Academic Copyright, Open Access and the "Moral" Second Publication Right

The Green route to Open Access (OA), meaning the re-publication in OA venues of previously published works, can essentially be executed by contract and by copyright law. In theory, rights retention and contracts may allow authors to re-publish and communicate their works to the public, by means of license to publish agreements or specific addenda to copyright transfer agreements. But as a matter of fact, because authors lack bargaining power, they usually transfer all economic copyrights to publishers. Legislation, which overcomes the constraints of a contractual scheme where authors usually have less bargaining power, may deliver a (digital) second publication or communication right, which this paper discusses in the context of research publications. Outlining the historical and philosophical roots of the secondary publication right, the paper provocatively suggests that it has a “moral” nature that even makes it a shield for academic freedom as well as a major step forward in the overall development of OA.

When Men Deprive Women of Their Free Will, They Are Not Protecting Anyone: They Are Obstructing God’s Plan

If women cannot make their own decisions, what is God to judge them on? Women will certainly get no credit for a “good deed” that is forced upon them, much less grow spiritually from it, any more than they will for or from any good their menfolk do. As the Qur’an never tires of telling us, every single soul—whether male or female—will ultimately face God individually. Yet once again, faux-hadith arguments denigrating women’s moral nature and intellectual capacity are deployed to justify restricting women’s freedoms, including an eye-popping one placed in the Prophet’s mouth that makes a wife’s access to heaven essentially dependent on being in her husband’s good graces. What if he is a despicable fellow?

Prolegomenon

Hayek contended that the Open Society has evolved beyond basic human inclinations and capacities. We will consider his three Unsettling Theses. First, that the Open Society is fundamentally at odds with our evolved moral intuitions. Second, that the Open Society’s complexity surpasses our capacity to understand the function and justification of its constitutive rules. Third, that the Open Society has evolved beyond our governance. These concerns apparently manifest in our daily politics. Because of the first, we are constantly tempted to morally renounce, and construct barriers to, The Open Society. Because of the second, our attempts to reflect on and reconstruct its rules generate unrelenting moral conflict. Because of the third, we lack the knowledge to competently improve the functioning of the Open Society, and so we are always disappointed with our politics. Hayek’s diagnoses of these systems, long dismissed, resonate with a large body of contemporary scientific work and thus merit deeper investigation and possible revision. This will be done across inquiries into each one of Hayek’s Unsettling Theses. The first inquiry considers the problem of our evolved moral nature, and whether we are by nature parochial egalitarians who rebel at diversity, inclusion and impartiality. The second inquiry analyses the Open Society itself, particularly its autocatalytic diversity and constant change. The third inquiry focuses on whether the open society is beyond governance.

The Moral Virtue of Being Understanding

Being understanding is a moral virtue. But what exactly is it that an understanding person does excellently? And what exactly makes it a moral virtue, rather than (merely) an intellectual one? Stephen Grimm suggests that an understanding person judges other people’s moral failings accurately without being too permissive or too judgemental. I argue against this view and develop an alternative one. First I demonstrate that judging other people’s failures accurately is neither necessary nor sufficient for being understanding and that Grimm leaves the moral nature of being understanding underexplored. I then draw on a related discussion on the moral virtue of open-mindedness and argue that a virtue is a moral one when it is a corrective to selfish and other weak inclinations that pull us away from feeling and acting as the situation demands. In order to fill in what this means in the case of being understanding, I turn to Iris Murdoch’s notion of attention. Being understanding, I argue, is the virtue of appropriately attending to others who are in a difficult situation.

Valuing Our Humanity

In the past Christine Korsgaard has argued that when Kant claims we value our humanity as an end in itself, he means that we take the value of the power of rational choice to be the condition of the value of our ends, and therefore to be unconditional. Here she reexamines these arguments by raising questions about the nature of valuing. She argues that valuing our moral nature does not imply thinking ourselves superior to non-moral creatures. She identifies two different ways of valuing ourselves that are at work in Kant’s arguments, regarding humanity as a valuable property and as the source of normative standing. She argues that we value ourselves as ends both in the sense of attributing normative standing to ourselves and in the sense that we regard our ends as good because they are good for us, a sense which extends to the other animals.

