Animal welfare is emerging as one of the most controversial issues in modern livestock agriculture. Although consumers can buy free range products in niche markets, some have argued that existing markets cannot solve the animal welfare dilemma because there are individuals who care about animal well-being who do not eat animal products. This paper proposes a market-based solution to at least partially manage animal welfare externalities. After discussing the current lack of market incentives to promote farm animal well-being, a potential (...) scheme to quantify and trade units of farm animal well-being is proposed. The potential merits and efficacy of an animal welfare market are also discussed. (shrink)

This essay reflects on my academic work and personal experience as a bonsai enthusiast. Specifically, I plan to point out how Deleuzian theory informs my bonsai practice. First, I situate bonsai gardening as an encounter with the vegetal world. Then I consider this encounter as a form of Deleuzian becoming. Becoming reifies a transformation of the two species to become another version of itself—one that occurs between a bonsai and its carer. As a bonsai carer myself, I find becoming as (...) a precise illustration of my relationship with bonsais; hence, a vegetal encounter in the making. (shrink)

With the delegation of ethical checking mechanisms to the institutional review boards (IRBs), flexible interpretations of overarching research ethics principles differed across scientific and cultural settings. This article is a comparative case study of ethical frameworks for social research in the Philippines and Taiwan. Justifications in choosing the two cases preponderantly focused on data trends regarding research and development (R&D) policy and practice. This article compared the elements observed in the two frameworks, specifically in terms of: national regulations, curricular requirements, (...) procedures for IRB review application, and other arrangements. Findings revealed that the Philippine academe enjoys relative autonomy or described as more fragmented, unlike Taiwan institutions that strictly follow centralized and country-wide standardization. The intensification of research ethics in Taiwan did not, however, hamper R&D efforts. On the contrary, the Taiwan model may have strengthened the current research ecosystem and bolstered confidence in the different sectors, thus generating multi-sectoral funding and collaborations. (shrink)

From the start, John Dewey's ideas about education have been prone to misunderstanding. One of the greatest casualties has been "experience," a term so routinely misappropriated that Dewey ultimately decided to abandon it. He wrote, "I would abandon the term 'experience' because of my growing realization that the historical obstacles which prevented understanding of my use of 'experience' are, for all practical purposes, insurmountable. I would substitute the term 'culture' because with its meanings as now firmly established it can fully (...) and freely carry my philosophy of experience" (1981, p. 361). Dewey evidently recognized that a main challenge to understanding experience was the conceptual weight the term had .. (shrink)

While there has been a vast amount of research on breast cancer in recent years, areas within this domain remain unexplored. For instance, there have been few attempts to marry an understanding of the social context in which breast cancer occurs with an understanding of subjective experiences of this condition. The purpose of this study was to explore women's experiences of embodiment after breast cancer, utilizing a phenomenological approach rooted in a feminist perspective. The focus of this article is upon (...) the changes to embodiment that are long‐term. Twelve women were interviewed on two occasions each and were asked to talk about changes to their bodies that occurred as a result of breast cancer. Three key themes were identified: (1) how it feels (e.g. sensation and breast loss); (2) managing appearances (e.g. wearing prostheses); and (3) treatments without end (e.g. menopause). The findings of this study show that women with breast cancer are a diverse group and that survivorship is a dynamic, life‐long process, which suggests that health professionals can play an important role in establishing interdisciplinary approaches to caring, beyond the conclusion of acute treatment. (shrink)

Climate change is a unique ethical problem. The individual actions of virtually everyone in the world contribute to climate change, which risk causing great harm, especially in the future. We are all complicit in causing this harm. In most cases, complicity implies accountability: one deserves blame or punishment, he becomes a legitimate subject of reactive attitudes, or he owes compensation. I argue that individuals are not accountable in these ways for their complicity in causing climate change. Rather, our moral accountability (...) flows directly to our political and collective responsibility. A morally decent person living in a developed, carbon-based society has no moral obligation to change the way she lives, but we all have strong moral duties to pressure our governments to enact effective policies to limit carbon emissions. (shrink)

