Vulnerability is one of the least examined concepts in research ethics. Vulnerability was linked in the Belmont Report to questions of justice in the selection of subjects. Regulations and policy documents regarding the ethical conduct of research have focused on vulnerability in terms of limitations of the capacity to provide informed consent. Other interpretations of vulnerability have emphasized unequal power relationships between politically and economically disadvantaged groups and investigators or sponsors. So many groups are now considered to be vulnerable in (...) the context of research, particularly international research, that the concept has lost force. In addition, classifying groups as vulnerable not only stereotypes them, but also may not reliably protect many individuals from harm. Certain individuals require ongoing protections of the kind already established in law and regulation, but attention must also be focused on characteristics of the research protocol and environment that present ethical challenges. (shrink)

This article explores the carnal dimensions of existence through ethnographic research in a mixed martial arts club. Mixed martial arts (MMA) is an emergent sport where competitors in a ring or cage utilize strikes (punches, kicks, elbows and knees) as well as submission techniques to defeat opponents. Through data gathered from in-depth interviews with MMA practitioners and participant observation in an MMA club, I elucidate the social processes that are integral to the production of an MMA fighter habitus. I examine (...) how body techniques are learned and become attached to the identity of mixed martial arts fighters. Using Crossley’s concept of reflexive body techniques, I examine how MMA fighters engage in body callusing through use of reflexive body techniques thereby allowing them to withstand the rigors of the sport. (shrink)

This article contributes to recent existentialist interventions in critical criminology (see Lippens and Crewe 2009) and offers the existential concept of ‘event’ as a guiding image for critical victimology. Whereas existential criminologists have examined crime and wrongdoing, very little attention has been given to victimization. I utilize the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and Claude Romano to offer a critique of existing approaches to victimization within mainstream criminology and develop an evential analytic to understand the event of victimization. This paper (...) brings together existential philosophy and victimology to offer an alternative approach to victimization. I engage with the ‘problem of number’ in conventional victimology and offer a critique of quantitative approaches to victimization based on the unsubstitutability and singularity of existence. Through a discussion of selfhood and embodiment from an evential standpoint, this paper moves beyond existing victimological approaches to identity. I also consider the relationship between victimization and trauma. In the final section of the paper I carve out an alternative research agenda through a discussion of bearing witness and events of victimization. (shrink)

Biomedical and behavioral research may affect strongly held social values and thereby create significant controversy over whether such research should be permitted in the first place. Institutional review boards responsible for protecting the rights and welfare of participants in research are sometimes faced with review of protocols that have significant implications for social policy and the potential for negative social consequences. Although IRB members often raise concerns about potential long-term social implications in protocol review, federal regulations strongly discourage IRBs from (...) considering them in their decisions. Yet IRBs often do consider the social implications of research protocols and sometimes create significant delays in initiating or even prevent such research. The social implications of research are important topics for public scrutiny and professional discussion. This article examines the reasons that the federal regulations preclude IRBs from assessing the social risks of research, and examines alternative approaches that have been used with varying success by national advisory groups to provide such guidance. The article concludes with recommendations for characteristics of a national advisory group that could successfully fulfill this need, including sustainability, independence, diverse and relevant expertise, and public transparency. (shrink)

To address, as Miller does, the text of Catcher particularly, we would argue that Holden's experiences of old age, physical repulsiveness, sex, aloneness and isolation, and even death are embedded in his full experience of society, and that his responses, moment by moment, bear the imprint of his total response to the competitive, dehumanizing world he is in the process of rebelling against and rejecting. He finds old Spencer pathetic not just because he is elderly and arthritic and snuffy (...) with flu, but because he is relatively powerless, not very well off, and naïve in urging upon Holden his teacherly prescriptions for life: be sensible, do your lessons, take care for your future—as if with one's own efforts alone could guarantee one's worldly future. This essay is a reply to disagreements raised by James E. Miller, Jr. to the Ohmanns' “Reviewers, Critics, and The Catcher in the Rye” . Carol Ohmann has also contributed "Virginia Woolf's Criticism: A Polemical Preface" with Barbara Currier Bell. (shrink)

