In her 2004 book Carol Gould addresses the fundamental issue of democratizing globalization, that is to say of finding ways to open transnational institutions and communities to democratic participation by those widely affected by their decisions. The book develops a framework for expanding participation in crossborder decisions, arguing for a broader understanding of human rights and introducing a new role for the ideas of care and solidarity at a distance. Reinterpreting the idea of universality to accommodate a multiplicity of (...) cultural perspectives, the author takes up a number of applied issues, including the persistence of racism, cultural rights, women's human rights, the democratic management of firms, the use of the Internet to enhance political participation, and the importance of empathy and genuine democracy in understanding terrorism and responding to it. Accessibly written with a minimum of technical jargon this is a major contribution to political philosophy. (shrink)

_Material Feminisms: New Directions for Education_ provides a range of powerful theoretical and innovative methodological examples to illuminate how new material feminism can be put to work in education to open up new avenues of research design and practice. It poses challenging questions about the nature of knowledge production, the role of the researcher, and the critical endeavour arising from inter- and post-disciplinarity. Working with diffractive methodologies and new materialist ecological epistemologies, the book offers resources for hope which widen the (...) scope for how educational problems are interrogated, and provides a political counter-movement to neo-positivist, outcomes-based approaches within education. Inspired by writers such as Barad, Bennett, and Deleuze and Guattari, the book makes a radical break with cognitive, dualist, and universal conceptions of human subjectivity and intelligence in education. By taking its starting point as the co-consitutiveness of discourse, materiality, corporeality, and place, the book foregrounds educational practices as material enactments of multiple, non-linear, entangled, affective, and relational forces. It offers new insights into how gender, class, and ethnicity are constituted in, and by, material assemblages that are often submerged or ‘unseen’. This book is an essential starting place for those intrigued by what new theoretical accounts of materiality, posthumanism, and affect can offer educational research. Diffractive methodologies challenge readers to take a fuller range of actors into account than in ‘objective’ humanist methodologies, and in so doing to pay closer attention to what data is. It invites researchers to engage with long-standing feminist concerns about power and knowledge production in research processes. This book was originally published as a special issue of _Gender and Education. _. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to identify certain consonances between contemporary liberalism and classical pragmatism. I identify four of the most trenchant criticisms of classical liberalism presented by pragmatist figures such as James, Peirce, Dewey, Addams, and Hocking: that liberalism overemphasizes negative liberty, that it is overly individualistic, that its pluralism is suspect, that it is overly abstract. I then argue that these deficits of liberalism in its historical incarnations are being addressed by contemporary liberals. Contemporary liberals, I show, have (...) taken on board a surprising number of classical pragmatist insights and have responded to a surprising number of classical pragmatist criticisms. I thus argue that both contemporary pragmatism and contemporary liberalism have much to gain by joining forces. (shrink)

Abstract: The emergence of cross-border communities and transnational associations requires new ways of thinking about the norms involved in democracy in a globalized world. Given the significance of human rights fulfillment, including social and economic rights, I argue here for giving weight to the claims of political communities while also recognizing the need for input by distant others into the decisions of global governance institutions that affect them. I develop two criteria for addressing the scope of democratization in transnational contexts— (...) common activities and impact on basic human rights —and argue for their compatibility. I then consider some practical implications for institutional transformation and design, including new forms of transnational representation. (shrink)

Since the mid-twentieth century, the concept of the Turing machine has dominated thought about effective procedures. This paper presents an alternative to Turing's analysis; it unifies, refines, and extends my earlier work on this topic. I show that Turing machines cannot live up to their billing as paragons of effective procedure; at best, they may be said to provide us with mere procedure schemas. I argue that the concept of an effective procedure crucially depends upon distinguishing procedures as definite courses (...) of action(- types) from the particular courses of action(-tokens) that actually instantiate them and the causal processes and/or interpretations that ultimately make them effective. On my analysis, effectiveness is not just a matter of logical form; `content' matters. The analysis I provide has the advantage of applying to ordinary, everyday procedures such as recipes and methods, as well as the more refined procedures of mathematics and computer science. It also has the virtue of making better sense of the physical possibilities for hypercomputation than the received view and its extensions, e.g. Turing's o-machines, accelerating machines. (shrink)

