Sternberg, Elaine. Just Business: Business Ethics in Action
2000, Oxford University Press.
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Added by: Clotilde Torregrossa, Contributed by: Simon FoktPublisher's Note: Just Business provides the first comprehensive, reasoned framework for resolving questions of business ethics and corporate governance. Innovative, accessible, and global in scope, its powerful Ethical Decision Model can be used to manage the ethical problems of business as they arise in all their complexity and variety. Just Business combines business realism with philosophical rigor, and demonstrates that it is not necessary to emasculate or to adulterate business for business to be ethical. The book benefits from Elaine Sternberg's extensive experience as an academic philosopher, an international investment banker, and head of successful businesses. She is now Principal of a London-headquartered consultancy firm, and Research Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Leeds.Comment: This is a stub entry. Please add your comments below to help us expand it
Sterrett, Susan G.. The morals of model-making
2014, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 26: 31- 45.
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Added by: Helen MorleyAbstract: I address questions about values in model-making in engineering, specifically: Might the role of values be attributable solely to interests involved in specifying and using the model? Selected examples illustrate the surprisingly wide variety of things one must take into account in the model-making itself. The notions of system , and physically similar systems are important and powerful in determining what is relevant to an engineering model. Another example illustrates how an idea to completely re-characterize, or reframe, an engineering problem arose during model-making.I employ a qualitative analogue of the notion of physically similar systems. Historical cases can thus be drawn upon; I illustrate with a comparison between a geoengineering proposal to inject, or spray, sulfate aerosols, and two different historical cases involving the spraying of DDT . The current geoengineering proposal is seen to be like the disastrous and counterproductive case, and unlike the successful case, of the spraying of DDT. I conclude by explaining my view that model-making in science is analogous to moral perception in action, drawing on a view in moral theory that has come to be called moral particularism.Comment: Further reading, particulary in relation to geoengineering responses to climate change. Also of interest in relation to engineering & technology ethics.
Stock, Kathleen. Resisting Imaginative Resistance
2005, Philosophical Quarterly 55: 607-24.
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Added by: Andrea BlomqvistAbstract: Recently, philosophers have identified certain fictional propositions with which one does not imaginatively engage, even where one is transparently intended by their authors to do so. One approach to explaining this categorizes it as 'resistance', that is, as deliberate failure to imagine that the relevant propositions are true; the phenomenon has become generally known (misleadingly) as 'the puzzle of imaginative resistance'. I argue that this identification is incorrect, and I dismiss several other explanations. I then propose a better one, that in central cases of imaginative failure, the basis for the failure is the contingent incomprehensibility of the relevant propositions.Comment: The literature on imaginative resistance is a vast one in philosophy of fiction. This gives one response to the problem, and would be a useful text for students to have paired with Gendler's original paper on imaginative resistance.
Stock, Kathleen. Imagining and Fiction: Some Issues
2013, Philosophy Compass 8: 887-96
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Added by: Andrea BlomqvistAbstract: In this paper, I survey in some depth three issues arising from the connection between imagination and fiction: (i) whether fiction can be defined as such in terms of its prescribing imagining; (ii) whether imagining in response to fiction is de se, or de re, or both; (iii) the phenomenon of 'imaginative resistance' and various explanations for it.Comment: Very introductory text which would be suitable for undergraduates in a philosophy of fiction module.
Stock, Kathleen. Learning from fiction and theories of fictional content
2016, Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy (3):69-83.
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Added by: Andrea BlomqvistAbstract: In this paper I present an objection to the theory of fictional content known as 'hypothetical intentionalism'. It centres around the fact that certain sentences in fictions can both imply fictional truths and convey testimony, to be believed by the reader. I argue that hypothetical intentionalism cannot easily make sense of this fact; whereas actual author intentionalism (a rival to hypothetical intentionalism) can.Comment: This text would be good as further reading for students who are particularly interested in intentionalism and how things can be true in fiction.
Stock, Kathleen. Fantasy, imagination, and film
2009, British Journal of Aesthetics 49 (4):357-369.
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Added by: Chris Blake-Turner, Contributed by: Christy Mag UidhirAbstract: In his article 'Fantasy, Imagination and the Screen' , Roger Scruton offers an account of fantasy, arguing that it is directed away from reality in some important sense, and that cinema is its natural representational medium. I address certain problems with Scruton's basic account, thereby producing a signifi cantly amended version, though one that owes a great debt to his. I explain why, as he says, much fantasy is signifi cantly directed away from reality; and conclude with some brief remarks about.
