Recently, Fenton (2009) has argued that Buddhist ethics can accommodate the use of attention-enhancing drugs, and Walker (2006 , 2009) has argued that future neurotechnologies may be used to enhance happiness and virtue. This paper uses a Western Buddhist perspective, drawing on many Buddhist traditions, to explore how emerging neurotechnologies may be used to suppress vices and enhance happ...

This essay explores virtue ethical concepts in the context of animal law theory and practice. For reasons discussed in the essay, virtue ethics may not, on its own, serve as an adequate foundation for general anticruelty statutes, but it may have application in those contexts in which sufficient sharing of values enables participants in legal reform to work through differences in moral commitme...

How can Confucian philosophy provide a useful path toward understanding the basic processes of human moral psychology? This is the question that SEOK Bongrae’s new book Embodied Moral Psychology and Confucian Philosophy strives to answer. To the uninitiated, Confucian philosophy will be an unlikely resource, even an anachronism with respect to current issues in philosophy, especially with regar...

The moral nature and ideals of Machiavelli, as portrayed in his work The Prince, have long been discussed and debated. Machiavelli has been characterized to such extremes as to be considered both the embodiment of political treachery and a civic visionary. The focus of this analysis is to investigate the moral considerations of Machiavelli’s model prince and to examine the image that these qual...

An obvious, if somewhat perverse, attraction of criminal law for those who study it is that it involves the regulation of some of the darkest and most disturbing aspects of human behavior. If one is interested in observing the most wrongful, harmful, and anti-social kinds of conduct in which people are capable of engaging, the criminal law offers as promising a place as any to start. Moral phil...

Abstract In this paper, I argue that certain social-identity groups—ones involve systematic relations of power and oppression—have distinctive epistemic reasons in virtue constituting group. This claim, further, would potentially benefit at least three bodies scholarship—on the epistemology groups, on collective moral responsibility, injustice.

M. Christen et al. (eds.), Empirically Informed Ethics: Morality between Facts and Norms, Library of Ethics and Applied Philosophy 32, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-01369-5_13, © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014 It is commonly assumed that humans do not begin life with moral character or virtue. Most documented societies through history considered infants to be unformed persons, not y...

Medicine is explicitly committed to the traditional values of empathy, compassion, and altruism. Along with the “middle” principles of beneficence, non-maleficence, justice and respect for autonomy, these are among the values which form the ethical framework by which physician conduct is evaluated. But how is empathy to be understood as fundamental to the practice of ethical medicine? Should it...

An ethics concerned with health care developments and systems must be historically continuous, especially as it concerns the application to managed structures of key moral-epistemic concepts such as care, love and empathy. These concepts are traditionally most at home in the personal, individual domain. Human beings have non-instrumental worth just because they are human beings and not by virtu...