It may be seen from the foregoing that Pauline's existence is multiply jeopardized; or rather, that my right to use 'Pauline' as a name, the way I said I was going to, is very doubtful, for I agree with Parmenides that one cannot name what is not there to be named. The words I have used to describe Pauline's various perils are full of what Ryle aptly called "systematically misleading expressions"; but we need not worry about that for the (...) moment-enough for now if the words succeed in bringing the various cases before our minds--and we can tidy up our language as we come to see things more clearly. (shrink)

The Perils of Invention is based on three Hannah Arendt Center Conferences: "Human Being in an Inhuman Age," "Lying and Politics," and "Truthtelling: Democracy in an Age without Facts." Contributions written for these conferences are placed alongside many new essays that reflect on the ideas they raised. The result is a freshly invigorated investigation into these critical and timely themes. The authors have diverse backgrounds--Arendt scholars, public intellectuals, novelists, journalists, and business people--and include Uday Mehta, Marrianne Constable, Nicholson Baker, (...) George Kateb, Marianne Constable, Linda M.G. Zerilli, Peg Birmingham, Davide Panagia, and many others. (shrink)

"Dogmatism" is a term renovated by James Pryor [2000] to stand for a certain kind of neo-Moorean response to Scepticism and an associated conception of the architecture of basic perceptual warrant. Pryor runs the response only for (some kinds of) perceptual knowledge but here I will be concerned with its general structure and potential as a possible global anti-sceptical strategy. Something like it is arguably also present in recent writings of Burge 1 and Peacocke.2 If the global strategy could succeed, (...) (...) it would pre-empt any role in the diagnosis and treatment of sceptical paradoxes for the kind of notion of entitlement (rational, non-evidential warrant) I have proposed elsewhere [Wright 2004]. But my overarching contention will be that Dogmatism is, generally and locally, too problematic a stance to be helpful in that project. (shrink)

With The Perils of Global Legalism, Eric A. Posner explains that such views demonstrate a dangerously naive tendency toward legalism—an idealistic belief that ...

The authors analyze deficiencies and perils of the European Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine , in particular the concept of human rights as given by natural law and the Conventions stand on germline therapy and its refutation of therapeutic enhancement.

abstract As history shows, some human beings are capable of acting very immorally. 1 Technological advance and consequent exponential growth in cognitive power means that even rare evil individuals can act with catastrophic effect. The advance of science makes biological, nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction easier and easier to fabricate and, thus, increases the probability that they will come into the hands of small terrorist groups and deranged individuals. Cognitive enhancement by means of drugs, implants and biological (including (...) genetic) interventions could thus accelerate the advance of science, or its application, and so increase the risk of the development or misuse of weapons of mass destruction. We argue that this is a reason which speaks against the desirability of cognitive enhancement, and the consequent speedier growth of knowledge, if it is not accompanied by an extensive moral enhancement of humankind. We review the possibilities for moral enhancement by biomedical and genetic means and conclude that, though it should be possible in principle, it is in practice probably distant. There is thus a reason not to support cognitive enhancement in the foreseeable future. However, we grant that there are also reasons in its favour, but we do not attempt to settle the balance between these reasons for and against. Rather, we conclude that if research into cognitive enhancement continues, as it is likely to, it must be accompanied by research into moral enhancement. (shrink)

(1994). Perils of a modern Cassandra: Rhetorical aspects of public indifference to the population explosion. Social Epistemology: Vol. 8, Public Indifference to Population Issues, pp. 221-237.

The individual right of access to one’s own data is a crucial privacy protection long recognized in U.S. federal privacy laws. Mobile health devices and research software used in citizen science often fall outside the HIPAA Privacy Rule, leaving participants without HIPAA’s right of access to one’s own data. Absent state laws requiring access, the law of contract, as reflected in end-user agreements and terms of service, governs individuals’ ability to find out how much data is being stored and how (...) it might be shared with third parties. Efforts to address this problem by establishing norms of individual access to data from mobile health research unfortunately can run afoul of the FDA’s investigational device exemption requirements. (shrink)

The story of how Perrin’s experimental work established the reality of atoms and molecules has been a staple in (realist) philosophy of science writings (Wesley Salmon, Clark Glymour, Peter Achinstein, Penelope Maddy, …). I’ll argue that how this story is told distorts both what the work was and its significance, and draw morals for the understanding of how theories can be or fail to be empirically grounded.

