Manuel Gonzalez

This article has a twofold purpose: first, it explores how Leonardo Polo's personalist anthropology enriches and enhances neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics and second, it highlights how this specific personalist approach brings new perspectives to servant leadership. The recently revived neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics tradition finds that MacIntyre's scholarship significantly contributes to virtue ethics in business—particularly his conception of practices, institutions, and internal/external goods. However, we argue that some of his latest insights about the virtues of acknowledged dependence and human vulnerability remain underdeveloped because of the underlying anthropology that neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics relies on. To overcome this limitation, we introduce Polo's transcendental anthropology as a possible foundation of a personalist approach that enriches virtue ethics. To do so, we address how transcendental anthropology can enrich two central aspects of virtue ethics, namely (1) the understanding of human beings and their flourishing and (2) the relationship of virtue to praxis and human work. Finally, to address the practical implications for business leadership and work that can derive from assuming transcendental anthropology, we address how servant leadership acquires a new perspective in light of this personalism and its logic of gift, highlighting interpersonal self-giving as a way of service.

Disregard of gender and of women’s contributions in the higher education curriculum is still a widespread phenomenon. Building on feminist institutionalism, this article explores the forms and types of resistance that efforts to engender the higher education curriculum must contend with and discusses the ways in which resistance to curricular reform is entrenched in a web of both gender-specific and apparently gender-neutral academic informal rules. In doing so, the authors use empirical evidence collected by an action-research project undertaken at a faculty of political and social sciences in a Catalan public university. The Spanish case is intriguing because mainstreaming gender in higher education has been prescribed by various national and regional laws that are nonetheless poorly implemented. The article also reflects on the positive feedback loop action-research projects can facilitate within gendered institutions such as universities and pinpoints the role of feminist agency in counteracting resistance to institutional change.

In this paper we present the authors’ experience of teaching a course in Ethics for Engineers, which has been delivered four times in three different universities in Spain and Chile. We begin by presenting the material context of the course, and especially the intellectual background of the participating students, in terms of their previous understanding of philosophy in general, and of ethics in particular. Next we set out the objectives of the course and the main topics addressed, as well as the methodology and teaching resources employed to have students achieve a genuine philosophical reflection on the ethical aspects of the profession, starting from their own mindset as engineers. Finally we offer some results based on opinion surveys of the students, as well as a more personal assessment by the authors, recapitulating the most significant achievements of the course and indicating its underlying Socratic structure

Is ethics a computable function? Can machines learn ethics like humans do? If teaching consists in no more than programming, training, indoctrinating… and if ethics is merely following a code of conduct, then yes, we can teach ethics to algorithmic machines. But if ethics is not merely about following a code of conduct or about imitating the behavior of others, then an approach based on computing outcomes, and on the reduction of ethics to the compilation and application of a set of rules, either a priori or learned, misses the point. Our intention is not to solve the technical problem of machine ethics, but to learn something about human ethics, and its rationality, by reflecting on the ethics that can and should be implemented in machines. Any machine ethics implementation will have to face a number of fundamental or conceptual problems, which in the end refer to philosophical questions, such as: what is a human being (or more generally, what is a worthy being); what is human intentional acting; and how are intentional actions and their consequences morally evaluated. We are convinced that a proper understanding of ethical issues in AI can teach us something valuable about ourselves, and what it means to lead a free and responsible ethical life, that is, being good people beyond merely “following a moral code”. In the end we believe that rationality must be seen to involve more than just computing, and that value rationality is beyond numbers. Such an understanding is a required step to recovering a renewed rationality of ethics, one that is urgently needed in our highly technified society.

An engineer who becomes an educator in a school of software engineering has the mission to teach how to design and construct software systems, therein applying his or her knowledge and expertise. However, due to their engineering background, engineers may forget that educating a person is not the same as designing a machine, since a machine has a well-defined goal, whilst a person is capable to self-propose his or her own objectives. The ethical implications are clear: educating a free person must leave space for creativity and self-determination in his or her own discovery of the way towards personal and professional fulfillment, which cannot consist only in achieving goals selected by others. We present here an argument that is applicable to most fields of engineering. However, the dis-analogy between educating students and programming robots may have a particular appeal to software engineers and computer scientists. We think the consideration of three different stages in the educational process may be useful to engineers when they act as educators. We claim that the three stages are essential to engineering education. In particular, education is incomplete if the third stage is not reached. Moreover, mentoring is incompatible with an educational assessment framework that considers the goals of the engineer are always given by others. In our view, then, an integral education is not only beyond programming the behavior of students, but also beyond having them reach those given goals.

Among the various contemporary schools of moral thinking, consequence-based ethics, as opposed to rule-based, seems to have a good acceptance among professionals such as software engineers. But naïve consequentialism is intellectually too weak to serve as a practical guide in the profession. Besides, the complexity of software systems makes it very hard to know in advance the consequences that will derive from professional activities in the production of software. Therefore, following the spirit of well-known codes of ethics such as the ACM/IEEE’s, we advocate for a more solid position in the ethical education of software engineers, which we call ‘moderate deontologism’, that takes into account both rules and consequences to assess the goodness of actions, and at the same time pays an adequate consideration to the absolute values of human dignity. In order to educate responsible professionals, however, this position should be complemented with a pedagogical approach to virtue ethics.

