Two Views of Conscience for the Australian People

Australian democracy has recently seen a new emphasis on ‘conscience votes’ in parliament. However, despite this increasing awareness, the Australian media, public and governments have failed to examine closely the concept of a ‘conscience vote’, and the important question of what conscience really is. I will examine a number of statements made by politicians, media commentators and other groups surrounding conscience votes to show the problems that emerge from lacking a clear account of conscience. From this, I will outline two different classical views of conscience: that of Bishop Joseph Butler and that of St. Thomas Aquinas, and show the implications for politicians of adopting either view. I will suggest that the contemporary Australian usage of conscience has more in common with Butler than Aquinas, but that the Thomistic view could serve to better inform both the contemporary Australian usage, and Butler’s views. I will briefly suggest some ways that adopting the Thomistic view of conscience would impact on the Australian democratic system, and explain the problems with a philosophical view that upholds the primacy of conscience and fails to appeal to external moral truth

Human Dependency as Luck: Some insights on human relationships

Human relationships have always held a unique position in moral philosophy, particularly in eudaemonist ethics, where they are considered by most to be essential to “the good life”. However, this fact has made conceptualising the good life in purely individualistic terms difficult, due to the important role that the ‘other’ plays in any kind of relationship. In this paper I argue that the fragile relationship between self and other that exists in all human relationships – but especially in more meaningful ones – can be best understood by considering it to be a kind of luck. In developing this account I look closely at the nature of human relationships, using Aristotle’s account of friendship as a model. From this I argue that friendship consists of two virtues working in reciprocity in two persons. Finally, I explain how this reciprocity can be understood as luck, and how recognising that a particular type of luck, dependence luck, is inherent to relationships can in fact help to foster the virtues that allow a person to participate in those relationships

Virtuous soldiers: A role for the liberal arts?

The modern soldier is faced with a complex moral and psychological landscape. As Nancy Sherman puts it in The Untold War: Inside the Hearts and Minds of our Soldiers, ‘soldiers go to war to fight external enemies… but most fight inner wars as well.’ The modern soldier is no longer simply a warrior: he (or she) is at once a peacekeeper, diplomat, leader, sibling and friend. In the face of such challenges, some responsible for the teaching of soldiers have endeavoured to incorporate a character-based training programme, designed to develop virtues that will assist soldiers in fulfilling the multiple roles required of them. However, these training programmes are stymied by the dearth of virtue-based discussion within the most influential guide to the moral conduct of soldiers: just war theory (JWT). JWT remains a primarily deontic system in which rights, duties and law are generally perceived as the most important considerations. Aretaic ethics has a great deal to offer both JWT and military education programmes

Personhood, harm and interest: A reply to Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva

In the article ‘After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?’ arguments are made in favour of the moral permissibility of intentionally killing newborn infants, under particular conditions. Here we argue that their arguments are based on an indefensible view of personhood, and we question the logic of harm and interest that informs their arguments. Furthermore, we argue that the conclusions here are so contrary to ordinary moral intuitions that the argument and conclusions based upon it—including those which defend more mainstream methods of abortion—should be treated with immediate suspicion

Soldier enhancement: ethical risks and opportunities

Over the past decade, interest in human enhancement has waxed and waned. The initial surge of interest and funding, driven by the US Army’s desire for a ‘Future Force Warrior’ has partly given way to the challenges of meeting operational demands abroad. However the ethical opportunities provided by soldier enhancement demand that investigation of its possibilities continue. Benefits include enhanced decision-making, improved force capability, reduced force size and lower casualty rates. These benefits — and enhancement itself — carry concomitant risks, including morale issues due to tension between enhanced and unenhanced soldiers, the issues of enhanced veterans and ownership of enhanced bodies, challenges to the army’s core values and personal identity issues. A range of measures should be designed to highlight the opportunities offered by enhancement while also minimising the potential risks. This includes providing advice on which areas the army ought to demonstrate restraint in research for ethical reasons

