As early as 1981, about 1 year before Shechtman’s discovery of an actual quasicrystal, Alan L. Mackay discussed, in a seminal paper, the first steps for the expansion of crystallography toward its modern phase. In this phase, new possibilities of structures and order, such as the structures of five-fold symmetry, for crystals have been discovered. Medieval Islamic decorators as well as Albrecht Dürer, Johannes Kepler, Roger Penrose, Mackay himself, and other pioneer crystallographers raised important contributions to the theoretical (...) discovery of crystalline possibilities long before or independently of the discovery of their actual existence. In this paper, I discuss further the philosophical significance of Mackay’s theoretical discovery and his contribution to the expansion of pure geometrical crystallography, biological crystallography, and generalized crystallography. (shrink)

This chapter examines the stages of processing meta‐theory (SPM) that has guided construction of theories in psychology during the past 350 years, from philosopher René Descartes in seventeenth‐century France to neuropsychologists Carl Wernicke and Paul Broca in nineteenth‐century Europe to psychologists Dominic Massaro and Alan Baddeley in late twentieth‐century America and Britain. The most basic SPM assumptions are that processing and storage of information take place within a finite number of autonomous modules or stages, and that some stages are sequentially (...) ordered with respect to others. Flowcharts typically summarize these assumptions. The traditional stages of processing for verbal information are comprehension, storage, retrieval, and production. SPM flowcharts can add new stages and can alter old labels to represent new types of information processing, but whatever the labels, the stages must be finite in number, distinct, independent, and sequentially ordered between input and output. (shrink)

Journal of Social Philosophy, EarlyView.

In this article, I ask whether a principle analogous to the principle of clinical equipoise should govern the design and conduct of RCTs evaluating the effectiveness of policy interventions. I answer this question affirmatively, and introduce and defend the principle of policy equipoise. According to this principle, all arms of a policy RCT must be, at minimum, in a state of equipoise with the best proven policy that is also morally and practically attainable and sustainable. For all arms of a (...) policy RCT, policy experts must either reasonably disagree about whether the trial arms are more effective than this policy, or know that they are. (shrink)

In their Target Article, “Promoting Ethical Payment in Human Infection Challenge Studies,” Lynch et al. propose a framework for ethical payment to research participants and apply it to the c...

In this commentary on Brown and colleagues’ paper, entitled ‘Against Moral Responsibilisation of Health: Prudential Responsibility and Health Promotion’, I highlight the tension between individual responsibility—even when this is prudential and not moral—and systemic factors that impact people's health. Brown and colleagues and I agree that individuals are frequently held inappropriately responsible for health-related behaviours or diseases that have become associated with the so-called ‘lifestyle’ diseases. We further agree that health is an instrumental value to people, allowing them to achieve (...) their goals or plans. However, while Brown and colleagues argue that health promotion is justified in providing education campaigns that highlight the pragmatic reasons people have for improving their health-related behaviours, I argue that this amounts to the same inaction on systemic issues as holding individuals morally responsible. Further, without action on systemic issues such as the social determinants of health, some people lack the kinds of future-oriented pragmatic reasons that Brown and colleagues place at the centre of their argument. Rather, for some groups, the pragmatic thing is to enjoy current pleasures even if unhealthy, rather than to forego them for the sake of health in a mythical future. (shrink)

A person of average height would assert a truth by the conditional ‘if I were seven feet tall, I would be taller than I am,’ in which an indicative clause ‘I am’ is embedded in a subjunctive conditional. By contrast, no one would assert a truth by ‘if I were seven feet tall, I would be taller than I would be’ or ‘if I am seven feet tall, I am taller than I am’. These examples exemplify the fact that whether (...) a sentence's evaluation remains at the actual world in the scope of a modal or conditional depends on the combination of mood in the embedded and matrix clauses rather than, as is commonly thought, just on the presence of an operator ‘actually’. This essay argues that this phenomenon provides evidence that mood admits of bound and free readings along the lines of tenses and pronouns. It therefore favors the hypothesis that natural language contains variables and quantifiers for possible worlds in the object language. This, in turn, requires that the truth of a semantic value of a sentence (or whatever structure is embedded in a modal) be relativized to a sequence of worlds rather than to an individual world, and thus be distinguished from a proposition in the traditional sense. The essay also compares the framework defended with an alternative account of similar phenomena by Kai Wehmeier. (shrink)