I use the collection of “carnal ethnographies” of martial arts and combat sports assembled by Raul Sanchez and Dale Spencer under the title Fighting Scholars to spotlight the fruitfulness of deploying habitus as both empirical object (explanandum) and method of inquiry (modus cognitionis). The incarnate study of incarnation supports five propositions that clear up tenacious misconceptions about habitus and bolster Bourdieu’s dispositional theory of action: (1) far from being a “black box,” habitus is fully amenable to empirical inquiry; (...) (2) the distinction between primary (generic) and secondary (specific) habitus enables us to capture the malleability of dispositions; (3) habitus is composed of cognitive, conative and affective elements: categories, skills, and desires; (4) habitus allows us to turn carnality from problem to resource for the production of sociological knowledge; and (5) thus to realize that all social agents are, like martial artists, suffering beings collectively engaged in embodied activities staged inside circles of shared commitments. (shrink)

Shows that current elitist theories are based on an inadequate understanding of the early writings of democratic theory and that much sociological evidence has been ignored.

Carole Pateman is one of the leading political theorists writing today. This wide-ranging volume brings together for the first time a selection of her work on democratic theory and feminist criticism of mainstream political theory. The volume includes substantial discussions of problems of democracy, citizenship and the welfare state, including the largely unrecognized difficulties surrounding women's participation. The inclusion of essays from both a mainstream and feminist perspective provides concrete examples of the differences between these two approaches to democracy, (...) to questions of consent and political obligation, and to the relationship between the private and public spheres. This scholarly and highly challenging work will be of interest to students and researchers in political theory, political science, women's studies and sociology. (shrink)

Pateman challenges the way contemporary society functions by questioning the standard interpretation of an idea that is deeply embedded in American and British political thought: that our rights and freedoms derive from the social contract explicated by Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau and interpreted in the United States by the Founding Fathers. The author shows how we are told only half the story of the original contract that establishes modern patriarchy. The sexual contract is ignored and thus men's patriarchal right over (...) women is also glossed over. No attention is paid to the problems that arise when women are excluded from the original contract but incorporated into the new contractual order. One of the main targets of the book is those who try to turn contractarian theory to progressive use, and a major thesis of the book is that this is not possible. Thus those feminists who have looked to a more "proper" contract- one between genuinely equal partners, or one entered into without any coercion- are misleading themselves. In the author's words, "In contract theory universal freedom is always a hypothesis, a story, a political fiction. Contract always generates political right in the forms of domination and subordination." Thus the book is also aimed at mainstream political theorists, and socialist and other critics of contract theory. The author offers a sweeping challenge to conventional understandings- of both left and right- of actual contracts in everyday life: the marriage contract, the employment contract, the prostitution contract, and the new surrogate mother contract. By bringing a feminist perspective to bear on the contradictions and paradoxes surrounding women and contract, and the relation between the sexes, she is able to shed new light on fundamental political problems of freedom and subordination. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The role of the Catholic Church as conservative watchdog in the ‘culture wars’ of the 1970s and 1980s, with regards to issues of contraception, abortion and divorce, has perhaps obscured its more complicated stance on social issues. This article focuses on a significant shift in thinking with regards to the unacceptability of poverty and the role of the state in welfare provision in the 1960s and 1970s. It argues that in Ireland Catholic ideas, given a public platform by the (...) Second Vatican Council, had a significant impact on clerics and people, creating social justice agendas that could both influence government policy and inspire its critique. While obviously not solely responsible for the shift to the left that occurs in this period, this article highlights the significance of Catholic ideas in shaping attitudes to poverty and welfare in the Irish context. Reflecting on the longer history on the role of Catholic ideas in Irish society, this article concludes with the suggestion that the frequent alignment of the institutional Church and successive governments in many areas implies the need for further analysis of the influence of class interests in determining policy and shaping attitudes, interests which transcend the lens of church versus state. (shrink)

In his article “Beyond Point-and-Shoot Morality,” Joshua Greene argues that the empirical findings of cognitive neuroscience have implications for ethics. Specifically, he contends that we ought to trust our manual, conscious reasoning system more than our automatic, emotional system when confronting unfamiliar problems; and because cognitive neuroscience has shown that consequentialist judgments are generated by the manual system and deontological judgments are generated by the automatic system, we ought to trust the former more than the latter when facing unfamiliar moral (...) problems. In the present article, I analyze one of the premises of Greene’s argument. In particular, I ask what exactly an unfamiliar problem is and whether moral problems can be classified as unfamiliar. After exploring several different possible interpretations of familiarity and unfamiliarity, I conclude that the concepts are too problematic to be philosophically compelling, and thus should be abandoned. (shrink)

