Helen Steward argues that determinism is incompatible with agency itself--not only the special human variety of agency, but also powers which can be accorded to animal agents. She offers a distinctive, non-dualistic version of libertarianism, rooted in a conception of what biological forms of organisation might make possible in the way of freedom.

This article uses philosopher Miranda Fricker’s work on epistemic injustice to shed light on the legal concept of the fiduciary, alongside demonstrating the wider contribution Fricker’s work can make to business ethics. Fiduciary, from the Latin fīdūcia, meaning “trust,” plays a fundamental role in all financial and business organisations: it acts as a moral safeguard of the relationship between trustee and beneficiary. The article focuses on the ethics of the fiduciary, but from a unique historical perspective, referring back to the (...) original formulation of the fiduciary within a familial context to investigate presuppositions regarding agential capabilities, whilst also paying attention to the power mechanism embedded in the trustee–beneficiary relationship. Using Fricker’s theory of pre-emptive testimonial injustice, the analysis elucidates the impact of cumulative beneficiary silencing in contemporary contexts, and the article uncovers ethical issues of an epistemological kind at the core of the fiduciary—of epistemic injustice. (shrink)

In this article, I discuss the structural domination of whiteness as it intersects with the potential of individual critique and reflexivity. I reflect on my positioning as a white nurse researcher while researching international nurse migration. I draw on two large qualitative studies and one small focus group study to discuss my reactions as a white researcher to evidence of institutional racism in the British health services and my growing awareness of how racism is reproduced in the British nursing profession.

This volume will be the starting point for future discussion and research.

Making a Difference presents fifteen original essays on causation and counterfactuals by an international team of experts. Collectively, they represent the state of the art on these topics. The essays in this volume are inspired by the life and work of Peter Menzies, who made a difference in the lives of students, colleagues, and friends. Topics covered include: the semantics of counterfactuals, agency theories of causation, the context-sensitivity of causal claims, structural equation models, mechanisms, mental causation, causal exclusion argument, free (...) will, and the consequence argument. (shrink)

This article defends two claims. First, humans could be in relationships characterised by hate with some robots. Second, it matters that humans could hate robots, as this hate could wrong the robots (by leaving them at risk of mistreatment, exploitation, etc.). In defending this second claim, I will thus be accepting that morally considerable robots either currently exist, or will exist in the near future, and so it can matter (morally speaking) how we treat these robots. The arguments presented in (...) this article make an important original contribution to the robo-philosophy literature, and particularly the literature on human–robot relationships (which typically only consider positive relationship types, e.g., love, friendship, etc.). Additionally, as explained at the end of the article, my discussions of robot hate could also have notable consequences for the emerging robot rights movement. Specifically, I argue that understanding human–robot relationships characterised by hate could actually help theorists argue for the rights of robots. (shrink)

Psychological evidence suggests that laypeople understand the world around them in terms of intuitive ontologies which describe broad categories of objects in the world, such as ‘person’, ‘artefact’ and ‘animal’. However, because intuitive ontologies are the result of natural selection, they only need to be adaptive; this does not guarantee that the knowledge they provide is a genuine reflection of causal mechanisms in the world. As a result, science has parted ways with intuitive ontologies. Nevertheless, since the brain is evolved (...) to understand objects in the world according to these categories, we can expect that they continue to play a role in scientific understanding. Taking the case of human evolution, we explore relationships between intuitive ontological and scientific understanding. We show that intuitive ontologies not only shape intuitions on human evolution, but also guide the direction and topics of interest in its research programmes. Elucidating the relationships between intuitive ontologies and science may help us gain a clearer insight into scientific understanding. (shrink)

Summarizes author’s contextual empiricism and uses it to analyze the difference between neuro-endocrinological accounts of presumed behavioral sex differences and neuro-selectionist accounts. Contextual empiricism is a philosophical approach that both shows how feminist critique works in the sciences and makes a contribution to general philosophy of science.

