The “scarred villain” trope, where facial differences like scars signify moral corruption, is ubiquitous in film (e.g., Batman’s The Joker). Strides by advocacy groups to undermine the trope, however, suggest cinematic representations of facial differences could be improving with time. This preregistered study characterized facial differences in film across cultures (US vs. India) and time (US: 1980-2019, India: 2000-2019). Top-grossing films by country and decade were screened for characters with facial differences. We found that the scarred villain trope has actually (...) worsened with time, although in tandem with progress in also representing non-villainous characters with facial anomalies. Country of origin did not predict the presence of facial differences in villains or heroes. “Action” and “fantasy” movies were the most likely genres to depict villains with facial differences. Finally, villains’ facial differences crossed more facial subunits and were more likely to involve lips, chin, and mandible than when present in heroes. Our findings underscore the need for critical reflection on the role of cultural practices—even when seemingly innocuous—in shaping and maintaining negative biases against already stigmatized groups. (shrink)

Background: Facial proportionality and symmetry are positively associated with perceived levels of facial attractiveness. -/- Objective: The aims of this study were to confirm and extend the association of proportionality with perceived levels of attractiveness and character traits and determine differences in attractiveness and character ratings between "anomalous" and "typical" faces using a large dataset. -/- Methods: Ratings of 597 unique individuals from the Chicago Face Database were used. A formula was developed as a proxy of relative horizontal proportionality, where (...) a proportionality score of "0" indicated perfect proportionality and more negative scores indicated less proportionality. Faces were categorized as "anomalous" or "typical" by 2 independent reviewers based on physical features. -/- Results: Across the ratings for all faces, Spearman correlations revealed greater proportionality was associated with attractiveness ( ρ = 0.292, P < 0.001) and trustworthiness ( ρ = 0.193, P < 0.001), while lesser proportionality was associated with impressions of anger (ρ = 0.132, P = 0.001), dominance (ρ = 0.259, P < 0.001), and threateningness ( ρ = 0.234, P < 0.001). Mann-Whitney U tests revealed the typical cohort had significantly higher levels of proportionality (-13.98 versus -15.14, P = 0.030) and ratings of attractiveness (3.39 versus 2.99, P < 0.001) and trustworthiness (3.48 versus 3.35, P < 0.001). -/- Conclusions: This study demonstrated that facial proportionality is not only significantly associated with higher ratings of attractiveness, but also associated with judgements of trustworthiness. Proportionality plays a role in evoking negative attributions of personality characteristics to people with facial anomalies. (shrink)

Background: Facial attractiveness influences our perceptions of others, with beautiful faces reaping societal rewards and anomalous faces encountering penalties. The purpose of this study was to determine associations of visual attention with bias and social dispositions toward people with facial anomalies. -/- Methods: Sixty subjects completed tests evaluating implicit bias, explicit bias, and social dispositions before viewing publicly available images of preoperative and postoperative patients with hemifacial microsomia. Eye-tracking was used to register visual fixations. -/- Results: Participants with higher implicit (...) bias scores fixated significantly less on the cheek and ear region preoperatively (P = 0.004). Participants with higher scores in empathic concern and perspective taking fixated more on the forehead and orbit preoperatively (P = 0.045) and nose and lips (P = 0.027) preoperativel. -/- Conclusions: Participants with higher levels of implicit bias spent less visual attention on anomalous facial anatomy, whereas participants with higher levels of empathic concern and perspective taking spent more visual attention on normal facial anatomy. Levels of bias and social dispositions such as empathy may predict layperson gaze patterns toward those with facial anomalies and provide insights to neural mechanisms underlying the "anomalous is bad" paradigm. (shrink)