Biometric technologies are at the forefront of organizational innovation, surveillance, and control. In many instances, the use of physiological and behavioral biometrics enhances individual and organizational performance. However, they also have the potential to hinder human wellbeing. In particular, recent generations of biometrics are capable of extracting deeper insights into human behavior, enabling organizational surveillance practices, but may also constrain individual rights and freedoms. While biometric technologies have been evidenced to infringe upon privacy and lead to discriminatory practices, little research (...) has examined the impact of biometrics on dignity, an important ethical construct related to human wellbeing. In this conceptual paper, we draw from the theory of affordances to identify and delineate six affordances of biometric technologies, categorized into inhibiting and augmenting biometric affordances. We propose a framework in which inhibiting and augmenting biometric affordances may simultaneously support and humiliate dignity. This separation offers a theoretical base for future empirical research to explore the increasingly pervasive relationship between biometric adoption and human dignity. Moreover, we explain six paradoxical tensions across three forms of dignity—inherent, behavioral, and meritocratic—in the proposed framework. Finally, we discuss why firms should be responsible for addressing the tensions across dignity forms when they adopt biometric technologies to balance the trade-off between wealth creation and human wellbeing. This offers guidance for practitioners on how to integrate biometric technologies without hindering human dignity. (shrink)

This is a major work by Ian Maclean exploring the foundations of learning in the Renaissance. Logic, Signs and Nature offers a profoundly learned, compelling and original account of the range of what was thinkable and knowable by learned medics of the period c.1530-1630. This is a study of great significance to the history of medicine, as well as the history of European ideas in general.

In What is a Law of Nature? (1983) David Armstrong promotes a theory of laws according to which laws of nature are contingent relations of necessitation between universals. The metaphysics Armstrong develops uses deterministic causal laws as paradigmatic cases of laws, but he thinks his metaphysics explicates other sorts of laws too, including probabilistic laws, like that of the half-life of radium being 1602 years. Bas van Fraassen (1987) gives seven arguments for why Armstrong’s theory of laws is incapable of (...) explicating probabilistic laws. The main thrust of the arguments is that Armstrong’s metaphysical apparatus serves to drive up the initial probability values stated by probabilistic laws. Armstrong replies .. (shrink)

The Political Responsibility of Intellectuals addresses the many problems in defining the relationship of intellectuals to the society in which they live. In what respects are they responsible for, and to, that society? Should they seek to act as independent arbiters of the values explicitly or implicity espoused by those around them? Should they seek to advise those in public life about the way in which they should act, or should they withdraw from any form of political involvement? And how (...) should their preoccupations with truth and language find practical expression? The contributors to this volume seek to provide tentative answers to these questions. They come from a wide variety of disciplines, ranging from economics to linguistics and sociology to philosophy, and are drawn from both America and Eastern and Western Europe. The volume is given a particular interest by recent political upheavals in Eastern Europe, where many intellectuals have been confronted with sharply practical, sometimes dramatic, choices about their role in the political arena. (shrink)

This chapter will argue that due to a lack of genuine consent, some of Russell’s practices in his romantic/sexual relationships are morally objectionable according to his own normative theory (utilitarianism) and these practices are intellectually objectionable according to his post-1913 meta-ethics (expressivism) and his understanding of rationality. On utilitarian grounds, Russell’s actions would maximize pleasure and minimize pain for all the parties affected by the relationship if the authenticity of his partners’ consent were maintained either by a more or less (...) equal social and political standing of the partners or, failing that, by the powerful partner’s exercise of the virtue of restraint; neither of these conditions was satisfied in Russell’s relationships with Vivien Eliot or Helen Dudley. On expressivist grounds, the expressions of desires upon which Russell’s romantic/sexual practices were based, such as the disregard for the humanity of women, conflict with his calls for world peace based on a concern for the well-being of humanity. (shrink)

Consent transforms an otherwise illegitimate act into a legitimate one. To be valid, however, it must be adequately informed. The legal requirement is vague and provides little assistance in predicting when it will be satisfied. This is particularly so when a patient consents to a procedure and the physician subsequently varies one of the components of that procedure. Using three legal judgments and one General Medical Council decision as a springboard, I have explored the concept of a medical procedure within (...) the context of consent and developed a theoretical model to elucidate a more predictable and consistent informational requirement. (shrink)

This book investigates theories of interpretation and meaning in Renaissance jurisprudence.