The subject of this essay is the dependence of evidential relations on background beliefs and assumptions. In Part I, two ways in which the relation between evidence and hypothesis is dependent on such assumptions are discussed and it is shown how in the context of appropriately differing background beliefs what is identifiable as the same state of affairs can be taken as evidence for conflicting hypotheses. The dependence of evidential relations on background beliefs is illustrated by discussions of the Michelson-Morley (...) experiment and the discovery of oxygen. In Part II, Hempel's analysis of confirmation and the contrasting model of theory acceptance provided by philosophers such as Kuhn and Feyerabend are discussed. It is argued that both are inadequate (on different grounds) and the problems addressed by each are shown to be more satisfactorily approached by means of the analysis developed in Part I. In Part III, it is argued that if there are objective criteria for deciding between competing theories, these cannot be simply that one theory has greater evidential support than another. Finally, some further methodological questions arising from the analysis are mentioned. (shrink)

Feminist scholars advocate the adoption of distinctive values in research. While this constitutes a coherent alternative to the more frequently cited cognitive or scientific values, they cannot be taken to supplant those more orthodox values. Instead, each set might better be understood as a local epistemology guiding research answerable to different cognitive goals. Feminist scholars advocate the adoption of distinctive values in research. While this constitutes a coherent alternative to the more frequently cited cognitive or scientific values, they cannot be (...) taken to supplant those more orthodox values. Instead, each set might better be understood as a local epistemology guiding research answerable to different cognitive goals. (shrink)

Outlines the origin and evolution of postmodern thought over the last half century and argues that the unchecked spread and application of postmodern ideas -- from academia, to activist circles, to the public at large - presents an authoritarian ideological threat not only to liberal democracy but also to modernity itself.

This paper is a discussion of the nature of inferring and focusses on the relation between reasons for belief and causes of belief. Two standard approaches to the analysis of inference, the epistemological and the psychological, are identified and discussed. While both approaches incorporate insights concerning, inference, counterexamples show that neither provides by itself an adequate account. A third account is developed and recommended on the grounds that it encompasses the essential insights of the rejected analyses while being immune to (...) their counterexamples. On this account coming to believe for a reason is taken to be central to our concept of inferring, but a causal relation holds between taking something to be a reason and belief. (shrink)

The paper attempts to explicate and justify the position I call `Agency Incompatibilism'- that is to say, the view that agency itself is incompatible with determinism. The most important part of this task is the characterisation of the conception of agency on which the position depends; for unless this is understood, the rationale for the position is likely to be missed. The paper accordingly proceeds by setting out the orthodox philosophical position concerning what it takes for agency to exist, before (...) going on to explain why and how that orthodoxy should be challenged. The relations between my own views and those of others writing on the issues of free will and moral responsibility, in three crucial and inter-connected areas are then explored. These are (1) the question how animals should figure in the philosophy of action; (2) the question what the lesson is of `Frankfurt-style' examples; and (3) the distinction between so-called `leeway' incompatibilism and `source' incompatibilism. The paper moves on to consider and respond to various objections to Agency Incompatibilism, including the claim that to embrace the conception of agency that makes incompatibilism plausible is to beg the question against the compatibilist, and also the worry that determinism is an empirical thesis which ought not to be straightforwardly falsifiable by such a priori reasoning as Agency Incompatibilism appears to involve. I also try to rebut the worry that Agency Incompatibilism is committed to the existence of an unintelligible and/or naturalistically impossible variety of irreducible agent causation. (shrink)

