We have been asked to consider the feasibility of piloting a Citizens’ Basic Income : a basic, unconditional, universal, individual, regular payment that would replace aspects of social security and be introduced alongside changes to taxes. Piloting and evaluating a CBI as a Cluster Randomized Control Trial raises the question of whether intervention and comparison groups would be in equipoise, and thus whether randomization would be ethical. We believe that most researchers would accept that additional income, or reduced conditions on (...) receiving income would be likely to improve health, especially at lower income levels. However, there are genuine uncertainties about the impacts on other outcomes, and CBI as a mechanism of providing income. There is also less consensus amongst civil servants and politicians about the impacts on health, and substantial disagreement about whether these would outweigh other impacts. We believe that an RCT is ethical because of these uncertainties. We also argue that the principle of equipoise should apply to randomized and non-randomized trials; that randomization is a fairer means of allocating to intervention and comparison groups; and that there is an ethical case for experimentation to generate higher-quality evidence for policymaking that may otherwise do harm. (shrink)

This paper sets out to accomplish two goals. First, drawing on the Irish perspective, it reconceptualises one of the enduring legacy-based harms of epistemic colonisation, in this case, ‘linguicism’, in terms of ‘hermeneutical injustice’. Second, it argues that otherwise well-meaning attempts to combat epistemic colonisation through the inclusion of marginalised testimony can, in certain circumstances, lead to cases of ‘epistemic exploitation’, which, in turn, can result in ‘ontic burnout’. Both linguicism and epistemic exploitation, this paper theorizes, have the potential to (...) bring about ontic burnout. Here is the plan: to set the scene, section I briefly surveys some key arguments supporting the call for higher education institutions (HEIs) to engage in epistemic decolonising, focusing on the importance of striking a balance between two extremes: (i) abandoning all forms of Eurocentric/colonial knowledge through the elimination of inherited thinking and conceptual schemes which result from colonization, in particular, those which remain in our thinking “owing to inertia rather than to our own reflective choices” (Wiredu 2002, p.56); (ii) the other—pursuing a more positive project where we seek to, “exploit as much as is judicious the resources of indigenous conceptual schemes” (Wiredu 1996: p.136). From here, it moves to consider harms associated with a subset of ‘epistemicide’, that is, ‘linguicism’—a phenomenon where the language and culture of the colonizer become part of the ‘civilising project’ and, in more extreme cases of linguicide, forcibly replaces indigenous languages. Section II then explores the subtleties of harmful by-products deriving from ‘inclusion’, namely that which scholars refer to as ‘epistemic exploitation’. Situations where marginalised scholars are finally ‘at the table but still on the menu’ arise when privileged persons, compel marginalised knowers to educate them [and others] about the nature of their oppression (Berenstain, 2016). Habitual requests to turn themselves inside out for emancipatory principles give rise to a phenomenon known as ontic burnout (Dunne and Kotsonis, 2022, p.9)—“a form of dissociative explanatory fatigue culminating in oppressed persons engaging in a conscious or unconscious decoupling from their socially constructed identity, from the burdens and injustices associated with being a member of a certain social kind”. This harm is, I argue, rarely discussed in the literature and worthy of further analysis. (shrink)

Is there a public good? A prevalent view in political science is that democracy is unavoidably chaotic, arbitrary, meaningless, and impossible. Such scepticism began with Condorcet in the eighteenth century, and continued most notably with Arrow and Riker in the twentieth century. In this powerful book, Gerry Mackie confronts and subdues these long-standing doubts about democratic governance. Problems of cycling, agenda control, strategic voting, and dimensional manipulation are not sufficiently harmful, frequent, or irremediable, he argues, to be of normative (...) concern. Mackie also examines every serious empirical illustration of cycling and instability, including Riker's famous argument that the US Civil War was due to arbitrary dimensional manipulation. Almost every empirical claim is erroneous, and none is normatively troubling, Mackie says. This spirited defence of democratic institutions should prove both provocative and influential. (shrink)

