The Slippery Slope Argument in the Context of Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide

This article analyzes the slippery slope argument and its application to the problem of legalizing euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. The argument is often referred to in discussions of abortion, in vitro fertilization, etc., but it has been little developed in the Russian-language literature. This explains the relevance and novelty of this article. The focus is on the ways of representation of the argument in research. It distinguishes its main types: logical (disintegrating into no-principle distinction argument and the soritical argument), empirical (or psychological argument), and non-logical (metaphorical). Each of these types of argument is constructed according to a certain principle and has a number of features and critiques. A common place for criticism of an argument is its focus on the future so that it makes reasoning probabilistic. The logical type of argument is centered around denoting the transition between the original event and its adverse consequences and denotes the action of social factors to accelerate the transition. The no-principal distinction argument implies that there is no moral distinction between the events at the beginning and the end of the slope. The soritical argument involves intermediate steps between questionable and unacceptable practices. The conceptual slope is another variant of the logical kind of argument. The empirical argument illustrates a situation of changing societal values which results in an easier acceptance of morally disapproved practices. The metaphorical argument is used to illustrate the metaphor of slope and the situation of the accumulation of small problems that lead to serious undesirable results. The non-logical kind of argument centers around the routinization of practice, desensitization, and exploitation of unprotected groups in society. Exploitation can be called the victims' slope. It grounds its consideration on the abuse of the practice being administered. Application of the ethical methodology (theoretical-logical and empirical-historical) to the types of arguments and ways of their application allows us to highlight the value component of the argument, to determine its dilemma nature and to correlate it with bioethical principles. The application of bioethical principles to suppress the transition to undesirable consequences is critiqued on the basis of particularly difficult cases in which one is unable to articulate one's decision. The criticism of the argument is built on the probabilistic nature of the reasoning, the lack of reflection on the underlying premise and the lack of empirical evidence. It concludes that the slippery slope argument is incapable of being the only valid justification for rejecting the practices of physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia.

The transformative power of accepting God's love

This article develops an account of some of the central features involved on the human side in adopting a richly accepting orientation towards God's love. It then builds a conceptual and empirical argument for the conclusion that accepting God's love can enhance a person's mental health and can indirectly enable a person to cultivate or maintain moral virtues – whether or not God exists. Importantly, the article contends that these transformative benefits are available to both believers and agnostics, and an original secondary data analysis is offered to support this conclusion in the case of agnostics. The article explains how this transformative value of accepting God's love may serve as the basis for a novel pragmatic argument for theistic religious commitment.

Does Big4 Audit Improve the Quality of Corporate Information, An Empirical Analysis Based on PSM

Based on the PSM (Propensity Score Matching) approach, this paper presents a rigorous empirical argument to illustrate the statistical relationship between the audit background of the Big Four accounting firms and the quality of corporate accounting information, using a sample of all listed companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen A-shares from 2011 to 2020. This paper finds that after selecting the control and treatment groups under the PSM approach and solving the model endogeneity problem, the information quality of companies with the audit background of the Big Four accounting firms is significantly better than that of companies audited by ordinary accounting firms.

Bayesian Reasoning’s Power to Challenge Religion and Empirically Justify Atheism

Bayes’ Theorem is a simple mathematical equation that can model every empirical argument. Accordingly, once understood it can be used to analyze, criticize, or improve any argument in matters of fact. By extension, it can substantially improve an overall argument for atheism (here meaning the belief that supernatural gods probably do not exist) by revealing that god apologetics generally operates through the omission of evidence, and how every argument for there being a god becomes an argument against there being a god once you reintroduce all the pertinent evidence that the original argument left out. This revelation further reveals that god apologetics generally operates through the omission of evidence. This paper demonstrates these propositions by illustrating their application with examples.

The Univocity of Real Essence in Locke

I argue that Locke’s various descriptions of real essence pick out one and the same thing, namely a nature that can be ascribed to many things, and in terms of which we can get matters of classification right or wrong. On my reading, Locke does not attack real essences of the sort that are the essences of real species, but rather the presumption that a sorting according to our species concepts and their names is a sorting of things according to their real essences. And the lesson of Locke’s empirical argument against that presumption, I argue, is that our species concepts often function more like higher taxa, grouping together things that knowledge of their real essences would distinguish into distinct lowest species.

The Religious Argument—How We Substantiate Divine Authority in Human Terms

Religious beliefs are unprovable except by empirical argument. The human race has struggled with full submission to these beliefs because beliefs, by definition intangible. The Argument, if performed well, substantiates valid religious beliefs and their utility to in human society, do not exact a price upon it or presume to self-enforce. Still, several kinds of arguments exist: Religion as an absolute, far from optional, and the other provides logic as to how we find God, the Real One, connect with Him and the beautiful universe around us without the constant redirection of religious nonsense-or its proponents in the way?This paper will examine Arguments from Islam, the Fatwa, the Greek, called a Polemic, the Apologetic, which exists in both Protestant and Catholic Christianity, the Chazakah, or presumption used in Judaism, and the Upanishad, an ancient form of spiritual inquiry and scientific method used by Vedantin Hindus. My objectives include overview of the history, structure, and forms of each type of Argument, and finally, recommendations for a standard format all religions can take advantage of.

A Comparison of Two Neurobiological Models of Fear and Anxiety: A “Construct Validity” Application?

The main focus of this article is on an application of “construct validity,” although it is better thought of as a construct-progressivity assessment (CPA) for reasons developed in the article and related to the concepts of “truth” and “validity” in science. The specific example presented involves the recent LeDoux and Pine two-system model (TSM) and the more traditional fear-center model (FCM), two important constructs in even broader debates in recent fear research. The focal point of the TSM–FCM dispute is arguably the contrasting interpretation of four empirical “findings” that are summarized in a section on findings of this article and then explored later in depth as “empirical arguments.” This notion of an empirical argument is closely related to Kane’s “argument-based” analysis of construct validity. In addition, it is essential to describe and then apply what are called “epistemic values” to the TSM–FCM example. The CPA in the present article ultimately tilts in favor of the TSM and against the FCM, on empirical as well as on more general epistemic-value grounds, with the caveat that any CPA is temporally contingent and may reach a different conclusion later, depending on future instruments and advances.

Proportionality and Its Discontents

This chapter focuses on one element of judicial review which is particularly affected by deference: proportionality analysis. It argues that the connection between proportionality and deference is not accidental. Constitutional scholarship has overly focused on the benefits of proportionality analysis for judges. Yet, the test equally creates a series of duties which can become a burden, a burden which courts will try to reduce by resorting to deference techniques. The chapter offers a historical, theoretical, comparative and empirical argument in support of this thesis. It traces the development of proportionality in EU law and compares it with the American ‘standards of review’ model. An empirical analysis of free movement case law reveals that the more frequently the European Court of Justice applies proportionality, the more frequently it opts for deferential forms of scrutiny.

Is Vision for Action Unconscious?

Empirical work and philosophical analysis have led to widespread acceptance that vision for action, served by the cortical dorsal stream, is unconscious. I argue that the empirical argument for this claim is unsound. That argument relies on subjects’ introspective reports. Yet on biological grounds, in light of the theory of primate cortical vision, introspection has no access to dorsal stream mediated visual states. It is wrongly assumed that introspective reports speak to absent phenomenology in the dorsal stream. In light of this, I consider a different conception of consciousness’s relation to agency in terms of access. While theoretical reasons suggest that the inaccessibility of the dorsal stream to conceptual report is evidence that it is unconscious, this position begs important questions about agency and consciousness. I propose a broader notion of access in respect of the guidance of intentional agency as the crucial link connecting agency to consciousness.