Introduction The bioethics literature reflects significant interest in and concern with the use of genetic and genomic information in various settings. Because psychiatric treatment and research raises unique ethical, legal, and social issues, we conducted a scoping review of the biomedical, bioethics, and psychology literature regarding the application of genetic and genomic tools to psychiatric disorders (as listed in the DSM-5) and two associated behaviors or symptoms to provide a more detailed overview of the state of the field. Objectives The (...) primary objective was to examine the available bioethics, biomedical, and psychology literature on applying genetic and genomic tools to psychiatric disorders (other than neurodevelopmental disorders) and two behaviors or symptoms sometimes associated with them (aggression or violence and suicidality) to identify the disorders to which these tools have been applied, the contexts in or purposes for which they have been applied, the ethical, legal, or social concerns associated with those uses, and proposed recommendations for mitigating those concerns. Methods We used Arksey and O’Malley’s scoping review framework: (1) identify the research question; (2) identify relevant studies; (3) select studies; (4) chart the data; and (5) collate, summarize, and report results (2005). We relied on Levac et al. to inform our application of the framework (2010). The PRISMA extension for scoping reviews checklist informed our reporting (2018). We searched three electronic databases MEDLINE (PubMed), Embase, and PsycInfo (EbscoHost) for peer-reviewed journal articles in English to identify relevant literature. One author screened the initial results and additional screening was done in consultation with other authors. A data extraction form using DSM-5 diagnostic categories (excluding neurodevelopmental disorders) was developed and two authors independently each reviewed approximately half of the articles. Inter-rater reliability was ensured by double-coding approximately 10% of the papers. An additional author independently coded 10% of the articles to audit the data. Results In 365 coded publications, we identified 15 DSM-5 diagnostic categories in addition to the two pre-selected behaviors or symptoms (aggression or violence and suicidality) to which genetic or genomic tools have been applied. We identified 11 settings in or purposes for which these tools were applied. Twenty-two types of ethical, legal, or social concerns associated with the application of genetic or genomic tools to these disorders or behaviors/symptoms were identified along with 13 practices or policies that could mitigate these concerns. Conclusion Genetic and genomic tools have been applied to a wide range of psychiatric disorders. These raise a range of ethical, legal, and social concerns. Additional research is warranted to better understand the concerns and effective ways to address them. Advancing the literature to identify relevant ethical, legal, or social concerns and solutions to those problems likely requires greater attention to specific applications of genetic or genomic tools to particular psychiatric disorders and associated behaviors/symptoms as well as broad stakeholder engagement. (shrink)

Phenomenology gives rise to certain ontological considerations that have far-reaching implications for standard conceptions of patient autonomy in medical ethics, and, as a result, the obligations of and to patients in clinical decision-making contexts. One such consideration is the phenomenological reduction in classical phenomenology, a core feature of which is the characterisation of our primary experiences as immediately and inherently meaningful. This paper builds on and extends the analyses of the phenomenological reduction in the works of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty (...) in order to identify and explain its implications for our current understanding of the principle of respect for patient autonomy and the norms of clinical decision making. (shrink)

Frank A. Lewis presents a close study of book Zeta of Aristotle's Metaphysics, one of his most dense and controversial texts, commonly understood to contain his deepest thoughts on the definition of substance and related metaphysical issues. Lewis argues that Aristotle returns to the causal view of primary substance from his Posterior Analytics.

Some reasons are thought to depend on relations between people, such as that of a promiser to a promisee. It has sometimes been assumed that all reasons that are relational in this way are moral obligations. I argue, via a counter example, that there are non-obligatory relational reasons. If true, this has ramifications for relational theories of morality.