Beloved author of, among many other books, the bestsellers How to Argue and Win Every Time and The Making of a Country Lawyer , Gerry Spence distills a lifetime of wisdom and observation about how we live, and how we ought to live in Seven Simple Steps to Personal Freedom . Here, in seven chapters, he delivers messages that inspire us first to recognize our servitude-to money, possessions, corporations, the status quo, and our own fears-and then shows us how (...) to begin the self-defining process toward liberation. Seven Simple Steps to Personal Freedom is a powerfully affirming, large-hearted, and life-changing book that asks us all to take the greatest risk for the greatest reward-our own freedom. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper scrutinizes the nature and scope of deleterious consequences arising from the pursuit of unattainable pedagogical exemplars on social media. We cash out this phenomenon using exemplarist theory to emphasize the fact that social media (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, TikTok) are platforms in which the vast majority of users present idealized and curated versions of themselves. We focus specifically on educational practitioners and show that attempting to emulate unattainable pedagogical exemplars has negative impacts on agents’ emotional well-being: It can (...) cause burnout and self-conflict, decrease motivation, and also inflict detrimental outcomes on agents’ self-esteem. We conclude that attainable, relevant, relatable, and authentic exemplars are key to a successful exemplarist approach and that safeguarding against unattainable pedagogical exemplars is of paramount importance for the wellbeing of pedagogues, and by extension, the success of educational systems. (shrink)

This paper considers in conceptual terms the extent to which pre-service teachers’ disengagement with philosophy of education might usefully be explained in terms of the mistaken charge of (1) ‘epistemic trespassing’ frequently levelled against philosophers of education. This cohort charge philosophers of education with being ultracrepidarians—those who proffer opinions on subjects that they know nothing about. Contra this view, I argue that casting philosophers as epistemic trespassers—lofty theorists with nothing meaningful to contribute to professional practice—is a wrongful charge, or ‘epistemic (...) vice’, based on a series of epistemic mistakes. These, individually and collectively, lead to a series of troubling costs in terms of impoverished professional formation and practice. To diagnose a plausible explanatory account of this phenomenon, I briefly turn to what I consider the main causes of this misattribution—more precisely—the four secondary category mistakes pre-service teachers make. Naturally a qualification is required. I contend these epistemic mistakes can rightfully be attributed to *some pre-service teachers in such determinations, which include: (2) misunderstanding standpoint epistemology (SE) in terms of automatic privilege being coextensive with first-personal authority (FPA); (3) overestimating the added value of deliberate/rational ignorance; (4) misguided intellectualist views of skills and expertise; and, (5) uncritical technicist attempts to emulate TikTok Exemplars with the allure of ‘Insta results’. (shrink)

This paper proposes a novel educational approach to epistemic vice rehabilitation. Its authors Gerry Dunne and Alkis Kotsonis note that, like Quassim Cassam, they remain optimistic about the possibility of improvement with regard to epistemic vice. However, unlike Cassam, who places the burden of minimizing or overcoming epistemic vices and their consequences on the individual, Dunne and Kotsonis argue that vice rehabilitation is best tackled via the exemplarist animated community of inquiry zetetic principles and defeasible-reasons-regulated deliberative processes. The vice-reduction (...) method they propose is made up of four distinct yet complementary components: (1) positive exemplarism of epistemic virtue (saints), (2) negative exemplarism of epistemic vice (sinners), (3) direct teaching/instruction, and (4) cognitive apprenticeship. Dunne and Kotsonis argue that this pedagogical intervention appropriately considers learnings deriving from forensic scrutiny of both ideal and non-ideal interpersonally calibrated zetetic features integral to knowledge acquisition as well as wider societal influences impacting the development of agents' epistemic character. It bridges research on vice epistemology (Cassam's obstructivist theory), social epistemology (corrupted social processes mitigating against vice rehabilitation), virtue epistemology, and moral exemplarism. (shrink)

