By opening our eyes we do not necessarily see what confronts us.We are anxietyridden animals.Our minds are continually active, fabricating an anxious, usually self-preoccupied, often falsifying veil which partially conceals the world.Our states of consciousness diff er in quality.[. ..]And if quality matt ers, then anything which alters consciousness in the direction of unselfi shness, objectivity and realism is to be connected with virtue.-Iris Murdoch, 'The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts'Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?-Chico Marx, Duck Soup 1. Thanks also to Tom Douglas for his excellent editorial suggestions.2. As R.

The online social revolution has seen the pursuit of friendship online become core business of the internet and part of the friendships and social lives of most of us. This chapter provides an overview of the burgeoning contemporary research concerning online friendship and of the main themes, since Aristotle, on the nature and value of friendship. It also aims to provide some substantial fresh research for future analyses. It argues that the pursuit of friendship relies heavily upon the rich, face-to-face dynamic of plural modes of self-expression and communication that we have engaged in for thousands of years. Our social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, flatline much of this territory, and as a result much of the moral universe that we have built upon it is lost or distorted online. The chapter concludes by suggesting that we need to better understand this social dependence of our values and valuing, both to improve the value-sensitive design of life online, and, where this social dependence cannot be well captured, to also improve our engagement in our traditional worlds and so help get us offline.

Aristotle’s ethics has been the wellspring for much contemporary discussion of ideal friendship and what might be importantly and distinctively valuable about it. In this paper I describe one Aristotelian view about relations between friendship and virtue, and I develop an account of this view to shed light on how the shared activity of ideal friendship can be plausibly understood to generate and maintain virtue and a valuable life. I describe and develop this view in contrast to another Aristotelian view, most common in recent discussions, where the shared activity of ideal friendship is claimed to be the province of those already near perfect and fully formed in virtue, and about how such virtuous exemplars might regard one another and contribute to one another’s leading of a valuable life and on-going virtue.

ABSTRACT This study investigated Hg uptake from soil into garden crops to help assess the significance of human consumption of crops as a potential route of exposure to Hg. Locations for both a floodplain and a control garden were identified within the Augusta Forestry Center near Crimora, VA, USA, which is about 16 river-km downstream from the city of Waynesboro, along the South River. The floodplain garden had measured soil Hg concentrations ranging from 4.2 to 78 mg Hg kg−1 dry weight basis in the surface to 15-cm deep layer. A total of 139 samples from the floodplain garden from 17 different crops were analyzed for Hg. All crop samples (except for nine) had less than 0.1 μg Hg g−1 wet weight basis (ww). Many samples were less than the method detection limit (MDL) of 0.003 μg Hg g−1 ww. Based on the measured Hg concentrations and several conservative assumptions (e.g., Hg assumed present when less than MDL; 100% consumption from the geographical area in which study was conducted; and 100% bioavailable Hg as methyl Hg), consumption of crops with these Hg levels is not expected to be a significant route of Hg exposure.

The advent of the online world was first and primarily a revolution in information and access to data. We could gain much more information far more effectively and easier than, say, by going to the library, and access to individuals, groups and organizations became far more broadly available and generally cheaper than by phone, post or travel. In more recent years there has been a second revolution online— namely, the rise of social life. Social networking sites have become the predominant use of the internet. Google, for instance, has now fierce competition from Face-book. Facebook is now, together with Amazon, Google and Apple, a formidable force in the market for IT services. At the forefront of social life becoming the predominant use of the internet has been the pursuit of friendships online. In fact, as is now widely recognized, the average user conducts more than one hundred friendships online. Many users have hundreds of friends online and some have over one thousand. Of course, online social network use of the term ‘friend’ does not mean online users are necessarily imagining they have many hundred close companion friends, such as friends with whom one identifies intimately and broadly, rather than, say, narrowly as in friendships merely of pleasure or utility. And plainly, many users are clear enough about the general distinction and navigate the terrain easily—without mistaken or confused views—and so, for instance, have separate accounts divided along the line of their internet and ‘real’ friends. However, it is also plain that for many online users the term ‘‘friend’’ does import aspects and demands of ‘real’ friendship and, so, for instance, when requests to be a friend with another on social networking sites are ignored or denied, its often taken personally—for example, why don’t they want to be my friend? It is also hard to believe that young people—the dominant cohort of social networkers—rarely operate without clarity about the distinction between companion friendship and the appropriation of the term ‘friend’ by social networking sites. All of the articles ahead focus on the question of whether there are obstacles presented by online communication environments for achieving ideal companion friendship. In fact, while some apply their claim only to, say, purely textbased worlds, such as email, and some find obstacles across various different online worlds, including social networking sites, Skype and interactive games, all find much the same kind of obstacle for companion friendship online— namely, limited and distorted information. Indeed, all find much the same kind of limitation and distortion of information online to be the main problem.

