How should we characterize the interaction between moral and aesthetic values in the context of environmental aesthetics? This question is important given the urgency of many environmental problems and the particular role played by aesthetic value in our experience of environment. To address this question, we develop a model of Environmental Virtue Aesthetics (EVA) that, we argue, offers a promising alternative to current theories in environmental aesthetics with respect to the relationship between aesthetics and ethics. EVA counters environmental aesthetic theories (...) that focus more narrowly on scientific knowledge and ground aesthetic value in ways that obfuscate pluralistic modes of appreciation of and relationships with natural and semi-natural environments. To develop EVA, we work with a revised notion of respect and engage with ideas concerning the development of aesthetic sensibilities, care, and virtuous aesthetic appreciation. EVA has the potential to support forms of human-nature co-flourishing, as well as constituting an aesthetic grounding for ecological citizenship. (shrink)

In the _Biopolitics of Disability_, David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder ( 2015 ) assert that disabled people are subjected to endless health and government questionnaires that harvest their data in exchange for better care. As disability advocates such as the National Disability Rights Network ( 2021 ) have demonstrated, these questionnaires—like the 2020 census—are highly flawed because disabled populations are not asked to shape the questions that will determine government funding and access to medical care. Although data collection is a (...) source of contemporary literary and scholarly interest, few works explore this in the context of disability. However, Jesse Ball’s 2018 novel _Census _examines questionnaires, specifically the census, and illuminates how narratives of disability are warped by the faulty data these objects collect. I argue that the protagonist, a dying father whose son has Down syndrome and requires full-time care, uses what Jack Halberstam calls “queer failure” to create a more equitable census that _will _make possible the kinds of care disabled populations deserve. Rather than create a perfect, objective questionnaire, the father skews the questions and data to center disability in the story of America, as he moves away from recording everyone’s experiences and instead highlights the lives of disabled people, their caretakers, and their systems of care (doctors, neighbors, etc.). I suggest that this “failed” census reveals those networks and systems of interdependency that scholars like Judith Butler ( 2020 ) and advocates such as Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha ( 2018 ) posit would radically change how care is approached, thus rendering the census as an object of care. (shrink)

The United Nations (UN) Universal Declaration of Human Rights engenders important state commitments to respect, fulfill, and protect a broad range of socio-economic rights. In 2010, a milestone was reached when the UN General Assembly recognized the human right to safe and clean drinking water and sanitation. However, water plays an important role in realizing other human rights such as the right to food and livelihoods, and in realizing the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. (...) These broader water-related rights have been recognized but have not yet been operationalized. This paper unravels these broader water-related rights in a more holistic interpretation of existing international human rights law. By focusing on an emerging approach to water services provision—known as ‘domestic-plus’ services—the paper argues how this approach operationalizes a comprehensive range of socio-economic rights in rural and peri-urban areas. Domestic-plus services provide water for domestic and productive uses around homesteads, which challenges the widespread practice in the public sector of planning and designing water infrastructure for a single-use. Evidence is presented to show that people in rural communities are already using their water supplies planned for domestic uses to support a wide range of productive activities. Domestic-plus services recognize and plan for these multiple-uses, while respecting the priority for clean and safe drinking water. The paper concludes that domestic-plus services operationalize the obligation to progressively fulfill a comprehensive range of indivisible socio-economic rights in rural and peri-urban areas. (shrink)

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) has been proposed as a potential treatment of drug addiction on the basis of its effects on drug self-administration in animals and on addictive behaviours in some humans treated with DBS for other psychiatric or neurological conditions. DBS is seen as a more reversible intervention than ablative neurosurgery but it is nonetheless a treatment that carries significant risks. A review of preclinical and clinical evidence for the use of DBS to treat addiction suggests that more animal (...) research is required to establish the safety and efficacy of the technology and to identify optimal treatment parameters before investigating its use in addicted persons. Severely addicted persons who try and fail to achieve abstinence may, however, be desperate enough to undergo such an invasive treatment if they believe that it will cure their addiction. History shows that the desperation for a cure of addiction can lead to the use of risky medical procedures before they have been rigorously tested. In the event that DBS is used in the treatment of addiction, we provide minimum ethical requirements for clinical trials of its use in the treatment of addiction. These include: restrictions of trials to severely intractable cases of addiction; independent oversight to ensure that patients have the capacity to consent and give that consent on the basis of a realistic appreciation of the potential benefits and risks of DBS; and rigorous assessments of the effectiveness and safety of this treatment compared to the best available treatments for addiction. (shrink)

