Is Nanotechnology Giving Rise to New Ethical Problems?

In this paper I focus on the question of whether nanotechnology is giving rise to new ethical problems rather than merely to new instances of old ethical problems. Firstly, I demonstrate how important it is to make a general distinction between new ethical problems and new instances of old problems. Secondly, I propose one possible way of interpreting the distinction and offer a definition of a “new ethical problem”. Thirdly, I examine whether there is good reason to claim that nanotechnology is giving or will give rise to new ethical problems. My conclusion is that there are no new ethical problems in nanotechnology but merely new occurrences of certain well-known types of ethical problems. Fourthly, I consider three arguments by van de Poel (NanoEthics 2:25–28, 2008) which contradict my conclusion. I argue that my negative conclusion is consistent with the claim that certain ethical issues arising in nanotechnology may require new normative standards or new analytical tools. I conclude that it is likely that a number of ethical issues arising in nanotechnology will have a considerable impact on our ethical theories and values – and that ethical reflection on nanotechnology will be one of the mother lodes of future ethical research – in spite of the fact that no ethical problem in nanoethics will actually be “new”.     

Revisiting the Reformation—Shakespeare and Fletcher's King Henry VIII

Abstract

This paper looks afresh at William Shakespeare's and John Fletcher's Henry VIII. The piece, while obsessed with truth, makes no attempt to define the nature of that truth—and truth is closely related to the issue of the Reformation. Henry VIII's role is questioned. The terms ‘Lutheran’ and ‘heretic’ appear as by-words to describe the threat of up-and-coming new influences around the king. The opposition of the Catholic Wolsey and the Protestant Cranmer in the play is all-important. Wolsey emerges as somewhat reformed from his disgrace. Cranmer, like Wolsey, is demonized; however his prophecy at the end of the play is highly significant. Prophecy in Tudor England tended to be subversive and part of the implications of Cranmer's prophecy are that James should model himself on Elizabeth. However, Cranmer's prophecy also announces that Elizabeth, ever a virgin, will manage to engender her successor, King James. As the play is about to close, Cranmer's prophecy about the reign of Elizabeth I and that of James I cannot dispel the impression that Henry VIII's reformist intentions remain inconclusive. Shakespeare, it seems, never veered in his view that religious reformations are not ‘once and for all events'. Something has happened that has altered the world, but the full meaning of these events is denied.     

Alterity in Simone de Beauvoir and Emmanuel Levinas: From Ambiguity to Ambivalence

This article is meant to stage an encounter, a kind of rendezvous, between Emmanuel Levinas and Simone de Beauvoir regarding how alterity seems to enable an ethical relation for Levinas while closing one for Beauvoir. I will argue that Beauvoir's reading of Levinas on “the other” is not a charitable one, and the ethical ambivalence in Levinas's notion of alterity can motivate the praxis Beauvoir seeks for undoing social forms of oppression. I will start with Beauvoir's interpretation of alterity as “feminine otherness” in Levinas's ethics that, for her, originates in the violent perspective of male privilege. Then I will move to Levinas's response to this critique in a set of interviews with Philip Nemo, and to consideration of how a more charitable reading of alterity, understood as a sort of ambivalence in the structure of subjectivity, creates a close proximity between Levinas's and Beauvoir's ethics of action. I contend that both Beauvoir and Levinas respectively developed their ethics of action, either of ambiguity or of ambivalent alterity, in order to free thought from the absolute seriousness with which normative standards are held.     

Indiscriminable shades and demonstrative concepts

Virtue ethicists argue that modern ethical theories aim to give direct guidance about particular situations at the cost of offering artificial or narrow accounts of ethics. In contrast, virtue ethical theories guide action indirectly by helping one understand the virtues—but the theory will not provide answers as to what to do in particular instances. Recently, this had led many to think that virtue ethical theories are self-effacing the way some claim consequentialist and deontological theories are. In this paper I defend virtue ethics against the charge of self-effacement. I distinguish between modestly self-effacing theories, immodestly self-effacing theories and theories that recommend indirect guidance. Though all self-effacing theories are indirect, not all indirect theories are self-effacing. I argue that virtue ethics is not self-effacing, but rather indirectly action-guiding. The response I articulate draws on the distinctive virtue ethical mode of action-guidance: namely, that thinking hard about virtue and what kind of person one aims to be offers the kind of guidance we want (or should want) as we face practical moral problems.     