The duty to rescue is a highly plausible and powerful ethical principle. It requires agents to assist others in extreme need in cases where doing so does not conflict with some weighty moral aim; requires little personal sacrifice; and is likely to significantly benefit the recipients.1 As a general obligation, it binds all persons simply qua persons, and it is owed to all persons simply qua persons. Clinical investigators working in low-income countries frequently encounter sick or destitute people to whom (...) they might possess a duty to rescue. Investigators may often ask themselves, what can I do, what should I do, to help? Such investigators often help people in the future by carrying out their... (shrink)

This paper imagines what the liberatory possibilities of (full) ectogenesis are, insofar as it separates woman from female reproductive function. Even before use with human infants, ectogenesis productively disrupts the biological paradigm underlying current gender categories and divisions of labour. I begin by presenting a theory of women’s oppression drawn from the radical feminisms of the 1960s, which sees oppression as deeply rooted in biology. On this view, oppressive social meanings are overlaid upon biology and body, as artefacts of culture (...) and history. I then argue that ectogenesis should be pursued to replace two modes of assisted gestation that can be seen as outgrowths of oppressive assumptions about women's function, ectogenesis should be pursued to replace two modes of assisted gestation. These are gestational surrogacy and uterine transplant, which arise partly from gendered, pronatalist, and geneticist norms. These practices are supported by assumptions about women’s identity and value. Pursuing technologies such as ectogenesis, which weaken the presumed link between biology and gender, is beneficial to (trans-inclusionary radical) feminist aims, as part of a broad project of challenging dominant power relations resting on and maintaining gender categories. By allowing the conceptual separation of female reproductive function from ‘woman’, ectogenesis raises questions about how we determine who counts in this gender identity, and also how we value those who claim the identity ‘woman’. I conclude that ectogenesis has the potential to challenge traditional patriarchal family structures, and thence all other male-dominated structures (of work, education, cultural production), allowing a reimagining of the family and society in more radical ways than we have yet achieved. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the ethics of subject selection in the context of biomedical research. I reject a key principle of what I shall refer to as the standard view. According to this principle, investigators should select participants so as to minimise aggregate risk to participants and maximise aggregate benefits to participants and society. On this view, investigators should exclude prospective participants who are more susceptible to risk than other prospective participants. I argue instead that investigators should select subjects (...) in accordance with an alternative principle: formal equality of opportunity. According to this principle, investigators must treat all prospective participants the same unless differential treatment is warranted by the scientific goals of the study or the need to promote participants' medically related interests. All prospective participants (1) who meet the scientifically defined eligibility criteria and (2) for whom participation is consistent with their medically related interests should have an equal, formal opportunity to participate in the study. Prospective participants should not be excluded simply because they are more susceptible to risk than others. (shrink)

According to the norm of policy equipoise, it is permissible to randomly assign participants to two or more interventions in a public policy randomized controlled trial (RCT) when there is meaningful uncertainty among the relevant expert community regarding which intervention is superior. While this norm is gaining traction in the research ethics literature, the idea of interventional superiority remains unclear. Is one intervention superior to another if it is reasonably expected to realize one outcome of interest more effectively, even though (...) there is uncertainty regarding other outcomes of interest? Or must an intervention be reasonably expected to realize all outcomes of interest more effectively? I address this question in this paper. My aim is to develop and defend an account of interventional superiority for policy RCTs that are authorized, funded, or conducted by government institutions. I defend the greatest value view, according to which one intervention is superior to another if and only if it is reasonably expected to more effectively realize a set of outcomes with greater value. (shrink)

Governments are increasingly using randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to evaluate policy interventions. RCTs are often understood to provide the highest quality evidence regarding the causal efficacy of an intervention. While randomization plays an essential epistemic role in the context of policy RCTs however, it also plays an important distributive role. By randomly assigning participants to either the intervention or control arm of an RCT, people are subject to different policies and so, often, to different types and levels of benefits. In (...) this paper, I identify one necessary condition as well as a set of sufficient conditions for the permissible use of random assignment by government agencies. I argue first that random assignment is permissible only if it is consistent with governments’ duty to realize morally important outcomes. I argue second that random assignment is permissible in cases where investigators are in a state of genuine equipoise regarding all arms of the experiment and the policy to which people have a claim of justice. Finally, I defend a set of conditions under which random assignment is permissible in cases where one or more arms of a policy RCT are reasonably expected to be either superior or inferior to this policy. (shrink)

