_Environmental Ethics_ provides an accessible, lively, and up-to-date introduction to the central issues and controversies in environmental ethics. Requiring no previous knowledge of philosophy or ethical theory, the book will be of interest to students, environmental scientists, environmental policy makers, and anyone curious to know what philosophers are saying today about the urgent environmental challenges we face. _ The book is divided into two parts. _Part One deals with theoretical issues in environmental philosophy, examining a variety of ethical and environmental (...) theories that provide diverse and thought-provoking perspectives on critical ecological issues. Part Two turns to applied environmental ethics, addressing current debates on topics such as climate change, biodiversity loss, wilderness preservation, responsibilities to future generations, population growth, overconsumption, food ethics, and ecological activism. _ Features include: _ Clear explanations of key concepts and theories that lie at the heart of current debates in environmental ethics. A mix of theory of practice that permits readers to apply diverse theoretical perspectives to key environmental debates. A wealth of pedagogical aids, including chapter summaries, discussion questions, suggested readings, and a glossary of important terms. (shrink)

in 2017, a study of the brains of former football players returned some of the most damning evidence to date of the inherent dangers of the game. Of 111 former NFL players' brains examined post-mortem, 110 were found to have the damage associated with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a brain disease causing serious emotional and behavioral problems—and, often, premature death. That football is physically risky has been known virtually since its advent; what the newest studies suggest is that its dangers are (...) much more extensive than previously imagined, and much harder to avoid than had been hoped.Such findings add urgency to the ethical problems that football raises: How can one justify... (shrink)

This paper addresses two issues: the controversy over pragmatism in environmental philosophy, and the habitual exclusion of William James's work from serious examination. Addressing critiques of pragmatic naturalism from Max Horkheimer, Eugene Hargrove and Holmes Rolston, I argue that their criticisms misfire, primarily due to skewed perception derived from mis-interpretative projections of views to which pragmatism is not committed. I conclude that the critics' major concerns are largely groundless, but that greater emphasis on pragmatism's experiential aspect would clarify this.

Although William James wrote no philosophical treatise on aesthetics, he can be seen as an important source for pragmatist aesthetics. This paper reconstructs James's aesthetic views from his diverse writings that demonstrate a keen regard for the arts and for the central, pervasive importance of the aesthetic dimension of experience, a dimension he saw as closely linked to the rational and practical. Special attention is given to his path-blazing The Principles of Psychology which precedes James's explicit pragmatist stage but contains (...) all the most essential themes of pragmatist aesthetics that Dewey would later formulate with much greater detail and argumentation in Art as Experience . This paper elucidates James's treatment of these themes, argues for his influence on Dewey's aesthetics, and suggests how the Jamesian approach exemplifies a promising convergence of aesthetics with philosophy of mind. (shrink)

it seems like it would be easy to be a pragmatist and difficult to be a pacifist. In the commonsense understanding of "pragmatism," the term is nearly synonymous with "compromise," and compromise is usually thought to involve denying one's ideals in order to get things done. This could be getting things done for what is believed to be the common good, and both dictators and utilitarians can be called pragmatists. If it is said that a pragmatist sacrifices her ideals for (...) the sake of the greater good, this is a little misleading, since such sacrifice is merely an expression of one's natural disposition, and thus hardly tragic.On the other hand, "pacifism" is often understood to be a type of idealism, as the term is... (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe profession of arms is distinct from other professions for many reasons. One reason which is not so obvious is that, unlike members of other professions, soldiers may go their entire careers preparing for a day that never arrives. All things considered, we should think this to be a very good thing. For soldiers, however, this can feel somewhat odd, since there is a natural desire to want to feel useful and to see one’s role and purpose find realization. Accordingly, (...) the common soldier is forced to adopt a rather paradoxical mindset, one of longing for peace, and therefore for uselessness, while at the same time longing to be useful, which would entail that there be a war. This latter desire to be useful and to vindicate one’s identity as a soldier can sometimes take on an unhealthy life of its own. The pull of wanting too strongly to live up to a warrior identity, I argue, can sometimes skew a soldier’s ability to assess risk rationally. This article will therefore investigate how a soldier’s c... (shrink)

