Bioethicists frequently call for empirical researchers to engage participants and community members in their research, but don't themselves typically engage community members in their normative research. In this article, we describe an effort to include members of the public in normative discussions about the risks, potential benefits, and ethical responsibilities of social and behavioral genomics (SBG) research. We reflect on what might—and might not— be gained from engaging the public in normative scholarship and on lessons learned about public perspectives on (...) the risks and potential benefits of SBG research and the responsible conduct and communication of such research. We also provide procedural lessons for others in bioethics who are interested in engaging members of the public in their research. (shrink)

How should scarce healthcare resources be distributed? This is a contentious issue that became especially pressing during the pandemic. It is often emphasised that studies exploring public views about this question provide valuable input to the issue of healthcare priority setting. While there has been a vast number of such studies it is rarely articulated, more specifically, what the results from these studies would mean for the justification of principles for priority setting. On the one hand, it seems unreasonable that (...) public values would straightforwardly decide the ethical question of how resources should be distributed. On the other hand, in a democratic society, it seems equally unreasonable that they would be considered irrelevant for this question. In this paper we draw on the notion of reflective equilibrium and discuss the relevance and roles that empirical studies may plausibly have for justification in priority setting ethics. We develop a framework for analysing how different kinds of empirical results may have different kinds of implications for justification. (shrink)

General relativity poses serious problems for counterfactual propositions peculiar to it as a physical theory. Because these problems arise solely from the dynamical nature of spacetime geometry, they are shared by all schools of thought on how counterfactuals should be interpreted and understood. Given the role of counterfactuals in the characterization of, inter alia, many accounts of scientific laws, theory confirmation and causation, general relativity once again presents us with idiosyncratic puzzles any attempt to analyze and understand the nature of (...) scientific knowledge must face. (shrink)

This chapter deals with an area of study sometimes called “formal value theory” or “formal axiology”. Roughly characterized, this area investigates the structural and logical properties of value properties and value relations, such as goodness, badness, and betterness. There is a long-standing controversy about whether goodness and badness can, in principle, be measured on a cardinal scale, in a way similar to the measurement of well-understood quantitative concepts like length. Sect. 28.1 investigates this issue, mainly by comparing the properties of (...) the relations “longer than” and “better than”. In Sect. 28.2, some attempts to define goodness and badness in terms of the betterness relation are discussed, and a novel suggestion is made. Sect. 28.3, finally, contains an attempt to define the recently much discussed value relation “on a par with” in terms of the more familiar betterness relation. (shrink)

Invasive alien species are frequently discussed in academic literature by practitioners, government agencies, and popular media, but what does it mean for a species to be alien and why it this seen as a bad thing? To answer these questions, I have analysed texts about invasive alien species in academic journals and in communication from government agencies. The almost totally unanimous answer to the first question was that a species is alien if and only if it is introduced to an (...) area outside its natural range by humans. I found three primary answers to the second question, namely that (1) alien species are more probable to behave invasively or that it is impossible to know for sure if an alien species will behave invasively, (2) being alien is bad in itself or at least that alien species have a lower value than native species and native environments, and (3) being moved by humans is unnatural and being unnatural has negative value. All three answers probably contribute to why being alien is considered a negative property in species but none of them seem like a satisfying answer to why being alien should be seen as a bad thing in a species. (shrink)