This paper explores the relationship between a person's claim right not to be harmed and the duties this claim confers on others. I argue that we should reject Jonathan Quong's evidence-based account of this relationship, which holds that an agent A's possession of a claim against B is partly determined by whether it would be reasonable for A to demand B's compliance with a correlative duty. When B's evidence is that demanding compliance would not be reasonable, A cannot have a (...) claim against B. I suggest that some of the putatively problematic cases that Quong identifies can be resolved by plausibly narrowing the scope of the right not to be harmed. I also argue that Quong's view leads to implausible conclusions, and that his account of what happens to A's claim in the face of lesser-evil justifications is inconsistent with his broader view. I then defend the view that agents are required, and not merely permitted, to act on lesser-evil justifications. I further argue that A may not defend herself against the infliction of harms that are justified on lesser-evil grounds. However, she may defend herself in cases where B is only evidentially, and not objectively, justified in harming her. (shrink)

This essay explores the intersection of race science and plant taxonomy in the creation of evolutionary taxonomies (phylogenies) of populations of Zea mays, also known as maize or corn. Following recent work in the history and sociology of race, it analyzes maize taxonomy as technology. Through an analysis of successive attempts to classify diverse maize varieties, especially those originating in Mexico, it shows that taxonomy created possibilities for researchers to intervene in commercial agriculture, state development projects, biological conservation, and domestic (...) and international politics and policy. It further underscores that the modern science of maize taxonomy was distinct but never inseparable from assessments of maize’s human cultivators. Attending to particularities of this relationship is crucial, because it reveals the application of maize taxonomy as a technology for ordering human diversity and intervening in human lives, as well as managing the impressive diversity of Zea mays. (shrink)

In historical claims for nativism, mathematics is a paradigmatic example of innate knowledge. Claims by contemporary developmental psychologists of elementary mathematical skills in human infants are a legacy of this. However, the connection between these skills and more formal mathematical concepts and methods remains unclear. This paper assesses the current debates surrounding nativism and mathematical knowledge by teasing them apart into two distinct claims. First, in what way does the experimental evidence from infants, nonhuman animals and neuropsychology support the nativist (...) hypothesis? Second, granting that infants have some elementary mathematical skills, does this mean that such skills play an important role in the development of mathematical knowledge? (shrink)

This article presents the findings of a study about the history of aversion therapy as a treatment technique in the English mental health system to convert lesbians and bisexual women into heterosexual women. We explored published psychiatric and psychological literature, as well as lesbian, gay, and bisexual archives and anthologies. We identified 10 examples of young women receiving aversion therapy in England in the 1960s and 1970s. We situate our discussion within the context of post-war British and transnational medical history. (...) As a contribution to a significantly under-researched area, this article adds to a broader transnational history of the psychological treatment of marginalised sexualities and genders. As a consequence, it also contributes to LGBTQIA+ history, the history of medicine, and psychiatric survivor history. We also reflect on the ethical implications of the research for current mental health practice. (shrink)

Much work in the ethics of war is structured around the distinction between jus ad bellum and jus in bello. This distinction has two key roles. It distinguishes two evaluative objects—the war ‘as a whole’, and the conduct of combatants during the war—and identifies different moral principles as relevant to each. I argue that we should be sceptical of this framework. I suggest that a single set of principles determines the justness of actions that cause nonconsensual harm. If so, there (...) are no distinctive ad bellum or in bello principles. I also reject the view that whilst the justness of, for example, ad bellum proportionality rests on all the goods and harms produced by the war, the justness of combatants’ conduct in war is determined by a comparatively limited set of goods and harms in a way that supports the ad bellum–in bello distinction. (shrink)