On the surface, developing a social psychology of science seems compelling as a way to understand how individual social cognition – in aggregate – contributes towards individual and group behavior within scientific communities (Kitcher, 2002). However, in cases where the functional input-output profile of psychological processes cannot be mapped directly onto the observed behavior of working scientists, it becomes clear that the relationship between psychological claims and normative philosophy of science should be refined. For example, a robust body of social (...) psychological research demonstrates implicit gender bias in the evaluation of others (e.g., Steinpreis, Anders, & Ritzke, 1999). Many expected implicit bias to be a major cause of women’s underrepresentation in math intensive fields of science; however, quantitative sociological research of hiring and manuscript and grant evaluation has discovered no gender disparity in outcomes (Ceci & Williams, 2011). Why might this be so? This paper will discuss methodological challenges that go beyond classic problems of external validity in extrapolating psychological effects and explanations to scientific communities. These problems include more complex external validity issues raised by the introduction of multi-process models of cognition (e.g., implicit versus explicit social cognition) as well as the reflexive role that folk and experimental theories of social psychology play in guiding the behavior of scientists at the individual and community level. (shrink)

Psychometrically oriented researchers construe low inter-rater reliability measures for expert peer reviewers as damning for the practice of peer review. I argue that this perspective overlooks different forms of normatively appropriate disagreement among reviewers. Of special interest are Kuhnian questions about the extent to which variance in reviewer ratings can be accounted for by normatively appropriate disagreements about how to interpret and apply evaluative criteria within disciplines during times of normal science. Until these empirical-cum-philosophical analyses are done, it will remain (...) unclear the extent to which low inter-rater reliability measures represent reasonable disagreement rather than arbitrary differences between reviewers. (shrink)

Scholars belong to multiple communities of credit simultaneously. When these communities disagree about a scholarly achievement’s credit assignment, this raises a puzzle for decision and game theor...

Quine argues, in “On the Nature of Moral Values” that a coherence theory of truth is the “lot of ethics”. In this paper, I do a bit of work from within Quinean theory. Specifically, I explore precisely what a coherence theory of truth in ethics might look like and what it might imply for the study of normative value theory generally. The first section of the paper is dedicated to the exposition of a formally correct coherence truth predicate, the possibility (...) of which has been the subject of some skepticism. In the final two sections of the paper, I claim that a coherence theory in ethics does not reduce the practice of moral inquiry to absurdity, in practice as well as in principle. (shrink)

Growing interest in workplace spirituality has led to the development of a new paradigm in organizational science. Theoretical assumptions abound as to how workplace spirituality might enhance organizational performance, most postulating a significant positive impact. Here, that body of research has been reviewed and analyzed, and a resultant values framework for workplace spirituality is introduced, providing the groundwork for empirical testing. A discussion of the factors and assumptions involved for future research are outlined.

Research on bias in peer review examines scholarly communication and funding processes to assess the epistemic and social legitimacy of the mechanisms by which knowledge communities vet and self-regulate their work. Despite vocal concerns, a closer look at the empirical and methodological limitations of research on bias raises questions about the existence and extent of many hypothesized forms of bias. In addition, the notion of bias is predicated on an implicit ideal that, once articulated, raises questions about the normative implications (...) of research on bias in peer review. This review provides a brief description of the function, history, and scope of peer review; articulates and critiques the conception of bias unifying research on bias in peer review; characterizes and examines the empirical, methodological, and normative claims of bias in peer review research; and assesses possible alternatives to the status quo. We close by identifying ways to expand conceptions and studies of bias to countenance the complexity of social interactions among actors involved directly and indirectly in peer review. (shrink)