Philosophical descriptions of democratic music education frequently rely on “inclusion” and “participation” as the defining features of democratically oriented music programs. Democratic epistemic considerations, such as regulatory ideals of musical quality and excellence, however, are less commonly cited, if not actively avoided. This paper addresses several primary reasons for the paucity of epistemic considerations in democratic music education and problematizes current concerns about epistemic judgements from a democratic perspective. Drawing on Miranda Fricker’s influential concept of epistemic injustice, this paper argues (...) that democratic dialogue that respects values of diversity and inclusion cannot legitimately ignore epistemic dimensions because doing so occludes the epistemic dimensions of cultural, racial, and gender diversity in music education classrooms. (shrink)

This article is an examination of the Augsburg physician Ieremias Martius’s Catalogus bibliothecae of 1572, which may well by the first printed sales catalogue of a library. The author claims it to be the product of careful selection, covering the whole field of medicine and containing both rare and recent medical books. The catalogue is placed here in the context of Martius’s career, and his contacts in the European medical world. An account is given of the bibliographical resources available to (...) him, before the contents themselves are anatomised. His interest in various fields is revealed here: medieval practical medicine, medical humanism, anatomy, Hippocratism, medical observationes and letter collections, gynecology, astrological medicine, balneology, botany, and the literature of medical secrets. Martius’s eclecticism and open-mindedness is revealed further through a comparison of his library with five other contemporary book collections of doctors. (shrink)

This paper examines the theories of the soul proposed by Girolamo Cardano in his De immortalitate animorum (1545) and his De subtilitate (1550-4), Julius Caesar Scaliger's comprehensive critique of these views in the Exercitationes exotericae de subtilitate of 1557, and Cardano's reply to this critique in his Actio in calumniatorem of 1559. Cardano argues that the passive intellect is individuated and mortal, and that the agent intellect is immortal but subject to constant reincarnation in different human beings. His theory of (...) cognition leads him to claim that at its highest level, the intellect is converted into the object of its perception. In his refutation of the various elements of Cardano's theories, Scaliger uses his knowledge of the Greek text of Aristotle to stress the reflexive faculty of the soul, its ability to conceive of objects greater than itself, and its status as the individuating principle of the hylemorphic human being. In spite of Cardano's pretention to novelty and Scaliger's humanist credentials, both thinkers are shown to conduct their discussions in an inherited scholastic matrix of thought. (shrink)

In , John Broome defends a very weak consequentialist account of the value of saving lives. This paper challenges the commitments of this kind of account and describes some reasons for saving lives that would appeal to a non-consequentialist.

How should modern medicine's dramatic new powers to sustain life be employed? How should limited resources be used to extend and improve the quality of life? In this collection, Dan Brock, a distinguished philosopher and bioethicist and co-author of Deciding for Others, explores the moral issues raised by new ideals of shared decision making between physicians and patients. The book develops an ethical framework for decisions about life-sustaining treatment and euthanasia, and examines how these life and death decisions are transformed (...) in health policy when the focus shifts from what is best for a patient to what is just for all patients. Professor Brock combines acute philosophical analysis with a deep understanding of the realities of clinical health policy. This is a volume for philosophers concerned with medical ethics, health policy professionals, physicians interested in bioethics, and undergraduate courses in biomedical ethics. (shrink)

Bertrand Russell's Bundle Theory of Particulars presents and evaluates Russell's arguments for two competing theories on the nature of particulars at different stages in his career: the substratum theory of particulars (1903-1913) and the bundle theory of particulars (1940-1948). Through its original focus on Russell's little known metaphysics in the later part of his career, this study explains why Russell's theory of particulars is relevant today. It argues that a Russellian realist bundle theory is indeed the best explanation of similarities (...) and differences that we observe around us thanks to the ontological economy such a theory provides and its strength and completeness as a theory of the nature of reality. Tackling the major criticisms levelled against the realist bundle theory - the problem of individuation, the problem of necessity, and the problem of analyticity - this study presents and defends a tenable Russellian bundle theory which can answer the objections. Bertrand Russell's Bundle Theory of Particulars is a novel and significant contribution to Russell scholarship. (shrink)

