The allocation of any scarce health care resource, especially a lifesaving resource, can create profound ethical and legal challenges. Liver transplant allocation currently is based upon urgency, a sickest-first approach, and does not utilize capacity to benefit. While urgency can be described reasonably well with the MELD system, benefit encompasses multiple dimensions of patients’ well-being. Currently, the balance between both principles is ill-defined. This survey with 502 participants examines how urgency and benefit are weighted by different stakeholders. Liver transplant patients (...) favored the sickest-first allocation, although all other groups tended to favor benefit. Criteria of a successful transplantation were a minimum survival of at least 1 year and recovery of functional status to being ambulatory and capable of all self-care. An individual delisting decision was accepted when the 1-year survival probability would fall below 50%. Benefit was found to be a critical variable that may also trigger the willingness to donate organs. The strong interest of stakeholder for successful liver transplants is inadequately translated into current allocation rules. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop a metasemantics for relaxed moral realism. More precisely, I argue that relaxed realists should be inferentialists about meaning and explain that the role of evaluative moral vocabulary is to organise and structure language exit transitions, much as the role of theoretical vocabulary is to organise and structure language entry transitions.

The moral error theory generally does not receive good press in metaethics. This paper adds to the bad news. In contrast to other critics, though, I do not attack error theorists’ characteristic thesis that no moral assertion is ever true. Instead, I develop a new counter-argument which questions error theorists’ ability to defend their claim that moral utterances are meaningful assertions. More precisely: Moral error theorists lack a convincing account of the meaning of deontic moral assertions, or so I will (...) argue. (shrink)

As with all other moral realists, so-called relaxed moral realists believe that there are moral truths. Unlike metaphysical moral realists, they do not take themselves to be defending a substantively metaphysical position when espousing this view, but to be putting forward a moral thesis from within moral discourse. In this paper, I employ minimalism about truth to examine whether or not there is a semantic analysis of the claim ‘There are moral truths’ which can support this moral interpretation of one (...) of moral realism’s key theses. My results are both discouraging and encouraging: Whilst I will argue that the claim ‘There are moral truths’ cannot be shown to be both moral and capable of demarcating relaxed realism from irrealism on the basis of a convincing semantic analysis that would be compatible with relaxed commitments, the moral interpretation of moral realism can be secured by modifying our understanding of what distinguishes relaxed realism from error-theoretic irrealism. Yet, we will see that this moral interpretation of moral realism does not ‘tumble out’ of the semantics provided for its central claims. Rather, hard work needs to be done before we can fully relax. (shrink)

This article revisits, analyzes and critiques Bruce Chatwin’s 1987 bestseller, The Songlines,1 more than three decades after its publication. In Songlines, the book primarily responsible for his posthumous celebrity, Chatwin set out to explore the essence of Central and Western Desert Aboriginal Australians’ philosophical beliefs. For many readers globally, Songlines is regarded as a—if not the—definitive entry into the epistemological basis, religion, cosmology and lifeways of classical Western and Central Desert Aboriginal people. It is argued that Chatwin’s fuzzy, ill-defined use (...) of the word-concept “songlines”2 has had the effect of generating more heat than light. Chatwin’s failure to recognize the economic imperative underpinning Australian desert people’s walking praxis is problematic: his own treks through foreign lands were underpropped by socioeconomic privilege. Chatwin’s ethnocentric idée fixe regarding the primacy of “walking” and “nomadism,” central to his Songlines thématique, well and truly preceded his visits to Central Australia. Walking, proclaimed Chatwin, is an elemental part of “Man’s” innate nature. It is argued that this unwavering, preconceived, essentialist belief was a self-serving construal justifying Chatwin’s own “nomadic” adventures of identity. Is it thus reasonable to regard Chatwin as a “rogue author,” an unreliable narrator? And if so, does this matter? Of greatest concern is the book’s continuing majority acceptance as a measured, accurate account of Aboriginal belief systems. With respect to Aboriginal desert people and the barely disguised individuals depicted in Songlines, is Chatwin’s book a “rogue text,” constituting an act of epistemic violence, consistent with Spivak’s usage of that term? (shrink)