When naming certain hand-held, man-made tools, American Sign Language signers exhibit either of two iconic strategies: a handling strategy, where the hands show holding or grasping an imagined object in action, or an instrument strategy, where the hands represent the shape or a dimension of the object in a typical action. The same strategies are also observed in the gestures of hearing nonsigners identifying pictures of the same set of tools. In this paper, we compare spontaneously created gestures from hearing (...) nonsigning participants to commonly used lexical signs in ASL. Signers and gesturers were asked to respond to pictures of tools and to video vignettes of actions involving the same tools. Nonsigning gesturers overwhelmingly prefer the handling strategy for both the Picture and Video conditions. Nevertheless, they use more instrument forms when identifying tools in pictures, and more handling forms when identifying actions with tools. We found that ASL signers generally favor the instrument strategy when naming tools, but when describing tools being used by an actor, they are significantly more likely to use more handling forms. The finding that both gesturers and signers are more likely to alternate strategies when the stimuli are pictures or video suggests a common cognitive basis for differentiating objects from actions. Furthermore, the presence of a systematic handling/instrument iconic pattern in a sign language demonstrates that a conventionalized sign language exploits the distinction for grammatical purpose, to distinguish nouns and verbs related to tool use. (shrink)

A common early narrative that arose as people struggled to cope with their new lives under COVID-19 centered on a platitude about the pandemic being “the great leveler.” But the pretense that we are equally vulnerable—or that we’re “alone together” across lines of race, gender, and class—was a comforting lie. Chronicling the timeline of media talking points seen over the past few months, I argue that social privilege continues to structure the narratives many people use to process life under the (...) pandemic, even while material conditions are much worse for those not in charge of these narratives. At the same time, however, I argue that the pandemic might be setting the stage for genuinely new collective responses to social inequalities, including the long-overdue uprisings inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement. (shrink)

To contribute more effectively to conservation reform, environmental ethics needs a motivational turn, referenced to the best scientific information about motivation. I address the pivotal questions What actually motivates people to conserve nature? and What ought to motivate people to conserve nature? by proposing a framework for understanding motivations and developing motivationally relevant criteria for environmental ethics. The need for an adequate philosophy of psychology for moral philosophy, identified by Elizabeth Anscombe 50 years ago, remains. Only from a psychologically informed (...) motivational framework for morality can ethicists understand and address the widespread rhetoric behaviors gap plaguing conservation. (shrink)

Representing species-specific proteins and protein complexes in ontologies that are both human and machine-readable facilitates the retrieval, analysis, and interpretation of genome-scale data sets. Although existing protin-centric informatics resources provide the biomedical research community with well-curated compendia of protein sequence and structure, these resources lack formal ontological representations of the relationships among the proteins themselves. The Protein Ontology (PRO) Consortium is filling this informatics resource gap by developing ontological representations and relationships among proteins and their variants and modified forms. Because (...) proteins are often functional only as members of stable protein complexes, the PRO Consortium, in collaboration with existing protein and pathway databases, has launched a new initiative to implement logical and consistent representation of protein complexes. We describe here how the PRO Consortium is meeting the challenge of representing species-specific protein complexes, how protein complex representation in PRO supports annotation of protein complexes and comparative biology, and how PRO is being integrated into existing community bioinformatics resources. The PRO resource is accessible at http://pir.georgetown.edu/pro/. (shrink)

Arguments in favor of legalized assisted suicide often center on issues of personal privacy and freedom of choice over one's body. Many disability advocates assert, however, that autonomy arguments neglect the complex sociopolitical determinants of despair for people with disabilities. Specifically, they argue that social approval of suicide for individuals with irreversible conditions is discriminatory and that relaxing restrictions on assisted suicide would jeopardize, not advance, the freedom of persons with disabilities to direct the lives they choose. This paper examines (...) the idea promoted by some proponents of assisted suicide that it is reasonable to be depressed about one's diminished quality of life in cases of irreversible illness or disability and, therefore, such depression should not call into question the individual's competence to request assistance in dying. The concept of rational depression is defined and examined in the context of: four real-life cases involving individuals with disabilities who requested assistance in dying; a set of criteria commonly applied to decision-making to determine rationality; and research bearing on the emotional status of people with disabilities. It is concluded that although disability is associated with particular socially mediated stressors, there is no theoretical or empirical evidence to indicate that depression and its role in the right to die is dynamically different, more natural, or more reasonable for disabled people than for non-disabled people. (shrink)