Was Schopenhauer a Kantian Ethicist?

ABSTRACT

Commentators have generally seen the compassionate person as a second-rate character vis-à-vis the ascetic ‘saint’ who denies the will-to-life and resigns from willing altogether in Schopenhauer's ethical thought. In this paper I offer another way to interpret Schopenhauer’s ethics of compassion, which is textually grounded and genuinely Schopenhauerian, but which draws out similarities to Kant’s ethics that, I shall argue, have not been hitherto appreciated. Once these Kantian similarities are appreciated one sees that the compassionate person is no longer a runner up ethically and epistemically to the saint, rather, the compassionate person and the saint are at odds with each other, and really represent – unbeknownst to Schopenhauer himself–two distinct and incompatible ethical ideals.

To motivate this interpretation, I will first delineate the traditional interpretation of what Schopenhauer means by the compassionate person’s intuitive insight into the way the world really is. Second, I will offer a novel, and to my mind, textually preferable reading of what this intuitive insight consists in. Finally, I’ll suggest in light of recent work in metaethics by Colin Marshall – notably in his 2018 book titled Compassionate Moral Realism–that my interpretation of Schopenhauer’s ethics offers a creditable moral realist option for the contemporary landscape.     

Spinoza’s Critique of Humility in the Ethics

In the Ethics Spinoza denies that humility is a virtue on the grounds that it arises from a reflection on our lack of power, rather than a rational understanding of our power (Part IV, Proposition 53, Demonstration). He suggests that humility, to the extent that it involves a consideration of our weakness, indicates a lack of self‐understanding. However, in a brief remark in the same demonstration he also allows that conceiving our lack of power can be conducive to self‐understanding and an increase in power, on the condition that we “conceive [it] because [we] understand [intelligit ] something more powerful than [ourselves].” Unfortunately, Spinoza does not flesh out this remark, nor does he specify the name of the affect that arises from thus conceiving our weakness. Commentators have not been much help in this regard either. What does it mean, in the Spinozistic framework, to conceive our weakness because we understand something more powerful than ourselves? And what exactly is the difference between this instance of conceiving our lack of power and the one that is involved in humility? This paper will examine the nature of this difference by analyzing its metaphysical and epistemological underpinnings, as well as its ethical implications within Spinoza’s Ethics . In doing so, it will highlight the ethical importance and epistemological conditions of recognizing our weakness in the Spinozistic universe. Abraham Wolf takes Spinoza’s denial of humility’s virtue in the Ethics to imply that “the rational man should think of what he can do, not of what he cannot do.” While I agree with Wolf’s remark, my reading in this paper will show that as the rational person thinks of her power and what she can do, she never loses sight of her ineliminable weakness as a finite mode.     

Freedom, Unfreedom and Skinner's Hobbes

In an array of writings stretching over the better part of two decades, Quentin Skinner has repeatedly challenged the modern conception of negative liberty developed by Isaiah Berlin and many other theorists. He has sought to draw attention to some once vibrant but now largely peripheral traditions of thought—especially the civic-republican or neo-Roman tradition—in order to highlight what he sees as the limitedness and inadequacies of the currently dominant ways of thinking about freedom. The present essay will endeavor to defend one important aspect of the modern understanding of negative liberty against Skinner's strictures, and will challenge Skinner's reading of Thomas Hobbes.     