One major insight derived from the moral twin earth debate is that evaluative and descriptive terms possess different levels of semantic stability, in that the meanings of the former but not the latter tend to remain constant over significant counterfactual variance in patterns of application. At the same time, it is common in metanormative debate to divide evaluative terms into those that are thin and those that are thick. In this paper, I combine debates about semantic stability and the distinction (...) between the thin and the thick by presenting a new seamless inferentialist account of thin and thick evaluative terms which, despite subsuming them under the same metasemantic analysis, can nevertheless account for their varying levels of semantic stability. According to this position of ‘seamless metaconceptualism’, thin and thick evaluative terms do not belong to different categories, but are both understood as metaconceptual devices which do not differ in kind, but in scope. By providing the same analysis for both thin and thick terms, seamless metaconceptualism not only entails that the latter cannot shoulder the philosophical work that some have attributed to them, but also removes much of their surrounding intrigue. (shrink)

This article considers film as a form of artificial intelligence (AI). This non-anthropocentric hypothesis was first formulated in 1946 by filmmaker and theorist Jean Epstein and regards film as the thinking performance of a technical apparatus, the cinematograph, which is a manifestation of machine thinking based on the holistic entanglement of thought and world, film and philosophy. The article pursues an enquiry into ‘thinking’: one of the most prominent and oldest topics considered in philosophy, and also essential to art and (...) film. Thinking is not only characterised as a sense (like sight or taste) but as a creative and, ultimately, intra-active act. The possibility of film as AI is approached not only from a Deleuzian angle, long appraised by film-philosophy, but also through questions recently raised by theories of artistic research and the speculative-materialist turn in contemporary philosophy. The latter have as a common denominator a strong critique of anthropocentrism in Western philosophy; the article enquires into this criticism from different angles and applies it to the main hypothesis of this analysis – to regard film as a form of AI. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider the relationship between Matthew Kramer’s moral realism as a moral doctrine and expressivism, understood as a distinctly non-representationalist metasemantic theory of moral vocabulary. More precisely, I will argue that Kramer is right in stating that moral realism as a moral doctrine does not stand in conflict with expressivism. But I will also go further, by submitting that advocates of moral realism as a moral doctrine must adopt theories such as expressivism in some shape or form. (...) Accordingly, if you do not want to accept positions such as expressivism, you cannot defend moral realism as a moral doctrine. Similarly, if you want moral realism to compete with expressivism, you cannot accept Kramer’s take on moral realism either. Hence, moral realism as a moral doctrine stands and falls with theories such as expressivism, or so I shall argue. (shrink)

Quasi-realist expressivists have developed a growing liking for minimalism about truth. It has gone almost unnoticed, though, that minimalism also drives an anti-Archimedean movement which launches a direct attack on expressivists’ non-moral self-image by proclaiming that all metaethical positions are built on moral grounds. This interplay between expressivism, minimalism and anti-Archimedeanism makes for an intriguing metaethical encounter. As such, the first part of this dissertation examines expressivism’s marriage to minimalism and defends it against its critics. The second part then turns (...) to the anti-Archimedean challenge to expressivism and shows how to ward off this challenge by securing expressivism’s non-moral, metaethical status without having to abandon minimalism about truth. (shrink)

In organizational psychology the positive effects of democratically structured enterprises on their employees are well documented. However, the longstanding viability as well as economic success of democratic enterprises in a capitalistic market environment has long been contested. For instance, this has given rise to widespread endorsement of the “degeneration thesis” and the so-called “iron law of oligarchy”. By reviewing 77 qualitative studies that examined 83 democratic enterprises within the last 50 years, the present systematic review provides evidence that such enterprises (...) are able to economically survive and prosper. The majority of studied enterprises either resisted pressures toward degeneration or subsequently regenerated after undergoing degenerative processes. Only 9.5% fully degenerated in accordance with the degeneration thesis and the “iron law of oligarchy”, while 27.0% of the democratic enterprises showed diverse and mixed forms of degeneration tendencies, indicating that the notion of an “iron law” needs to be revised. Within the nine investigated cases of Mondragon not one single enterprise or group fully degenerated. Three cases showed degenerative tendencies, another three one degeneration tendencies and simultaneously regeneration, one case fully resisted degeneration tendencies and two cases regenerated. Further, this systematic review provides an overview of organizational and external conditions, non-/democratic or non-/participative practices and psychological phenomena that contribute to the degeneration, regeneration, or resistance to degeneration. The described examples of such practices may help practitioners to implement and maintain democratic structures and processes in contemporary organizations. (shrink)

This article presents the results of an evaluative research on the impacts of collaborative research in the evolution of the practices of researchers and associated teachers. It was a question of understanding how the collaborative approach was useful and relevant to the participants, how it enabled them to better take ownership of their role as an associate teacher, and how to transform their practices.