Background: This study tested the core tenets of how facial scars are perceived by characterizing layperson response to faces with scars. The authors predicted that scars closer to highly viewed structures of the face (i.e., upper lip and lower lid), scars aligned against resting facial tension lines, and scars in the middle of anatomical subunits of the face would be rated less favorably. Methods: -/- Volunteers aged 18 years and older from the United States were recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (...) to complete a face rating survey. Scars were digitally added in different locations and orientations for a total of 14 unique scars added to each face. Each participant rated 50 different faces on confidence, friendliness, and attractiveness. Data were analyzed using linear mixed effects models. Results: -/- A total of 88,850 ratings [82,990 scarred (93.4 percent)] for attractiveness, friendliness, and confidence were analyzed. In univariate linear mixed effects models, the presence of a facial scar did not significantly impact attractiveness (β = 0.016, SE = 0.014, z = 1.089, p = 0.276). A second set of linear mixed effects models identified interactions between location, subunit placement, and orientation to facial tension lines. Scars located on the lower lid mid subunit perpendicular to facial tension lines were rated less attractive (β = −0.065, SE = 0.028, z = −2.293, p = 0.022). Conclusions: -/- On average, a single well-healed facial scar does not negatively affect first impressions of attractiveness, confidence, or friendliness. Specific scar location and orientation combinations, however, such as a perpendicular scar at the mid-lower eyelid, may result in lower perceived attractiveness, confidence, and friendliness. (shrink)

Background: The use of therapeutic untruths raises a number of ethical issues, which have begun to be explored to some extent, particularly in dementia care services, where their use has been found to be high. Little is known, however, about their use by health professionals working in learning disability services. Research question: The study aimed to explore the frequency of use of therapeutic untruths by student learning disability nurses, and by their colleagues; how effective the students perceived them to be (...) as a means of responding to behaviours that challenge; and their level of comfort with using them. Research design: A correlational design was used to gather data from an online version of the Best Interest Scale, adapted for a learning disability context. Participants were 30 learning disability student nurses studying at a university in the North-East of England. Ethical considerations: The study was reviewed and received ethical approval from the first author’s university ethics committee. Findings: Overall, 96% of participants reported using therapeutic untruths. ‘Omission’ was the most frequently used type of therapeutic untruths, the most effective and the type that the students felt most comfortable using. Frequency of use of therapeutic untruths correlated significantly and positively with perceived effectiveness and the level of comfort that the students felt when using them, for all types of therapeutic untruths. Conclusion: The use of therapeutic untruths by the student nurses was consistent with that found in research in dementia care services in the United Kingdom and abroad. Further research to explore the generalisability of the results to the wider context of learning disability services is needed. The study highlights that there may be a need for more formal guidance and educational input to student nurses in the use of therapeutic untruths with people with a learning disability. (shrink)

Charles Taylor is quite rightly ranked as one of the leading philosophers writing in the world today. As such, his recent endorsement of Catholicism as his preferred vision for the good life warrants careful attention. To this end, I examine the core aspects of his Catholicism that centre on four main themes: Catholicism as difference, the need for transcendence, the necessity for acts of 'unconditional love', and his support for Matteo Ricci's Jesuit mission of the 16th century as a (...) model to be followed for Catholics today. I argue that Taylor has severe weaknesses in all these themes, which cast great doubts on the viability of his Catholic vision for offering an orientation towards the good. (shrink)

In A Secular Age Charles Taylor endorses Mikhail Epstein’s notion of ‘minimal religion’ as his preferred orientation to the good for Western secular society. This article examines the basis of Epstein’s ‘minimal religion’ which rests on the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. It is shown that Freud’s theories are incompatible with Taylor’s own thought, and in the case of Jung, Epstein fails to develop the latter’s contribution to our understanding of religion. Moreover, although Taylor (...) endorses Epstein’s work he makes no reference to Jung. To this end, the importance of Jung’s theories in relation to religion are elucidated and offered as a way to forge a dialogue between a nuanced humanist position and the theistic vision offered by Taylor. (shrink)

In this essay I discuss the historical adequacy of Charles Taylor's philosophical history of secularization, as presented in his A Secular Age . I do so by situating it in relation to the contextual historiography of secularization in early modern Europe, with a particular focus on developments in the German Empire. Considering how profoundly conceptions of secularization have been bound to competing religious and political programmes, we must begin our discussion by entertaining the possibility that modern philosophical and historiographic (...) conceptions of secularization might themselves be outcrops of this unfinished competition. Peter Gordon has rightly observed that Taylor's philosophical history of secularization is a Catholic one, and that this is bound up with a specific view of secularization as a theological and ecclesiological “disembedding” of rational subjectivity from its prior embodiment in a sacral body, community , and cosmos. Taylor delivers this history in his “reform master narrative”: that certain fundamental religious and cultural reforms or changes in early modern Europe wrought the secularization responsible for a modern epoch of “unbelief”. (shrink)

