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This article addresses the issue of how moral philosophy and social sciences can play a role in defining visions of a better future for humanity. The author analyzes Hilary Putnam’s relevant ideas in this respect, including the possible impact of knowledge obtained through literature in this process. The article emphasizes two aspects of Putnam’s discussion. First, the author focuses on what underlies the current inability of social sciences and practical reasoning to perform their proper visionary functions. Second, the author presents certain potentially interesting consequences of Putnam’s ideas on errors in practical reasoning, which are applicable to a classical debate in this field.
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The article is based on a lecture given by the author as a PP-presentation on the occasion of her election to the academic rank of professor in 2015. The reference to the popular proverb “Friendship is friendship but cheese costs money”, does not evoke the usual opposition of ethics and business, but, quite to the contrary, illustrates business ethics. It is assumed that the statement gives a good idea of: (1) business ethics – i.e., the possibility to apply ethical standards to business; (2) the specificity of this application; (3) the specificity of ethical standards applied to business. The elucidation of these three questions not only clarifies important issues of business ethics but shows that the proverb is relevant to them. This ultimately helps understand (4) the actual place of friendship in business and why, even for friends, cheese costs money. The structure and content of the article follow this logical order. The conclusion refers to some hazards associated with the extrapolation of the understanding of friendship in business to all human relationships.
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The main aim of the article is to argue the existence of a necessary link between the expansion of utilitarianism in the Victorian-Age and the problems we find today in the ethical thinking of modern liberal democratic societies, whose fundamental institutions and structural changes of the public field are still, to a certain degree, under the sway of that influential philosophical doctrine. In pursuing this aim, I make a closer study of the utilitarian philosophy of Henry Sidgwick, insofar as he is the main representative of utilitarianism in the late Victorian Age. Moreover, Sidgwick is the ethical philosopher who succeeded in adapting the system of classical utilitarianism to the dynamically changing world of the late 19th century. He was one of the first modern philosophers whose works established conditions for the emergence of the analytical tradition in ethics. Due to this, we must have a clearer understanding of the specific changes in the body of utilitarian ethics in the late Victorian Аge that brought about the emergence of today’s modern ethical discourse.
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If morality is the answer to “How we are supposed to live” at an individual (personal) level, then the political ideology is to be comprehended as a response to the same question but rather at a general social level. Starting from such a claim, it is assumed that the political ideology, as a form of social conscience is closely related to moral reasoning. For the purpose of perceiving the interrelatedness of moral reasoning and political ideology, hereby several researches are presented which tend to provide an answer to the issue of “existence of interrelatedness of moral reasoning and political ideology”. The summarized perceptions of the presented empirical researches, realized in diverse countries point out to the conclusion that even though the political ideology and moral reasoning are different variables, they are interrelated by means of the variable cognitive development. Such interrelatedness enables stimulation of a development of the humane forms of social organization through stimulation of a moral development.
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Тhe text is focused on the interpretation of Aristotle's conception of the human being as a citizen, as a political creature, and his view on happiness as the goal of humans. The article discusses Machiavelli’s and Weber’s ideas – emblematic for modernity – about the relation between ethics and politics, and the theoretical reflection of this relation in the context of contemporary society as a risk society and in the globalized world. The article aims to distinguish, based on comparative analysis, between Aristotle's understanding of ethics and politics as two sides of the same coin, i.e., as aspects of the life of people in a community. The article discusses the importance of Aristotle’s view of humans as beings that are political because they are ethical and ethical because they are political.
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The aim of the article is to investigate the idea of moral entities (entia moralia), one of the two main original intellectual concepts contributed to natural law philosophy by the famous German thinker of the 17th century Samuel Pufendorf. The article clarifies the relevance of the idea in an interdisciplinary perspective, emphasizing the historical discourse of the philosophy of law. The article gives a precise classification and explanation of the forms of entia moralia, such as person, status, quality and quantity, distinguishing them from entia physica, and demonstrates the significance of this distinction for the philosophy of natural law.Hopefully, the discussion will deepen our knowledge on some essential questions of early modern natural law philosophy and explore the traces Samuel Pufendorf left in this field; it will also increase interest in contemporary research on the moral issues involved in new classical natural law theory.
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The article analyzes the content of the concepts of professional ethics and professional morals in terms of PR as a profession. The author examines different aspects of the activity of PR specialists in relation to the moral assessment of their work. The author attempts to show how professional morality impacts on the practice and functions of professional communicators
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The article attempts to analyze the problems that the phenomenon of virtuality raises for moral philosophy. Virtuality is increasingly asserting itself in all areas of human activity. On the other hand, digitization, especially in the field of communication and media, is another important process requiring ethical analysis. It is important to ascertain whether philosophy has the ambition to establish the human presence in every universalized form of messaging and information. The author’s main idea is that, despite the growth of modern communication technologies, philosophical ethics must preserve the value of the spiritual, the moral sources that form us as persons.
