Using past episodes of climate change as a source of evidence to inform our projections about contemporary climate change requires establishing the extent to which episodes in the deep past are analogous to the current crisis. However, many scientists claim that contemporary rates of climate change (e.g., rates of carbon emissions or temperature change) are unprecedented, including compared to episodes in the deep past. If so, this would limit the utility of paleoclimate analogues. In this paper, I show how a (...) data adjustment procedure called “temporal scaling,” which must be applied to both contemporary and past rate data, complicates the claim that contemporary rates are truly unprecedented. On top of giving actionable recommendations to scientists, this paper advances the philosophical literature concerning the use of models that are known to be somewhat disanalogous to their target systems. (shrink)

Slavery has long stood as a mirror image to the conception of a free person in republican theory. This essay contends that slavery deserves this central status in a theory of freedom, but a more thorough examination of slavery in theory and in practice will reveal additional insights about freedom previously unacknowledged by republicans. Slavery combines imperium (state domination) and dominium (private domination) in a way that both destroys freedom today and diminishes opportunities to achieve freedom tomorrow. Dominium and imperium (...) working together are a greater affront to freedom than either working alone. However, an examination of slavery in practice, focusing on the experiences of American slaves, demonstrates that republicanisms’ acknowledged strategies for freedom-seeking, acquiring insulation from domination through law and through norms, do not encompass the full range of options. Slaves also seek freedom through physical absence, economic activity, and culture. The account of slavery and freedom developed here suggests republican accounts of freedom should either give up their focus on thresholds of freedom, or consider the possibility of a plural conception of freedom that extends beyond just freedom as non-domination to include freedom as collective world-making, or both. (shrink)

Menopause is an evolutionary mystery: how could living longer with no capacity to reproduce possibly be advantageous? Several explanations have been offered for why female humans, unlike our closest primate relatives, have such an extensive post-reproductive lifespan. Proponents of the so-called “grandmother hypothesis” suggest that older women are able to increase their fitness by helping to care for their grandchildren as allomothers. This paper first distinguishes the grandmother hypothesis from several other hypotheses that attempt to explain menopause, and then develops (...) a formal model by which these hypotheses can be compared and tested by empirical researchers. The model is then modified and used to respond to a common objection to the grandmother hypothesis: that human fathers, rather than grandmothers, are better suited to be allomothers due to their physical strength and a high incentive to invest in their own children. However, fathers—unlike maternal grandmothers—can never be sure that the children they are caring for are their own. Incorporating paternity uncertainty into the model demonstrates the conditions under which the grandmother hypothesis is more plausible than a hypothesis that focuses on the contributions of men. (shrink)

This article introduces several aspects of eighteenth-century discussions of slavery that may be unfamiliar or surprising to present-day readers. First, even eighteenth-century philosophers who were opponents of slavery often exhibited marked racism and helped develop racial concepts that would later serve pro-slavery theorists. Such thinkers include Hume, Voltaire, and Kant. Second, we must see slavery debates in the context of larger scientific and political debates, including those about climate and character, just political systems, the superiority or inferiority of the moderns (...) to the ancients, and the status of women. This section of the paper discusses the views of Montesquieu, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Sarah Chapone, and Mary Astell. Finally, many anti-slavery arguments of the time may seem too ‘soft’ to contemporary readers, as they appeal to negative effects or aspects of slavery rather than arguing for its absolute injustice. The last section of the paper compares Rousseau's arguments against slavery in The Social Contract with such arguments and concludes with a discussion of how Hume's understanding of humanity as a virtue may serve as a bridge between the two. (shrink)

The purpose of this chapter is to describe what we see as several important new directions for philosophy of medicine. This recent work (i) takes existing discussions in important and promising new directions, (ii) identifies areas that have not received sufficient and deserved attention to date, and/or (iii) brings together philosophy of medicine with other areas of philosophy (including bioethics, philosophy of psychiatry, and social epistemology). To this end, the next part focuses on what we call the “epistemological turn” in (...) recent work in the philosophy of medicine; the third part addresses new developments in medical research that raise interesting questions for philosophy of medicine; the fourth part is a discussion of philosophical issues within the practice of diagnosis; the fifth part focuses on the recent developments in psychiatric classification and scientific and ethical issues therein, and the final part focuses on the objectivity of medical research. (shrink)

Engineering the Climate: The Ethics of Solar Radiation Management is a wide-ranging and expert analysis of the ethics of the intentional management of solar radiation. This book will be a useful tool for policy-makers, a provocation for ethicists, and an eye-opening analysis for both the scientist and the general reader with interest in climate change.