Charles Taylor has recently stated his religious leanings as being at the core of his philosophical vision for a better society. At the heart of this vision is his emphasis on transcendence: that there is something beyond life as we know it. Some years earlier, Taylor had explicitly endorsed the work of Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch for the way he wanted to talk about the issue of transcendence; however, neither figures prominently in his recent writings. While there (...) may be differing reasons for this omission, my main concern in this article is to show how the issue of transcendence in Benjamin's and Bloch's writings offers an interesting comparison with Taylor's work on this issue. Moreover, Benjamin and Bloch will be shown to offer ways in which Taylor can more fully express his own undeveloped articulation of transcendence through a consideration of the themes of religion, God, time and death. (shrink)

Background Advance Care Planning via Group Visits (ACP-GV) is a patient-centered intervention facilitated by a clinician using a group modality to promote healthcare decision-making among veterans. Participants in the group document a “Next Step” to use in planning for their future care needs. The next step may include documentation of preferences in an advance directive, discussing plans with family, or anything else to fulfill their ACP needs. This evaluation seeks to determine whether there are identifiable subgroups of group participants with (...) differing needs prior to delivery of the ACP-GV program and, if so, to use information about the subgroups to enhance the program offered to veterans in United States Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) healthcare settings. Methods We conducted a secondary analysis of national data from a quality improvement evaluation. Patient- and provider-level data from administrative healthcare records for VA users in all 50 states, territories, and the District of Columbia provides data on veterans attending ACP-GV during federal fiscal years 2018–2022 (N = 26,857). Latent class analysis seeks to identify the various subgroups of veterans based on their level of ACP self-efficacy before attending ACP-GV and any demographic differences across the resulting subgroups of veterans attending ACP-GV. ACP self-efficacy is derived from seven items obtained from a participant worksheet used during the group. Results Analysis revealed two distinct groups of veterans, distinguishable by their pre-ACP-GV levels of one aspect of ACP self-efficacy: prior knowledge of ACP. Veterans with higher prior knowledge of ACP are associated with an identified next step focused on checking their current AD status and updating it, and veterans with lower ACP prior knowledge are associated with identifying a next step to discuss ACP more fully with family. Differences in age, sex, race, ethnicity, and marital status exist across subgroups of veterans. Conclusion Greater attention must be paid to ACP and veterans’ prior knowledge of ACP to consistently encourage annual review and status updates. (shrink)

Charles Taylor is a philosopher concerned with morality and the nature of the identity of individuals and groups in the West. This book offers an evaluation of Taylor's conception of self, and its moral and political possibilities.

Does disability make a person worse off? I argue that the best answer is yes AND no, because we can be worse off in two conceptually distinct ways. Disabilities usually make us worse off in one way (typified by facing hassles) but not in the other (typified by facing loneliness). Acknowledging two conceptually distinct ways to be worse off has fundamental implications for philosophical theories of well-being. (This paper won the APA’s Routledge, Taylor & Francis Prize in 2017.).

Christiane Bailey and Chloë Taylor (Editorial Introduction) Sue Donaldson (Stirring the Pot - A short play in six scenes) Ralph Acampora (La diversification de la recherche en éthique animale et en études animales) Eva Giraud (Veganism as Affirmative Biopolitics: Moving Towards a Posthumanist Ethics?) Leonard Lawlor (The Flipside of Violence, or Beyond the Thought of Good Enough) Kelly Struthers Montford (The “Present Referent”: Nonhuman Animal Sacrifice and the Constitution of Dominant Albertan Identity) James Stanescu (Beyond Biopolitics: Animal Studies, Factory (...) Farms, and the Advent of Deading Life) Ian Werkheiser (Domination and Consumption: An Examination of Veganism, Anarchism, and Ecofeminism) Cynthia Willett (Water and Wing Give Wonder: Trans-Species Cosmopolitanism) Corey Lee Wrenn (Nonhuman Animal Rights, Alternative Food Systems, and the Non-Profit Industrial Complex) Emily R. Douglas (Eat or Be Eaten: A Feminist Phenomenology of Women as Food) Gary Steiner’s Animals and the Limits of Postmodernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013) Chloë Taylor (“Postmodern” Critical Animal Theory: A Defense) Patrick Llored (La déconstruction derridienne peut-elle fonder une communauté politique et morale entre vivants humains et non humains?) Jan Dutkiewicz (“Postmodernism,” Politics, and Pigs) Gary Steiner (Response to Commentators). (shrink)