This volume is devoted to Lewis's work in ethics and social philosophy. Topics covered include the logic of obligation and permission; decision theory and its relation to the idea that beliefs might play the motivating role of desires; a subjectivist analysis of value; dilemmas in virtue ethics; the problem of evil; problems about self-prediction; social coordination, linguistic and otherwise; alleged duties to rescue distant strangers; toleration as a tacit treaty; nuclear warfare; and punishment. This collection, and the two preceding (...) volumes, will disseminate more widely the work of an eminent and influential contemporary philosopher. (shrink)

In the debates regarding the ethics of human organoid biobanking, the locus of donor autonomy has been identified in processes of consent. The problem is that, by focusing on consent, biobanking processes preclude adequate engagement with donor autonomy because they are unable to adequately recognise or respond to factors that determine authentic choice. This is particularly problematic in biobanking contexts associated with organoid research or the clinical application of organoids because, given the probability of unforeseen and varying purposes for which (...) a donor’s organoids could be employed and given the different ways in which a donor can relate to her biospecimens, a donor can value her organoids differently in different contexts and her reasons for autonomously permitting use of her cells and tissues in one case may not support an autonomous decision in another. In response, this paper has three aims: firstly, to make the case for why organoid biobanks ought to respect donor autonomy conceived as authentic choice; secondly, to explore the autonomy-respecting limits of established and widely prevalent models of biobank consent; and thirdly, to propose certain conditions that organoid biobanks ought to support or facilitate in order to respect donor autonomy. (shrink)

Criminal juries make decisions of great importance. A key criticism of juries is that they are unreliable in a multitude of ways, from exhibiting racial or gendered biases, to misunderstanding their role, to engaging in impropriety such as internet research. Recently, some have even claimed that the use of juries creates injustice on a large-scale, as a cause of low conviction rates for sexual criminality. Unfortunately, empirical research into jury deliberation is undermined by the fact that researchers are unable to (...) study live juries. The indirect sources of evidence used by researchers suffer from various problems, the most important of which is dubious levels of ecological validity. Real jury research—studying live jury deliberation—is controversial. However, as I argue, the objections to it are unconvincing. There is in fact a moral imperative to facilitate real jury research. (shrink)

Legal epistemology has been an area of great philosophical growth since the turn of the century. But recently, a number of philosophers have argued the entire project is misguided, claiming that it relies on an illicit transposition of the norms of individual epistemology to the legal arena. This paper uses these objections as a foil to consider the foundations of legal epistemology, particularly as it applies to the criminal law. The aim is to clarify the fundamental commitments of legal epistemology (...) and suggest a way to vindicate it. (shrink)

It is common for people to be sensitive to aesthetic qualities in one another’s speech. We allow the loveliness or unloveliness of a person’s voice to make impressions on us. What is more, it is also common to allow those aesthetic impressions to affect how we are inclined to feel about the speaker. We form attitudes of liking, trusting, disliking or distrusting partly in virtue of the aesthetic qualities of a person’s speech. In this paper I ask whether such attitudes (...) could ever be legitimate. This is a microcosm of the broader issue of whether people’s aesthetic qualities in general can justify the interpersonal valuing-attitudes that they so often cause. I draw from recent discussions of body aesthetics to articulate a pair of challenges. One challenge says that aesthetic judgements of speech are reliant on unjustifiable prejudices. The other holds that a person’s aesthetic qualities are irrelevant to whether they should be liked. Against these challenges I argue that some speech can bear aesthetic qualities which are not reliant on prejudice and which are relevant to whether the speaker should be liked. I develop this argument through an analysis of the concept of lyricism. (shrink)

This absorbing intellectual history vividly recreates the unique social, political, and philosophical milieu in which the extraordinary promise of Einstein and scientific contemporaries took root and flourished into greatness. Feuer shows us that no scientific breakthrough really happens by chance; it takes a certain intellectual climate, a decisive tension within the very fabric of society, to spur one man's potential genius into world-shaking achievement. Feuer portrays such men of high imaginative powers as Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, de Broglie, influenced by and (...) influencing the social worlds in which they lived. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that it cannot be fitting to be grateful to nature. I start by arguing that gratitude to someone/something can be fitting even if they do not intentionally benefit one. I then argue that a recent view on which it can be fitting to be grateful to nature faces counterexamples. Finally, I argue that it cannot be fitting to be grateful to nature, because it is fitting to be grateful to someone/something only if they manifest the (...) right kind of goodwill or care toward one. In particular, I argue that it is fitting to be grateful to someone/something only if they manifest a level of final care toward one beyond what can be legitimately expected or demanded of them. However, because nature does not manifest any level of goodwill or care, it cannot be fitting to be grateful to nature. I end by noting that it can still be fitting to be grateful that certain things are true about nature (e.g. that it provides many benefits to humans). (shrink)