_Contract and Domination_ offers a bold challenge to contemporary contract theory, arguing that it should either be fundamentally rethought or abandoned altogether. Since the publication of John Rawls's _A Theory of Justice_, contract theory has once again become central to the Western political tradition. But gender justice is neglected and racial justice almost completely ignored. Carole Pateman and Charles Mills's earlier books, _The Sexual Contract_ and _The Racial Contract_, offered devastating critiques of gender and racial domination and the contemporary (...) contract tradition's silence on them. Both books have become classics of revisionist radical democratic political theory. Now Pateman and Mills are collaborating for the first time in an interdisciplinary volume, drawing on their insights from political science and philosophy. They are building on but going beyond their earlier work to bring the sexual and racial contracts together. In _Contract and Domination_, Pateman and Mills discuss their differences about contract theory and whether it has a useful future, excavate the settler contract that created new civil societies in North America and Australia, argue via a non-ideal contract for reparations to black Americans, confront the evasions of contemporary contract theorists, explore the intersections of gender and race and the global sexual-racial contract, and reply to their critics. This iconoclastic book throws the gauntlet down to mainstream white male contract theory. It is vital reading for anyone with an interest in political theory and political philosophy, and the systems of male and racial domination. (shrink)

This paper questions the apparent silenc of Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms on the unconscious, in its double sense of the psychic structure and of the description of the imperceptible. Although Cassirer is engaged in a very fine phenomenological analysis of our experience of the world, under the prism of a critic of culture, and although he does not believe in the evidence of the self, the absence of the unconscious from his account shows precisely the force of his conceptualization (...) of the symbolic. Why and how does the theme of the unconscious absorb that of the symbolic? The article argues that the question has to be analyzed through “symbolic pregnance” (symbolische Prägnanz) and “concrescence” (Konkreszenz). Nonetheless, here, the concepts of “subject,” “reason,” and “representation” are considerably re-semantized and, therefore, displaced by the key concept of “symbol.” To analyze this problem, the prism of aesthetics will be fundamentally privileged. Symbolic aesthetics crystallizes these questions of perceptive phenomenology with a rare intensity, articulating the personal and the impersonal dimensions in a focusedway. The texts of Langer will help us to explain the field that Cassirer explored only in a discontinuous and fragmentary way. Our hypothesis is the following: when the double dimension (personal and impersonal) of the experience is intensified, not only does symbolic aesthetics go beyond the classical opposition between conscious and unconscious, but it also goes beyond the distinctions between form and affect, form and content, and formalism and expression. (shrink)

This paper considers a pair of mutually puzzling first-order intuitions: a case in which it seems both supererogatory for an agent to perform a specified act, and also seems as though were that act not performed, this would have been a failure of moral obligations. I argue that these intuitive reactions are difficult to dislodge and resist accommodation by standard accounts of supererogation. I then argue that this puzzle motivates a new form of supererogatory action: action that, though morally required, (...) is responding to moral circumstances or facts that the ordinary upright agent would typically overlook. (shrink)

In this study, we evaluate how individual virtues and inter-organizational management control systems influence buyer–supplier performance through relationship quality. Results from a sample of 232 firms confirm that virtues and IOMCS relate positively to relationship quality and performance, respectively. However, IOMCS lose their positive influence on relationship quality when considered along with virtues. That is, when both variables enter the regression model simultaneously, virtues win. This interesting finding has particular resonance at a time when research on ethics still needs to (...) reinforce its positive effects on the practice of management. (shrink)

In this title, new and established scholars demonstrate the application of feminism in a range of academic disciplines including history, philosophy, politics, and sociology.

The Abbé de Saint-Pierre, best known for his 'Project for Perpetual Peace', in fact left a much larger and more coherent body of political and moral writing, but it has been only partially studied. This book, the first systematic exploration of his entire corpus, offers a complete re-evaluation of this important author's contributions to the Enlightenment. From the first decades of the eighteenth century, Saint-Pierre set forth a pioneering vision of politics as the harmonisation of interests, anticipating Bentham as a (...) utilitarian. He imagines replacing the system of inherited power and clientele networks, which structured Old Regime society and determined the exercise of power under absolutism, with a rationalised, meritocratic and dynamic organisation. He argued for the political values of social utility and public good to take the place of the Christian ideals of perfection and the aristocratic ideals of personal charisma. As a deist seeking to reconcile morality and religion, Saint-Pierre argued that the search for salvation through active piety must also promote social justice and beneficence--and that only the indivisible power of a rationalised monarch, informed by competent elites, could carry out the reforms necessary to yield a government which would produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Saint-Pierre, thus, provided among the first arguments for an imposed welfare state, well before the sources more frequently associated with that idea--political economists, cameralists and the physiocrats."--Pages v-vi. (shrink)