Most of those political philosophers who have tried to make sense of claims about degrees of freedom have proposed that the individual options available to the agent be weighted in terms of their values. Most prominent among these authors are Charles Taylor, Amartya Sen, Richard Arneson and Richard Norman. This value-based approach to measuring freedom can be shown to conflict with the view that we are interested in measuring freedom only because freedom has non-specific value. It therefore renders degree-of-freedom (...) statements normatively superfluous. Moreover, even if interpreted as a way of making purely rhetorical sense of such statements, the approach has counterintuitive implications. (shrink)

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

As a young man, Samuel Taylor Coleridge lived in an age of great social change. The political upheavals in America and France, the industrial revolution, and the explosion in humanity's knowledge of the natural order all had a profound effect on Coleridge and radical intellectuals like him. This book examines Coleridge's ideas on science and society in the critical years 1794 to 1796, setting them within the moral, political, and scientific context of the time. Wylie shows how the complex (...) poem, Religious Musings, became a vehicle for these ideas and how they were then developed in the poetry of Coleridge's later years. (shrink)

This paper takes as its starting point the two paradigms for educational research discussed by Richard Pring in an earlier edition of this journal. The focus is on the role of language and how it might function in relation to research. Drawing on the work of Charles Taylor it is argued that language can legitimately be conceived as constitutive of certain aspects of reality. Taylor's position, it is suggested, indicates a possible relationship between language and reality which transcends (...) both representationalism and inferentialism. Some indications of the implications of this perspective for education are briefly considered. (shrink)

Some of the authors who adopt the value-based approach to measuring freedom think of freedom as the absence not only of constraints that are external to the agent but also of constraints that are internal to the agent. Most prominent among these authors is Charles Taylor. On Taylor’s view, freedom coincides with self-mastery or self-determination or “positive freedom”. As well as leading to illiberal judgements of degrees of freedom, the tendency to roll together internal and external freedom into (...) a single quantitative attribute can be shown to be logically inseparable from the value-based approach to measuring freedom. Given the arguments of chapter 5, this rules out internal constraints as a kind of constraint that can be relevant in measuring degrees of overall freedom. (shrink)

One of the curious things about this challenging book is that its ostensible subject— the Saxon medical and political scientist Hermann Conring (1606–1681)— is not mentioned in the title. Constantin Fasolt argues that we cannot know what Conring really thought or meant in his writings, which means that his topic cannot be Conring as such and must instead be that which occludes our knowledge of him, the titular limits of history. Given that we do in fact learn a good deal (...) about Conring from Fasolt’s book, we can only hope that the decapitation of its subject will be rectified in a subsequent edition, or perhaps by the restorative work of librarians putting together subject headings. And yet Fasolt’s decision is understandable, for Conring is indeed a stalking-horse for a much bigger quarry: historiography and the historical consciousness. By “history” Fasolt understands a way of imposing intelligibility on the world, which is founded on the twin assumptions that the past is gone and unchangeable, and that the meaning of texts can be determined by placing them in their historical contexts (ix). In challenging this mode of intelligibility, Fasolt is not attempting to improve professiona history—it’s already as good as it can be—but to displace it. He regards his work as a declaration of “independence from historical consciousness” (32). At the same time, Fasolt insists that he is not simply jumping from historiography to philosophy, or attempting to preempt history with ontology (37-39). That has been tried by Nietzsche and Heidegger, who have been tainted by Nazism (Fasolt thinks unfairly). It has also been attempted by modern philosophers from Gadamer to Foucault and Charles Taylor who, in failing to address the “violence” that its mode of intelligibility does to the world, have not succeeded in outflanking history. Perhaps, Fasolt wonders, it is only the personal experience of those who have been subject to this violence—the experience of those who have been subject to historical examination—that can break the spell of history. Fasolt’s disclaimer notwithstanding, in the course of these remarks I shall argue that he is indeed jumping from history to philosophy, or attempting to outflank history by subjecting it to a particular metaphysical understanding. I shall do so in part by sketching the recent intellectual history of this move—a historical examination that I hope inflicts as little violence as possible on Fasolt’s argument. (shrink)