Despite the ubiquity of bees in Dickinson’s work, most interpreters denigrate her nature poems. But following several recent scholars, I identify Nietzschean/Dionysian overtones in the bee poems and suggest the figure of bees/hive/queen illuminates as feminist key to her corpus. First, (a) the bee’s sting represents martyred death; (b) its gold, immortality; (c) its tongue, the “lesbian phallus”; (d) its wings, poetic power; (e) its buzz, poetic melody, and (f) its organism, a joyful Dionysian Susan (her sister-in-law and love interest) (...) to Emily’s flower. Second, the hive represents her individual poems (with slants/dashes as stingers, wings as hymn meter, honey as rhymes, variant words as exiled bees, and accompanying flowers their Darwinian coevolution with bees), constituting her writing persona as a multi-voiced self-swarm, as organized in the apiary of her letters and fascicles. And third, the queen represents her Western cultural and religious inheritance wherein bees are symbols of the soul, reincarnation, poetic-philosophical vocation, and a Nietzschean, trans-Dionysian naturalist ontology—symbolized by apiarian Artemis. (shrink)

The laws of nature have come a long way since the time of Newton: quantum mechanics and relativity have given us good reasons to take seriously the possibility of laws which may be non-local, atemporal, ‘all-at-once,’ retrocausal, or in some other way not well-suited to the standard dynamical time evolution paradigm. Laws of this kind can be accommodated within a Humean approach to lawhood, but many extant non-Humean approaches face significant challenges when we try to apply them to laws outside (...) the time evolution picture. Thus for proponents of non-Humean approaches to lawhood there is a clear need for a novel non-Humean account which is capable of accommodating these sorts of laws. In this paper we propose such an account, characterizing lawhood in terms of constraints, which are understood as a form of modal structure. We demonstrate that our proposed realist account can indeed accommodate a large variety of laws outside the time evolution paradigm, and describe some possible applications to important philosophical problems. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kant on the Method of MathematicsEmily Carson1. INTRODUCTIONThis paper will touch on three very general but closely related questions about Kant’s philosophy. First, on the role of mathematics as a paradigm of knowledge in the development of Kant’s Critical philosophy; second, on the nature of Kant’s opposition to his Leibnizean predecessors and its role in the development of the Critical philosophy; and finally, on the specific role of intuition (...) in Kant’s philosophy of mathematics. One of the points that I want to make is that recognizing the importance of these first two issues is essential to giving an adequate account of the third. That is, only by appreciating how Kant uses the example of mathematical knowledge, and in particular the objections he had to previous accounts of such knowledge, can we understand the philosophical role that he ascribes to intuition in his own account of mathematics.I don’t propose to explain the details of Kant’s philosophy of mathematics, but rather to compare his views on mathematics in the pre-Critical Prize Essay of 1764 to those of the Critique of Pure Reason, with the aim of showing how Kant’s doctrine of construction in pure intuition arises out of a combination of two factors: first, his attempt to ground the distinction between the respective methods of mathematics and philosophy, and second, his concern to defend the reality of mathematical knowledge against the views of those he called ‘the metaphysicians.’ The first factor demands an account of the certainty of mathematics, the second requires an account of its content. I shall argue that there is a possible conflict between Kant’s accounts of these features in the Prize Essay, a possibility which is finally ruled out only by means of the Critical doctrine of pure intuition. So I hope to show that there is a significant philosophical role for intuition in Kant’s account of mathematical knowledge (over and above the more logical role attributed to it on readings [End Page 629] such as those of Friedman, Beth, and Hintikka1) in reconciling the content of mathematics and its certainty.2. THE MATHEMATICIANS VS. THE METAPHYSICIANSThroughout his early writings, Kant appealed to the evidence and certainty of mathematics; his attitude towards metaphysics, however, underwent a dramatic shift. In the Physical Monadology of 1756, Kant asked how metaphysics and geometry can be united,[f] or the former peremptorily denies that space is infinitely divisible, while the latter, with its usual certainty, asserts that it is infinitely divisible. Geometry contends that empty space is necessary for free motion, while metaphysics hisses the idea off the stage. Geometry holds universal attraction or gravitation to be hardly explicable by mechanical causes but shows that it derives from the forces which are inherent in bodies at rest and which act at a distance, whereas metaphysics dismisses the notion as an empty delusion of the imagination [1:475–6].2He attempted in this work to reconcile the respective positions of metaphysics and geometry regarding infinite divisibility, thereby demonstrating that “it is neither the case that the geometer is mistaken nor that the opinion to be found among metaphysicians deviates from the truth” [1:480]. But in a series of works from 1762–3, Kant reveals a markedly different attitude towards metaphysics. For example, in “The only possible argument in support of a demonstration of the existence of God,” Kant says:the mania for method and the imitation of the mathematician, who advances with a sure step along a well-surfaced road, have occasioned a large number of such mishaps on the slippery ground of metaphysics. These mishaps are constantly before one’s eyes, but there is little hope that people will be warned by them, or that they will learn to be more circumspect as a result [2:71].In contrast, Kant describes the geometer as uncovering “with the greatest certainty” the most secret properties of that which is extended [2:70]. But the less conciliatory attitude to metaphysics comes out most clearly in Kant’s actual procedure in “The only possible argument.” In the Seventh Reflection, he presents an attempt to explain the origin of... (shrink)