The new wave of leadership studies

In their comprehensive review of leadership research, Dionne et al. (2014) identify 29 different thematic categories of leadership theories, developed over 100 years; 17 are ‘classic’ leadership categories, and 12 are classified as emerging. Dinh et al. (2014) note seven emerging theories in their review and in their examination of recent theoretical and empirical developments, while Avolio, Walumbwa and Weber (2009) note 13 significant areas of new inquiry into leadership. These studies indicate that there has been a focus shift in leadership studies, which represents a diversification of thinking around how leadership occurs, and what leadership actually is. In particular, scholars have begun to focus on the moral nature of leaders, suggesting that leaders now need to be concerned with issues of ethics and morality (Lemoine, Hartnell & Leroy, 2019).

Shadow Sophia

Why do humans who seem to be exemplars of virtue also have the capacity to act in atrocious ways? What are the roots of tendencies for sin and evil? A popular assumption is that it is our animalistic natures that are responsible for human immorality and sin, while our moral nature curtails and contains such tendencies through human powers of freedom and higher reason. This book challenges such assumptions as being far too simplistic. Through a careful engagement with evolutionary and psychological literature, it argues that tendencies towards vice are, more often than not, distortions of the very virtues that are capable of making us good. After beginning with Augustine’s classic theory of original sin, the book probes the philosophical implications of sin’s origins in dialogue with the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur. Different vices are treated in both individual and collective settings in keeping with a multispecies approach. Areas covered include selfishness, pride, violence, anger, injustice, greed, envy, gluttony, deception, lying, lust, despair, anxiety, and sloth. The work of Thomas Aquinas helps to illuminate and clarify much of this discussion on vice, including those vices which are more distinctive for human persons in community with other beings. Such an approach amounts to a search for the shadow side of human nature, shadow sophia. Facing that shadow is part of a fuller understanding of what makes us human and thus this book is a contribution to both theological anthropology and theological ethics.

Love, Morality, and Alienation

Is love incompatible with morality? A popular criticism of standard moral theories such as consequentialist theories and Kantian ethics—any theory that holds that the reasons of morality are impartial—is that such theories cannot accommodate the reasons of love. Either the reasons of love are not moral reasons, yet outweigh moral reasons in many situations, or they are moral reasons that are partial, not impartial. Many moral theorists try to retain both impartiality and the special moral nature of partial reasons for close relationships by presenting approaches that justify partial norms on the basis of impartial reasons. These writers are divided on the issue of whether or not such approaches need to be self-effacing. For those who argue that the indirection need not be self-effacing, and that people should be able to step back and evaluate all of their normative commitments, a problem is raised by writers such as Susan Wolf who argue that even considering the possibility of violating a close relationship norm for the sake of morality is problematic to the relationship in question. This article challenges this view of Wolf’s, arguing that, in effect, we can provide justifications for “silencing” when it really is practically appropriate in standard moral theories that do not threaten good relationships.

Specificity of Students’ Emotional Exhaustion in the Context of Online Learning

in the article the specificity of emotional exhaustion of students in the conditions of online learning, characterized by an average level of emotional exhaustion, determined by: high reduction changes in educational and professional motivation; higher than the average degree of reduction changes in educational achievements; medium: exhaustion in the emotional sphere, exhaustion of a psychoemotional nature, distance from personal training, inadequate selective emotional response, reduction changes in the duties of the educational and professional type, resistance (resistance) to stress factors of online learning; below the average degree: disorientation of an emotional and moral nature, depersonalization processes, a deficit of emotional manifestations, exhaustion, tension, disorders of the psychosomatic and psychovegetative spectra, detachment of the personal plan, detachment of the emotional plan, experiencing circumstances of a traumatic nature, anxiety-depressive symptoms, saving emotions of the extended spectrum; low: personal dissatisfaction and the state of depression