This entry summarizes an emerging subdiscipline of both empirical bioethics and experimental philosophy (“x-phi”) which has variously been referred to as experimental philosophical bioethics, experimental bioethics, or simply “bioxphi”. Like empirical bioethics, bioxphi uses data-driven research methods to capture what various stakeholders think (feel, judge, etc.) about moral issues of relevance to bioethics. However, like its other parent discipline of x-phi, bioxphi tends to favor experiment-based designs drawn from the cognitive sciences – including psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics – to (...) tease out why and how stakeholders think as they do. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

To address longstanding workforce shortages, increase efficiency and control the costs associated with the modern health-care provision, there has been a worldwide policy to promote increased flexibility within the health-care workforce. This is being done primarily by extending the ‘scope of practice’ of existing occupational roles into what is referred to as ‘advanced’ practice. The development of the advanced practice nurse (APN) has occurred within the context of a shortage of medical staff, and the need to control cost. However, the (...) means by which substantially repurposed occupational groups such as these, are incorporated into complex, hierarchical organisations such as the UK national health service (NHS) remains poorly understood. Using modern sociological theory, the development of the APN role has been examined in terms of power, control, professional identity and gender relations. Each of the theoretical approaches used adds to the quality of the discussion, although none provide a comprehensive picture. However, when synthesised, they do provide an enhanced insight into the evolution of the role. It is argued here that by critically examining the development of the APN role, this will enable both a better understanding of, and the means to influence, its future direction of travel. (shrink)

Taking an analytic and historical approach, this work develops and defends Althusserian critical theory. This theory, it is argued, produces knowledge of how a particular class of people, in a particular time, in a particular place, is dominated, oppressed, or exploited. Moreover, without relying on a general notion of human emancipation, concrete critical theory can suggest political means for the alleviation of these conditions. Because it puts Althusser’s ideas in dialogue with contemporary social science and philosophy, the book as a (...) whole makes contributions to Althusser studies, to Anglo-American political philosophy, and to current debates in the philosophy of the social sciences. (shrink)

The ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas is typically associated with a punishing conception of responsibility rather than freedom. In this chapter, our aim is to explore Levinas’s often overlooked theory of freedom. Specifically, we compare Levinas’s account of freedom to the Kantian (and Fichtean) idea of freedom as autonomy and the Hegelian idea of freedom as relational. Based on these comparisons, we suggest that Levinas offers a distinctive conception of freedom—“finite freedom.” In contrast to Kantian autonomy, finite freedom constitutively involves (...) standing in certain social relations with others. And in contrast to Hegelian relational freedom, the social relations involved in finite freedom are not defined by mutual recognition, but by feelings of separation and even antagonism. Along the way, we promote a reading Levinas’s Totality and Infinity as a Hegel-style story of Bildung (development), and show how, on Levinas’s view, freedom can develop or mature in the life of the individual. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has coincided with the proliferation of ethical guidance documents to assist public health authorities, health care providers, practitioners and staff with responding to ethical challenges posed by the pandemic. Like ethical guidelines relating to infectious disease that have preceded them, what unites many COVID-19 guidance documents is their dependency on an under-developed approach to bioethical principlism, a normative framework that attempts to guide actions based on a list of prima facie, unranked ethical principles. By situating them in (...) relation to the key philosophical debates concerning bioethical principlism, we aim to explore the limits and limitations of pandemic ethical guidance documents as, specifically, ethics documents – documents that fulfil the functions of ethics as a fundamentally normative discipline. This means not only determining whether such ethical guidance documents can, in principle, provide adequate action guidance and action justification, but also, more importantly where pandemics are concerned, determining whether they support consistent decision making and transparent processes of justification. Having highlighted the problems with merely furnishing ethical guidelines with substantive ethical content in terms of principles and values, we argue that organizations that develop these documents should, instead, focus on the procedural dimensions of action guidance and action justification, which extend to questions regarding the make-up of the committees, panels and groups that develop such guidelines, the public transparency of justifications for specific pandemic-related advice or interventions and the development of explicit procedures for transparent and consistent decision making. (shrink)