“Astrobiology as science” refers to how astrobiology is characterized and discussed in the philosophy of science.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Disaster Anarchy: Mutual Aid and Radical Action by Rhiannon FirthJohn-Erik HanssonRhiannon Firth. Disaster Anarchy: Mutual Aid and Radical Action. London: Pluto Press, 2022. Paperback, 243 pp. ISBN 9780745340463The COVID-19 pandemic and the unfolding climate crisis, with the multiplication of unprecedented weather events, have shown how urgent it is to reflect on our responses to disaster. Following up on themes she first broached in Coronavirus, Class, and Mutual (...) Aid in the United Kingdom, Rhiannon Firth throws a fresh, anarchist, and utopian light on disaster relief in Disaster Anarchy.1 In this work, Firth seeks to “consider how [anarchist] social movements’ impressive efforts in mutual aid might contribute to a radical and revolutionary reconceptualisation of disasters and the processes of relief and recovery efforts” (19). To do so, she begins by surveying the dominant approaches to disaster relief (chapters 2 and 3) before offering a comprehensive anarchist theoretical critique of these perspectives (chapter 4). Firth then fleshes out her anarchist theory of disaster and community response through two empirical case studies of grassroots relief efforts. In chapter 5 she looks into the Occupy Sandy movement, a New York area community-based response to the damage caused by Hurricane Sandy’s passage in October 2012 in the United States. The final chapter is then dedicated to the COVID-19 Mutual Aid Groups that emerged in the United Kingdom during the pandemic.In building her argument, Firth mobilizes anarchist (and more broadly radical) theory and interviews with participants in both movements. She engages with how activists motivated and understood their participation in mutual aid groups, perceived disaster and relief organizing, sought to solve practical and political problems, and reflected on their experiences. The empirical sections of Disaster Anarchy are thus reminiscent of investigations into the anarchist connections and orientations of contemporary social movements, such as Occupy Wall Street.2 However, Firth’s is a work [End Page 606] of political theory. Her interviews were not conducted simply to describe and analyze the anarchist components of disaster relief social movements. Echoing Uri Gordon, she proposes to take the “worldviews of activists seriously as sources of theoretical knowledge,” leading us to rethink both anarchism and the politics of disaster as a whole (16).3 There lies a key part of the originality of Firth’s contribution to both anarchist theory and to the study of disaster relief. The utopian core of Disaster Anarchy also shines through this movement-based theoretical elaboration of an anarchist challenge to the dominant theories and practices of disaster relief. By examining mutual aid groups in critical dialogue with anarchist theory, Firth raises the possibility of more egalitarian and democratic “utopian alternatives to the status quo,” though, as she reminds us, they always run the risk of being co-opted (20).To set the scene for the desirability of anarchist approaches to disaster relief, Disaster Anarchy opens with Firth’s dissatisfaction with what she identifies as the two main sets of approaches to disaster studies. The first represents “the dominant neoliberal paradigm of disaster politics” and falls under the umbrella of “Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR)” (21). Firth contends that, despite some internal variety, all DRR approaches share the three same basic assumptions. First, DRR considers disasters to be “ruptures in the normal functioning of society.” They become a “management problem” that must be dealt with using the tools of political governance to restore order and ensure “systemic stability” (39–40). This can be done both directly through state institutions, and through civil society-based nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that cooperate with state institutions. DRR then evaluates responses using the categories of “efficiency and cost-effectiveness,” leaving aside “the affects and human impacts of disasters” (40). Second, DRR tends to flatten out differences between disasters, and in the ways in which individuals and groups respond to them. Disaster becomes abstract, and authorities can design sets of responses taken to be effective regardless of local contexts and demands. DRR approaches are therefore particularly congenial to the growth of large governmental “specialised agencies like DHS [Department of Homeland Security] and FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency]” that produce knowledge and practices linked to the vertical “management of disaster” (41). Finally... (shrink)

Den här boken handlar om invasiva främmande växter. I det föregående kapitlet reflekterade Niklas Vareman om vad som läggs i begreppet ‘invasiv’, men vad gäller då för den andra termen i begreppet – alltså ordet ‘främmande’? Vid första påseende kan det verka som att ’främmande’ borde vara ett enklare ord att definiera. Det är ju vanligare och inte så tekniskt jämfört med ‘invasiv’. Frågan är dock om inte just dessa två egenskaper gör ordet ’främmande’ mer svårdefinierat. Ord som är både (...) vanligare och mer vardagliga används av fler personer och på fler olika sätt. (shrink)

Provability, Computability and Reflection.

Feminists are divided on whether consent should be employed in legal definitions of rape. Catharine MacKinnon has criticized the usefulness of consent in enabling legal systems to recognize and prosecute instances of rape (MacKinnon 1989, 2005, 2016). In a recent article in this journal, Lisa H. Schwartzman defends the use of affirmative consent in rape law against MacKinnon’s critique (Schwartzman 2019). In contrast to MacKinnon, Schwartzman claims our understanding of rape must include both force and consent components. In this paper, (...) I will argue in agreement with Schwartzman and against MacKinnon that the legal definition of rape should include an affirmative consent component. I will take Schwartzman’s discussion as my point of departure and consider whether she has responded adequately to MacKinnon’s criticisms of consent. I will argue that her responses are not fully adequate. In particular, she has not successfully rebutted the argument that an appeal to consent is unnecessary once we have accepted an expanded definition of coercion. I will then provide a more affirmative defense of affirmative consent in response to MacKinnon’s most challenging criticism. (shrink)

William Lane Craig’s inuential kalam cosmological argument concludes that the universe has a cause of its beginning. Craig provides some supplementary reasoning to suggest that the first cause is God—a God that exists timelessly without the universe and temporally with the universe. I argue that Craig’s hypothesis about the nature of the first cause is impossible. In particular, it cannot be the case that God timelessly wills to create the universe and the universe begins to exist.