Live coding is an embodied, sensorial and live technological–human relationship that is recursively iterated through sonic and visual outputs based on what we argue are kinship relations between and through bodies and technology. At the same time, and in a familiar moment of déjà vu for feminist scholars, live coding is most often discussed not in relation to the lived and sensory human–technology kinship, but in terms of fetishised code or software, output and agency. As feminist scholars have long argued, (...) emphasising and fetishising code or software, and celebrating output and agency are normatively masculine, white and Western conceptions of technology that feed into the growing valorisation of accelerationist logic whilst also negating embodied, not to mention other (non-white, Western, masculine) bodies, expertise or histories per se. In this article, we want to redress this by drawing on our empirical material on live coding to focus on human–technology kinship and, in so doing, think about failure, slowness and embodiment and about human–technology relations that are more akin to what Alison Kafer (drawing on the work of Donna Haraway) has termed ‘becoming with’ or ‘making kin’. This, we argue, has the potential to shift the focus from the potentialities of technologies on or through the body, towards the generative capacities of mediation (including failure), which are caught up in lived experiences. The question is not only about how the relations of bodies and technologies are played out in certain circumstances but about what might be played out if we reconceptualise these relations in these terms. (shrink)

In the late 1930s networks of amateur observers across Britain were collecting data on birds , aircraft and society itself . This paper concentrates on birdwatching practice in the period 1930–1955. Through an examination of the construction of birdwatching's subjects, the Observers, and their objects, birds, it is argued that amateur strategies of scientific observation and record reflected, and were part-constitutive of, particular versions of ecological, national and social identity in this period. The paper examines how conflicts between a rural, (...) organicist Britishness and a modern, planner-preservationist Britishness were elaborated and contained within the figure of the birdwatcher and within the institutional epistemologies of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the British Trust for Ornithology. Such conflicts are shown to be embedded in the structuring of visual perception in different strategies of bird and aircraft identification, particularly between analytic and gestalt methods; the paper examines, using the related ‘field-science’ of aircraft recognition, the importance of identificatory processes in the construction of the Observer, and concludes by examining whether tensions between organicist and scientific discourses were in any sense resolved by the end of this period. (shrink)

Irigaray's insistence on sexual difference as the primary difference arises out of a phenomenological perception of nature. Drawing on Heidegger's insights into physis, she begins with his critique of the nature/culture binary. Both philosophers maintain that nature is not matter to be ordered by technical know-how; yet Irigaray reveals that although Heidegger distinguishes physis from techn in his work, his forgetting of the potentiality of matter, the maternal-feminine, and the two-fold essence of being as sexual difference means that his own (...) concept of physis can be understood as another techn. Focussing in particular upon Heidegger's interpretation of Aristotle's privileging of morphé over hylé as a description of presencing into appearance, I show that for Irigaray the movements of presencing and absencing emerge out of a metaphysics that does not take into account the fluidity, the mixtures and interpenetrations of a nature that is limited by fecundity not by death. Our oblivion to nature is the greatest danger, and thus attending to our embodied and hence sexuate nature holds the promise of a new age, since it is rooted in the possibilities of the flesh revealed through the cultivated perception of sexual difference. (shrink)

Predictions about the health risks of low level radiation combine two sorts of measures. One estimates the amount and kinds of radiation released into the environment, and the other estimates the adverse health effects. A new field called health physics integrates and applies nuclear physics to cytology to supply both these estimates. It does so by first determining the kinds of effects different types of radiation produce in biological organisms, and second, by monitoring the extent of these effects produced by (...) given levels of exposure. This essay examines the interplay between evidential constraints and external, contextual interests and values in studying the biological hazards of radiation. By analyzing the debate over linear vs. quadratic dose response models, the essay focuses on problems of developing quantitative, rather than qualitative, estimates of the risks of increased cancer incidence in an exposed population. (shrink)

_The Ethics of Pregnancy, Abortion and Childbirth_ addresses the unique moral questions raised by pregnancy and its intimate bodily nature. From assisted reproduction to abortion and ‘vital conflict’ resolution to more everyday concerns of the pregnant woman, this book argues for pregnancy as a close human relationship with the woman as guardian or custodian. Four approaches to pregnancy are explored: ‘uni-personal’, ‘neighborly’, ‘maternal’ and ‘spousal’. The author challenges not only the view that there is only one moral subject to consider (...) in pregnancy, but also the idea that the location of the fetus lacks all inherent, unique significance. It is argued that the pregnant woman is not a mere ‘neighbor’ or helpful stranger to the fetus but is rather already in a real familial relationship bringing real familial rights and obligations. If the status of the fetus is conclusive for at least some moral questions raised by pregnancy, so too are facts about its bodily relationship with, and presence in, the woman who supports it. This lucid, accessible and original book explores fundamental ethical issues in a rich and often neglected area of philosophy in ways of interest also to those from other disciplines. (shrink)