I shall hear address the question of whether or not feminist philosophers should accept Kantian markers for the boundary between the aesthetic and nonaesthetic realms. I shall look at the way gender operates at the point in Kant's philosophy at which the aesthetic and ethical attitudes intersect: in the experience of the sublime. As we shall see, the later developments within the Kantian system mean that women fit comfortably neither side of the aesthetic/ethical divide and, indeed, fall outside personhood altogether.

In this reply, I argue that the worries raised by Kurth and this coauthors are not fatal for the perceptual theory of emotions. A first point to keep in mind in discussing the analogy argument in favor of that account is that what counts is the overall balance of similarities and differences, given their respective weight. In any case, I argue that none of the alleged differences between sensory perceptual experiences and emotions are such as to rule out that emotions (...) are a kind of perceptual experience which can confer epistemic justification of our evaluative beliefs. Finally, I suggest that the perceptual theory is in a position to nicely capture what happens when we disagree about evaluative issues. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The problem of the captivated gaze has been taken up repeatedly in philosophy. Plato's Allegory of the Cave stands paradigmatically for this. Here, the gaze at the shadowy images prevents people from taking the path to the sun. Denis Diderot's critical reinterpretation of Plato's Allegory of the Cave is less well known. In Diderot, the view of the artificial light images is just as captivating as Plato's shadow images. Unlike there, however, Diderot does not distinguish between perception and cognition (...) but instead focuses on the significance of the seemingly unimportant shift of the gaze within the cave. Diderot determines the starting point of the realisation of freedom in the liberation of one's own gaze from the captivation intended by third parties. Prerequisites for the liberation of the gaze are the realisation of an interruption. It is shifts in the alignment of the eyeballs that become visible here as lucid intervals and which, in Diderot, become the starting point of power analysis and the site of revolt and freedom practice. In this article, I will show how Diderot's demand for enabling the individual realisation of lucid intervals is not first and foremost an aesthetic, but a highly political one. The criteria of art, which are defined by Diderot and have not lost their relevance until today, are based on his explosive insight that the incessant captivation of the gaze stands in the way of democratisation. (shrink)

What would a person look like if she were to possess a virtue like compassion or courage? This is the question that will come to mind when contemplating the hau.

In this paper, I develop an expressive account of disrespect according to which an action becomes disrespectful in virtue of making an explicitly or implicitly demeaning statement about its target’s moral standing. On my reading, we act disrespectfully whenever we (in word or deed) spread the falsehood that some people can be treated worse than they in fact can be given the correct account of what we owe to each other. After elaborating on the content that renders an action disrespectful (...) and explaining how disrespectful actions come to acquire their distinctive content in the first place, I go on to defend my account against rival approaches and stress its usefulness in detecting a previously disregarded moral phenomenon, namely, the risk of causing moral confusion. I do so by arguing that, given our nature as social cognisers, disrespectful actions are particularly well-suited to pollute our beliefs about what we owe to each other and what is owed to us. (shrink)

This manuscript uses competitive college football as a lens into the complexities of decision-making amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Pulling together what is known about the decision-makers, the decision-making processes, the social and political context, the risks and benefits, and the underlying obligations of institutions to these athletes, we conduct an ethical analysis of the decisions surrounding the 2020 fall football season. Based on this ethical analysis, we provide key recommendations to improve similar decision processes moving forward.

This chapter shows that rather than simply focusing on empathy and benevolence, Hume's notion of love may inspire a virtue ethics of love. It outlines the bare bones of a Humean virtue ethics of love, including a Humean account of general or agapeic love. A modern development of sentimentalist virtue ethics has been undertaken by Michael Slote. The chapter shows how such a development would differ from Slote's morality of universal benevolence. Making sense of general love as a virtue or (...) core of virtue in Humean terms requires one then to do two things: explain how general love is possible, and explain how it is fitting. The chapter concerns with the first of these tasks. To show that general love is possible through bonds of proximate identification based on sympathy through resemblance, one need to say more about what kind of love is general love. (shrink)

Recent culture wars, as fueled by right-wing extremists and warmongers over an identitarian and biologistic understanding of culture, require philosophy of culture to contradict and articulate its self-understanding. The article is structured along four theses that contest widespread assumptions, unfold their problematics and outline perspectives of cultural philosophy: 1. culture is not a being 2. critique is not enmity 3. technology is not a doom 4. history is not destiny.