Criminal law and the proceedings surrounding it work, at least in theory, much like an author works when writing a play or a novel. Both the lawyer and the writer follow traditional formulae that allow them to create and express a vision of reality. When done well, the reality created is virtually seamless. This, however, is the point at which law and literary works diverge. Although we embrace creativity in literary endeavors, we would prefer that the foundation of our legal (...) system be something more substantial. Unfortunately, where US. criminal HIV exposure statutes are concerned, there appears to be little if any concrete connection between proscribed behaviors and what we know about HIV transmission risk. Twenty-four states in the U.S. make it a criminal offense for a person who has HIV to expose another to the virus through consensual sexual activities. The relationship between the activities prohibited by these laws and actual risk of virus transmission is tenuous at best. (shrink)

The pluralism of methodologies and severe time constraints pose important challenges to pedagogy in clinical ethics. We designed a step-by-step student handbook to operate within such constraints and to respect the methodological pluralism of bioethics and clinical ethics. The handbook comprises six steps: Step 1: What are the facts of the case?; Step 2: What are your obligations to your patient?; Step 3: What are your obligations to third parties to your relationship with the patient?; Step 4: Do your obligations (...) converge or conflict?; Step 5: What is the strongest objection that could be made to the identification of convergence in step 4 or the arguments in step 4? How can this objection be effectively countered?; and Step 6: How could the ethical conflict, or perceived ethical conflict, have been prevented? (shrink)

This paper explores the character of emotion and its value in understanding ethical dilemmas in work organisations. Specifically, we examine the emotional labour of human resource professionals. Through in-depth interviews and diary study, we uncover the emotional and ethical struggles of HRPs as they search for the ‘right thing to do’ in situated interaction. Through the lens of emotion, we chart the process of how the very framing of what is deemed ‘right’ can move from the social to the moral (...) order and vice versa. Based on our findings, we contribute to understanding the linkages between emotional and ethical dilemmas, and how expectations of multiple ‘others’ at the individual, interpersonal and organisational level shape and constrain ethical choices. (shrink)

Discrimination represents an important moral problem in the field of business ethics, and is often directed against minority groups. While most of the extant literature studies discrimination against employees, this paper studies discrimination against minority customers, addressing whether customers speaking English with an accent are discriminated against when contacting companies with a complaint. We draw upon the two literature streams of business ethics and service recovery to address discrimination in the service recovery process, as the recovery process after a service (...) failure constitutes a critical incident for customers, in which discrimination would be a particularly important moral problem. The findings confirm that customers speaking with an accent are discriminated against, as employees may evaluate customers as both less credible and less competent depending on their accent. We further show that this discrimination extends to negative outcomes: service employees offer customers speaking with an accent lower compensation, and are less likely to go the extra mile for them. Having identified the existence of a discriminatory practice in the service recovery process, we further uncover both an underlying reason and a potential solution. Our results show that employees’ level of cultural intelligence helps alleviate discrimination. We conclude that companies could benefit from including cultural intelligence in the recruitment and training of their employees. (shrink)

Rovane explores eight related claims: persons are not merely rational, but possess full reflective rationality; there is a single overarching normative requirement that rationality places on persons, which is to achieve overall rational unity within themselves; beings who possess full reflective rationality can enter into distinctively interpersonal relations, which involve efforts at rational influence from within the space of reasons; a significant number of moral considerations speak in favor of defining the person as a reflective rational agent; this definition of (...) the person has led Locke and others to distinguish personal identity from animal identity; although it is a platitude that a person has special reason to be concerned for its own well being, it is not obvious how best to account for that platitude; groups of human beings and parts of human beings might qualify as individual agents and, hence, as individual persons in their own right; there is a sense in which the normative requirements of rationality are not categorical but merely hypothetical. (shrink)