The article questions concepts of ‘democratic peace’ that presuppose an intrinsic relation between pacifism and democracy. This view lacks from both, empirical evidence and historical insight. Instead, pacifism as political and personal virtue can be better linked to the Deweyan idea of democracy as the basic way of life, that is, mutual cooperation and self-realisation. But not only pacifism but also warfare and aggressive conduct often are rooted and result in an ethos of solidarity and cooperation. Therefore, the task for (...) any realistic concept of democratic pacifism is at least two-fold: finding ‘moral equivalents’ to war and cultivating an ethos of self-criticism and self-restraint as already the Old Testament’s prophets have proclaimed. (shrink)

: The lies about the reasons for the U.S. war against Iraq provoked no mass public outcry in the United States against the war. What is the process of justification for this war, a process that seems to need no reasons? Mann argues that the process of justification is not a process of rational deliberation but one of aesthetic self-constitution, of rebuilding a masculine national identity. Included is a feminist reading of the National Defense University document Shock and Awe.

The lies about the reasons for the U.S. war against Iraq provoked no mass public outcry in the United States against the war. What is the process of justification for this war, a process that seems to need no reasons? Mann argues that the process of justification is not a process of rational deliberation but one of aesthetic self-constitution, of rebuilding a masculine national identity. Included is a feminist reading of the National Defense University document Shock and Awe.

The lies about the reasons for the U.S. war against Iraq provoked no mass public outcry in the United States against the war. What is the process of justification for this war, a process that seems to need no reasons? Mann argues that the process of justification is not a process of rational deliberation but one of aesthetic self-constitution, of rebuilding a masculine national identity. Included is a feminist reading of the National Defense University document Shock and Awe.

Colin Koopman’s Pragmatism as Transition offers an argumentative retelling of the history of American pragmatism in terms of the tradition’s preoccupation with time. Taking time seriously offers a venue for reorienting pragmatism today as a practice of cultural critique. This article examines the political implications third wave pragmatism’s conceptualization of time, practice, and critique. I argue that Koopman’s book opens up possible lines of inquiry into historical practices of critique from William James to James Baldwin that, when followed through to (...) their conclusion, trouble some of the book’s political conclusions. Taking time and practice seriously, as transitionalism invites pragmatists to do, demands pluralizing critique in a way that puts pressure on familiar pragmatist convictions concerning liberalism, progress, and American exceptionalism. (shrink)

Abstract: Pragmatism involves simultaneous commitments to modes of inquiry that are philosophical and historical. This article begins by demonstrating this point as it is evidenced in the historicist pragmatisms of William James and John Dewey. Having shown that pragmatism focuses philosophical attention on concrete historical processes, the article turns to a discussion of the specific historiographical commitments consistent with this focus. This focus here is on a pragmatist version of historical inquiry in terms of the central historiographical categories of the (...) object of historical inquiry and mode of historical periodization. After describing the basic historiographical consequences of pragmatism's historicism, the article moves to a discussion of the philosophical results of this historicism. The focus here is on the role that historical inquiry can play in the general philosophical perspective of pragmatism as well as on some recent texts that exemplify the dual pragmatist commitment to philosophy and history. (shrink)

School anti-violence programs are united in their radical condemnation of aggression, generally equated with violence. The programs advocate its elimination by priming children's emotional and cognitive controls. What goes unrecognized is the embeddedness of aggression in human beings, as well as its positive psychological and moral functions. In attempting to eradicate aggression, schools increase the risk of student disaffection while stifling the goods associated with it: status, power, dominance, agency, mastery, pride, social-affiliation, social-approval, loyalty, self-respect, and self-confidence. It is argued (...) that the distribution of power and authority to students as plausible substitutes for aggression, would enable them to express aggression in a legitimate manner and simultaneously encourage their attachment to school. A vibrant anti-violence program that attracts children will find a way for caring, amiability, sympathy, and kindness to live in tandem with competition, power, assertiveness, and anger tamed by institutional constraints. (shrink)

Given the increase in human rights abuses and suffering in the world, psychologists bear an ethical responsibility to become more vocal and active on issues of social justice. Western psychology has failed to realize its full transformative potential, largely due to its preoccupation with the individual level of intervention, historical tendency to respond reactively to war and violence, and various cultural biases and ethnocentrism that exist within the field. Instead, psychology must take a more proactive, systems-oriented approach to addressing human (...) rights issues. Due to the lack of guidelines in engaging in professional activism, psychologists must first more critically identify, challenge, and clarify relevant ethical concerns, including issues of culture, competence, and nonmaleficence involved in this type of work. This article explores these complex ethical considerations and suggests ways that psychologists can evolve their roles as researchers, therapists, consultants and educators. The aim is to stimulate dialogue about how psychology can embed ethical activism into its professional identity. (shrink)