We describe how the set of tools, practices, and social relations known as “precision agriculture” is defined, promoted, and debated. To do so, we perform a critical discourse analysis of popular and trade press websites. Promoters of precision agriculture champion how big data analytics, automated equipment, and decision-support software will optimize yields in the face of narrow margins and public concern about farming’s environmental impacts. At its core, however, the idea of farmers leveraging digital infrastructure in their operations is not (...) new, as agronomic research in this vein has existed for over 30 years. Contemporary discourse in precision ag tends to favour emerging digital technologies themselves over their embeddedness in longstanding precision management approaches. Following several strands of science and technology studies research, we explore what rhetorical emphasis on technical innovation achieves, and argue that this discourse of novelty is a reinvention of precision agriculture in the context of the growing “smart” agricultural economy. We overview six tensions that remain unresolved in this promotional rhetoric, concerning the definitions, history, goals, adoption, uses, and impacts of precision agriculture. We then synthesize these in a discussion of the extent to which digital tools are believed to displace farmer decision-making and whether digital agriculture addresses the biophysical heterogeneity of farm landscapes or land itself has become an “experimental technology”—a way to advance the general development of artificial intelligence. This discussion ultimately helps us name a larger dilemma: that the smart agricultural economy is perhaps less about supporting land and its stewards than promising future tech and profits. (shrink)

Ernest Gellner was a multilingual polymath who set the agenda in the study of nationalism and the sociology of Islam for an entire generation of academics and students. This definitive biography follows his trajectory from his early years in Prague, Paris and England to international success as a philosopher and public intellectual. Known both for his highly integrated philosophy of modernity and for combining a respect for nationalism with an appreciation for science, Gellner was passionate in his defence of reason (...) against every for of relativism. (shrink)

In this unprecedented book, contributors use Buddhist philosophical and contemplative traditions, both ancient and modern, and deploy critical philosophy of race, and critical whiteness studies, to address the proverbial elephant in the room – whiteness.