Fighting, Bargaining, and War Termination: Examining How Battlefield Factors Affect When Negotiations Can End Interstate Wars

How do interstate wars end? I explore this question in my dissertation by developing the bargaining model of war (e.g. Fearon 1995, Powell 2006, Wagner 2000, Filson and Werner 2002 and others) to include a more detailed account of war processes. In particular, I examine how military strategy affects interstate bargaining and how this relates to war termination. Several significant developments emerge from this examination. First, it becomes apparent that there are in fact two fundamentally different bargaining situations in interstate wars. Ground wars occur where the states attempt to take and hold territory and can achieve their objectives militarily. Bombardment wars occur when the states only inflict costs on their opponent through air or artillery bombardment, and must rely on their opponent voluntarily making concessions to achieve any changes to the status quo. Second, examining war termination relative to the military situation at the end of the war shows that standard bargaining explanations fail to adequately explain the actual end of most wars. Wars typically end before credible commitment issues have been fully resolved. However, most wars do not appear to involve freely negotiated settlements, as war outcomes tend not to be intermediate to the two sides&rsquo; war aims and tend not to involve one side making preemptive concessions before they have been militarily lost. I argue that in ground wars, defensive advantages present commitment problems internal to the war, inhibiting war termination until one side has achieved their war aims. However, once one side, and particularly the stronger, has achieved their war aims, defensive advantages actually cement a war ending settlement. Finally, bombardment wars must end with the revelation of private information, as the combatants cannot achieve their aims militarily. However, revealing this information is difficult, as individual engagements reveal very little information. Precipitating events may thus be necessary to prompt the end of bombardment wars. I empirically test these theories with originally coded data on military campaign outcomes. I supplement the quantitative analysis with multiple case studies, demonstrating that the hypothesized mechanism does occur.</p

War rights and military virtues: A philosophical re-appraisal of Just War Theory

The overwhelming majority of theorists addressing questions of the morality of war do so from within the moral framework provided by Just War Theory (JWT): a normative account of war that dates back over 1500 years in the Western Tradition. However, today’s iterations of Just War Theory are markedly different from those of its intellectual ancestors. Specifically, today’s accounts tend not to consider matters of moral virtue, personal excellence, moral psychology, or human flourishing – that is, aretaic matters – to be worthy subjects of discussion. Instead, they prefer to focus overtly on questions of law, justice, and human rights – deontological questions – as if they were the entire purview of a comprehensive morality of war. I explore some of the major theorists in the history of Western JWT, showing that the ancestors of today’s just war theories did consider aretaic matters – in particular the moral virtues – to be of central importance to the morality of war. I also show how and why it came to be that deontological and aretaic discussions became fragmented in contemporary JWT. In order to demonstrate how this fragmentation is problematic, I consider deontological ethics’ connection to aretaic ethics. I explain how contemporary JWT tends to conceptualise rights, emphasising the central place of intention in those theories. I show how aretaic ethics can enrich deontological appraisals of ongoing debates in military ethics. Finally, I make a positive case for aretaic ethics by identifying new questions that aretaic ethics reveals to JWT, those being: the complexity of the identity of soldiers, how moral character and identity can help prevent moral transgressions, and the moral and psychological trauma suffered by many soldiers and veterans. I argue that aretaic modes of thinking help to explain moral transgressions of soldiers and the psychological difficulties that veterans can experience post-war. Deontological and aretaic ethics also interact in the three professions most relevant to waging war: soldiers, commanders, and political leaders. I show how the virtues are necessary character traits in order to guarantee that warfighters and their political leaders can be relied on to fulfil their professional duties. Aretaic ethical analysis is also able to provide conceptual understanding of supererogatory actions. Contemporary just war theorists would be wise to re-integrate aretaic ethics into their considerations of the morality of war. Aretaic ethics can be combined seamlessly and productively with deontological ethics, yielding more robust and intelligible responses to the most pressing controversies facing military ethics today. Rights and deontology present crucial elements of the ethics war, but they can be ably complemented by insights from aretaic ethics; specifically, matters of character and the moral development of the agent. Furthermore, incorporating aretaic ethics into JWT enables theorists to utilise that framework to consider matters currently outside of its purview, but which are of growing relevance to military practice