In the essay, I present the basic principles of Merab Mamardashvili’s phenomenology of ontological maturation. Though Mamardashvili’s thinking has been recently introduced to the West, there is still very little awareness of the uniqueness of his phenomenological insights, allowing him to illuminate contemporary philosophy’s central ontological and existential matters in a novel light. The essay addresses Mamardashvili’s interpretation of the “phenomenon,” which he exemplifies on rich experiential material from Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time. The “phenomenon” is shown to (...) differ radically from its traditional phenomenological interpretation as something that gives/shows itself in/for experience. Instead, the phenomenon is interpreted as an event that shocks one unexpectedly and offers a momentary opportunity to let oneself be appropriated by that truth, constituting the event of being human. I explicate the relations between Mamardashvili’s notion of the phenomenon, human transformation, and ontology. The central theme of these discussions is a new sense of human agency and autonomy revealed as the goal of transformation and requiring that one walks a path of ontological maturation. (shrink)

The three-tenet model, which focuses on ‘distributional justice’, ‘procedural justice’, and ‘justice as recognition’, has emerged as the most influential framework in the field of energy justice. Based on critical reviews of the three-tenet model, we identify three challenges that the model currently still faces: (i) a normative challenge on the grounding of the three-tenet model in philosophical theories; (ii) an ‘elite’ challenge on the justification of the use of power in energy-related decision; and (iii) a practical challenge on the (...) application of the three tenets in situations of conflicting justice demands. In this article, we provide the basic contours of a three-step pluralist and pragmatic dialogue model for questions of energy justice that addresses the three challenges, based on the ‘commonwealth model’ of Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot. The model proposes to create moral legitimacy in the face of plural demands for energy justice by engaging actors in an inclusive dialogue based on an explicit recognition of Boltanski and Thévenot’s commonwealth model. We thereby make three contributions to the existing literature on energy justice. First, the commonwealth model’s rootedness in normative political theory provides a stronger philosophical underpinning than was available up till now in the literature (challenge 1). Second, it allows one to go beyond the (almost exclusive) focus on injustices perpetrated on disempowered or marginalised groups, to include questions on the justified exercise of power (challenge 2). Third, the commonwealth model shows us practical ways out of situations where conflicting demands for justice are being made (challenge 3). (shrink)

It is uncontroversial to claim that the extent to which health care interventions benefit patients is a relevant consideration for health care priority setting. However, when effects accrue to the individual patient, effects of a more indirect kind may accrue to other individuals as well, such as the patient's children, friends, or partner. If, and if so how, such relational effects should be considered relevant in priority setting is contentious. In this paper, we illustrate this question by using disease‐modifying drugs (...) for Alzheimer's disease as a case in point. The ethical analysis begins by sketching the so‐called prima facie case for ascribing moral weight to relational effects and then moves on to consider a number of objections to it. We argue that, whereas one set of objections may be dismissed, there is another set of arguments that poses more serious challenges for including relational effects in priority setting. (shrink)

In the small village of Kinnarumma in western Sweden an old wooden church was replaced by a new church buildning in the early twentieth century. The old church was de-sacralized by being moved to an open-air museum in Borås and used there for exhibitions and the storage of museum objects. The need for more church premises in the city led to the re-sacralization of the old church in 1930. The transition of Kinnarumma’s old wooden church to museum object, its museumification, (...) was an expression of change in religious heritage, and its re-sacralization expressed an unchanged part of the same heritage. (shrink)

Alfred Cuzán proposed five “laws of politics” that allegedly govern elections in democracies. Drawing from insights in the general philosophy of science and the philosophy of the social sciences, I argue that—although his empirical evidence is impressive—he failed to develop a convincing argument for calling the five theses “laws.” This article discusses other examples that often are claimed to be “laws of politics” and describes the global picture supporting this analysis.

Sokrates var inte bara en filosofisk nydanare. Genom sitt sätt att involvera sina samtalspartners i den filosofiska processen var han också i hög utsträckning en pedagogisk nydanare. Hans pedagogiska grundidé var den så kallade majeutiska metoden – det vill säga ”barnmorskemetoden”. Med det menade han att han inte överförde sina egna färdiga tankar till den han talade med utan han hjälpte sin samtalspartner att föda sina egna tankar. Inom pedagogiken är det vanligt att använda den så kallade ”Sokratiska metoden” vilket (...) i sin enklaste form bara innebär att man ställer frågor till studenterna. Den här artikeln kommer emellertid att handla om en mer sofistikerad metod som används för begreppsanalys/begreppsdefinition i grupp. Metoden är inspirerad av Sokrates men skiljer sig också en del från hur Sokrates själv grep sig an sina dialoger – åtminstone så som de beskrivs av Platon. Artikeln innehåller en kort historisk och pedagogisk bakgrund men syftar framför allt till att utgöra en praktisk vägledning för genomförande av sokratiska dialoger i filosofiundervisningen. Artikeln bygger framför allt på mina egna erfarenheter av att använda Sokratisk Dialog i undervisningen vid Filosofiska institutionen vid Lunds universitet, Lunds Tekniska Högskola, Sveriges Lantbruksuniversitet och i det privata näringslivet. Artikeln vänder sig till alla som undervisar i filosofi på universitetet eller gymnasiet eller i filosofiska metoder för studenter vid andra utbildningar, t.ex. värdeteori, vetenskapsteori eller tillämpad etik för ingenjörer eller medicinare – eller i vilket annat ämne som helst där det förekommer begrepp som saknar en enkel och knivskarp definition men som är viktiga för ämnet. (shrink)