Wittgenstein,Ethics and Basic Moral Certainty

Alice Crary claims that “the standard view of the bearing of Wittgenstein's philosophy on ethics” is dominated by “inviolability interpretations”, which often underlie conservative readings of Wittgenstein. Crary says that such interpretations are “especially marked in connection with On Certainty”, where Wittgenstein is represented as holding that “our linguistic practices are immune to rational criticism, or inviolable”. Crary's own conception of the bearing of Wittgenstein's philosophy on ethics, which I call the “intrinsically‐ethical reading”, derives from the influential New Wittgenstein school of exegesis, and is also espoused by James Edwards, Cora Diamond, and Stephen Mulhall. To my eyes, intrinsically‐ethical readings present a peculiar picture of ethics, which I endeavour to expose in Part I of the paper. In Part II I present a reading of On Certainty that Crary would call an “inviolability interpretation”, defend it against New Wittgensteinian critiques, and show that this kind of reading has nothing to do with ethical or political conservatism. I go on to show how Wittgenstein's observations on the manner in which we can neither question nor affirm certain states of affairs that are fundamental to our epistemic practices can be fruitfully extended to ethics. Doing so sheds light on the phenomenon that I call “basic moral certainty”, which constitutes the foundation of our ethical practices, and the scaffolding or framework of moral perception, inquiry, and judgement. The nature and significance of basic moral certainty will be illustrated through consideration of the strangeness of philosophers' attempts at explaining the wrongness of killing.     

The potential of paying attention: Tripping and the ethics of affective attentiveness

There is enormous power and ethical potential in the seemingly simple act of paying attention and choosing what one pays attention to. Taking this power seriously, I explore the ethical value attunement, or the state of paying attention, holds in relation to affect and its circulation. Because the affective texture of the everyday is not always directly accessible to experience, the ethical potential of becoming attuned to this texture can be more effectively examined through a conceptual framework of a radically altered, affectively-mediated state of consciousness: the trip. Conceptualizing tripping allegorically, as meaning something other and more than what is literally said, I use this mode of experience as a framework to think through the question of what ethical potential lies in practices of affective attentiveness. Exploring the connections between affect, attention, and tripping, I bring these concepts together in a close reading of excerpts from David Foster Wallace's The Pale King and This is Water. Engaging with the work of a writer who has always seen attention as an ethical imperative, I show that an indefinite, shifting understanding of affect can have concrete ethical applications in day to day life.     

Nietzsche on Art and Freedom

There are passages in Nietzsche that can be read as contributions to the free will/determinism debate. When read in that way, they reveal a fairly amateurish metaphysician with little of real substance or novelty to contribute; and if these readings were apt or perspicuous, it seems to me, they would show that Nietzsche's thoughts about freedom were barely worth pausing over. They would simply confirm the impression—amply bolstered from other quarters—that Nietzsche was not at his best when addressing the staple questions of philosophy. But these readings sell Nietzsche short. He had next to no systematic interest in metaphysics, and his concern with the question of freedom was not motivated by metaphysical considerations. Rather—and as with all of Nietzsche's concerns—his motivations were ethical. He was interested, not in the relation of the human will to the causal order of nature, but in the relation between freedom and the good life, between the will and exemplary human living. Read from this perspective, Nietzsche's remarks about freedom actually add up to something. And what they add up to is one aspect of his attempt to understand life after the model of art. Beauty, for Kant, was an image of the moral. ¹ For Nietzsche, by contrast—and the contrast can be hard to spell out—art was an image of the ethical. ² My hope here is to begin to explain why Nietzsche might have thought that the issue of freedom was relevant to that. In sections 1–3, I attempt to show why Nietzsche is not best read as a participant in the standard free will/determinism debate; in sections 4–6, I try to spell out the ethical conception of freedom that he develops instead.     

‘In the Court of a Great King’: Some Remarks on Leo Strauss’ <Emphasis Type="Italic">Introduction to the Guide of the Perplexed</Emphasis>

In the second half of this essay (begun in Sophia 50:141–158), we continue our reading of Leo Strauss’ important later essay on Maimonides, ‘How to Begin to Study the Guide of the Perplexed’. Our method is to try, as best as we are able, to read this essay as Strauss directs us to read esoteric texts in Persecution and the Art of Writing. As a means of testing and attempting to confirm our reading of this difficult later essay on Maimonides, we will close by situating our reading of ‘How to Begin to Study’ and Strauss’ partly concealed positions there on philosophy, prophecy and the Torah alongside the claims of his earlier, much less esoteric, but also rarely studied 1930s essay: ‘Some Remarks on the Political Science of Maimonides and Farabi’. Because of the widely recognised foundational importance of Maimonides in understanding Leo Strauss’ own lasting positions, this work aims at making a contribution to the continuing, and presently highly contentious, task of trying to understand Strauss’ thoughts on Athens and Jerusalem, reason and revelation, the city and man.     

