Moral Luck and The Unfairness of Morality

Moral luck occurs when factors beyond an agent’s control positively affect how much praise or blame she deserves. Kinds of moral luck are differentiated by the source of lack of control such as the results of her actions, the circumstances in which she finds herself, and the way in which she is constituted. Many philosophers accept the existence of some of these kinds of moral luck but not others, because, in their view, the existence of only some of them would make morality unfair. I, however, argue that this intermediary approach is unstable, because either morality is fair in ways that rule out resultant, circumstantial, and constitutive moral luck (and this leads to moral responsibility skepticism), or morality is unfair in ways that permit the existence of those kinds of moral luck. Thus, such intermediary approaches lack the motivation that their proponents have long taken them to have. In the appendix, I point to ways in which morality is unfair concerning the scope of moral responsibility, moral obligation, moral taint, being a good or bad person, and flourishing

Run-in with chemical additive protects gear surface

Run-in treatment provides a protective coating on turbopump gear surfaces so that they are capable of operation under marginal conditions in mineral oil and diester lubricants. This treatment protects highly loaded gears during relatively short-term operation

Social Policy Resources for Social Work: Grey Literature and the Internet

Accreditation standards for professional schools offering social work degrees mandate curriculum content that provides students with skills to analyze, formulate, and influence social policies. An important source of analytical thinking about social policy is the “grey” literature issued by public policy organizations, think tanks, university-based research institutions, professional organizations, etc., that is increasingly available via the Internet. This research surveys library social work subject pages for content and links related to the social policy grey literature. A coding scheme was developed that counted the number of paths to relevant grey literature from the libraries’ subject guides. The results of the study suggest that there is a great deal of variance across institutions in how much help they provide users. Libraries must do a better job guiding users to the policy organizations that produce reports, briefs, newsletters, etc., that are important to social policy problem solving and implementation

Homelessness and student learning

As increased foreclosure creates more homelessness and children change schools frequently, learning suffers. The author surveys the research and makes a case for urgent action.Homeless persons ; Education

How can I help you? User instructions in telephone calls

We a small corpus of instructions given in phone calls to customers who need support for programming their universal remote control, to make it suitable for their particular TV set VCR, Audio, etc. Typically, in these calls the operator or 'agent' coaches the client while the client is performing actions with the equipment (turning it on, pressing buttons and codes, directing it towards the TV, etc.). We compared these oral instructions with the concept of a 'streamlined step procedure' (Farkas, 1999) and other principles that are well-known from the literature about written instructions. Our conclusion is that many problems arise because the operator does not provide 'meta-communication' about the goals that have to be achieved, and because the feedback given by the client is neglected or misinterpreted