With unprecedented global access, speed, and relative anonymity with respect to how one is able to present oneself to and interact with others, computer-mediated communication (hereafter CMC) contexts provide many new worlds through which we may express and develop our identities as persons and form relationships with others. Through text-based e-mail and chat-room style forums, or Web site and Web cam technology, we may present or even ‘showcase’ ourselves to others, and we may enter and contribute to all sorts of communities, such as hobby and mutual interest groups, and develop various sorts of relationships with others. Indeed, for many people, significant aspects of key roles and relationships in their professional, business, and even personal lives are now conducted online. It makes sense then, to consider if these CMC contexts, where people are increasingly presenting themselves to and undertaking various activities and relationships with others, might tailor the content of these relationships and the self that is presented to others online in any notable ways. For many, opportunities to express and form relationships have been enormously increased by computer communication technology. But what sorts of identities and relationships are really possible online? How might our pursuit of values that constitute and regulate our ideals of personal identity and various significant relationships be sensitive to such communication environments? It is clear that contextual features of the setting within which we express ourselves to others can significantly influence the content and nature of our communication. Indeed, it is clear that the nature of the relationships one is able to have and the self one is able to communicate within those relationships can be seriously affected by the context of one’s

The standard problem with many slippery slope arguments is that they fail to provide us with the necessary evidence to warrant our believing that the significantly morally worse circumstances they predict will in fact come about. As such these arguments have widely been criticised as ‘scare-mongering’. Consequentialists have traditionally been at the forefront of such criticisms, demanding that we get serious about guiding our prescriptions for right action by a comprehensive appreciation of the empirical facts. This is not surprising, since consequentialism has traditionally been committed to the idea that right action be driven by empirical realities, and this hard-headed approach has been an especially notable feature of Australian consequentialism. But this apparent empirical hard-headedness is very selective. While consequentialists have understood their moral outlook and commitments as guided by a partnership with empirical science – most explicitly in their replies to the arguments of their detractors – some consequentialists have been remarkably complacent about providing empirical support for their own prescriptions. Our key example here is the consequentialist claim that our current practises of partiality in fact maximise the good, impartially conceived. This claim has invariably been made without compelling support for the large empirical claims upon which it rests, and so, like the speculative empirical hand-waving of weak slippery slope arguments, it seems similarly to be undermined. While these arguments have presented us with ‘wishful thinking’ rather than ‘scare-mongering’, we argue in this paper that their complacency in meeting the relevant empirical justificatory burden remains much the same.

The development of systematic professional ethics in the 1970s saw the traditional norms and entrenched practices in many professions being scrutinised and revised in the light of general ethical theories such as utilitarianism and Kantianism, and more recently, virtue ethics has been employed in a similar way. So, in medicine, for example, doctors have been told that rather than paternalistically withholding treatment information from patients, they must inform patients about the risks of medical procedures, since doing so respects patients' rights, maximises utility, or is required by the virtue of honesty. As we noted in the previous chapter, various writers have argued in support of such uses of broad-based ethical theories, whereas other writers have criticised the idea that the legitimacy of professional norms and practices should be judged directly in terms of what broad-based ethical theories would require. On the latter approach, for instance, Michael Stocker has argued that the sort of specific, role-based criteria against which good administrators and good legislators are properly judged make virtue ethics' general conception of the virtuous agent a poor moral exemplar for those occupying such positions. And, in rejecting appeals to ordinary virtues as an antidote to corruption in public life, Judith Shklar has argued that certain ordinary vices like dishonesty and hypocrisy can help public officials protect citizens' rights and national interests against internal and external threats.

Professionals, it is said, have no use for simple lists of virtues and vices. The complexities and constraints of professional roles create peculiar moral demands on the people who occupy them, and traits that are vices in ordinary life are praised as virtues in the context of professional roles. Should this disturb us, or is it naive to presume that things should be otherwise? Taking medical and legal practice as key examples, Justin Oakley and Dean Cocking develop a rigorous articulation and defence of virtue ethics, contrasting it with other types of character-based ethical theories and showing that it offers a promising new approach to the ethics of professional roles. They provide insights into the central notions of professional detachment, professional integrity, and moral character in professional life, and demonstrate how a virtue-based approach can help us better understand what ethical professional-client relationships would be like.

The current renewal of philosophical interest in the virtues is one of the most noteworthy developments in contemporary ethical theory. The first signs of this revival appeared in 1958, when Elizabeth Anscombe called for the restoration of Aristotelian notions of goodness, character, and virtue as central concerns of moral philosophy. While initial reactions to Anscombe's call were modest, interest in the virtues gathered momentum during the 1980s, largely because of the work of philosophers such as Philippa Foot, Bernard Williams, and Alasdair MacIntyre. The philosophical literature on the virtues is now vast, and there is a great variety of different views which advertise themselves as forms of virtue ethics. Many of those who hold such views argue that virtue ethics can lay serious claim to rival Kantianism and utilitarianism as comprehensive normative ethical theories. But what exactly is virtue ethics? What are the central claims which the variants of virtue ethics share, and how is virtue theory distinct from other, more familiar ethical theories?