This paper proposes a novel educational approach to epistemic vice rehabilitation. Its authors Gerry Dunne and Alkis Kotsonis note that, like Quassim Cassam, they remain optimistic about the possibility of improvement with regard to epistemic vice. However, unlike Cassam, who places the burden of minimizing or overcoming epistemic vices and their consequences on the individual, Dunne and Kotsonis argue that vice rehabilitation is best tackled via the exemplarist animated community of inquiry zetetic principles and defeasible-reasons-regulated deliberative processes. The vice-reduction (...) method they propose is made up of four distinct yet complementary components: (1) positive exemplarism of epistemic virtue (saints), (2) negative exemplarism of epistemic vice (sinners), (3) direct teaching/instruction, and (4) cognitive apprenticeship. Dunne and Kotsonis argue that this pedagogical intervention appropriately considers learnings deriving from forensic scrutiny of both ideal and non-ideal interpersonally calibrated zetetic features integral to knowledge acquisition as well as wider societal influences impacting the development of agents' epistemic character. It bridges research on vice epistemology (Cassam's obstructivist theory), social epistemology (corrupted social processes mitigating against vice rehabilitation), virtue epistemology, and moral exemplarism. (shrink)

This review considers Darko Suvin’s recent career anthology Defined by a Hollow with respect to debates about the relevance of Marxism and utopian critique in the context of a global neoliberal hegemony that still imagines itself as the ‘end of history’. Suvin’s work suggests that the relationship between Marxism and aesthetics in such times is not simply a quirk of the academy, but is in fact a politically necessary conjoining of materialist praxis and quasi-religious inspiration.

Realist philosophies of science posit a dialectical relation between theoretical, explanatory knowledge and practical, including taxonomic knowledge. This paper examines the dialectic between the theory of descent and empirical, Linnaean taxonomy which is based on a logic of traditional classes. It considers the arguments of David Hull to the effect that many of the practical problems of empirical classification can be resolved by means of an ontology based upon the theory of descent in which species taxa are regarded as individuals (...) rather than as classes or natural kinds.Contra Hull, it is argued that this view is, at best, only partially consistent with taxonomic practice and that it cannot sustain experimental practice which presupposes that species taxa be regarded as natural kinds. An outline is given of a possible alternative dialectic between a field theory of morphogenesis and a rational systematics involving a logic of relations. (shrink)

This paper examines the relatively underexplored relationship between epistemic wrongs and epistemic harms in the context of epistemic injustice. Does the presence of one always imply the presence of the other? Or, is it possible to have one without the other? Here we aim to establish a prima facie case that epistemic wrongs do not always produce epistemic harms. We argue that the epistemic wrongness of an action should never be evaluated solely based on the action's consequences, viz. the epistemic (...) and practical harms suffered by the wronged party. Instead – as we shall show – epistemic harms necessarily follow from epistemic wrongs. To conclude, we suggest ways in which extant accounts of epistemic wrongs and epistemic harms as they cash out in epistemic injustice contexts might be refined in light of our argument. (shrink)

What it means to be a knower together with the social practices through which we come to know are irreducibly complex ethical concepts (Congdon, 2018). Extant analyses of epistemic injustice typica...

The Sentimental Life of International Law is about our age-old longing for a decent international society and the ways of seeing, being, and speaking that might help us achieve that aim. This book asks how international lawyers might engage in a professional practice that has become, to adapt a title of Janet Malcolm's, both difficult and impossible. It suggests that international lawyers are disabled by the governing idioms of international lawyering, and proposes that they may be re-enabled by speaking different (...) sorts of international law, or by speaking international law in different sorts of ways. In this methodologically diverse and unusually personal account, Gerry Simpson brings to the surface international law's hidden literary prose and offers a critical and redemptive account of the field. He does so in a series of chapters on international law's bathetic underpinnings, its friendly relations, the neurotic foundations of its underlying social order, its screened-off comic dispositions, its anti-method, and the life-worlds of its practitioners. Finally, the book closes with a chapter in which international law is re-envisioned through the practice of gardening. All of this is put forward as a contribution to the project of making international law, again, a compelling language for our times. (shrink)

Gerry Gaden; Rehabilitating Responsibility, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 24, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 27–38, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-975.

Some writers appear to believe that a theory of justice must somehow pick people up by the scruff of the neck and force them to behave justly, regardless of their beliefs or inclinations. This is an absurd demand... (B. Barry, Justice as Impartiality).