An epistemic account of constitutive relevance lists the criteria by which scientists can identify the components of mechanisms in empirical practice. Three prominent claims from Craver form a promising basis for an account. First, constitutive relevance is established by means of interlevel experiments. Second, interlevel experiments are executions of interventions. Third, there is no interlevel causation between a mechanism and its components. Currently, no account on offer respects all three claims. I offer my causal situationist account of constitutive relevance that (...) respects the claims. By situating a part of a mechanism on the causal chain between the mechanism’s input and output, components can be identified with interventions, without the interventions suggesting interlevel causation. The causal situationist account is the only account on offer so far that clearly fits within Craver’s framework. (shrink)

A common trait of all realistic political theories is the rejection of a conception of political theory as applied moral philosophy and an attempt to preserve some form of distinctively political thinking. Yet the reasons for favouring such an account of political theory can vary, a point that has often been overlooked in recent discussions by realism’s friends and critics alike. While a picture of realism as first-and-foremost an attempt to develop a more practical political theory which does not reduce (...) morality to politics is often cited, in this paper we present an alternative understanding in which the motivation to embrace realism is grounded in a set of critiques of or attitudes towards moral philosophy which then feed into a series of political positions. Political realism, on this account, is driven by a set of philosophical concerns about the nature of ethics and the place of ethical thinking in our lives. This impulse is precisely what motivated Bernard Williams and Raymond Geuss to their versions of distinctively realist political thought and is important to emphasise because it demonstrates that realism does not set politics against ethics (a misunderstanding typically endorsed by realism’s critics) but is rather an attempt to philosophise about politics without relying on understandings of morality which we have little reason to endorse. (shrink)

Where ethical or regulatory questions arise about an individual’s interests in accessing bioinformation about herself, the value of this information has traditionally been construed in terms of its clinical utility. It is increasingly argued, however, that the “personal utility” of findings should also be taken into account. This article characterizes one particular aspect of personal utility: that derived from the role of personal bioinformation in identity construction. The suggestion that some kinds of information are relevant to identity is not in (...) itself new. However, the account outlined here seeks to advance the debate by proposing a conception of the relationship between bioinformation and identity that does not depend on essentialist assumptions and applies beyond the narrow genetic contexts in which identity is customarily invoked. The proposal is that the identity-value of personal bioinformation may be understood in terms of its instrumental role in the construction of our narrative identities, specifically that its value lies in helping us to develop self-narratives that support us in navigating our embodied existences. I argue that this narrative conception provides useful insights that are pertinent to the ethical governance of personal bioinformation. It illuminates a wider range of ethical considerations in relation to information access; it accounts for variations in the utility of different kinds of information; and it highlights that the context in which information is conveyed can be as important as whether it is disclosed at all. These arguments are illustrated using an example drawn from psychiatric neuroimaging research. (shrink)

For centuries, philosophers of time have produced texts containing words and pictures. Although some historians study visual representations of time, I have not found any history of philosophy on pictures of time within texts. This paper argues that studying such pictures can be rewarding. I will make this case by studying pictures of time in the works of Leibniz, Arthur Eddington and C. D. Broad, and argue they play subtle roles. Further, I will argue that historians of philosophy more widely (...) could benefit from paying more attention to pictures. (shrink)

To what extent is the scientist's endeavor qua scientist influenced by his philosophic image of himself? A preliminary and partial answer to this question is suggested by a study of eight physiological thinkers of the second half of the eighteenth century, a period during which biology was much influenced by the scientific and philosophical ideas of Isaac Newton. At this time, physiologists invoked certain "principles," "properties," and "powers" which were deemed useful as explanatory devices, even though they could not themselves (...) be explained. The use of these devices in physiology was often defended in terms of their supposed similarity to devices used in mathematics and Newtonian physics. The results of this practice are considered critically, partly in the light of current studies of scientific explanation. (shrink)

In this article, I offer an analysis of what it is to take offense and what doing so is like, on which a more nuanced and positive appraisal of this emotion becomes possible as compared to its popular reputation. First, I survey the shortfalls of the limited discussion of offense by philosophers, before proposing an alternative analysis. Second, I distinguish offense from nearby emotions, like anger, disgust, and pride. Third, I examine the implications not only for how we conceptualize offense (...) but also how we regard those who take it. On my account, offense tends to be a smaller-scale, more everyday emotion than those making claims about its threats to society suppose, and one ripe for a moral reassessment. While offense sometimes appears excessive, that is likely only in limited cases: namely, those requiring symbolic withdrawal or proxy forms of estrangement. Even there, the appearance of excess may be illusory, with the grander gestures of offense appropriate given the distance between the offended and offending parties. Furthermore, on my account, to take offense is to resist affronts to one's standing, rather than merely a reflection of hurt feelings. Concluding, I sketch a defense of this resistance as a sometimes valuable response to injustice. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophical work on causation is a tangled mess of disparate aims, approaches, and accounts. Best to cut through it by means of ruthless but, hopefully, sensible judgments. The ones that follow are designed to sketch the most fruitful avenues for future work.