To arrive at their final evaluation of a manuscript or grant proposal, reviewers must convert a submission’s strengths and weaknesses for heterogeneous peer review criteria into a single metric of quality or merit. I identify this process of commensuration as the locus for a new kind of peer review bias. Commensuration bias illuminates how the systematic prioritization of some peer review criteria over others permits and facilitates problematic patterns of publication and funding in science. Commensuration bias also foregrounds a range (...) of structural strategies for realigning peer review practices and institutions with the aims of science. (shrink)

One debate that metaphysicians of race have been consumed with since the 1990s is what we can call the US race debate, which is the debate about what the nature and reality of race is according to the dominant ways that ‘race’ and race terms are used to classify people in contemporary American English. In 2014, I contributed a defence of biological racial realism in the US race debate that utilized new results about human genetic clustering from population genetics. In (...) this paper, I will show that all US race theories have been wrong, including my own. This is because, as I will argue, the correct US race theory has a radically pluralist form. This is an instance of a metametaphysical position that I call radical racial pluralism. After defending radical racial pluralism in the US race debate, I explore valuable implications of the view for philosophers of race. (shrink)

An empirically sensitive formulation of the norms of transformative criticism must recognize that even public and shared standards of evaluation can be implemented in ways that unintentionally perpetuate and reproduce forms of social bias that are epistemically detrimental. Helen Longino’s theory can explain and redress such social bias by treating peer evaluations as hypotheses based on data and by requiring a kind of perspectival diversity that bears, not on the content of the community’s knowledge claims, but on the beliefs and (...) norms of the culture of the knowledge community itself. To illustrate how socializing cognition can bias evaluations, we focus on peer-review practices, with some discussion of peer-review practices in philosophy. Data include responses to surveys by editors from general philosophy journals, as well as analyses of reviews and editorial decisions for the 2007 Cognitive Science Society Conference. (shrink)

La « camera-réalité », néologisme qualifiant la nature du médium photographique, est un « objet théorique » qui interroge l’irruption de l’image photographique en philosophie. Siegfried Kracauer définit dans Théorie du film le réalisme propre à l’image photographique, en revisitant le concept d’affinité, dans une discussion serrée avec l’héritage kantien qu’il connaît parfaitement : il y va d’une redéfinition de l’expérience esthétique par l’enregistrement, entre déliaison et rédemption, le trait d’union entre caméra et réalité signant un effort conceptuel à notre (...) avis remarquable. (shrink)

The "Feminist Theory Reader" provides a revolutionary new approach to anthologizing the important works in feminist theory by incorporating the voices of women ...

The aim of this analysis was to examine the concept of time to rejuvenate and extend existing narratives of time within the nursing literature. In particular, we hope to promote a new trajectory in nursing research and practice which focuses on time and person‐centred care, specifically of older people with cognitive impairment hospitalized in the acute care setting. We consider the explanatory power of concepts such as clock time, process time, fast care, slow care and time debt for elucidating the (...) relationship between ‘good care’ and ‘time use’. We conclude by offering two additional concepts of time, plurotemporality and person‐centred time (PCT) which we propose will help advance of nursing knowledge and practice. Nurse clinicians and researchers can use these alternative concepts of time to explore and describe different temporal structures that honour the patient's values and preferences using experiential, observation‐based nursing research approaches. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the limitations of four major critiques of the work of Leavis made by Kevin Harris. It is argued that (1) Leavis's procedure of working with the concrete and particular and (2) the context within which he worked, dominated by the exponents of modernism, are glossed over by Harris so that Leavis's insights are not given due weight. Furthermore, Harris overlooks the significance of an Aristotelian perspective to Leavis's concern for value and thus underestimates literature's role (...) in furthering our understanding of what it is to flourish. (shrink)

Dans le Littré, le mot « étudiant » est ainsi défini : « Celui qui étudie [...] / Particulièrement celui qui étudie dans une université, et, en France, dans une faculté [...] / Au féminin, étudiante, dans une espèce d'argot, grisette du Quartier Latin ». À la fin du XIXe siècle, l'étudiante, telle que nous la concevons aujourd'hui, c'est-à-dire celle qui étudie, n'existe pas. L'étudiante est celle qui accompagne, voire qui « couche » avec l'étudiant, et non celle qui étudie (...) à ses côtés.. (shrink)