In order for us to have epistemic justification, Sinnott-Armstrong believes we do not have to be able to rule out all sceptical hypotheses. He suggests that it is sufficient if we have 'modestly justified beliefs', i.e., if our evidence rules out all non-sceptical alternatives. I argue that modest justification is not sufficient for epistemic justification. Either modest justification is independent of our ability to rule out sceptical hypotheses, but is not a kind of epistemic justification, or else modest justification is (...) a kind of epistemic justification, but is not truly independent of our ability to rule out sceptical hypotheses. (shrink)

Schumpeter's redefinition of representative democracy as merely leadership competition was canonical in postwar political science. Schumpeter denies that individual will, common will, or common good are essential to democracy, but he, and anyone, I contend, is forced to assume these conditions in the course of denying them. Democracy is only a method, of no intrinsic value, its sole function to select leaders, according to Schumpeter. Leaders impose their views, and are not controlled by voters, and this is as it should (...) be, he says. I respond that his leadership democracy is implausible, both descriptively and prescriptively. Competitive election is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition of democracy, not sufficient even for the limited empirical purpose of regime classification. Any adequate definition of democracy must make reference to the common will, the common good, and other values, I submit. (shrink)

We identify a number of principles with respect to prediction that, we argue, underpin adult language comprehension: (a) comprehension consists in realizing a mapping between the unfolding sentence and the event representation corresponding to the real‐world event being described; (b) the realization of this mapping manifests as the ability to predict both how the language will unfold, and how the real‐world event would unfold if it were being experienced directly; (c) concurrent linguistic and nonlinguistic inputs, and the prior internal states (...) of the system, each drive the predictive process; (d) the representation of prior internal states across a representational substrate common to the linguistic and nonlinguistic domains enables the predictive process to operate over variable time frames and variable levels of representational abstraction. We review empirical data exemplifying the operation of these principles and discuss the relationship between prediction, event structure, thematic role assignment, and incrementality. (shrink)

Using the 1991 police beating of Rodney King as case study, this paper draws on Husserlian phenomenology to establish a coherentist account of knowledge as situated with respect to its concrete circumstances of production. I take as my point of departure Gail Weiss's phenomenological investigation into the jury's assessment of evidence in the "Rodney King incident," and in particular, her interest in Husserl's conception of the "horizon" as a structure of consciousness that mediates what is present in perceptual awareness. Making (...) use of Anthony Steinbock's work on Husserlian phenomenological method — drawn from his extensive study of Husserl's unpublished manuscripts — I develop an epistemological framework that treats knowledge claims as inextricably bound to the horizons of meaning from which they arise, and provides standards of epistemic responsibility pertaining to an agent's "framing" of evidence. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper is concerned with the view that, in so far as they involve the deliberate targeting of innocent people, neither terrorism nor area bombing is ever morally permissible. Four attempts to justify this view are considered, all of which are based on the intuition that deliberately killing innocent people is wrong. By means of a detailed examination of the introduction of area bombing by Britain in 1940–41, it is argued that in certain circumstances there are other equally powerful (...) and accessible intuitions which support the opposite view. It is further argued that only moral theories which provide for the weighing of competing moral intuitions are capable of avoiding this kind of impasse and the biased selection of intuitions that this form of absolutism involves. (shrink)

Richard Rorty, a world-renowned American pragmatist, died on 8 June 2007. He left an enduring impact on Western philosophy. Like his predecessors Nietzsche, Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Derrida, Rorty attempted the gargantuan task of redescribing the nature of philosophy in the late twentieth century. This article is a modest personal tribute to a great philosopher who shaped the author’s views about self-creation, metaphysics, and politics. The major themes in Rorty’s philosophy are discussed briefly. It is the author’s hope that this article (...) will serve as a short introduction to Rorty’s neopragmatism. The author likewise hopes that it will stimulate the readers to pursue the philosophical issues that Rorty raised. (shrink)

This study investigates the relationship between moral stress reactions and resulting coping efforts in severely morally challenging situations. Long-term positive reactions and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) indicators following morally challenging situations are also studied. The sample consisted of cadets and officers (n = 332) from Norway and Sweden. Long-term positive reactions were found to be associated with limited moral stress reactions during the challenging episode and frequent use of acceptance and positive reappraisal coping strategies. Long-term high scores on a PTSD (...) indicator scale covaried with high scores on Openness, a strong moral stress reaction, and frequent use of instrumental coping strategies. The main conclusion is that the immediate moral stress reaction and coping strategies following morally challenging situations appear to be related to both positive long-term reactions and to indicators of PTSD. (shrink)

The present discussion of dialectic thought is an extension of Van's original discussion of “realism” as the dialectic synthesis of conservatism (theism) and liberalism (empiricism) as approaches to thought.