Stock, Kathleen. Only imagine: fiction, interpretation and imagination
2017, Oxford: Oxford University Press
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Added by: Andrea BlomqvistAbstract: In the first half of this book, I offer a theory of fictional content or, as it is sometimes known, 'fictional truth'.The theory of fictional content I argue for is 'extreme intentionalism'. The basic idea - very roughly, in ways which are made precise in the book - is that the fictional content of a particular text is equivalent to exactly what the author of the text intended the reader to imagine. The second half of the book is concerned with showing how extreme intentionalism and the lessons learnt from it can illuminate cognate questions in the philosophy of fiction and imagination. For instance, I argue, my position helps us to explain how fiction can provide us with reliable testimony; it helps explain the phenomenon of imaginative resistance; and it fits with, and so supports, a persuasive theory of the nature of fiction itself. In my final chapter, I show how attending to intentionalist practices of interpreting fictional content can illuminate the nature of propositional imagining itself.Comment: This book would be good to read chapter by chapter in a module which focussed exclusively on it, perhaps with supplemantary readings which relate to the topic of each chapter. It would be a good for a third year module.
2018, 1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology
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Added by: Simon Fokt, Contributed by: Nathan NobisAbstract: Hope is ubiquitous: family members express hope that we find love and happiness, politicians call for hope in response to tragedies, and optimists urge people to keep their hopes up. We also tell ourselves to maintain hope, to find it, or in darker moments, to give it up. We hope for frivolous things, too. But what is hope? Can hope be rational or irrational? Is hope valuable? Is it ever dangerous? This essay reviews recent important answers to these questions with the goal of better understanding hope.Comment: An introduction to the epistemology and ethics of hope.
Stramondo, Joseph A.. Tragic Choices: Disability, Triage, and Equity Amidst a Global Pandemic
2021, The Journal of Philosophy of Disability. 1: 201–210.
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Added by: Chris Blake-TurnerAbstract:
In this paper, I make three arguments regarding Crisis Standards of Care developed during the COVID-19 pandemic. First, I argue against the consideration of third person quality of life judgments that deprioritize disabled or chronically ill people on a basis other than their survival, even if protocols use the language of health to justify maintaining the supposedly higher well-being of non-disabled people. Second, while it may be unavoidable that some disabled people are deprioritized by triage protocols that must consider the likelihood that someone will survive intensive treatment, Crisis Standards of Care should not consider the amount or duration of treatment someone may need to survive. Finally, I argue that, rather than parsing who should be denied treatment to maximize lives saved, professional bioethicists should have put our energy into reducing the need for such choices at all by resisting the systemic injustices that drive the need for triage.Comment (from this Blueprint): Stramondo critiques triage protocols that were put into place, or at least proposed, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Stramondo argues that protocols that prioritize quality of life involve ableist commitments. While chance-of-survival protocols might do better here, he argues that they are also vulnerable to creeping ableism. Stramondo’s paper is valuable not only for its perspective on triage protocols, but also for highlighting some crucial theoretical contributions by philosophers of disability and by bioethicists. Stramondo also argues not to cede too much ground to fatalism in thinking about triage protocols; bioethicists should also, and perhaps primarily, resist the framing of triage as inevitable, rather than a product of various privileged interests.
Street, Sharon. A Darwinian Dilemma for Realist Theories of Value
2006, Philosophical Studies 127 (1):109-166.
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Added by: Graham Bex-PriestleyAbstract: Contemporary realist theories of value claim to be compatible with natural science. In this paper, I call this claim into question by arguing that Darwinian considerations pose a dilemma for these theories. The main thrust of my argument is this. Evolutionary forces have played a tremendous role in shaping the content of human evaluative attitudes. The challenge for realist theories of value is to explain the relation between these evolutionary influences on our evaluative attitudes, on the one hand, and the independent evaluative truths that realism posits, on the other. Realism, I argue, can give no satisfactory account of this relation. On the one hand, the realist may claim that there is no relation between evolutionary influences on our evaluative attitudes and independent evaluative truths. But this claim leads to the implausible skeptical result that most of our evaluative judgments are off track due to the distorting pressure of Darwinian forces. The realist’s other option is to claim that there is a relation between evolutionary influences and independent evaluative truths, namely that natural selection favored ancestors who were able to grasp those truths. But this account, I argue, is unacceptable on scientific grounds. Either way, then, realist theories of value prove unable to accommodate the fact that Darwinian forces have deeply influenced the content of human values. After responding to three objections, the third of which leads me to argue against a realist understanding of the disvalue of pain, I conclude by sketching how antirealism is able to sidestep the dilemma I have presented. Antirealist theories of value are able to offer an alternative account of the relation between evolutionary forces and evaluative facts—an account that allows us to reconcile our understanding of evaluative truth with our understanding of the many nonrational causes that have played a role in shaping our evaluative judgments.Comment: This is an influential paper that could serve either as required reading or further reading in a metaethics module. Includes a very clear explanation of realism.
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