Background High levels of moral distress in nursing professionals, of which oncology nurses are particularly prone, can negatively impact patient care, job satisfaction, and retention. Aim “Positive Attitudes Striving to Rejuvenate You: PASTRY” was developed at a tertiary cancer center to reduce the burden of moral distress among oncology nurses. Research Design A Quality Improvement (QI) initiative was conducted using a pre- and post-intervention design, to launch PASTRY and measure its impact on moral distress of the nursing unit, using Hamric’s (...) Moral Distress Scale–Revised (MDS-R.) This program consisted of monthly 60-minute sessions allowing nurses to address morally distressing events and themes, such as clinicians giving “false hope” to patients or families. The PASTRY program sessions were led by certified clinicians utilizing strategies of discussion and mind-body practices. Participants Clinical nurses working on an adult leukemia/lymphoma unit. Ethical considerations This was a QI initiative, participation was voluntary, MDS-R responses were collected anonymously, and the institution’s Ethics Committee oversaw PASTRY’s implementation. Findings While improvement in moral distress findings were not statistically significant, the qualitative and quantitative findings demonstrated consistent themes. The PASTRY program received strong support from nurses and institutional leaders, lowered the nursing unit’s moral distress, led to enhanced camaraderie, and improved nurses’ coping skills. Discussion Measurement of moral distress is innately challenging due to its complexity. This study reinforces oncology nurses have measurable moral distress. Interventions should be implemented for a safe and healing environment to explore morally distressing clinical experiences. Poor communication among multidisciplinary team members is associated with moral distress among nurses. Programs like PASTRY may empower nurses to build support networks for change within themselves and institutions. Conclusion This QI initiative shows further research on moral distress reduction should be conducted to verify findings for statistical significance and so that institutional programs, like PASTRY, can be created. (shrink)

People are increasingly subject to algorithmic decisions, and it is generally agreed that end-users should be provided an explanation or rationale for these decisions. There are different purposes that explanations can have, such as increasing user trust in the system or allowing users to contest the decision. One specific purpose that is gaining more traction is algorithmic recourse. We first pro- pose that recourse should be viewed as a recommendation problem, not an explanation problem. Then, we argue that the capability (...) approach provides plausible and fruitful ethical standards for re- course. We illustrate by considering the case of diversity constraints on algorithmic recourse. Finally, we discuss the significance and implications of adopting the capability approach for algorithmic recourse research. (shrink)

I assess various proposals for the source of the intuition that there is something problematic about contextuality, ultimately concluding that contextuality is best thought of in terms of fine-tuning. I then argue that as with other fine-tuning problems in quantum mechanics, this behaviour can be understood as a manifestation of teleological features of physics. Finally I discuss several formal mathematical frameworks that have been used to analyse contextuality and consider how their results should be interpreted by scientific realists. In the (...) course of this discussion I obtain several new mathematical results—I demonstrate that preparation contextuality is a form of fine-tuning, I show that measurement contextuality can be explained by appeal to a global constraint forbidding closed causal loops, and I demonstrate how negative probabilities can arise from a classical ontological model together with an epistemic restriction. (shrink)

Canada’s Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans mandates that all research involving human subjects be reviewed and approved by a research ethics board . We have little evidence on how researchers are dealing with this requirement in multisite studies, which involve more than one REB. We retrospectively examined 22 REB submissions for two minimal-risk, multisite studies in leading Canadian institutions. Most REBs granted expedited review to the studies, while one declared the application to be exempt from review. (...) Time between submission and approval ranged greatly, from four to 546 days. We received a total of 155 REB queries for changes and clarifications, most of which asked for further information, clarification, or additional documents. Less than a third of the REB queries were requests for specific changes, and a vast majority had a very limited impact on the research projects. Institutions also varied broadly in their description of what was required of local principal investigators. We conclude that the organizational and practical challenges these results imply could deter researchers from embarking on multisite research projects, and that recently proposed changes to the TCPS will not solve these problems. (shrink)

Bioethics, Volume 36, Issue 3, Page 298-304, March 2022.

