I argue that it is possible to prevent (and to be praiseworthy for preventing) an unwelcome outcome that had no chance of occurring. I motivate this position by constructing examples in which it makes sense to explain the non-occurrence of a certain outcome by referring to a particular agent's intentional and willing behavior, and yet the non-occurrence of the outcome in question was ensured by fa

Invited discussion of G. Sher, Who Knew?: Responsibility Without Awareness

In April of 2004, about a year after the start of the Iraq War, a story broke in the American media about the abuse of Iraqi detainees by American soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad.1 From the beginning, editorialists and science writers noted affinities between what happened at Abu Ghraib and Philip Zimbardo’s 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment.2 Zimbardo’s experiment is part of a bod

The largest dune fields in Sweden and Norway are small in international comparison but still form distinct parts of this previously glaciated landscape. The dunes formed c.10.5-9 ka ago, shortly after the last deglaciation, when winds close to the ice sheet were strong and vegetation was largely absent [1-4]. Since then they have been more or less stable and today they are covered by forest. Most

The process of cutting is treated as a fracture mechanical process. For an elliptic rigid wedge pressed into an elastic material, fracture may occur as an autonomous process if the tip of the wedge is sufficiently blunt or is affected by the geometry of the wedge if the tip is sharp. The conditions leading to the former or the latter case is obtained as a relation between the wedge tip radius, the

On the Seven Islands, north of Nordaustlandet, Svalbard, decreasing snow cover has made previously inaccessible stratigraphic sections in coastal cliffs possible to investigate. Sections on two of the islands, Phippsøya and Parryøya, reveal mainly raised marine deposits, representing one or more coarsening upward sequences (emergence cycles) at each site, which in turn imply preceding regional gla

Late Quaternary sedimentary units at Kongsfjordhallet, NW Svalbard, represent five cycles of glaciations and subsequent deglaciations during high relative sea levels. The high sea-level events are interpreted as glacioisostatically induced and imply preceding regional glaciations, which we constrain in time by luminescence and radiocarbon ages to just prior to ~195 ka, ~130 ka, ~85 ka, ~60 ka and

Mentometrar (”clickers”) är ett verktyg som kan användas för att göra snabba utvärderingar av studenters kunskap och förståelse under t.ex. en föreläsning (s.k. classroom assessment), och studier har visat att de förbättrar både lärande och uppmärksamhet (Keough 2012). Genom sådana formativa utvärderingar får både studenter och lärare omedelbar återkoppling som kan hjälpa till att identifiera områ