Argument mapping is a way of diagramming the logical structure of an argument to explicitly and concisely represent reasoning. The use of argument mapping in critical thinking instruction has increased dramatically in recent decades. This paper overviews the innovation and provides a procedural approach for new teaches wanting to use argument mapping in the classroom. A brief history of argument mapping is provided at the end of this paper.

The relationship between entrepreneurship and ethics has largely been characterized as antithetical. In this article we develop a conceptual model integrating pragmatism, a philosophical approach that emphasizes experimentation and action characteristic of entrepreneurial leadership, with ethics to suggest that the two are not incompatible and that sustaining entrepreneurial leadership for value creation necessitates ethical action to build legitimacy. Case studies from the United States and India highlight the necessity of infusing pragmatism with ethics for sustainable entrepreneurial leadership.

Objective This work disentangles moral tolerance from moral relativism and reveals their distinct personological meanings. Both constructs have long been of interest to moral philosophers, moral psychologists, and everyday people, and they may play prominent roles in the feasibility of modern diverse societies. However, they have been criticized as devaluing morality and as producing overly permissive societies. Moreover, although they lack necessary conceptual implications for each other, they are easily (and often) conflated. -/- Method Three studies included nine samples (total (...) N > 3,200, 40%–50% female, Mage = 38–40, 83% white). Participants completed (online) new measures of moral tolerance and moral relativism, along with measures of 40 additional constructs. -/- Results Results reveal robust psychometric quality of the new measures (the Moral Relativism Scale and the Moral Tolerance Scale), demonstrate that the constructs are empirically overlapping but separable, and highlight their distinct personological networks. Moral relativism was associated with liberal political views and a lowered valuing/enacting of moral values. Moral tolerance was weakly associated with liberal political views but was strongly related to a broad range of both liberal and conservative moral values. -/- Conclusion This work yields new tools for investigating moral character, and it reveals the differential meaning of two important moral constructs. (shrink)

This paper considers criticisms of the author's Science and Scepticism advanced by Fred D' Agostino, Graham Oddie, Elie Zahar, Alan Musgrave, and John Worrall. The criticisms concern the following topics: the aim of science, unified theoryhood, the empirical basis, corroboration by already known evidence, the idea that scientific theories need be no more than possibly true, and the pragmatic problem of induction. Various clarifications and improvements result, and on the last topic the author significantly modifies his position.

In the UK, the writing of Doris Lessing has frequently been associated with left–wing politics and the second–wave feminist movement. Critics have concentrated primarily on issues of class and gender and have focused their attention on novels published in the 1950s and 1960s. This essay suggests that Lessing's work is over–ripe for reassessment in relation to ideas from post-colonial theory. Her writing repeatedly addresses questions about national identity and its imbrications with ‘race’. These ideas intersect in complex ways with her (...) more familiar analysis of gender and class. This essay discusses Lessing's recent novel The Sweetest Dream (2001), which was widely read as an attack on the political idealism of the 1960s. It relates the novel to her collection of essays, African Laughter (1992), her recent essay on the situation in Zimbabwe, ‘The Jewel of Africa’ (2003) and the second volume of her autobiography, Walking in the Shade (1997). Zimbabwe (previously Southern Rhodesia) is of crucial importance in these works. The article explores how Lessing makes use of notions of city, home and memory that can be instructively compared with some of Toni Morrison's ideas in her novel Beloved (1987) and the essays ‘Home’ (1998) and ‘The Site of Memory’ (1990). Lessing revises the notion of ‘home’ so that it becomes capable of both recognizing racial and national differences and moving outside them. She also interprets memory as productive for the individual and the nation only when it becomes, as Morrison would say, ‘rememory’: when it can acknowledge the importance of imagination in dealing with trauma and thus suggest the fluctuating, mobile status of identity. The article demonstrates that similar ideas about home and memory are present in her fiction, essay and autobiography, indicating that her intention is to explore generic classification and blur the boundaries between different methods of writing personal and political history. Lessing's work strongly suggests the possibility that apparently ‘fictional’ writings may be more fruitful than ostensibly factual ones in allowing individuals and nations to make sense of their immediate pasts. (shrink)

Two experiments are reported in which nondysphoric participants, not prone to excessive levels of rumination in everyday life, were asked to retrieve autobiographical memories using the Williams and Broadbent (Citation1986) procedure (AMT). In the first experiment, two variants of a self‐related category fluency task were interleaved among sets of autobiographical memory cues. In one variant (blocked) a normal model of analytic rumination was induced by grouping prompts on a single superordinate theme together. In the other (intermixed) prompts from several different (...) themes were grouped together. It was predicted that the blocked variant would reduce the number of specific memories recollected and increase the number of categoric memories relative to the intermixed variant. This prediction was confirmed and provides the first demonstration of a bidirectional causal influence of analytic rumination on the balance between specific and categoric retrievals. A second experiment showed no alteration in this balance when the same fluency manipulation involved animal‐related categories rather than self‐related ones. The results support a two component model of autobiographical retrieval being driven in part by the extent to which an analytic mode of processing is adopted in the short term and in part by the level of differentiation in self‐related schematic models. (shrink)