Marie-Anne Boivin a été en son temps une des sages-femmes françaises les plus célèbres. Son parcours professionnel et scientifique est présenté ici, illustrant l’espace laissé aux femmes dans les professions médicales. Reconnue d’abord pour ses ouvrages techniques concernant l’obstétrique, elle sort de son champ traditionnel de compétence pour aborder de façon novatrice la gynécologie naissante, à l’instar des médecins, avec son Traité pratique des maladies de l’utérus (1833), devenu un classique. Cette œuvre scientifique lui vaut un succès d’estime, mais ne (...) lui permet pas d’atteindre une véritable reconnaissance institutionnelle dans son pays. (shrink)

Behavioral weight loss interventions that promote healthy eating as a way to achieve and maintain healthy weights do not work for most people. Most participants encounter significant challenges to behavior change and do not lose weight or maintain meaningful weight loss. For some, there may be negative consequences of participating in a BWLI, including social, psychological and economic costs. The literature is largely silent on these negative unintended consequences, but they are important for both practical and ethical reasons. If efforts (...) to eat healthier have too many negative consequences for individuals and groups, then these efforts are unlikely to be effective, and promoting them may not always be ethical; this would boost the case for moving away from individual-focused efforts as part of healthy eating efforts. Alternatively, if we can make BWLI interventions more effective and more ethical by mitigating these unintended consequences, then it may be too soon to give up on individual-focused efforts. We make a case for systematic assessment and reporting of the unintended consequences of BWLI. This could contribute to more effective and ethical BWLI and inform obesity interventions and policies more broadly. (shrink)

An affectionate and thoughtful look at the history of county fairs and their tradition and persistence today reveals the county fair as an important institution that helped define America as a nation of free-thinking, self-reliant, and ...

Friedrich Nietzsche has emerged as one of the most important and influential modern philosophers. For several decades, the book series Monographien und Texte zur Nietzsche-Forschung (MTNF) has set the agenda in a rapidly growing and changing field of Nietzsche scholarship. The scope of the series is interdisciplinary and international in orientation reflects the entire spectrum of research on Nietzsche, from philosophy to literary studies and political theory. The series publishes monographs and edited volumes that undergo a strict peer-review process. The (...) book series is led by an international team of editors, whose work represents the full range of current Nietzsche scholarship. (shrink)

The first book of NE is organised on the model of investigating definitions described in the second Book of the Posterior Analytics, although, of course, with some adaptation due to the subject matter. It first establishes if the object exists and looks for the meaning of the terms used in common language to indicate it, next considers some necessary qualities of the object and then concludes with a definition of the object. We find there a dialectical syllogism of definition, and (...) not the procedure in three steps described in NE VII 1, sometimes called 'the method of ethics'. In fact, the method described in NE VII 1 does not apply to the first book of the NE. Its relevance for the NE has been somehow exaggerated. (shrink)

Why is America again unjustly at war? Why is its politics distorted by wedge issues like abortion and gay marriage? Why is anti-Semitism still so powerfully resurgent? Such contradictions within democracies arise from a patriarchal psychology still alive in our personal and political lives in tension with the equal voice that is the basis of democracy. This book joins a psychological approach with a political-theoretical one that traces both this psychology and resistance to it to the Roman Republic and Empire (...) and to three Latin masterpieces: Virgil's Aeneid, Apuleius's The Golden Ass, and Augustine's Confessions. In addition, this book explains many other aspects of our present situation including why movements of ethical resistance are often accompanied by a freeing of sexuality and why we are witnessing an aggressive fundamentalism at home and abroad. (shrink)

This chapter argues that doubts about the scientific status of the field sciences often rest on mistaken preconceptions about the nature of the evaluative relation between empirical evidence and hypothesis or theory, namely, that it is some sort of formal logical relation. It argues that there is a potentially more fruitful approach to understanding the nature of the support offered by empirical evidence to scientific hypotheses. The first part of the chapter briefly reviews the traditional philosophical take on the scientific (...) method in order to clarify its most serious problems. It shows that these problems are greatly exacerbated when science moves from the artificially controlled environment of the laboratory to the messy uncontrollable world of nature. The second part ferrets out some highly general, causal components in the methodological reasoning of nonhistorical field scientists. It argues that differences in patterns of evidential reasoning in the experimental sciences versus the field sciences, and in the historical versus nonhistorical field sciences, seem tailored to pervasive causal differences in their epistemic situations. (shrink)