Bioethics and Global Bioethics are currently among the most visible programs in ethics in the global academic community. It was my good fortune to have met Dr. Van Rensselaer Potter in 1963, long before he coined the term “Bioethics” and emerged as America's first Bioethicist, maintaining “The Wisconsin Tradition” established by John Muir and Aldo Leopold. Van believed that all ethics are properly based on a pan-cultural scientific knowledge base. How it is that ethics are related to knowledge, and to (...) values and morals, is the subject of this discussion. (shrink)

Neurofilaments are by far the most obvious elements of the neuronal cytoskeleton. Their subunits are biochemically among the most abundant neuron specific components, particularly in axons. Clearly they must be important to the neuron or they would not be so numerous But what do they do?.

Discussion is frequently observed in democratic politics, but change in view is rarely observed. Call this the ‘unchanging minds hypothesis’. I assume that a given belief or desire is not isolated, but, rather, is located in a network structure of attitudes, such that persuasion sufficient to change an attitude in isolation is not sufficient to change the attitude as supported by its network. The network structure of attitudes explains why the unchanging minds hypothesis seems to be true, and why it (...) is false: due to the network, the effects of deliberative persuasion are typically latent, indirect, delayed, or disguised. Finally, I connect up the coherence account of attitudes to several topics in recent political and democratic theory. Key Words: deliberation • democracy • persuasion • change in view • coherence. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: 1 Introduction 1 -- 2 Central themes and critical issues 10 -- Introduction 10 -- Core themes 11 -- Differences which have surfaced in the move from -- margins to mainstream 15 -- The claims of restorative justice: a brief examination 21 -- Some limitations of restorative justice 25 -- Some dangers of restorative justice 29 -- Debunking restorative justice 32 -- 3 Reviving restorative justice traditions 36 -- The rebirth of an ancient practice 36 -- (...) Pre-modem criminal justice 37 -- The renaissance of native justice traditions 43 -- Navajo peacemaking 44 -- Can one characterise ancient and indigenous -- justice as restorative? 47 -- Can one revive restorative justice traditions? 49 -- Conclusion: did restorative justice ever die? 59 -- 4 Healing the victim 62 -- Introduction 62 -- The experiences and needs of victims 64 -- The inadequacy of punitive justice for the victim 67 -- Victim reforms 70 -- Restitution from the offender 74 -- Beyond restitution: restoring victims 76 -- Restorative justice or 'clubbing together'? 78 -- Using victims to rehabilitate offenders 81 -- Paternalism towards victims 83 -- Balancing the needs of the victim with those of society 84 -- 5 A restorative approach to offenders 87 -- Introduction 87 -- Restorative justice as an alternative to retributive justice 88 -- Restorative justice as an alternative to treatment 94 -- The goals and methods of restorative justice in relation -- to offenders 95 -- An alternative to punishment or an alternative form of -- punishment? 106 -- An alternative to treatment? 111 -- 6 Shame, apology and forgiveness 114 -- Introduction 114 -- Restorative cautioning 115 -- The psychological routes of restorative conferencing 116 -- The idea of reintegrative shaming 118 -- Some questions about shaming 123 -- Apology and forgiveness 132 -- 7 Mediation, participation and the role of community 136 -- Introduction: handling criminal conflicts 136 -- The rationale for the restorative justice process 140 -- Achieving restorative goals 141 -- Moral development and the strengthening of community 144 -- The role of community 151 -- 8 The future of restorative justice 161 -- Introduction 161 -- Implementing restorative justice: the paths less likely 163 -- The implementation of restorative techniques 166 -- Restorative justice and the pattern of penal control 169 -- The future of restorative justice research 170 -- Appendix to chapter 3: the theological roots of judicial -- punishment 172. (shrink)