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Charles Taylor's work has recently taken a religious turn, with Taylor becoming more explicit about his own religious faith and its influence on his thinking. Ian Fraser offers a systematic, critical exploration of the nature of Taylor's Catholicism as it appears in his writings. This reply to Fraser endorses his belief in the importance of looking carefully at Taylor's religious views. However, it raises doubts about some of Fraser's particular arguments and conclusions, and aims to foster (...) a clearer understanding of Taylor's religious beliefs. It poses questions for Fraser about what Taylor is setting out to do in A Catholic Modernity?; why he invokes the figure of Matteo Ricci; whether he believes that acts of practical benevolence are impossible without a religious foundation; and whether his religiously-inspired pluralism suffers an inherent contradiction. (shrink)

The subject of the article is the philosophical narratives of secularization and their importance for the study of religion in modern society. I am focusing in particular on Charles Taylor’s narrative presented in his monumental A Secular Age. Contrary to some of Taylor’s critics, especially Ian Hunter, I argue that the philosophical approach to secularity presented by the Canadian thinker cannot be equated with ideologically marked “combat concepts” that characterize the emergence of modernity as a result of either (...) the overcoming of religion by autonomous reason or as the “self-alienation of Christianity”. The “conditions of belief” analyzed by Taylor indicate the mutual mediation of religion and secularity and provide a hermeneutical framework thanks to which we can criticize both the Enlightenment narratives about the triumph of religion over reason and religious visions, which perceive modernity as a theological phenomenon in its essence (John Milbank). Referring to David Martin’s considerations, I also draw attention to the heuristic dimension of Taylor’s narrative and its relevance to the research on religion. (shrink)

Supported by Ian Hacking’s concept of “intervention,” and Charles Taylor’s concept of “intentionality,” this article argues that doubting is acting, and that doubting is therefore subject to the same demands of responsibility as any other action. The argument is developed by using medical practice as a test-case. The central suggestion is that the demand of acting responsibly limits doubt in medicine. The article focuses on two such limitations to doubt. Firstly, the article argues that it is irresponsible to doubt (...) that our actions can harm other people. Secondly, the article argues that it is irresponsible not to strive for coherence between our utterances of doubt and our other actions. Incoherence here can cause “cultural impoverishment.” In a larger context this article also argues that medicine can enrich our epistemology, because medical knowledge displays important traits of knowledge that are downplayed in traditional epistemology derived from mathematics and physics. In particular, medicine makes it possible to get the relation between ethics and epistemology into sharper focus. The endpoint in medical epistemology is “responsible action,” and not certainty in and of itself. (shrink)

Social metaphysics is a source of important philosophical and moral insight. Furthermore, much social metaphysics appears to be substantive. However, some have recently argued that standard views of metaphysics cannot accommodate substantive social metaphysics. In this paper I offer a new diagnosis of this problem and defend a new solution, showing that this problem is an illuminating lens through which to examine the nature and boundaries of metaphysics. This case instantiates a broad, common pattern generated by attempts to align distinctions (...) between realism and anti-realism, mind-independence and mind-dependence, and legitimate and non-legitimate inquiry. I show that the best response is to abandon the association between substantive metaphysics and mind-independence, and I sketch a new definition of substantivity, given in terms of explanatory power, that makes room for substantive social metaphysics while also offering an attractive basis for general metaphysics. (shrink)

In the late Middle Ages the philosopher and mystic Meister Eckhart preached that to know the truth you must be the truth. But how to be the truth? Eckhart's answer comes in the form of an imperative: release yourself, let be. Only then will you be able to understand that the deepest meaning of being is releasement. Only then will you become who you truly are. This book interprets Eckhart's Latin and Middle High German writings under the banner of an (...) imperative of releasement, and then shows how the twentieth-century thinker Martin Heidegger creatively appropriates this idea at several stages of his career. Heidegger had a lifelong fascination with Eckhart, referring to him as "the old master of letters and life." Drawing on archival material and Heidegger's marginalia in his personal copies of Eckhart's writings, Moore argues that Eckhart was one of the most important figures in Heidegger's philosophy. This book also contains previously unpublished documents by Heidegger on Eckhart, as well as the first English translation of Nishitani Keiji's essay "Nietzsche's Zarathustra and Meister Eckhart," which he initially gave as a presentation in one of Heidegger's classes in 1938. (shrink)