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The text is centered on the issue of the relationship and the boundary between the law and fairness. The dramatic character Shylock is used to express the relation between the law in a subjective and in an objective sense, a relation where the laws and legality do not depend on, and do not require a criterion of fairness. The abandonment of the idea of, and requirement that there must be, a necessary connection between the law and fairness, in a world built on pseudo-values, additionally destroys the notion of a truly real world. Humans are unable to properly evaluate what is actually happening, which brings them one step away from the “banality of evil”.
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The foundations of the ethics of science as a separate and particular research domain were laid in the 1930s by Robert Merton. He was the first to formulate the structure of the ethos of science as well as to present the first conjectures concerning the specific mode of action in science in terms of habits, collective expectations, incentives, encouragements, and the how these are built into the individual scientist as his/her “duty”. Unfortunately, the first elements of this foundation remained incomplete; Merton’s concept was poorly understood and later neglected, considered irrelevant to contemporary ethical practice. My research investigates the roots of Merton’s ethical categories in the process of knowledge production, in which the negative effects of the violation of these categories also occur. The article further demonstrates that the ethical norms are correlative with, and complementary to, the norms of knowledge production (the latter, similar to ethical norms, are tacitly shared and transmitted by tradition). Tentative steps are taken to reveal how the building of ethical norms takes place in the individual’s mind during his/her specialized education in science. The separate layers of Merton's integral ethical categories are identified in order to show that they regulate a larger cluster of violations than those listed by him. The rethinking of the classical ethical categories and their mode of action furthers the completion of the classical foundations of the ethics of science.
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This article deals with the externalist approach to subjective justification, which grounds the latter upon cognitive integration of our faculties or virtues. The crucial assumption in this theory is that cognitive integration must be motivated by our aiming at the truth. By analogy, the approach is applicable to subjective justification in the moral domain. One would be subjectively justified in making a moral decision, if that decision resulted from an integrated moral character, and if the integration was motivated by our aiming at the good. I claim that this approach has the same kind of drawback in both domains. My claim is that adding the motivation component of achieving the truth or the good is possible only by introducing the requirement of reflection, and therefore externalism with regard to subjective justification is not sustainable. My argument is based on Kahneman (2011) who shows that our belief formation and decision-making is affected by cognitive biases, such as those related to ease, speed and conformist thinking. These biases are subjectively indistinguishable from reliable processes that aim at the truth. Thus, motivation to achieve the truth cannot be controlled without reflection upon the relevant processes.
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Today’s technological progress allows for precise and effective human enhancement, based on technological devices, and based on pharmacological means – via biologically active compounds. This then raises a multitude of philosophical, legal, ethical and biomedical questions. The breakthrough in psychopharmacology and biotechnology came in the middle of the 20th century, and since then, thousands of active compounds have been synthesized and successfully applied in clinical practice. The article focuses on philosophical aspects (including ethical, biomedical and genetic) of contemporary human cognitive neuro-enhancement based on neuro-psychopharmacological (i.e. psychotropic and nootropic) agents in the era of cognitive science.
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The author aims to formulate some observations regarding the connection between evil, time, and the human being. The discourse focusses especially on the ways in which the evil appears and manifests itself in human life-world. There are a lot of prejudices regarding the evil, many of them being philosophically constituted. But all prejudices, both the philosophical ones and the common ones, come from a certain tradition and talk about an “existential” support for each bad deed. The evil does not intervene in the world by a divine or natural decision or cause; it appears only in the core of human life. But this idea is a pre-judgment found both in public consciousness and in philosophy (in theology, certain sciences, or even in ideology). This pre-judgment crosses all these contexts due to its obvious existential support, in other words, because it is lived by a person in flesh and blood (leibhaftig). The author will attempt to point out its meontological meanings, by a temporal analysis, in fact, by two kinds of temporal reduction.
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When it comes to specifying the moral duties we bear towards future generations, most political philosophers position themselves on what could be regarded as a safe ground. A variant of the Lockean proviso is commonplace in the literature on intergenerational justice, taking the form of an obligation to bestow upon future people a minimum of goods necessary for reaching a certain threshold of well-being (Meyer, 2017). Furthermore, even this minimum is often frowned upon, given the non-identity problem and the challenges this presents to the topic of justice between generations. Additional issues are raised at the level of non-ideal theory, the most significant being the problem of non-compliance (Gosseries and Meyer, 2009). In this paper I intend to probe the limits of “practical political possibility” (Rawls 1999), by inquiring whether embracing the sufficiency view (Frankfurt, 1987; Crisp, 2003; Benbaji, 2005) as a distributive pattern and capabilities as a metric can lead to more burdensome obligations for present generations. More specifically, I try to show that we have a duty to invest in research that aims at prolonging the lifespan of humans (the idea can already be found in the sufficientarian literature, for instance in Farrelly, 2007). Moreover, given the Earth’s limited resources, we ought to encourage the terraforming of other planets in order to make them inhabitable for (future) people. I argue that these two seemingly far-fetched projects are in fact worthwhile goals to pursue on the one hand, and moral obligations on the other hand. Nonetheless, they are not the only ones we ought to take on; for instance, we must simultaneously pursue them and try to improve the prospects of those who fall under a sufficiency threshold here and now. That is, specifying these (prima facie) duties towards future generations is connected with stronger obligations towards the current generation. Towards the end of the paper I engage in a discussion regarding the role of the feasibility constraint in a theory of justice, as rationales pertaining to feasibility are perhaps going to be the most recurrent criticisms raised against my proposal. To that end, I defend limitarian policies, which aim at setting an upper limit to how much money individuals are allowed to possess (Robeyns, 2017; Volacu and Dumitru, 2019).