A study of protein-protein interactions involving type 4 phosphodiesterase

The cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP) signalling pathway is centrally involved in the regulation of cell function by many extracellular messengers. Signalling through the cAMP pathway is involved in the acute regulation of numerous metabolic processes including glucose and lipid metabolism, neurotransmission and membrane trafficking. The cAMP pathway also functions to affect gene expression and can thereby mediate the long term control of processes such as cell growth and differentiation. Every stage in the cAMP signalling pathway is mediated by a family of enzymes. This provides opportunities for cell type and developmental stage specific variations in the control of the cAMP signalling, dependent upon the particular isoforms of each of the components of the cAMP pathway that are expressed in a given cell. In addition, each stage in the cAMP pathway is able to interact with components of other intracellular signalling pathways and this allows for a cell to modulate its response to any one stimuli depending upon the other stimulatory inputs that it receives. An important aspect of intracellular signalling is the spatial organisation of the components of the various pathways within the 3 dimensional cell interior. The paradigm for the spatial organisation of signalling proteins as a regulatory factor arose with the identification of protein domains that mediated the rapid clustering of tyrosine kinases around activated insulin receptors. It has since become apparent that the regulated targeting of a wide variety of signalling proteins to specific subcellular locations is an essential feature of much of the signalling that occurs within eukaryotic cells. In chapter 3 of this thesis I have shown that the type 4 phosphodiesterase (PDE4) splice variant PDE4D4 can interact specifically with Src homology 3 (SH3) domains in vitro. HSPDE4D4 showed a selectivity for the SH3 domains that it could interact with and bound most strongly to the SH3 domains of the tyrosyl kinases Src, Lyn, Fyn and Abl and also the SH3 domain of the cytoskeletal protein fodrin. In contrast it did not bind to a number of other SH3 domains that were tested. In chapter 4 of this thesis I have shown for the first time that it is possible to express both full length HSPDE4D4 and also the unique, alternatively spliced, amino terminal 166 amino acids of HSPDE4D4 in E.coli as fusion proteins with maltose binding protein (MBP) and to purify these species to near homogeneity by affinity chromatography. I used these purified fusion proteins to demonstrate a direct protein-protein interaction between the alternatively spliced, amino terminal region of HSPDE4D4 and the SH3 domain of Lyn kinase. By engineering a recognition site for a high fidelity viral protease (TEV) into the MBP-HSPDE4D4 fusion protein, I was able to separate proteolytically the MBP and the HSPDE4D4 moieties and, for the first time, to perform a limited characterisation of highly purified, full length HSPDE4D4. This species migrated on SDS-PAGE with and apparent Mw of 121kDa and catalysed the hydrolysis of cAMP with a Km of 2.3muM and an apparent Vmax of 3490mumol/min/mg. In chapter 5 of this thesis I have mapped sub-regions within the amino terminal of RNPDE4A5 that are involved in the interaction with SH3 domains, in the subcellular targeting and in the regulation of the catalytic activity of this isoform. My data suggest that the extreme amino terminal region, residues 1-10, of RNPDE4A5 are important in the interaction of this isoform with the SH3 domain of Lyn kinase. The region between residues 218-259 of RNPDE4A5 appears to be involved in both the subcellular targeting and the regulation of the catalytic activity of this enzyme. In chapter 6 of this thesis I have shown that 2 highly conserved regions of sequence called Upstream Conserved Regions 1 and 2 (UCRl and UCR2) that characterise the amino terminal regions of all long PDE4 isoforms can bind to one another. I have shown that this interaction is stabilised by electrostatic bonds between specific residues located in the carboxyl terminal portion of UCRl and the amino terminal portion of UCR2. This interaction can be regulated by the phosphoiylation of a serine residue that lies within the amino terminal region of UCRl and forms a consensus recognition site for protein kinase A (PKA)