The most eminent exponents of the ontological argument for the existence of God have been characterized as well by a common emotional ingredient — a concern with individual guilt. Anselm, Josiah Royce, Karl Barth, and Norman Malcolm in their respective ways have made the experience of guilt a central one in their metaphysical standpoints. The hypothesis is therefore advanced that the validity which such thinkers have found in the ontological argument is the expression of a frame of mind which we (...) can call 'logical masochism'; under the influence of such emotions, the ontologian bows his logical powers submissively before an entity the existence of which he cannot question because of the guilt that such questioning would arouse. Under such social circumstances, on the other hand, as during the eighteenth century, when the psychology of individual guilt subsided, the appeal of the ontological argument likewise declines. (shrink)

In the search for elementary particles, such principles are used as Gell‐mann's that ‘anything which is possible is compulsory’. This is an example of a teleological principle according to which the scientist tries to realize in science the kind of world that he desires on prior emotional grounds. Mendeleev's classical discovery of the Periodic Law and Table of Elements was thus guided by his mystical values. A mechanistic anti‐teleologist such as Jacques Loeb was indeed a crypto‐teleologist who wished science to (...) fulfil his radical, socialistic aims. Hoyle's ‘perfect cosmological principle’ projected conservative values, while such conceptions as Oppenheimer's ‘catastrophic collapse’, and Mach's Principle likewise had their teleological bases. Anti‐mystical and individualistic values inspired Bridgman's operationism. A ‘perfect operational principle’ would stipulate that every imaginable state of affairs would be operationally differentiable from others. Teleological principles are essential to the functioning of sciences; in the Theory of Theories, the principle of plenitude may hold: that for every mode of theory, there is some segment of reality for which it provides the best explanation. Naturalistic accounts of basic teleological principles seem inadequate. (shrink)

At the heart of Levinas’s work is the apparently simple idea that through the encounter with another person, we are forced to give up our self-concern and take heed of the ethical relation between us. But, while simple on the surface, when one tries to characterize it in more detail, it can be hard to fit together the various ways in which Levinas talks about this relation and to identify precisely what he took its normative structure to be, as this (...) is described in a number of apparently different ways, that are not obviously compatible or equivalent, such as “command,” “call,” “summons,” “demand,” and so on. In this chapter, we intend to focus on these different characterizations and show what makes them different while also endeavoring to find a way in which Levinas’s conception may nonetheless be fitted together into a coherent account of the face-to-face encounter that is at the heart of his ethics. We will begin by considering the different normative terms used to characterize the encounter in that text and show how they are conceptually distinct from one another; we will then offer a way to read Levinas’s position to nonetheless show how these different normative relations can be fitted together into a stable position. (shrink)

H. D. Lewis; I—Mind and Body—Some Observations on Mr. Strawson's Views: The Presidential Address, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 63, Issue 1, 1.

There are three points which Professor Schlesinger makes in his criticism of my discussion of the principle of simplicity. He holds that the principles of simplicity and verifiability may in actual use contradict each other. The simpler hypothesis will be rejected, he maintains, if it leads to unverified consequences.He holds that it is legitimate to add auxiliary hypotheses to one's theory, if it is desired to allow, let us say, for the creation of the universe by a deity, or to (...) exclude the possibility for all time of such events as a pail of water freezing on fire.He maintains with Bridgman that the cosmogonists' use of the simple notion that the same laws of nature hold throughout space-time leads to “perfectly hair-raising extrapolations” which a verificationist will reject. (shrink)

There is a considerable literature about causation. A great many investigators constantly employ the notion of causation in some form. But with the exception of a very few items, these investigators will find little of use in this literature.