Soren Kirkegaard and Maurice Blondel are positioned together in a dialogue regarding the vision of the supernatural. Maurice Ashley Agbaw-Ebai draws from this a sharper image of the preeminent place religious experience possesses in human life and thought. Kirkegaard's lament of Christian lack of fervor and Blondel's concern that religion and philosophy no longer interact are both examined and Agbaw-Ebai concludes that they both indicate the same outcome: a "dominant leveling of society" that robs religion of its particularity. This (...) devastates the individual because he is no longer challenged to seek a relationship with God and expose himself to the supernatural. The boundlessness of man must be acknowledged or else his actions will never be understood, and religious experience and philosophy must coexist with mutual reference or self-knowledge will never amount to the discovery of supernatural destiny. And this, asserts Agbaw-Ebai, is the shared urgency of both Kirkegaard and Blondel. Like these philosophers who have preceded him, Agbaw-Ebai exhorts us to never allow the sense of our relation to the supernatural as a settled matter. The philosophy of religion we have inherited does not protect us from having to confront our own subjectivity with autonomy: to be God without God and against God, or to be God with and through God. (shrink)

Some scholars have recently found commonalities between Hume's motivational psychology and Kantian understandings of reason and obligation. Although this trend corrects certain misreadings of Hume, it goes too far in other respects. This essay argues that we can understand Hume's explanation of the artificial virtue of justice in a way that avoids such mistakes. I begin by considering Stephen Darwall's argument that features of Hume's account of justice reveal an inadequacy in the empirical naturalist tradition and underlying commitments to the (...) proto-Kantian tradition. I argue that a broader understanding of Hume's ethics and reinterpreting crucial passages dissolve Darwall's 'puzzles' about Humean justice. I defend Hume against the charge of inconsistency by suggesting an alternative interpretation of his theory of the will and his arguments about the justice's development as a virtue. Finally, I argue that Hume's theory of the will can consistently account for motives to Humean justice, properly understood. (shrink)

Since its introduction just over two decades ago, evidence-based medicine (EBM) has come to dominate medical practice, teaching, and policy. There are a growing number of textbooks, journals, and websites dedicated to EBM research, teaching, and evidence dissemination. EBM was most recently defined as a method that integrates best research evidence with clinical expertise and patient values and circumstances in the treatment of patients. There have been debates throughout the early 21st century about what counts as good research evidence between (...) EBM proponents and philosophical critics and even within the EBM community itself. Similar controversy arises about the relative worth of patient values and clinical expertise (and how these can be integrated). EBM has also evolved in ways that have come under scrutiny. Specifically, policymakers have used EBM research methodology to increase the relative importance of clinical guidelines that some clinicians have argued are tyrannical. Philosophers have addressed all of these controversies, and with very few exceptions have been critical of EBM. In addition most philosophical attention has been on the epistemic role of Randomization and evidence hierarchies, with relatively little attention being paid to the role of Diagnosis, expertise, patient values, and Systematic Reviews within EBM. (shrink)

Recent animal research suggests that it may soon be possible to support the human fetus in an artificial uterine environment for part of a pregnancy. A technique of extending gestation in this way (“ectogestation”) could be offered to parents of extremely premature infants (EPIs) to improve outcomes for their child. The use of artificial uteruses for ectogestation could generate ethical questions because of the technology’s potential impact on the point of “viability”—loosely defined as the stage of pregnancy beyond which the (...) fetus may survive external to the womb. Several medical decisions during the perinatal period are based on the gestation at which infants are considered viable, for example decisions about newborn resuscitation and abortion, and ectogestation has the potential to impact on these. Despite these possible implications, there is little existing evidence or analysis of how this technology would affect medical practice. In this paper, we combine empirical data with ethical analysis. We report a survey of 91 practicing Australian obstetricians and neonatologists; we aimed to assess their conceptual understanding of “viability,” and what ethical consequences they envisage arising from improved survival of EPIs. We also assess what the ethical implications of extending gestation should be for newborn and obstetric care. We analyze the concept of viability and argue that while ectogestation might have implications for the permissibility of neonatal life‐prolonging treatment at extremely early gestation, it should not necessarily have implications for abortion policy. We compare our ethical findings with the results of the survey. (shrink)