In the Buddhist ethical traditions, equanimity along with love, compassion, and sympathetic joy form what are called the four boundless qualities, which are affective states one cultivates for moral and spiritual development. But there is a sense in which equanimity seems very unlike the three others: love, compassion, and sympathetic joy all imply an emotional investment in others, whereas equanimity seems to imply an absence of such investment. This observation has provoked debate as to how to properly understand the relationship (...) between equanimity and the other three qualities. In this paper, I propose that equanimity - like love, compassion, and sympathetic joy - is itself a virtue of good intimate relationships and not in conflict with such virtues. (shrink)

Empirical psychology documents widespread evidence of bias in the ways that people select, interpret, and selectively interpret evidence in forming and revising their beliefs. These biases can function to create and perpetuate epistemologies of ignorance. I argue that virtue epistemology can help us explain what goes epistemically wrong in these cases, and can offer positive advice, orienting us toward ways to right it. In particular, I defend the virtue approach from epistemic situationist worries about the empirical plausibility of individual agents' (...) ability to develop corrective virtues. I argue that situational virtues are genuine responsibilist virtues, and are one of the tools at our disposal for overcoming epistemologies of ignorance. (shrink)

In this essay, after a brief decolonial analysis of the concept of “poetry” in Indigenous communities, I will investigate the poetic-philosophical implications of Cherokee culture, more specifically the poetic essence of the Cherokee language, the poetic aspects of Cherokee myth (pre-history) and post-myth (history), and the poetic-philosophical powers of Cherokee ritual. My first section analyzes the poetic essence, structure, special features, and historical context of the Cherokee language, drawing on Ruth Holmes and Betty Sharp Smith’s language textbook, Beginning Cherokee. My (...) second section considers poetic aspects of the pre-history and history of the Cherokee Nation considered as a text, using Robert J. Conley’s The Cherokee Nation: A History. And my third section investigates the poetic nature of the Cherokee rituals’ myth-ontological background and its existential psychological implications, via J. T. Garrett & Michael Tlanusta Garrett’s The Cherokee Full Circle: A Practical Guide to Ceremonies and Traditions. Collectively, these analyses will suggest that, just as the Cherokee and other tribes are the slandered, disenfranchised, suppressed and covered-over Indigenous peoples of the North American continent, so poetry writ large (including Indigenous philosophy) is the slandered, disenfranchised, suppressed and covered-over arche of western philosophy (as I have previously explored via a new interpretation of Nietzsche). In short, I will argue that both poetry and Cherokee culture can be understood as indigenous “absences” which are in truth vital and enduring presences. (shrink)

En este ensayo se examina de manera crítica el desarrollo de la filosofía analítica y, en particular, de la filosofía analítica latinoamericana. Se propone que esta última adopte un giro político y uno pedagógico con el fin de recuperar su espíritu original y reconectarse con la tradición intelectual latinoamericana. This essay is a critical examination of the development of analytic philosophy and, in particular, of Latin American analytic philosophy. It is argued that the latter ought to adopt a political and (...) pedagogical turn in order to recover its original spirit and to be reconnected to Latin American intelectual tradition. (shrink)

1. A World of Difference: Travel Narratives and the Inscription of Culture -- 2. Fair Texts/Dark Ladies: Renaissance Lyric and the Poetics of Color -- 3. "Commerce and Intercourse": Dramas of Alliance and Trade -- 4. The Daughters of Eve and the Children of Ham: Race and the English Woman Writer -- 5. "An Object in the Midst of Other Objects": Race, Gender, Material Culture -- Epilogue: Oil "Race," Black Feminism, and White Supremacy -- Appendix: Poems of Blackness.