The phenomenon of war occupies one of the leading places in socio-philosophical and cultural studies. War also has an ambiguous position in human life. On the historical map we see the ongoing waves of armed conflicts, which inevitably lead to fatal consequences for countries, peoples and human beings. War mainly appears in the form of horrors and tragedies. However, in philosophical studies, war is considered from different angles. Philosophers often emphasize the ambiguity and multidimensionality of war. In this work, the (...) authors analyze the phenomenon of war, given a certain “attractiveness” and even the “necessity” of this phenomenon for humans. The authors also summarize the available range of answers to the question of where the desire for violence comes from, that is, the so-called “thirst for war”. It is this desire that gives rise to a constant stay of people in a state of war. The results of this study show that war is indeed an important phenomenon, which can also be considered one of the fundamental attributes of human nature. Analyzing various approaches that explain the causes of war the authors note that the source of any armed conflict is precisely the “militancy” in the very essence of homo sapiens. Human beings must constantly fight for their existence. And such a struggle often takes various forms, which can be considered as concrete variants of the same phenomenon. This phenomenon at the theoretical and philosophical level is fixed in the concept of war. Despite the natural sense of horror that the word “war” evokes at the level of everyday consciousness, pain and hope, death and freedom, faith in human and the justice of the universe, as well as a willingness to fight for this justice, are simultaneously hidden under this “ language shell”. All these internally contradictory meanings are united within the framework of the philosophically processed concept of war, and are also embodied in many different “wars” that a person constantly wages due to his / her specific “being structure”. Human, therefore, is a “warring creature,” or, as the authors propose to denote this feature, “homo militaris”. (shrink)

Despite a prevalence of articles exploring links between sport and art in the 1970s and 1980s, philosophers in the new millennium pay relatively little explicit attention to issues related to aesthetics generally. After providing a synopsis of earlier debates over the questions ‘is sport art?’ and ‘are aesthetics implicit to sport?’, a pragmatically informed conception of aesthetic experience will be developed. Aesthetic experience, it will be argued, vitally informs sport ethics, game logic, and participant meaning. Finally, I will argue that (...) embodying pragmatic conceptions of art as its ideal metaphor re-opens space to best realize the deep potential of sport as a meaningful human practice. (shrink)

In this contribution, I examine several key publications on the physiology of emotions from the 1860s to the 1930s. I focus on physiologists who studied the emotions prior to and following William James’s 1884 Mind article, by critically reflecting on the conceptual and practical origins and constituents of the Cannon–Bard thalamic theory of emotions. I offer a historical corrective to several major assumptions in our histories of the scientific study of emotions.

In this article I argue both that an understanding of sport’s general character as competitive play can help us to read Homer more insightfully and that this reading can boomerang back to us to further illuminate the sport as competitive play thesis. My overall method is that of (Rawlsian) reflective equilibrium. The three sections of Homer that I examine are the Phaiacian games in Book 8 of the ‘Odyssey’, the Patroclos games in Book 23 of the ‘Iliad’, and the Penelope (...) games in Books 21–22 of the ‘Odyssey’. (shrink)

Almost all of the themes contained in E.O.Wilson's sociobiological writing on war and human aggression were prefigured in Anglo-American bio-social discourse, c. 1880–1919. Instinct theory – stemming from animal psychology and the genetics revolution – encouraged the belief that pugnacity had been programmed into the ancient part of the human brain as a result of evolutionary pressures dating from prehistory. War was seen to be instinct-driven, and genocidal fighting postulated as a eugenic force in early human evolution. War was explained (...) in distinctly modern sociobiological terms as adaptive behaviour springing from territorial urges, crowding, competition for resources and reproductive advantage, ethnocentrism and pseudo-speciation. (shrink)

The author considers James’ (1910) essay The Moral Equivalent of War and applies some of its ideas to another pressing problem of our times, which for short is called greed, but can be described more precisely as the working out of the possessive market society under the conditions of neoliberalism and great technological power. James considered that pacifists had the best arguments, but failed to persuade mainstream society. The same can be said today of the critics of neoliberalism. There is (...) need for radical change away from an unjust and dysfunctional economic system, but mainstream society is unwilling to try new ideas. The present author adapts James’ idea and considers benign and malign forms of greed. What we all desire, more than huge monetary assets, is self-respect and social respect. There are already many rewards that are not primarily monetary. In a radically different culture, which rejected the principles of unlimited accumulation and almost unlimited convertibility, benign rewards would motivate constructive activity. The moral equivalents of greed briefly discussed here are—Honours and prizes for merit (administered justly); Celebrity (important in society); Luck (gambling, with certain constraints, could be benign); Power (rewarding in itself, so large monetary gain need not go with it); Services (people making important contributions to society could concentrate their commitment); Temporary custody of public treasures (a privilege prized by some). The essay ends by linking James’ idea, the Faustian bargain myth, and the necessity of hope. (shrink)