This clinical case report illustrates the potential dilemmas that can arise from knowledge gained through genetic analysis. These conflicts require careful ethical analysis of presumed duties to protect patient privacy and maintain confidentiality, the duty to warn a second party of a health risk, and the duty of veracity. While the questions raised by genetic testing of one individual for disease that reveals potentially important information about relatives, such as risk for Huntington chorea or breast cancer, have been discussed, the (...) continuing expansion in our capacity for sophisticated genetic analysis continues to present new and challenging situations. The resolution of this case and others like it requires close collaboration among the treatment team, geneticists, and clinical ethicists. (shrink)

Although activated spinal cord glia contribute importantly to neuropathic pain, how nerve injury activates glia remains controversial. It has recently been proposed, on the basis of genetic approaches, that toll-like receptor 4 may be a key receptor for initiating microglial activation following L5 spinal nerve injury. The present studies extend this idea pharmacologically by showing that TLR4 is key for maintaining neuropathic pain following sciatic nerve chronic constriction injury. Established neuropathic pain was reversed by intrathecally delivered TLR4 receptor antagonists derived (...) from lipopolysaccharide. Additionally, -naltrexone, -naloxone, and -naloxone, which we show here to be TLR4 antagonists in vitro on both stably transfected HEK293-TLR4 and microglial cell lines, suppressed neuropathic pain with complete reversal upon chronic infusion. Immunohistochemical analyses of spinal cords following chronic infusion revealed suppression of CCI-induced microglial activation by -naloxone and -naloxone, paralleling reversal of neuropathic pain. Together, these CCI data support the conclusion that neuron-to-glia signaling through TLR4 is important not only for initiating neuropathic pain, as suggested previously, but also for maintaining established neuropathic pain. Furthermore, these studies suggest that the novel TLR4 antagonists -naloxone and -naloxone can each fully reverse established neuropathic pain upon multi-day administration. This finding with -naloxone is of potential clinical relevance. This is because -naloxone is an antagonist that is inactive at the -opioid selective receptors on neurons that produce analgesia. Thus, these data suggest that -opioid antagonists such as -naloxone may be useful clinically to suppress glial activation, yet -opioid agonists suppress pain. (shrink)

In demonstrating how much Kant’s metaphysics of judgment relies on symbolism, this book clarifies Kant’s relationship to Romanticism. This connection sets the stage for an argument against the rational/irrational dichotomy.

Drawing from existing theory and empirical evidence on mindfulness, we posit that trait mindfulness is associated with less accurate memories of immoral conduct. We report three studies that provide evidence of this argument. One significant implication of this finding is that it provides a more balanced and complete view of mindfulness. Specifically, while mindfulness is widely promoted for its positive effects for employee well‐being, mindfulness may inadvertently promote a biased moral self‐perception based on inaccurate memories of one's past immoral conduct. (...) In a fourth study, we explore this implication and demonstrate that memory mediates the negative relationship between trait mindfulness and self‐reported immoral conduct. This research contributes to literatures on mindfulness, memory, morality, and to the growing body of work assessing the importance of mindfulness. (shrink)

Bioethical decision‐making in pediatrics diverges from similar decisions in other medical domains because the young child is not an autonomous decision‐maker, while the teen is developing—and should be encouraged to develop—autonomy and decisional capacity. Thus the balance between autonomy and beneficence is fundamentally different in pediatrics than in adult medicine. While ethical dilemmas that reflect these fundamental issues are common, many pediatric physician and nursing training programs do not delve into the issues or offer specific training about how to deal (...) with borderline cases.To meet this need, the Children's Mercy Bioethics Center in Kansas City, Missouri, created a program specifically dedicated to serving practicing, experienced pediatric health professionals. Our students come from various professional disciplines: they are doctors, nurses, social workers, chaplains, lawyers, psychologists, counselors, and hospital administrators practicing in pediatrics. (shrink)

By attending to how people speak about their gender, we can find diverse answers to the question of what it is like to have a gender identity. To some, it is little more than having a body whereas others may report it as more attitudinal or dispositional—seemingly contradictory views. In this paper, I seek to reconcile these disparate answers by developing a theory of how individual gender identity comes about. In the simplest possible terms, I propose that gender identity is (...) how we make sense of our gender subjectivity, the totality of our gendered experiences of ourselves. Gender identity is constituted by gender subjectivity, but this constitutive relationship is underdetermined. While gender subjectivity may narrow the range of inhabitable gender identities, it is always compatible with more than one. To arrive at a gender identity, we arrange gender subjectivity like building materials. My theory helps us understand how different people offer seemingly incompatible accounts of their gender identity without questioning their authenticity or validity. They simply arrange similar building materials differently. (shrink)