There have been calls for some time for a new approach to public health in the United Kingdom and beyond. This is consequent on the recognition and acceptance that health problems often have a complex and multi-faceted aetiology. At the same time, policies which utilise insights from research in behavioural economics and psychology have gained prominence on the political agenda. The relationship between the social determinants of health and behavioural science in health policy has not hitherto been explored. Given the (...) on-going presence of strategies based on findings from behavioural science in policy-making on the political agenda, an examination of this is warranted. This paper begins by looking at the place of the SDoH within public health, before outlining, in brief, the recent drive towards utilising behavioural science to formulate law and public policy. We then examine the relationship between this and the SDoH. We argue that behavioural public health policy is, to a certain extent, blind to the social and other determinants of health. In section three, we examine ways in which such policies may perpetuate and/or exacerbate health inequities and social injustices. We argue that problems in this respect may be compounded by assumptions and practices which are built into some behavioural science methodologies. We also argue that incremental individual gains may not be enough. As such, population-level measures are sometimes necessary. In section four we defend this contention, arguing that an equitable and justifiable public health requires such measures. (shrink)

In a carefully argued article, Haley K. Sullivan and Benjamin E. Berkman address the important question of whether investigators have a duty to report incidental findings to research participants in low‐resource settings. They suggest that the duty to rescue offers the most plausible justification for the duty to return incidental findings, and they explore the implications of this duty for the context of research in low‐resource settings. While I think they make valuable headway on an important problem, in this commentary, (...) I identify a significant difference between the paradigmatic rescue case and the return of incidental findings in low‐resource settings. This difference, I suggest, implies that their framework may be too narrow in scope. If investigators (and their sponsors) really wish to fulfill their duty to rescue, they must consider factors that are left out of Sullivan and Berkman's framework. (shrink)

Many high-income countries have skill-selective immigration policies, favoring prospective immigrants who are highly skilled. I investigate whether it is permissible for high-income countries to adopt such policies. Adopting what Joseph Carens calls a " realistic approach " to the ethics of immigration, I argue first that it is in principle permissible for high-income countries to take skill as a consideration in favor of selecting one prospective immigrant rather than another. I argue second that high-income countries must ensure that their skill-selective (...) immigration policies do not contribute to the non-fulfillment of their duty to aid residents of low-and middle-income countries. (shrink)

Oracles and philosophy -- Oracles, allegory and mystery cults -- Debating oracles: pagan and Christian perspectives -- Debating oracles: Porphyry's letter to Anebo and Iamblichus' De mysteriis -- Divination, rationality and ritual in neoplatonism -- Divination inspiration, possession and contact with the gods in Iamblichus' De mysteriis -- Divination and theurgy in Iamblichus' De mysteriis -- Manifesting the gods: oracles as symbola.

Australia, Canada, and New Zealand currently apply health requirements to prospective immigrants, denying residency to those with health conditions that are likely to impose an “excessive demand” on their publicly funded health and social service programs. In this paper, I investigate the charge that such policies are wrongfully discriminatory against persons with disabilities. I first provide a freedom-based account of the wrongness of discrimination according to which discrimination is wrong when and because it involves disadvantaging people in the exercise of (...) their freedom on the basis of morally arbitrary features of their identity. Discrimination is permissible, I suggest, when it is necessary to advance a valuable exercise of the discriminating agent’s freedom. I then apply this account to the case of social cost health requirements. Against critics of these requirements, I argue that it is sometimes permissible for states to discriminate against prospective immigrants with disabilities. States may do so, I suggest, when such discriminatory treatment is necessary to prevent an increase in rates of mortality and/or morbidity amongst citizens. Alongside critics of social cost health requirements however, I argue that existing policies are likely a form of wrongful discrimination insofar as they are too broad to satisfy this standard. (shrink)

In this article, I focus on two problematic aspects of British health-promotion campaigns regarding feeding children, particularly regarding breastfeeding and obesity. The first of these is that health-promotion campaigns around “lifestyle” issues dehumanize mothers with their imagery or text, stemming from the ongoing undervaluing and objectification of mothers and women. Public health-promotion instrumentalizes mothers as necessary components in achieving its aims, while at the same time undermining their agency as persons and interlocutors by tying “mother” to particular images. This has (...) a double effect: first, it excludes mothers who do not fit the campaign picture of a mother; second, it encloses those who do fit the picture into an objectified image of motherhood that is defined by and subject to the dominant white, heteropatriarchal gaze. The second problem is that campaigns place unjustified demands on mothers, which stem from a misinterpretation of the maternal duty to benefit. I argue that nutrition-related health concerns regarding children are improperly framed as individual failures of maternal duty, rather than as failures of a system to function correctly. These arguments ultimately support shifting the focus of responsibility for issues around childhood nutrition away from mothers and back toward policymakers. (shrink)