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In this paper, one of my primary objectives is to analyze why adopting particular machine-learning techniques and using a moral AI as an adviser is an insufficient condition for eradicating racist human attitudes. By outlining some difficulties in justifying what artificial “explicit ethical agents” in Moor’s sense should look like, I explore why, even if the development of machine-learning techniques can be accepted in epistemic terms, it does not follow that the techniques in question will have a positive impact in changing immoral human behavior.
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The main aim of this paper is to examine the tangible forms of cultural heritage represented by European hospital buildings from states across the Black Sea that are still functional or have been closed, and that are subjected, due to the lack of sustainable financial means for conservation and restoration, to degradation, abandonment, and destruction. For the purpose of this analysis, I will tackle both elements of the operational plan of hospital buildings that have been evaluated and registered as national monuments, from the perspective of their clinical functionality, and the elements of architecture and aesthetic forms behind such structures that embrace medical canons and particularities. Therefore, hospitals will be treated as entities of tangible cultural heritage that develop, through their complementary medical and cultural history, forms of intangible cultural heritage. This wide range of buildings can be reduced to two operational categories: hospital buildings designed from the beginning to fulfil a clinical functionality, and cultural buildings – from ecumenical establishments, castles, or villas, such as hermitages and churches, to military structures, such as garrisons – which have been adapted for historical, social, or political reasons to clinical conversion. I will analyse not only the national constraints, prejudgments, and values that contributed to a certain medical and cultural imaginary of state hospitals as monuments, but also the similar strategies and cultural policies that different states across the Black Sea have adopted in preserving the memory and structure of these buildings. The main question I address is: To what extent is it possible to create a network Black Sea region state hospitals as European cultural monuments, and what advantages might this bring to the attempt to perform a more reflective and inclusive notion of European identity? The current research is designed to be a starting point for the development of transectorial public policies, which could lead to an improvement in standards for quality of life, the infrastructures of medical units, and the preservation of tangible forms of cultural heritage, such as the public state hospitals classified as monuments.
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A world in constant motion, in a state of migration turbulence, presents humanity with new challenges and risks. Globalization is a blessing or a tragedy for humanity, occasioning the problem of how to preserve one’s identity, remaining “one’s own among strangers” while, at the same time, not becoming “a stranger among one’s own.” Integration processes in the world today are met with resistance by multidirectional processes that encourage a critical engagement with all spheres of life in modern society in order to counteract forces of depersonalization and the disappearance of one's identity – one's self – as expressed in the preservation of one's ethnic group, culture, religion, and so on. This is especially evident in attempts at preserving identity within Muslim communities in European countries. Given the growing Muslim population in Europe, it has become obvious that “European” and “Islamic” values are opposed in the context of preserving one's own identity, which is increasingly manifested in a religious context. Europe today has become a hostage of its values, which are despised by many of the immigrants who have poured into its borders. These are tolerance, political correctness, multiculturalism, democracy, and freedom of speech, among others, which are perceived as weakness and indecision. Eastern mentality, habits, and traditions are sometimes very different from European ones. The author examines the transformation of Muslim identity and the compatibility of “European” and “Islamic” values. The article also presents the opinions of various researchers on this issue, and provides possible scenarios for the trajectory of events, given continued intercultural contact through immigration and given the stakes and state of this collision of values.
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This critical analysis of the city-building survival game Frostpunk focuses on the representations and mechanics of the game applied in the a fictionalised city builder. Kłosiński draws on hermeneutics to make sense of various elements of the game – such as multimodal elements (the interface) and transmedia elements (the trailer and website)– as well as to problematise the fundamental mechanics of the game. Analysing the moral and ethical conflicts as well as the social vision presented in the game leads him to question the nature of the apocalyptical tone in the representation of the city. The narratives of constructing the last city on earth oscillate between messianism and utopianism. Kłosiński discusses what vision of biopolitics are presented by the mechanics that allow players to co-create the narrative world of Frostpunk.
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