The law often calls on the concept of public interest for assistance. Privacy law makes use of this concept in several ways, including to justify consent waivers for secondary research on health information. Because the law sees information privacy as a means for individuals to control their personal information, consent can only be set aside in special circumstances. Ballantyne and Schaefer argue that only public interest, and only a broad conception of public interest, can do the special ‘normative justificatory work’ (...) to override consent requirements. Other, similar-sounding concepts, such as public benefit, public good and social value, also provide useful services. But none more so than public interest. In fact, they argue, public interest is the superior concept precisely because it can capture those concepts as well as a range of other interests. Our response focuses on this claim. We argue their strategy is not as promising as it might first seem. Ballantyne and Schaefer construe the important role that public interest plays in this context as their endpoint. They claim that unless the concept is open and content-rich, it will lose some of its importance. But by refusing to place limits around it, their inquiry leads us back to a catch-all concept that lacks clear focus or meaning. In reply, we argue that, for practically minded theorists, a narrow conception of public interest is more useful. Further, the narrowing of public interest in this context can be achieved by first analysing it in its legal, rather than ethical, sense. (shrink)

Though Young’s “Throwing Like a Girl” has been praised for pre-senting the “I can” body as more of an aspiration than a reality for many women in the world today, she has also been criticized for claiming that women’s typical modes of bodily comportment are contradictory, and thus that their experience of the “I can” body is compromised. From her critics’ perspective, Young’s account seems to imply that women’s experiences of embodied agency are inferior or deficient in comparison to men (...) who have been encouraged to maximize their physical capabilities. The question this essay addresses is whether the “I can” body is itself a suspect notion that should be rejected altogether, or whether the problem lies in its sexist, racist, and ableist history that has failed to acknowledge the di-verse experiences of embodied agency it was originally intended to describe. Quoique « Lancer comme une fille » ait reçu des éloges pour sa pré-sentation du « je peux » corporel non comme la description d’un état de fait, mais plutôt comme une aspiration pour beaucoup de femmes dans le monde contemporain, certains critiquent la présentation des modalités typiques du comportement corporel féminin comme « contradictoire », car il en découle que l’expérience par les femmes du « je peux » corporel est compromise. Selon ces critiques, l’approche de Young semble impliquer que l’expérience féminine de l’agentivité corporelle est inférieure ou déficiente par rapport à celle des hommes, ces derniers ayant été encouragés à cultiver au maximum leurs capacités physiques. Dans cet article, nous poserons la question suivante : le « je peux » corporel est-il un concept sus-pect que l’on doit rejeter, ou doit-on plutôt dire que le problème gît dans l’histoire sexiste, raciste et capacitiste de ce concept, une histoire qui n’est pas parvenue à rendre compte des diverses expériences de l’agentivité corporelle que le « je peux » visait décrire initialement. (shrink)

This book offers a novel critique of public-private partnerships in public health. The author argues these relationships create webs of influence that undermine the integrity of public health agencies, and imperil public health. He makes a compelling case that the paradigm interaction between governments and corporations should be at arm's length: separation, not collaboration.

Subpart B of 45 Code of Federal Regulations Part 46 (CFR) identifies the criteria according to which research involving pregnant women, human fetuses, and neonates can be conducted ethically in the United States. As such, pregnant women and fetuses fall into a category requiring “additional protections,” often referred to as “vulnerable populations.” The CFR does not define vulnerability, but merely gives examples of vulnerable groups by pointing to different categories of potential research subjects needing additional protections. In this paper, I (...) assess critically the role of this categorization of pregnant women involved in research as “vulnerable,” both as separate entities and in combination with the fetuses they carry. In particular, I do three things: (1) demonstrate that pregnant women qua pregnancy are either not “vulnerable” according to any meaningful definition of that term or that such vulnerability is irrelevant to her status as a research participant; (2) argue that while a fetus may be vulnerable in terms of dependency, this categorization does not equate to the vulnerability of the pregnant woman; and (3) suggest that any vulnerability that appends to women is precisely the result of federal regulations and dubious public perceptions about pregnant women. I conclude by demonstrating how this erroneous characterization of pregnant women as “vulnerable” and its associated protections have not only impeded vital research for pregnant women and their fetuses, but have also negatively affected the inclusion of all women in clinical research. (shrink)