I argue alongside some other scholars that there is a plausible reading of Spinoza’s philosophy of suicide which holds both of the following tenets: first, that suicides occur because of external conditions, and second, that there are at least some suicides which are rational. These two tenets require special attention because they seem to be the source of significant tension. For Spinoza, if one’s cognitions are to be the most adequate, they must be “disposed internally” (E2p29s/G II 114), or determined (...) more from one’s own mental nature than from “fortuitous encounters” with other things (E2p29s/G II 114). It may seem there is a conflict, then, in saying both that there are rational suicides in the Spinozist framework, and that suicides must always be a result of external conditions: it seems a suicide simply cannot be rational if it is the result of external conditions. But this tension, it will be shown, can be dissolved. Once this tension is dealt with, I offer some brief closing arguments. I explain how this reading of Spinoza’s philosophy of suicide can satisfy a call for new suicide research which avoids forms of over-individualism and epistemic injustice, and which encourages us to abolish oppressive conditions that lead to rational suicides. (shrink)

Droysen sought to exploit, for practical political effect, a vision of history as an integral, progressive, and fathomable continuum, and hence in his writings subordinated historical individuality to history's discernible teleology. Droysen's methodological opponent, Rankean historicism, was to the right of his centrist politics. Droysen insisted against Ranke that history is not something "out there" that can be dispassionately and scientifically analyzed but is man's ontological ground. He was basically a moderate Young Hegelian: historians can be scholars and yet ally (...) with and further the rational dynamism of history's normative Ideas because those Ideas are their own as progressive human beings. This battle between Ranke and Droysen illustrates that the evolution of German historical hermeneutics at mid-nineteenth century was generated both by a deep conflict within the German historical tradition and by the confrontation of that tradition with positivism. (shrink)

A revolution is under way in telecommunications technology, and this is generating a new approach to governance in the field as well as new ethical dielmmas which are challenging the core values of the industry’s traditional approach. The author served in the Canadian Department of Communications before founding his own consultancy in communications and information technology. For the past five years he has been chief of the Strategic Planning Unit of the General Secretariat of the International Telecommunication Union, Place des (...) Nations, CH–1211 Geneva 20, Switzerland. (shrink)

The law in England allows that both parents and competent minors concurrently have the right to consent to medical treatment of the minor. This means that while competent minors may consent to treatment their refusal of consent does not act as an effective veto of treatment and treatment remains lawful if given with parental consent. This approach has been heavily criticized as inconsistent with the House of Lords decision in the Gillick case and damned as ‘palpable nonsense’. In this article, (...) I examine these criticisms and conclude that, far from being illogical, it is entirely consistent with the essential asymmetry between consent to treatment and refusal of treatment. I examine the two metaphors of keyholders and flak jackets used to explain this approach and I suggest that both have value but only when used in combination. I also explain why, contrary to the criticism, it is consistent with Gillick. (shrink)

In his very distinguished career as a medical historian and chronicler of Galen, Vivian Nutton has often been involved in successful collaborative projects to map the course of European medicine, a...

Many philosophers have argued against “speciesism”—an attitude of bias toward the interests of members of one’s own species. In reply, Douglas MacLean defends a speciesist or humanist outlook on morality, exploring the ways in which ethics is inextricably tied to practices that define what it is to live a distinctively human life.

This article sets out to investigate aspects of the uptake of Renaissance law and medicine from some of the logical and natural-philosophical components of the university arts course. Medicine is shown to have a much laxer operative logic than law, reflecting its commitment to the theory of idiosyncrasy as opposed to the demands made upon the law by the need for a uniform application of justice. Symptomatic of the different uptake arc the contrasting meanings of "regulariter" and "generaliter" in the (...) two disciplines. Whereas the law treats the rule as inviolable and the exception as only valid if made explicit in due legal form, medicine is able to conceive of a nature as a field of knowledge broader than that encompassed by its rules of art. Both law and medicine approach evidence. (shrink)

This highly readable book is aimed at anyone with an interest in the food they eat. In conversational tone, and avoiding academic jargon, it provides an honest and objective account of the consequences of food consumption choices and policies, through the lens of economics.