Naturalism pervades Spinoza’s doctrines of The Ethics, but the contours of it often bewilder us. In this light, I consider the account of falsity, or having a false idea, as presented by Spinoza in Proposition thirty_five of the Second Part, its demonstration, and the subsequent note. Based on my interpretation I argue for the claim that his account has coherence and makes sense. Further, I examine the significance of what Spinoza says about falsity for comprehension of his philosophy overall, especially (...) as regards its contrasts with the philosophy of Descartes. (shrink)

The shape of the spectral lines of an optically active system interacting with one or more strong radiation fields in the presence of a perturbing bath is studied. A method based on the statistics of the fluctuation of the interaction between the radiator and the perturbing environment (the model Markov microfield theory) is used. This method permits the foundations of line shape theory in modern statistical mechanics to be seen clearly. Multiphoton processes and homogeneous, inhomogeneous, and power broadening mechanisms are (...) included in the analysis. The correlations between radiative and collisional processes which arise in nonlinear spectroscopy are included explicitly. A discussion of the new information that is obtained from these correlations in nonlinear spectroscopy is also presented. Several model systems are presented as illustrative examples of the theory. (shrink)

Created as a poetic and visual journey, Touchless Automatic Wonder spans twenty-five years and four continents. These striking photographs capture “found text”: the sometimes mysterious, occasionally humorous, often cryptic presence of words in the everyday landscape. In Koch’s lyrical sequencing, the images reveal obscure and eccentric voices in their various and distinctive roles on the daily stage of the world around us. This intriguing approach at the intersection of language, image, and the social landscape will appeal to readers interested in (...) contemporary art and photography, popular culture, and conceptual concerns both literary and visual. (shrink)

This is the first of a three-volume collection of David Lewis's most recent papers in all the areas to which he has made significant contributions. The purpose of this collection is to disseminate even more widely the work of a preeminent and influential late twentieth-century philosopher. The papers are now offered in a readily accessible format. This first volume is devoted to Lewis's work on philosophical logic from the last twenty-five years. The topics covered include: deploying the methods (...) of formal semantics from artificial formalised languages to natural languages, model-theoretic investigations of intensional logic, contradiction, relevance, the differences between analog and digital representation, and questions arising from the construction of ambitious formalised philosophical systems. The volume will serve as an important reference tool for all philosophers and their students. (shrink)

A general practice of precedent is one that can plausibly apply to any well-functioning legal system. This practice, which can be grounded in the Rule of Law, needs to make it the case that courts always have a legal reason for following relevant precedent – even if the precedent is morally suboptimal, so long as it is not evil. Without this reason, a precedent may be treated as having no legal influence for the later court (‘the Null Model’), and this (...) runs counter to the Rule of Law. On top of this reason, courts may have a general legal obligation to follow precedent – stare decisis – but this risks entrenching morally bad decisions in the law. We need, therefore, a type of reason that lies in between the Null Model and stare decisis as a necessary step for any future justification of stare decisis. But how can courts have a legal reason for following morally suboptimal precedent? They can have that reason, I argue, in virtue of a specific judicial duty, positively laid down in a legal source, which aims to advance the Rule of Law in an institutionalised way. In this article, I aim to explain and justify that judicial duty. (shrink)

The author discusses Jane Anna Gordon’s proposal, in the 2006 international meeting of the Caribbean Philosophical Association, of creolizing theory. He summarizes the research it generated, including Gordon’s monograph on creolizing political theory, and the set of articles in this forum on creolizing social and political identities and theory.

An account of Socrates' encounter with divine revelation.

This title provides readers with an on-the-job look at what it's like to be an animal rescue worker.