This paper examines attention as a scientific concept, and argues that it has a patchwork structure. On this view, the concept of attention takes on different meanings, depending on the scientific context. I argue that these different meanings vary systematically along four dimensions, as a result of the epistemic goals of the scientific programme in question and the constraints imposed by the scientific context. Based on this, I argue that attention is a general reasoning strategy concept: it provides general, non-specific (...) guidance that aids scientific work. As well as shedding light on attention as a scientific concept, this theory has two wider consequences. First, it demonstrates that the patchwork approach is a fruitful way to think about psychological concepts. Second, it provides novel resources to resist eliminativism about attention. (shrink)

This essay summarizes key insights across the essays in the Hastings Center Report's special report “Time to Rebuild: Essays on Trust in Health Care and Science.” These insights concern trust and trustworthiness as distinct concepts, competence as a necessary but not sufficient input to trust, trust as a reciprocal good, trust as an interpersonal as well as structural phenomena, the ethical impermissibility of seeking to win trust without being trustworthy, building and borrowing trust as distinct strategies, and challenges to trustworthiness (...) posed by the contingent nature of science. Together, these insights stand to advance an area of research that we believe has been historically stymied by conceptual confusion and a long‐standing insistence on treating trust as a purely instrumental good. (shrink)

Criminal justice systems have traditionally relied heavily on human decision-making, but new technologies are increasingly supplementing the human role in this sector. This paper considers what general limits need to be placed on the use of algorithms in sentencing decisions. It argues that, even once we can build algorithms that equal human decision-making capacities, strict constraints need to be placed on how they are designed and developed. The act of condemnation is a valuable element of criminal sentencing, and using algorithms (...) in sentencing – even in an advisory role – threatens to undermine this value. The paper argues that a principle of “meaningful public control” should be met in all sentencing decisions if they are to retain their condemnatory status. This principle requires that agents who have standing to act on behalf of the wider political community retain moral responsibility for all sentencing decisions. While this principle does not rule out the use of algorithms, it does require limits on how they are constructed. (shrink)

Essentialist facts, facts about what is essential to what, are explanatorily distinctive. They can often be appealed to in the course of metaphysically explaining some fact, while themselves serving as explanatory ends. In other words, when one arrives in the course of an explanation at an essentialist fact, it often seems like a legitimate place to stop. In certain contexts, they seem to provide a metaphysical backstop to making further explanatory demands. This paper defends the view that essentialist facts are (...) zero-grounded. Just as we can think of certain logical truths as truths derivable from the empty set of premises, we can think of the zero-grounded facts as the facts that obtain in virtue of the empty set of facts. On this picture, the essentialist facts are grounded, but they are grounded literally in nothing—grounded for free, automatically, and by default. -/- This view has been unpopular for many reasons, including concerns about the obscurity of the notion of zero-grounding. Concerns notwithstanding, I make the case that the zero-grounding view fares better than the alternative ground-theoretic accounts in making sense of certain explanatory roles essences plausibly play. After some preliminary remarks on how we should understand what an essentialist fact is as well as which ones serve as explanation stoppers, I introduce a widespread and attractive picture of what the essentialist facts are; they are domain fixing facts. I then argue that this feature of the essentialist facts well-positions them to serve as explanation stoppers. Afterwards, I argue that the zero-ground view best accommodates the domain-fixing conception of essence. (shrink)

According to the ‘starting-gate’ interpretation of equality of opportunity, individuals who enjoy equal starts can legitimately become unequal to the extent that their differences derive from choices for which they can be held responsible. There can be no coercive transfers of resources in favour of individuals who disregarded their own futures, and no limits on the right of an individual to distribute resources intrapersonally. This paper assesses two ways in which advocates of equality of opportunity might depart from the starting-gate (...) interpretation. The first involves limiting the degree to which people are liable to pay the costs of their past choices. The second involves limiting their initial opportunities so as to prevent certain risky or apparently short-sighted choices. The paper compares these alternatives in terms of their compatibility with a particular conception of persons as morally equal and temporally extended. It constructs this conception by combining reductionist premises about personal identity with the premise that our status as equals is based on the fundamental requirement of opacity respect. Two conclusions about equality of opportunity are shown to follow from this conception of persons as morally equal and temporally extended: the first is that an individual’s liability to pay the costs of her past choices does not diminish over time; the second is that the individual’s initial scope of choice, in bringing about intrapersonal distributions between her current and future selves, can nevertheless be permissibly limited. The two conclusions are consistent, and the second allows for departures from starting-gate equality of opportunity. (shrink)