La creación de imágenes científicas es uno de los ámbitos más activos dentro de la cultura visual. Este artículo describe, en su primera parte, las cuatro dimensiones principales de la imagen científica (las dimensiones cognitiva, constructiva, pragmática y estética), para poner el énfasis al final de su descripción en la presente convergencia de la ciencia y del arte. En su segunda parte analiza un conocido caso de imagen paracientífica actual, donde a través de una específica combinación de dichas cuatro dimensiones comparecen ejemplarmente buen número de las obsesiones a la vez epistémicas y políticas de la contemporaneidad.

En 2010 tuvo lugar en Roma el Sínodo de Oriente Medio. Este artículo presenta los problemas, conflictos, oportunidades y esperanzas de la región y de las comunidades cristianas de Oriente Medio, y su reflejo en el Instrumentum Laboris. Se describe su desarrollo, resumiendo las aportaciones del Papa, de los Padres Sinodales, de los Delegados Fraternos de otras Iglesias y de los Delegados Especiales de otras religiones, sus reflexiones en busca de una respuesta espiritual, teológica y pastoral a las múltiples necesidades humanas y religiosas de los cristianos y de todas las personas de otros credos, insistiendo en la libertad religiosa, las respuestas ecuménicas y la colaboración interreligiosa, concluyendo con las propuestas presentadas al Papa Benedicto XVI por parte de la Asamblea Sinodal.

La fe en el progreso técnico ha llevado a la liberación de las energías de la naturaleza y con ello, como dice Heidegger, se ha inaugurado el peligro de “ser absorbido por la tecnología”. En esta línea se encuentra las propuestas del transhumanismo, como el biomejoramiento humano, tratando de superar las limitaciones humanas como la salud, el conocimiento, la afectividad y moral, y mortalidad haciendo uso de las nuevas tecnologías NBIC. El filósofo francés, Fabrice Hadjadj, es un nuevo referente en la discusión del transhumanismo con sus análisis sobre la tecnología y la corporeidad humana. Mi propósito es mostrar las críticas que se encuentran en el pensamiento de Hadjadj a los núcleos esenciales del movimiento transhumanista, interpretándolas como desarrollos que continúan y profundizan las ya realizadas por autores como Jürgen Habermas y Michael Sandel; además, pretendo mostrar que son plausibles, tienen consideraciones convincentes y una nueva forma de pensar y responder al transhumanismo. La estructura está dividida en tres partes: 1) la exposición de los argumentos y crítica que Hadjadj hace a esta postura filosófica basándome en las liberaciones de nuestras limitaciones antes mencionadas; 2) centrarme en la propuesta que hace para superar esta postura, cómo complementa las críticas que hacen Habermas y Sandel desde una perspectiva metafísica; y, por último, 3) la defensa del ser humano desde su visión basada en sus “cuatro vueltas”.

La lectura de mapas es una competencia pendiente para los estudiantes universitarios. Es el caso de los del Grado en Turismo de las universidades de Las Palmas de G.C., en España, y Autónoma de Juárez, en México, que usan los mapas para la comprensión de la realidad turística sin que hayan adquirido una alfabetización cartográfica suficiente.Esta comunicación presenta un diagnóstico del pensamiento geográfico de este alumnado centrado en las capacidades de localización, interpretación y análisis relacional de variables territoriales. Se ha corroborado que solo alcanzan un nivel descriptivo y que es necesario poner en macha estrategias didácticas específicas.

Clemente de Alejandría nos ofrece, en su libro de El Pedagogo, la primera formulación de Cristo como Bien Común. En este texto se analiza la herencia cultural del que es deudor Clemente y cómo lo lleva al perfeccionamiento con su fe cristiana, después un análisis de cómo considera a Cristo como bien común y cómo nos conduce para la edificación y el florecimiento de los bienes comunes temporales y espirituales, y por último se menciona cuál es el fin último, para quiénes es y qué acciones se deben desarrollar para cultivar el bien común temporal.

We report a scanning tunnelling microscopy investigation of the emission of dislocations around nanoindentations in the form of dislocation arrangements previously called hillocks , consisting of two pairs of Shockley partial dislocations, each encompassing a stacking fault. The spatial arrangement and size distribution of hillocks around the nanoindentation traces are studied. We show that standard dislocation theory for an isotropic continuum can be used to describe the stability of the hillocks, their size and spatial distribution and the broadening of the corresponding extended dislocations near the surface. A model is proposed in which hillocks originate from the split into dislocations partials of primary perfect dislocation loops punched into the crystal by the scanning tunnelling microscope tip. This model implies the operation of a novel dislocation mechanism involving long-range transport of matter across the surface