La bioéthique est à la mode. Il faut " être pour "! La prochaine étude par le législateur français des lois " bioéthiques " en témoigne. Avortement, fabrication d'enfants " prêts-à-porter ", recherche biomédicale, clonage, génétique, rien n'échappe à la bioéthique. Et si, cheval de Troie pénétrant le droit, la morale, les déontologies, elle ne constituait qu'une habile machine de subversion des sciences médicales, d'appropriation globale de l'être humain. Des médecins, des philosophes, parlementaires, juristes engagés dans l'examen des doctrines et (...) mécanismes bioéthiques se sont posés la question. Leur réponse n'est vraiment pas celle du " consensus ". Elle impose au public savant et aux gens prétendus ordinaires et à leurs représentants dans la Cité, une réflexion, un retour vers une nouvelle liberté de penser. (shrink)

The “motive of justice” is ambiguous between three quite different categories of motivation. These are: the motive to perform a particular just act; the motive to set up institutions of justice, most particularly the conventions or “artifices” which regulate and establish property; and a motivational disposition, or essential part of a complex of motivational dispositions, that is characteristic of a person with the virtue of justice. The question now arises: Can justice as a basic virtue be understood as having at (...) its core a natural motive which is expressed in its various differentiated forms? More particularly, could Hume find such a motive? This chapter argues that compassion can be seen as just that natural motive. It considers two problems for the understanding of compassion as the natural motive for justice in sense, in relation to Hume's theory of the passions. (shrink)

This chapter provides a background for a virtue ethical map of Hume and Nietzsche. A map offers an interpretation of a terrain or subject matter that is “stylized,” “abstract,” and “simplified. A complete map of Nietzsche and Hume, whether or not it involves a virtue ethical map of their ethics, ideally requires a thoroughly explicated conception of their metaphysical perspective. The chapter offers instead a very abstract map of the main issues and the author's general position. Of great importance for (...) a virtue ethical map of Hume and Nietzsche is their emphasis on psychology. Psychological interpretation must not be confused with an “individualistic” interpretation, according to which persons are viewed as if they were not shaped by their cultures. Indeed Nietzsche frequently draws the attention to the virtues of different ages which may be embryonic in earlier ages. (shrink)

This collection explores the concepts and practices of masquerade as they apply to concepts and practices of war. The contributors insist that masquerades are everyday aspects of the politics, praxis, and experiences of war, while also discovering that finding masquerades and tracing how they work with war is hardly simple. With a range of theories, innovative methodologies, and contextual binoculars, masquerade emerges as a layered and complex phenomenon. It can appear as state deception, lie, or camouflage, as in the population-centric (...) American warfare in Iraq that was sold as good for the local people, or the hidden violence Russian military forces used on each other and on local men in Chechnya. Masquerade can also be part of a people's war logic as exemplified by the Maoist movement in India. Yet masquerade can also be understood as a normal social mask that people don to foreground an identity or belief from one's cluttered repertoire in order to gain agency. Elements of masquerade can appear in texts that proclaim seemingly unequivocal positions while simultaneously yet subtly suggesting opposing positions. Masquerades of all kinds also seem ubiquitous in fieldwork research and in resistance movements in war zones. Perhaps masquerade, though, is ultimately the denial of death lurking behind the clarion call of security, a call that bolsters war by making militarized policing normal to secure populations from terrorists. These interpretations and others comprise Masquerades of War. This book will be of much interest to students of critical war studies, critical security, conflict studies and IR in general. (shrink)

Der vorliegende Band enthält Predigten zu 56 Terminen des Jahres 1824 sowie ergänzend 28 dazugehörige Liederblätter Schleiermachers. Mit Ausnahme der zahlreichen Kasualpredigten und zweier im Urlaub gehaltener Kanzelreden ist Schleiermachers Predigttätigkeit damit für das genannte Jahr lückenlos dokumentiert. Die Editionsbasis bilden neben Drucktexten und einem Autograph Schleiermachers mehrheitlich die qualitativ hochwertigen Nachschriften des Theologiestudenten Johann Gottfried Andrae. Zu 22 Terminen existierte bislang keine Predigtveröffentlichung; zu 34 Terminen liegen bereits Drucke vor. Für 12 der insgesamt 15 von Schleiermacher selbst redigierten und (...) publizierten Texte konnte allerdings eine abweichende Vorlage ausgemacht und ediert werden, wodurch ein besonderes Licht auf seine Vorgehensweise bei der Herstellung der literarischen Predigten fällt. (shrink)