Societies need markets, so just as trustworthy professionals are needed in fields such as healthcare, law and education, modern societies need trustworthy market managers, including corporate officers and directors. But in its screening of candidates, U.S. corporate business has lagged behind fields such as medicine and law, which in the nineteenth century addressed their need for screening by upgrading professional education and establishing licensing of individual practitioners. Corporate business, by contrast, has been too tolerant of problematic executives, particularly executives of (...) a type shown by recent research in psychology to exhibit a set of personality traits including below average concern about bad effects of their actions on other people. Over-representation of this problematic type has cost corporate business the trust and respect it could earn by resting fully on a time-honored alternative foundation already espoused by many trustworthy teachers and practitioners of business. Society needs these trustworthy people of business to work together to establish screening of candidates for high level corporate positions by upgrading MBA education and establishing licensing for these positions. For reasons again based on current findings in psychology, screening candidates for the MBA could be significantly strengthened by requiring historical studies, particularly history of the corporate legal structure in the U.S. and history of the MBA itself. Upgrading the MBA and establishing correlated licensing could open the way toward corrections in the legal form of the corporation to bring it into line with hospitals, law courts and universities as places where responsible professionals pursue their callings on behalf of society. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 25, Issue 2, pp 256 - 278 Rabbi Abraham Isaac Ha-Cohen Kook’s essay “The War” is a text of immense importance with respect to the development of ideological militaristic writing in religious Zionism. The essay was first published in the book _Orot me-Ofel_, edited by R. Kook’s son, Rabbi Zvi Yehudah Kook. In this study, I wish to distinguish the views presented in the notebooks and collected writings of R. Kook from his position as set forth in (...) the edited essay, which bears the stamp of the editor’s interpretation. Nine of the essay’s ten passages were written during World War I, and only the first passage, which bears the theological-militant stamp, does not appear in the collections of manuscripts from which the essay was constructed. My aim is to trace how R. Zvi Yehudah edited the essay and to explore the important influence of this passage. (shrink)

The paper has three parts. The first is a discussion of the values as goals and means. This is a known Moorean distinction between intrinsic and instrumental values, with one other Moorean item - the doctrine of value wholes. According to this doctrine the value wholes are not simply a summation of their parts, which implies a possibility that two evils might be better than one (e. g. crime + punishment, two evils, are better than either one of them taken (...) separately). In this first part I will discuss peace as an end value, and war as a means value. The second part dicsusses briefly the issue of sincerity. The third, last and for me the most important part of the paper explores the issue of moral integrity in pacifism: could a pacifist preserve the integrity of the attacker, or, for that matter her own integrity, or must she destroy anyone’s integrity and dehumanize the attacker and also herself? (shrink)

This study explores the entry of new and small parties into the party system in Albania, focusing on the period from 1990 to 2017. It is a comprehensive exploration of the Albanian political landscape from 1991 to 2017, focusing on the role of electoral systems and how they influence party politics. The study underscores the necessity for strong, stable political parties in a thriving democracy and investigates how the electoral system either facilitates or hinders the representation of small and new (...) parties. It investigates the influence of institutional factors, as well as the challenges and strategies related to political survival that these parties face. The analysis reveals how the two-round majority system typically fosters a two-party system, whereas a proportional system can lead to a more fragmented party landscape, often necessitating coalitions for effective governance. The impact of these dynamics was observed during several key periods in Albanian political history, noting the consequences of changes in the electoral system on the party system. The paper also highlights how major parties often manipulate the electoral system, through practices such as gerrymandering, to their own advantage, leading to potential distortions in representation. Furthermore, it presents the challenges for new and small parties, emphasizing the importance of financial support and media coverage for their survival and competitive performance. (shrink)

Chapter. 1. Philosophical. Perspectives. on. Democracy. in. the. Twenty-First. Century: Introduction. Ann E. Cudd and Sally J. Scholz Abstract Recent global movements, including the Arab Spring, the Occupy Movement, as well as polarizing ...