This book analyses public sector reform comprehensively in all parts of China's public sector - government bureaucracy, public service units and state-owned enterprises. It argues that reform of the public sector has become an issue of great concern to the Chinese leaders, who realize that efficient public administration is key to securing the regime's governing capacity and its future survival. The book shows how thinking about public sector reform has shifted in recent decades from a quantitative emphasis on 'small government', (...) which involved the reduction in size of what was perceived as a bloated bureaucracy, to an emphasis on the quality of governance, which may result in an increase in public sector personnel. The book shows how, although Western ideas about public sector reform have had an impact, Chinese government continues to be best characterized as 'state capitalism', with the large state-owned enterprises continuing to play an important - and increasing - role in the economy and in business. However, state-owned enterprises no longer provide care for large numbers of people from the cradle to the grave - finding an alternative, efficient way of delivering basic welfare and health care is the big challenge facing China's public sector. (shrink)

GENERALIZED RECUBION THEORY II © North-Holland Publishing Company (1978) MONOTONE QUANTIFIERS AND ADMISSIBLE SETS Ion Barwise University of Wisconsin ...

Arbejderne i denne publikation er dels tidligere udgivne tidsskriftartikler, dels ikke før publiceret materiale. De afspejler en vedvarende og relevant forskning i antikkens opfattelse af psyken og af især den sokratiske samtale, som har gennemgribende indflydelse på mange forskellige områder i moderne tid: pædagogik, retsvæsen, sundhedsområdet, retorik osv. Teksterne falder i fire grupper: Sokrates (samtalens logik), Platon (især moralfilosofi og psykologi), Aristoteles (moralfilosofi, gudsbegreb og hverdagsargumentation) og Senere Filosofi (stoisk naturfilosofi, nyplatonisme, Augustins erkendelsesteori, og sjæl-legeme-opfattelsen i antikken). Læseren præsenteres her (...) for en række emner, der vil interessere den, der ønsker at fordybe sig i de ‘evige’ spørgsmål. (shrink)

Given the contemporary complexity of cities, landscape and society, urgent social tasks call for an integral, multidisciplinary approach. Rietveld Landscape’s strategic interventions focus and use the forces of existing developments and processes. This design method creates new opportunities for landscape, architecture, the public domain, ecology, recreation and economic activity.

Fresh look at how Jewish intellectuals thought about Judaism within a German philosophical tradition.

In this book, Stephen Hetherington attacks what he thinks are two "dogmas" of epistemology. One he calls "epistemic absolutism" which amounts to the claim that knowledge is absolute: you can be with or without it, but once you have it, it is not possible to have more or less. The other is "justificationalism" which is the view that some sort of justification is necessary for knowledge.

Using critical discourse analysis, this article analyzes the discursive representation of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in The Daily Yomiuri, part of the largest and most influential media conglomerate in Japan. A critical discourse analysis of The Daily Yomiuri reveals that Japanese national identity and the ideology of technoscience are reproduced through two discursive constructions: a diminished ‘risk’ from Fukushima radiation and citizens’ national duty in the nuclear crisis. Within these two constructions, 11 major techniques are identified by which The Yomiuri (...) discursively mitigates the risks from Fukushima and calls Japanese national identity into the service of the nuclear industry. The article concludes with implications for understanding the impact of political discourse in mass media on other policy debates in Japan and elsewhere. (shrink)

Volatile Knowing refers to the positive change that can result when parents and teachers talk together about the politics of school reform. Based on a study of teachers and parents who researched aspects of the accountability movement typically censored in mainstream media, Volatile Knowing reveals the hidden power behind current reform efforts that serve private, not public interests. It is aimed at provoking a new, child-centered movement for accountability and creativity in the nation's schools.

John Broome has argued that alleged cases of value incomparability are really examples of vagueness in the betterness relation. The main premiss of his argument is ‘the collapsing principle’. I argue that this principle is dubious, and that Broome's argument is therefore unconvincing. Correspondence:c1 Erik[email protected].