On Quine’s Translation Argument

Quine's translation argumnent figures centrally in his views on logic. The goal of this paper is to get clear on that argument. It can be interpreted as an argument to the effect that one should never translate somebody’s speech as going against a law of the translator’s logic. Key to this reading of the translation argument is the premise that one should never translate somebody's speech such that their speech is unintelligible. Ultimately, it is my aim to reject this reading. I argue that only a weaker conclusion—one that says “not most of the time” instead of the stronger “never”—should be attributed to Quine. Accordingly, I propose and defend a weaker version of the first premise that better coheres with the weaker conclusion of the translation argument. Instead of the claim that one should never translate somebody’s speech such that their speech is unintelligible I argue that we should only ascribe to Quine the claim that one should not most of the time translate somebody’s speech in a way that makes it unintelligible. I go on to  sum up the results of my discussion and respond to a criticism of my reading.

     

Isaiah Shembe, Zulu Religious Leader

Do you want to understand yourself?Look how others behave;Do you want to understand others?Look in your own heart.Willst du dich selber erkennen,so sieh, wie die andern es treiben;Willst du die andern verstehn,blick in dein eigenes Herz.(Schiller)¹This paper deals with some problems encountered by scholars who attempt to study Primal Religions.²It focuses on an examination of the major scholarly literature and some traditions surrounding perceptions of the Zulu religious leader Isaiah Shembe.³It has nine sections: The Problem of Prejudice, Isaiah Shembe: Zulu Prophet or Black Christ?, The Judgement of Shembe's Successors, Literary Norms and Living Traditions, Studying Living Religions, The Role of Primal Experiences, The Importance of Mythology, Getting One's Hands Dirty, and Who was Isaiah Shembe?     

‘In the Court of a Great King’: Some Remarks on Leo Strauss’ Introduction to the <Emphasis Type="BoldItalic">Guide for the Perplexed</Emphasis>

This essay, which will be divided between two SOPHIA editions, proposes to test the consensus in Maimonidean scholarship on the alleged intellectualism of Leo Strauss’ Maimonides by making a close interpretive study of Strauss’ 1963 essay ‘How to Begin to Study the Guide for the Perplexed’. While the importance of this essay, which is Strauss’ last extended piece on the Guide, is established in Maimonidean scholarship, its recognised esotericism has been matched by a dearth of detailed studies of the piece. We aim in this essay to try to rectify this situation, by reading ‘How to Begin to Study’ as Strauss directs us to read esoteric texts in Persecution and the Art of Writing. As one control on our exegetical claims, we will close by situating our reading of ‘How to Begin to Study’ and Strauss’ positions there on philosophy, prophecy and the Torah alongside the claims of his earlier, much less esoteric, but also rarely studied: ‘Some Remarks on the Political Science of Maimonides and Farabi’. Because of the now widely recognised foundational importance of Maimonides in understanding Leo Strauss’ own lasting positions, this work will have wider importance in Strauss scholarship, and hopefully make a contribution to the continuing task of trying to understand Strauss’ important thoughts on Athens and Jerusalem, reason and revelation, the city and man.     

A Sermon

Preached at Blackfriars, Cambridge, on Sunday, 9 February, three days after Kenelm Foster's death, to a congregation that knew him well. The readings for that Sunday were: Isaiah 6:1–8 (the call of Isaiah); 1 Corinthians 15:1–11 (Paul's testimony of Christ's death 'for our sins' and resurrection); and Luke 5:1–11 (the call of the first disciples).     