In this special issue of Human Nature we explore the possible adaptive links between teaching and learning during childhood, and we aim to expand the dialogue on the ways in which the social sciences, and in particular current anthropological research, may better inform our shifting understanding of how these processes vary in different social and ecological environments. Despite the cross-disciplinary trend toward incorporating more behavioral and cognitive data outside of postindustrial state societies, much of the published cross-cultural data is presented (...) as stand-alone population-level studies, making it challenging to extrapolate trends or incorporate both ecological and developmental perspectives. Here, contributors explore how human life history, ecological experience, cumulative culture, and ethnolinguistics impact social learning and child development in foraging and transitioning societies around the world. Using historical ethnographic data and qualitative and quantitative data from studies with contemporary populations, authors interrogate the array of factors that likely interact with cognitive development and learning. They provide contributions that explore the unique environmental, social, and cultural conditions that characterize such populations, offering key insights into processes of social learning, adaptive learning responses, and culture change. This series of articles demonstrates that children are taught culturally and environmentally salient skills in myriad ways, ranging from institutionalized instruction to brief, nuanced, and indirect instruction. Our hope is that this collection stimulates more research on the evolutionary and developmental implications associated with teaching and learning among humans. (shrink)

This paper argues that the position on free will which is defended in ‘Freedom: An Impossible Reality’ is not, as Tallis claims, a compatibilist view, but actually a version of libertarianism. While endorsing many aspects of that libertarian view itself, the paper raises questions about how one of the central arguments for Tallis’s view is supposed to work, and queries whether it really follows from the fact that we need to stand apart from nature in a certain sense, in order (...) to develop the kind of abstract knowledge that is constituted by the body of scientific law, that our own actions are not mere manifestations of what Tallis calls the ‘habits of nature’. It is also suggested that while a strong case can be made for many varieties of human exceptionalism, Tallis’s view of animal behaviour may be too simple and that there are examples of animal agency which cannot be explained merely by the associative learning which appears to be the highest grade of animal cognition that Tallis countenances. (shrink)

Global ignorance about Africa continues to sustain inappropriate global interventions to resolve public health crises, often with disastrous consequences. To explain why this continues to happen, I marshal two theorems that predict basic statistical properties, called ‘the doctrinal paradox’ and ‘the discursive dilemma’, which underlie scientific consensus formation and evidence-based decision making on a global scale. These mathematical results illuminate the epistemic and material injustices committed by the protocols of medical research conducted at the highest level of global knowledge production (...) in the service of international humanitarian aid for Africans. These social choice theorems reveal that a global scientific consensus projecting claims and proposing policies about Africa’s disease burden is likely to yield a low degree of reliability, in that the probability of its accuracy is less than chance. The solution to this anomaly is to remove from the global scientific agenda the statistically unrealisable demand of satisfying too many multinational corporate and foreign governments’ priorities as equally entitled to benefit from the knowledge produced to improve Africa’s public health sector. Instead, foreign funding targeted to support medical science and policy in Africa should be directed by those specialists in situ who are most familiar with their own national health challenges and potential solutions, rather than relying upon foreign decision makers to interpret Africa’s emergency public health care needs. Keywords Doctrinal paradox, discursive dilemma, scientific consensus, epistemic trust, global health ethics, group agency. (shrink)