The nascent for-profit psychedelic industry has begun to engage in corporate practices like funding scientific research and research programs. There is substantial evidence that such practices from other industries like tobacco, alcohol, pharmaceuticals and food create conflicts of interest and can negatively influence population health. However, in a context of funding pressures, low publicly funded success rates and precarious academic labor, there is limited ethics guidance for researchers working at the intersection of clinical practice and population health as to how (...) they should approach potential financial sponsorship from for-profit entities, such as the psychedelic industry. This article reports on a reflective exercise among a group of clinician scientists working in psychedelic science, where we applied Adams’ (2016) PERIL (Purpose, Extent, Relevant harm, Identifiers, Link) ethical decision-making framework to a fictionalized case of corporate psychedelic financial sponsorship. Our analysis suggests financial relationships with the corporate psychedelic sector may create varying degrees of risk to a research program’s purpose, autonomy and integrity. We argue that the commercial determinants of health provide a useful framework for understanding the ethics of industry-healthcare entanglements and can provide an important population health ethics lens to examine nascent industries such as psychedelics, and work toward potential solutions. (shrink)

If the morphology of baseball is similar to that of the fairy tale, it is obviously not because baseball is a form of narrative art. As my title suggests, insofar as baseball resembles literature at all in the way it manifests itself, it is clearly much closer to drama. Baseball takes place within a fixed, carefully delimited space that may be improvised but is reserved specifically for the purpose wherever the game is institutionalized. It is an ensemble performance carried out (...) by specially trained "players" in front of an audience for whom the occasion is a festive event that occurs as a suspension of ordinary life. It possesses a plot that develops in a limited period of time from initial situation through complication to denouement and has a relatively large number of dramatis personae who are sent into the playing area at a given moment in order to perform specific roles. Dennis Porter, associate professor of French and comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, has published widely on nineteenth- and twentieth-century French and English novels. He is currently an NEH fellow and is working on two books: one on plot and ideology in the novel, the other, The Alibi of Crime, on detective fiction. (shrink)

In a 2012 review article, Anthony P. Maingot made a case for each generation rewriting history according to its own needs and preoccupations. Everyone, he suggested, has their own C.L.R. James. Everyone, perhaps, except students of international relations and international history, where references to James’s copious and critical body of work are less common. In the spirit of finding one’s own James, this article employs The Black Jacobins and James’s other magnum opus, World Revolution,1917–1936: The Rise and Fall of the (...) Communist International, to think historically about two interrelated processes of the twentieth century: the rise of the state, and the relationship between nationalisms and internationalisms. Along with encounters with revolutionary Marxism and pan-Africanism, James bore witness to the challenges of the state, and the tensions between nationalism and internationalism that were so central to understanding the twentieth century. (shrink)

Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu argue that non-traditional forms of cognitive enhancement (those involving genetic engineering or pharmaceuticals) present a serious threat to humanity, since the fruits of such enhancement, accelerated scientific progress, will give the morally corrupt minority of humanity new and more effective ways to cause great harm. And yet it is scientific progress, accelerated by non-traditional cognitive enhancement, which could allow us to dramatically morally enhance human beings, thereby eliminating, or at least reducing, the threat from the (...) morally corrupt minority. I argue that this apparently intractable dilemma is less difficult to resolve than Persson and Savulescu suppose. Their analysis of non-traditional cognitive enhancement overstates the risks and undervalues the benefits that such enhancement might provide. Once the benefits are better described, it is clear that non-traditional cognitive enhancement could be the means of our survival, not of our destruction. (shrink)

