280.5 ± 116.1 min vs. 372.5 ± 58.7 min, P = 0.03) and worse SE (59.2 ± 22.7% vs. 75.9 ± 11.2%, P = 0.04) when compared to participants with 2–3 episodes of nocturia with low bother (n = 13).

Conclusions

These results verify objectively that PD patients with nocturia have poor sleep. Furthermore, among individuals with comparable levels of reported nocturia, higher bother is associated with poorer sleep as defined on PSG. Neurourol. Urodynam. Published 2013. This article is a U.S. Government work and is in the public domain in the USA. Neurourol. Urodynam. 32:1080–1085, 2013.