Climate change challenges the means of subsistence for many, particularly in the Global South. To respond to the challenges of climate change, countries increasingly resort to resettling those most affected by land erosion, heat, drought, floods, and the like. In this article, I investigate to what extent resettlement can compensate for the harm that climate-induced migration brings. The first harm I identify is that to individual autonomy. I argue that climate change changes the options of those affected by it to (...) the point that the decision to migrate can no longer count as a voluntary one. In some cases, I argue, the conditions of climate change coerce individuals. Second, I suggest that climate-induced migration severs the ties to territory, explaining the constitutive nature of such ties for accounts of individual autonomy. Third, I argue that severing ties with a traditional and historical territory challenges the capacity to imagine a future for individuals. I conclude that resettlement, even if actively planned and chosen, possibly providing gains in individual well-being and human flourishing, nevertheless harms individual autonomy interests. (shrink)

This chapter describes the development of a workshop series focused on helping students develop research lab ethics guidelines. The workshop was developed through a National Science Foundation-funded project that situates ethics education within the research environment. Students in four departments at a private research university were recruited to join a Student Ethics Committee that collaboratively developed context-specific codes-of-ethics-based guidelines for their departments. These bottom-up developed guidelines were revised in an iterative process, including feedback from faculty, other graduate students, and the (...) original Student Ethics Committee. The goal of the workshops was to promote the cultivation of an ethical culture in experimental laboratories by integrating research stakeholders in a bottom-up approach to developing context-specific guidelines and to identify factors that students consider relevant to the ethical conduct of research. After describing the workshop series, this chapter presents a qualitative content analysis of the guidelines. The guidelines developed by the Student Ethics Committees reflect the current culture of experimental labs in these departments and the ethical issues that students think are important. The content of these guidelines and the ethical issues the students focused on contrast in some key ways with what ethical issues faculty who head research groups saw as paramount. The chapter describes the first two iterations of the ethics education workshop module, a qualitative analysis of the first draft of these guidelines, and finally reflects on future work in this area of in situ ethics education. (shrink)

Student researchers encounter ethical issues daily, but little is known about their unique perspectives. This article presents the results of 30 qualitative semi-structured interviews exploring students’ views and experiences around ethical issues in research groups. During the interviews, students were asked to describe challenges and successes they have encountered in their lab, their conception of what counts as an “ethical issue in research,” and how they handle these issues when they arise. Against this background, the article discusses students’ conceptions of (...) ethical issues in research environments, the types of issues students reported facing, how these issues were ultimately resolved, and finally, the factors, internal qualities, and lessons learned that help students thrive in research environments, as well as some of the challenges students face – especially international students. Many of the ethical challenges interviewees discussed focused on interpersonal issues, highlighting the intense collaboration most graduate students have with their colleagues and supervisors. Findings from this study point to the need for targeted training programs for students and faculty supervisors focusing on building mentoring relationships and finding space in the lab where open communication can occur around ethical research practices. (shrink)

This volume examines works of the early Frankfurt School that are concerned with gender identities, institutions, and ideologies, as well as the ongoing relevance of early Frankfurt School ideas for contemporary feminist analyses of gender, sex, and sexuality.

Elephantine Revisited: New Insights in the Judean Community and Its Neighbors. Edited by Margaretha Folmer. University Park, PA: Eisenbrauns, 2022. Pp. xix + 187, illus. $149.95.

La genèse de la construction médicale de la ménopause est ici appréhendée en croisant des approches empruntées à l’histoire sociale des savoirs. Cela conduit en premier lieu à revenir sur la variété des termes employés pour désigner la « cessation des règles ». Ces évolutions doivent être examinées en regard des nouvelles échelles de la vie humaine élaborées au cours de la période. Est-ce qu’une sexuation des âges de la vie, absente jusque-là, y transparaît? L’expression « âge de retour » (...) désigne-t-elle un âge propre aux femmes comme le laissent penser certains auteurs? La médicalisation de la ménopause peut ainsi être remise en perspective, avant d’étudier de plus près les temps forts de sa construction au cours de la période considérée (1770-1836). Enfin, un dernier volet questionne l’existence d’un discours sur l’âge de retour au masculin et analyse la fabrique des asymétries sexuées dans les dispositifs hygiénistes destinés aux quarantenaires et aux cinquantenaires des deux sexes. (shrink)