Configurations of Rape: Some Issues for ConversationConfigurations of Rape in the Hebrew Bible: A Literary Analysis of Three Rape Narratives – By Frank M. Yamada

While I am in much agreement with Frank Yamada's analysis and reading of the Genesis 34, Judges 19, and 2 Samuel 13 as rape narratives, in that all three texts show a ‘family resemblance’, this review essay is an attempt to engage his work in a conversation by discussing the following issues: (1) his use of ‘family resemblance’; (2) common authorship; (3) insider–outsider category; (4) 2 Samuel 11 as a rape narrative; (5) theological and ethical implications of such readings.     

From Ethics to Aesthetics: A Reconsideration of Buddhist Monastic Rules in the Light of Michel Foucault's Work on Ethics

This article considers the recent debate over the nature of Buddhist ethics largely conducted by scholars who have argued in different ways that Buddhist ethics may be assimilated to or may correspond with different forms of western ethical theory.

I argue that the interpretation of Buddhist texts, and in particular the Vinaya, in light of western ethical theory creates misunderstanding. I argue that in each case of a supposed ethical dilemma, Buddhist ethics should be seen as empirical, since the ultimate point of reference for the choices involved in a proposed action lies in the purity and wholesomeness of each individual action.

My approach follows Foucault's argument for scepticism with regard to the notions of a universal nature or of a universal rationality. I argue that it is not instructive to read Buddhist texts against generalized standards. Rather, it is more productive to regard ethics as creating a space for the ethical, not in a normative sense but one arising from personal practice as related to individual circumstances.

At the same time, this article outlines the role of beauty and its role in ethical formation. I suggest that one interpretation of Theravada Buddhism has regarded beauty as a form of sensuous pleasure, which is seen as a danger for someone on the spiritual path. However, an alternative reading of such texts is more sympathetic to the educative role of beauty.     

Framing Ethical Acceptability: A Problem with Nuclear Waste in Canada

Ethical frameworks are often used in professional fields as a means of providing explicit ethical guidance for individuals and institutions when confronted with ethically important decisions. The notion of an ethical framework has received little critical attention, however, and the concept subsequently lends itself easily to misuse and ambiguous application. This is the case with the ??ethical framework?? offered by Canada??s Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO), the crown-corporation which owns and is responsible for the long-term management of Canada??s high-level nuclear fuel waste. It makes a very specific claim, namely that it is managing Canada??s long-lived radioactive nuclear fuel waste in an ethically responsible manner. According to this organization, what it means to behave in an ethically responsible manner is to act and develop policy in accordance with its ethical framework. What, then, is its ethical framework, and can it be satisfied? In this paper I will show that the NWMO??s ethical and social framework is deeply flawed in two respects: (a) it fails to meet the minimum requirements of a code of ethic or ethical framework by offering only questions, and no principles or rules of conduct; and (b) if posed as principles or rules of conduct, some of its questions are unsatisfiable. In particular, I will show that one of its claims, namely that it seek informed consent from individuals exposed to risk of harm from nuclear waste, cannot be satisfied as formulated. The result is that the NWMO??s ethical framework is not, at present, ethically acceptable.     

Business Research, Self-fulfilling Prophecy, and the Inherent Responsibility of Scholars

Business research and teaching institutions play an important role in shaping the way businesses perceive their relations to the broader society and its moral expectations. Hence, as ethical scandals recently arose in the business world, questions related to the civic responsibilities of business scholars and to the role business schools play in society have gained wider interest. In this article, I argue that these ethical shortcomings are at least partly resulting from the mainstream business model with its taken-for granted basic assumptions such as specialization or the value-neutrality of business research. Redefining the roles and civic responsibilities of business scholars for business practice implies therefore a thorough analysis of these assumptions if not their redefinition. The taken-for-grantedness of the mainstream business model is questioned by the transformation of the societal context in which business activities are embedded. Its value-neutrality in turn is challenged by self-fulfilling prophecy effects, which highlight the normative influence of business schools. In order to critically discuss some basic assumptions of mainstream business theory, I propose to draw parallels with the corporate citizenship concept and the stakeholder theory. Their integrated approach of the relation between business practice and the broader society provides interesting insights for the social reembedding of business research and teaching.