Large-scale data systems are increasingly envisioned as tools for justice, with big data analytics offering a key opportunity to advance health equity. Health systems face growing public pressure to collect data on patient “social factors,” and advocates and public officials seek to leverage such data sources as a means of system transformation. Despite the promise of this “data-driven” strategy, there is little empirical work that examines big data in action directly within the sites of care expected to transform. In this (...) article, I present a case study on one such initiative, focusing on a large public safety-net health system’s initiation of sexual orientation and gender identity data collection within the clinical setting. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews with providers, staff, and administrators, I highlight three main challenges that elude big data’s grasp on inequality: provider and staff’s limited understanding of the social significance of data collection; patient perception of the cultural insensitivity of data items; and clinic need to balance data requests with competing priorities within a constrained time window. These issues reflect structural challenges within safety-net care that big data alone are unable to address in advancing social justice. I discuss these findings by considering the present data-driven strategy alongside two complementary courses of action: diversifying the health professions workforce and clinical education reform. To truly advance justice, we need more than “just data”: we need to confront the fundamental conditions of social inequality. (shrink)

A range of positions persist in the proper interpretation of generative linguistics. The paper responds to recent work in this area that either weakly or strongly diverges from the non-contentful, internalist model presented in Collins (2008a). Against the sympathetic criticisms of Matthews (2008) and Smith (2008), it is argued that a crucial role for content in our understanding of linguistic theories remains obscure, although the discussion here will hopefully clarify the divergence between the parties as merely perspectival. Rey (2008) more (...) strongly argues that the non-contentful model is prey to some classic complaints. The charges are rebutted. Finally, the position of Devitt (2008a, b) is considered. It is argued that his most recent presentation of his brand of realism fails to speak to the fundamental complaints levelled against it, especially as regards the putative role of conventions in the explanation of unvoiced syntax. (shrink)

Intervencions a càrrec de Ronald J. Allen i Susan Haack sobre diferents idees del pensament de Michele Taruffo.

Physicalism is construed as an extreme form of reductive materialism, along the lines of thomas nagel's well-known characterization. without intending to undermine materialism, it's argued that the defense of physicalism, adjusted to meet graduated difficulties, typically fails to take account of the fact that purely formal considerations regarding predication do not relieve us of the need to demonstrate the propriety of making certain predications of entities of certain sorts; also, that shifting from predications made of persons and the like to (...) predications of events and states obscures, without resolving, the ontological problem of predicating these properties of these entities. an alternative form of materialism is sketched. (shrink)

Through the sixteenth century, the Christian tradition upheld the biblical denunciation of usury as the oppression of the poor and the neighbor. The church should critically retrieve this understanding as a contribution to the public discourse about the oppressive use of interest and debt in the current worldwide fiscal crises.

One of the most entrenched commandments in medicine is: “Never take away a patient's hope!” Often it is issued during the treatment of a terminally ill patient to spur and justify the continuation of aggressive life-prolonging efforts. Hope has been called one of a patient‘s “most powerful internal resources,” and “a powerful ally, our last defense against despair.” One editorialist confidently stated: “[C]ommunicating hope can improve patients’ prognosis.”.

The dominant academic paradigm and the main inspiration of anticorruption policies is the economic theory of corruption, according to which anticorruption policies should be focused on raising the costs associated with corrupt behavior. In this article, I provide three reasons to explain why anticorruption interventions in organizations inspired by the economic theory of corruption frequently fail. I contribute to the current literature by integrating the literature on constructive deviance, on personality psychology, and on managerial biases in ethical decision-making into the (...) study of corruption and into the design and implementation of anticorruption interventions. Research propositions are advanced. Research and practice implications are discussed. (shrink)

Minimalism is a theory, of increasing popularity in the United States in recent decades, that requires the judiciary to base its decisions on the most limited grounds available. One of its central tenets dictates that the judiciary, if at all possible, should base its rulings on statutory rather than constitutional grounds. Set in the context of the "War on Terror" and a number of U.S. Supreme Court decisions regarding the rights of prisoners held in Guanta´namo, this Article seeks to identify (...) the pitfalls of such an approach to judicial decisionmaking. Specifically, it shows how minimalism has led to legislative enactments that deprive the prisoners of basic rights and that, as a practical matter, compromise the capacity of the Supreme Court ever to adequately address the prisoners’ claims. Although minimalism has been defended on the ground that it furthers democratic values, such a view reduces democracy to majoritarianism as opposed to a broad-based deliberative process that gives content to the fundamental values of the nation. It also overlooks the important and constructive role of the judiciary in that process. (shrink)