This paper develops and defends a compound powerful qualities view of properties. According to this view, properties are essentially composed of distinct powerful and qualitative elements. First, I outline an argument for the compound powerful qualities view, based on the claim that it has the explanatory power of other views, without incurring their costs. Second, I argue that the view has the resources to explain how properties are individuated, by claiming that properties are partially individuated by their qualitative elements, and (...) partially by their powerful elements. Third, I distinguish two versions of the view, one of which says that the qualitative and powerful are parts of properties, the other of which says that they are aspects of properties. I argue that the parthood view is the more parsimonious because it can avoid postulating a novel metaphysical relation. Fourth, I argue that the relation between the powerful and qualitative elements of a property is necessary, and lay out various viable options concerning what the relation might be, including grounding and primitivism. (shrink)

We suggest that there is a need for those who seek to explore issues associated with the implementation of citizenship education in England to clarify its specific nature. This can be done, at least in part, through a process of comparison. To that end we review some of the connections and disjunctions between 'character education' and 'citizenship education'. We argue, drawing from US and UK literature but focusing our attention on contexts and issues in England, that there are indeed some (...) broad areas of overlap between these two fields. Citizens should be of 'good' character and the educational initiatives that we consider both emerge from a concern about current trends in society. However, we suggest that the overlaps with citizenship education principally apply when character education is drawn very broadly. When we examine a particular approach to character education that is often US-based, and titled as 'citizenship', we note many contrasts with citizenship education as formulated in the National Curriculum for England. We suggest that citizenship educators in England need to interpret claims about the similarity between these two fields with caution, or meanings that apply to both character education and citizenship education will be distorted. (shrink)

Nassim Noroozi proposes a juxtaposition of pedagogy with and a characterization of it as justice. The term pedagogical here is not limited to “the educational,” nor is pedagogy limited to the methods of teaching. At the same time, the term justice will not be framed in terms of liberal conceptual grounds. Noroozi defines pedagogy as an arrangement of meaning so that it becomes impossible not to see injustice. Noroozi argues that “pedagogy-as-justice” concerns itself with exposing injustice in transformative ways, and (...) as such it is an ethical undertaking. She explores how philosophizing for struggle is inherently pedagogical and, because of our perception of “the pedagogical,” how it is inherently transformative. Furthermore, she argues that seeing pedagogy as justice will consequentially deem “the arrangements of meanings to engage others in the issues pertaining to injustice” as equally important to writing or thinking about those struggles. To illustrate the above points, Noroozi analyzes a case of public philosophical engagement against war. By expanding on this case, she proposes some central attributes of pedagogy-as-justice, namely its preoccupation with grounding abstract and anonymous concepts in their contested historical realities; its commitment to wrestling with an “opacity of concepts” or with “dishonest reasonings” that end up promoting suffering and injustice; and its recognition of the precarities inherent in undertaking pedagogy-as-justice. Noroozi traces a genealogy of the concept of pedagogy-as-justice going back to Socratic public philosophical engagements. (shrink)

This paper is a critical reflection on the concepts of Responsible Innovation (RI) and Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI). We offer an account of the emergence of these related but different accounts of responsible innovation that have recently been adopted by funders. We further report on our exploration of the knowledge and understanding of these concepts through the views of senior scientists involved in synthetic biology research projects. Though most of our respondents struggled to provide a clear account of RI/RRI (...) we identified that existing “practices of responsibility” include many aspects of RI/RRI but that this often went unrecognized as such. Most respondents associated RI/RRI with risk avoidance. While some visions of RI/RRI see scientists as taking an active role in shaping the future of innovation, we suggest that it is not for such individuals to take decisions alone on the types of futures a society should have available to it. (shrink)