This chapter provides a critical overview and interpretation of fair subject selection in clinical and social scientific research. It first provides an analytical framework for thinking about the problem of fair subject selection. It then argues that fair subject selection is best understood as a set of four subprinciples, each with normative force and each with distinct and often conflicting implications for the selection of participants: fair inclusion, fair burden sharing, fair opportunity, and fair distribution of third-party risks. It then (...) defends an approach to navigating the conflicting imperatives of these subprinciples, one which privileges the need to include epistemically distinct groups in research, before concluding by considering the most pressing research questions regarding fair subject selection. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

In the never-ending debate about the scope and limits of science, the hottest argument now centres on the scientific study of man himself. Can there be a science of man at all, in any comprehensive sense? Or is the idea in some way ultimately self-defeating, like that of pulling oneself up by one's own shoelaces? My purpose in this paper is not to venture a direct answer to this ticklish question, but rather to highlight one or two desirable characteristics of (...) a science which I think must inevitably be lacking in any attempt to turn the scientific spotlight upon ourselves. Whether we call the attainable residue by the name of ‘science’ is less important than that we see clearly what not to expect of it. (shrink)

This book offers an opportunity for an anti deficit and positive examination of Black/Black-multiracial culture and its role in creating educational efficacy among academics of color. Through personal narrative, educational and learning theory, and creative writing/poetry, this hybrid text examines the cultural path to the doctorate.

François Laruelle's lifelong project of "nonphilosophy," or "nonstandard philosophy," thinks past the theoretical limits of Western philosophy to realize new relations between religion, science, politics, and art. In_ Christo-Fiction_ Laruelle targets the rigid, self-sustaining arguments of metaphysics, rooted in Judaic and Greek thought, and the radical potential of Christ, whose "crossing" disrupts their circular discourse. Laruelle's Christ is not the authoritative figure conjured by academic theology, the Apostles, or the Catholic Church. He is the embodiment of generic man, founder of (...) a science of humans, and the herald of a gnostic messianism that calls forth an immanent faith. Explicitly inserting quantum science into religion, Laruelle recasts the temporality of the cross, the entombment, and the resurrection, arguing that it is God who is sacrificed on the cross so equals in faith may be born. Positioning itself against orthodox religion and naive atheism alike, _Christo-Fiction_ is a daring, heretical experiment that ties religion to the human experience and the lived world. (shrink)

This case is another in a series intended to highlight the new questions emerging from advances in mapping the human genome and the application of genetic findings to clinical practice. The National Human Genome Research Institute, a component of the National Institutes of Health, by law is directed to designate a portion of its annual budget to furthering understanding of the ethical, legal, and social questions emerging from research on the human genome. As part of the effort, the Institute supports (...) research by scientists and scholars around the nation with the aim of clarifying and resolving the tough ethical and research choices facing this endeavor. But recently it has launched an intramural program, which is expected to take a catalytic role in grappling with the array of issues the researchers face in carrying out investigations in human genetics. (shrink)

This article argues that, despite its reputation as a homogenising and authoritarian system, the political thought of Bernard Bosanquet contains resources with which to develop a robust and culturally sensitive model of liberal multiculturalism. Throughout the discussion, Bosanquet's thought is located within contemporary theoretical debates. The first section rehearses the critique of Millian liberalism developed by Bhikhu Parekh and others, which alleges that the considerations of individuality and autonomy underlying such a political order preclude it from showing adequate respect for (...) cultures which do not conceive of personal identity in essentially individualistic terms. The next section sketches Bosanquet's social theory, as a preclude to the rebuttal of allegedly insurmountable barriers to the theory's accommodation of cultural diversity. Specifically, section three counters the objection that Bosanquet sanctions the imposition of internal restrictions on personal dissent. The final section rebuts the claim that a General Will cannot exist within a culturally diverse society, showing that in reality Bosanquet's theory leads us to endorse the ‘fundamental beliefs’ of a multi-ethnic society outlined recently in the Parekh Report. It is concluded that, when drawing on Bosanquet's thought, a liberal multicultural society can take different forms and yet still show proper respect for cultural diversity. (shrink)

In their analysis of how much fetal genetic information prospective parents should be able to access, Bayefsky and Berkman determine that parents should only be able to access information th...