The Speculum Ecclesie, by which title it is commonly known, of St Edmund of Abingdon, archbishop of Canterbury, has come down in various versions in Latin, Anglo-Norman, and English. The present edition comprises the original Latin text, which has never before been printed, and for comparison, printed en face, the vulgate Latin text, which is a translation of one of the Anglo-Norman versions.Manuscript evidence suggests that the Speculum must almost certainly have been written before Edmund became archbishop in 1234, and (...) even before the 1220s. The chief authority for the treatise, apart from the scriptures, is High of St Victor, and the Speculum is, in fact, a skilful summa of Hugh's teaching on the life of meditation and contemplation which should be the ideal of the religious. Edmund has drawn together and systemized advice and instruction scattered in many places in Hugh's ascetical and theological writings. (shrink)

This book offers a new description of the significance of Hesiod's 'myth of the races' for ancient Greek and Roman authors, showing how the most detailed responses to this story go far beyond nostalgia for a lost 'Golden' age or hope of its return. Through a series of close readings, it argues that key authors from Plato to Juvenal rewrite the story to reconstruct 'Hesiod' more broadly as predecessor in forming their own intellectual and rhetorical projects; disciplines such as philosophy, (...) didactic poetry and satire all engage in implicit questions about 'Hesiodic' teaching. The first chapter introduces key issues; the second re-evaluates the account in Hesiod's Works and Days. A major chapter outlines Plato's use of Hesiod through close study of the Protagoras, Republic and Statesman. Subsequent chapters focus on Aratus' Phaenomena and Ovid's Metamorphoses; the final chapter, on the Octavia attributed to Seneca and Juvenal's sixth Satire, broadens ideas of Hesiod's reception in Rome. (shrink)

Stocks and flows are building blocks of dynamic systems: Stocks change through inflows and outflows, such as our bank balance changing with withdrawals and deposits, or atmospheric CO2 with absorptions and emissions. However, people make systematic errors when trying to infer the behavior of dynamic systems, termed SF failure, whose cognitive explanations are yet unknown. We argue that SF failure appears when people focus on specific system elements, rather than on the system structure and gestalt. Using a standard SF task, (...) SF failure decreased by a global as opposed to local task format; individual global as opposed to local processing styles; and global as opposed to local perceptual priming. These results converge toward local processing as an explanation for SF failure. We discuss theoretical and practical implications on the connections between the scope of attention and understanding of dynamic systems. (shrink)

This article uses a 36-million word corpus of news reporting on Hurricane Katrina in the United States to explore how computer-based methods can help researchers to investigate the construction of newsworthiness. It makes use of Bednarek and Caple’s discursive approach to the analysis of news values, and is both exploratory and evaluative in nature. One aim is to test and evaluate the integration of corpus techniques in applying discursive news values analysis. We employ and evaluate corpus techniques that have not (...) been tested previously in relation to the large-scale analysis of news values. These techniques include tagged lemma frequencies, collocation, key part-of-speech tags and key semantic tags. A secondary aim is to gain insights into how a specific happening – Hurricane Katrina – was linguistically constructed as newsworthy in major American news media outlets, thus also making a contribution to ecolinguistics. (shrink)

This paper considers a certain genre of anti-racist solidarity — what I call simulations of lived experience – in order to critically examine the premises and pitfalls of such efforts. Two primary examples are examined: (1) a 2014 smartphone app called Everyday Racism, where users are invited to ‘play’ a racialised character for a week in order to ‘better understand’ the experience of racism; and (2) various iterations of ‘Hijab Day’, where non-Muslim women are invited to wear a hijab for (...) a day. I argue that both examples, while well-intentioned, offer only a ‘thin’ version of the lived experience of veiled Muslim women and people of colour, failing to reckon with the epistemological and phenomenological complexity entailed in this embodied experience. Moreover, I argue that both proceed on the misguided idea that first-hand experience, rather than empathic listening, is generative of anti-racist solidarity, and in doing so, these efforts risk reproducing the very structures and habits of white privilege they set out to challenge. (shrink)