Soda taxes are controversial. While proponents point to their potential health benefits and the public projects that could be funded with their revenue, critics argue that they are paternalistic and regressive. In this paper, we explore the prospects for designing a just soda tax, one that appropriately balances the often-competing ethical considerations of promoting social welfare, respecting people’s autonomy and ensuring distributive fairness. We argue that policymakers have several paths forward for designing a just soda tax, but that the considerations (...) relevant to ethical policy design are more complicated than is sometimes acknowledged. (shrink)

This paper explores the suggestion that our conscious experience is embodied in, rather than interactive with, our brain activity, and that the distinctive brain correlate of conscious experience lies at the level of global functional organization. To speak of either brains or computers as thinking is categorically inept, but whether stochastic mechanisms using internal experimentation rather than rule‐following to determine behavior could embody conscious agency is argued to be an open question, even in light of the Christian doctrine of man. (...) Mechanistic brain science does nothing to discredit Christian experience in dialogue with God or the Christian hope of eternal life. (shrink)

The Popperian epistemology underlying Levelt's commentary and other aspects of contemporary psychology has limited application and, in particular, does not apply to the creation or development of theory, the main goal of MacKay . This is relevant to Levelt's questions, “What has changed?” and “What is the harvest?”: From a non-Popperian perspective, both changes and harvest are greater than Levelt's commentary would suggest and carry implications for the field at large.

Philippe Schlenker gives a method of deriving local contexts from an expression’s classical semantics. In this paper I show that this method, when applied to the traditional variably strict semantics for subjunctive conditionals of Robert Stalnaker, David Lewis, and Angelika Kratzer, delivers an empirically incorrect prediction. The prediction is that the antecedent of a conditional should have the whole domain of possible worlds as its local context and therefore should be allowed to have only necessary presuppositions. In the later part (...) of the paper, I suggest the outlines of a solution to the problem. The solution involves adding a shifting contextual restriction on the domain of possible worlds. (shrink)

A principal rationale for public policy is to address market failures. Pareto efficiency is therefore a highly common and relatively non-controversial evaluative criterion for many policy analyses and is discussed at length in policy analysis texts. This makes sense, for Pareto improvements involve making at least one person better off without making anyone worse off. Who could object to that? But does efficiency deserve the prominence it enjoys in public policy? Is one policy option better than another, at least in (...) one respect, simply because it is more Pareto efficient? Or, is efficiency valuable for some other reason? In this chapter, I discuss Pareto efficiency as an evaluative criterion and argue that it is a stand-in for a more foundational criterion: wellbeing. I begin with an overview of Pareto efficiency, discuss the various ways in which it is operationalized to evaluate policy options, and argue that it is valuable insofar as more efficient states of affairs promise more wellbeing than less efficient states of affairs. I then raise questions regarding whether the conception of wellbeing presupposed by Pareto efficiency – preference satisfaction – is a defensible conception of wellbeing. I go on to introduce three alternative conceptions of wellbeing which have been proposed and defended by both philosophers and policy scholars, namely, hedonism, objective goods views, and the capability approach, and suggest ways in which each can be operationalized as an evaluative criterion. I close by discussing four ‘theory-free’ approaches to thinking about the impact of policies on the quality of people’s lives. Such approaches reject the idea that there is one single theory of wellbeing that should be used to evaluate policy options, and instead develop ways to evaluate the impact of policies on people’s lives that are not grounded in a specific theory. (shrink)

Elizabeth A. McGibbon and Josephine B. Etowa, Anti-racist health care practice, Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2009, reviewed by Kathryn L. Mackay.

The methodological device of or, as sometimes euphemistically labeled, does not enjoy much support among institutional review boards (IRBs) and a large portion of scholars in bioethics. The reasons for this have been documented sufficiently, beginning with the now-paradigmatic attack on the well-known study by Milgram and the unsavory study of Laud Humphries on male homosexual activities in public restrooms. But are the current attitudes interfering with some worthwhile approaches to data gathering that seem to have no other methodology of (...) equal effectiveness? (shrink)