The push by some bioethicists to excise religion from the clinical ethics consultative process has received institutional support from the American Society for Bioethics and the Humanities. Their certification program, Healthcare Ethics Consultant-Certified, is intended to identify and assess “a national standard for the professional practice of clinical healthcare ethics consulting” devoid of religious content. As Christian ethicists who wish to preserve the morally evaluative nature of healthcare ethics, we must pause and theologically reflect on the meaning of such a (...) program. The five articles in this issue offer rich theological responses to the religion-free standardized methodology endorsed by the ASBH and reified in the HEC-C certification program. They offer a depth of theological reflection we see previously lacking in the literature, attending to the real possibilities of a “terraformed bioethics” effecting metaphysical harm, severing of clinical ethics from its sources, eliminating possibilities for conversion, and confusing the meaning of moral expertise. (shrink)

Honor walks are ceremonies that purportedly honor organ donors as they make their final journey from the ICU to the OR. In this paper, we draw on Ronald Grimes’ work in ritual studies to examine honor walks as ceremonial rituals that display medico-technological power in a symbolic social drama (Grimes, 1982). We argue that while honor walks claim to honor organ donors, ceremonies cannot primarily honor donors, but can only honor donation itself. Honor walks promote the quasi-religious idea of donation (...) as a “good death,” and mask the ambiguity and discomfort inherent in organ donation to promote greater acceptance by the medical community. While some goods may be achieved through honor walks, particularly for donor families, it is still important to examine the negative work done by this practice. (shrink)

Here we identify approximately 40,000 healthy human volunteers who were intentionally exposed to infectious pathogens in clinical research studies dating from late World War II to the early 2000s. Microbial challenge experiments continue today under contemporary human subject research requirements. In fact, we estimated 4,000 additional volunteers who were experimentally infected between 2010 and the present day. We examine the risks and benefits of these experiments and present areas for improvement in protections of participants with respect to safety. These are (...) the absence of maximum limits to risk and the potential for institutional review boards to include questionable benefits to subjects and society when weighing the risks and benefits of research protocols. The lack of a duty of medical care by physician–investigators to research subjects is likewise of concern. The transparency of microbial challenge experiments and the safety concerns raised in this work may stimulate further dialogue on the risks to participants of human experimentation. (shrink)

Stone maps the force, vivacity, and stories within our most mundane matter, stone. For too long stone has served as an unexamined metaphor for the "really real": blunt factuality, nature's curt rebuke. Yet, medieval writers knew that stones drop with fire from the sky, emerge through the subterranean lovemaking of the elements, tumble along riverbeds from Eden, partner with the masons who build worlds with them. Such motion suggests an ecological enmeshment and an almost creaturely mineral life.Although geological time can (...) leave us reeling, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen argues that stone's endurance is also an invitation to apprehend the world in other than human terms. Never truly inert, stone poses a profound challenge to modernity's disenchantments. Its agency undermines the human desire to be separate from the environment, a bifurcation that renders nature "out there," a mere resource for recreation, consumption, and exploitation.Written with great verve and elegance, this pioneering work is notable not only for interweaving the medieval and the modern but also as a major contribution to ecotheory. Comprising chapters organized by concept --"Geophilia," "Time," "Force," and "Soul"--Cohen seamlessly brings together a wide range of topics including stone's potential to transport humans into nonanthropocentric scales of place and time, the "petrification" of certain cultures, the messages fossils bear, the architecture of Bordeaux and Montparnasse, Yucca Mountain and nuclear waste disposal, the ability of stone to communicate across millennia in structures like Stonehenge, and debates over whether stones reproduce and have souls.Showing that what is often assumed to be the most lifeless of substances is, in its own time, restless and forever in motion, Stone fittingly concludes by taking us to Iceland--a land that, writes the author, "reminds us that stone like water is alive, that stone like water is transient.". (shrink)

Jeffrey A. Mason has written an informative, accessible guide to today's most popular form of philosophical writing, the journal-length essay. The Philosopher's Address does what no other book on the market has attempted: it takes the reader behind the scenes of the writing process to expose the rhetorical underpinnings of philosophical texts. Mason argues that readers need to understand why philosophical writing is constructed as it is, and to be aware of the rhetorical devices by which authors (...) seek to persuade them if they are to engage fully with these texts. This book is intended for a broad audience of specialists and students alike. Professional scholars will appreciate Mason's astute discussion of current trends within analytic philosophy, while students will benefit greatly from his comprehensive understanding of the social context in which philosophical discourse is produced, its various and competing schools of thought, and the theoretical concepts that inform them. (shrink)

One must technologize bodies to conceive of organ transplantation. Organs must be envisioned as replaceable parts, serving mechanical functions for the workings of the body. In this way, it becomes possible to imagine exchanging someone’s organs without changing anything essential about the selfhood of the person. But to envision organs as mechanical parts is phenomenologically uncomfortable; thus, the terminology used to describe the practice of organ retrieval seems to attempt other, less technological ways of viewing the human body. In this (...) paper, I analyze three common metaphors that currently contextualize the process of organ retrieval in English-speaking communities: harvesting the agrarian body, procuring the commodified body, and receiving the gifted body. These powerful images constrain the gaze toward the body in important ways. Every gaze both obscures and reveals. While each of these three metaphors makes sense of some aspects of organ retrieval, each of them is ultimately subject to being overtaken by what Jeffrey Bishop calls the technological imaginary. This imaginary deploys a gaze that obscures important elements of what it means to be human and does violence to parts of the phenomenological experience of transplantation and bodily existence. I argue that no matter how hard one tries to avoid the technological aspect of transplantation practices by embracing nonviolent metaphors—even the metaphor of gifting, which seems the most promising—it will never be possible to fully resist organ transplantation’s violence toward our phenomenological sense of embodiment. (shrink)

"The demonization of the radical right ill serves us when now, more than ever before, it is vitally important to know all we can about this esoteric milieu's nature and potentialities…by…demonizing the many, we cloak the few, and, however unwittingly, facilitate the existence of evil in the world." —From the Introduction by Jeffrey Kaplan White power groups are universally vilified and feared. But to better understand the threat they pose, scholars and activists must try to better understand their disturbing (...) ideas and practices. In this controversial volume, Jeffrey Kaplan brings to light the workings of white supremacy movements in the United States and Europe in the years since World War II. The first half of the Encyclopedia is made up of over 100 entries—many of them essay-length—describing the people, groups and themes that make up the radical racist right. Some of the entries are written by movement activists themselves, providing useful insider accounts. The second half contains original resources circulated within the movement, each prefaced and placed in scholarly context by the editor. These documents, although offending, are invaluable to researchers and often available nowhere else. Cross-references and an index make the information easily accessible. For scholars of race, religion, politics or social movements, the Encyclopedia of White Power is an essential resource. (shrink)

Belief in propositions has had a long and distinguished history in analytic philosophy. Three of the founding fathers of analytic philosophy, Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and G. E. Moore, believed in propositions. Many philosophers since then have shared this belief; and the belief is widely, though certainly not universally, accepted among philosophers today. Among contemporary philosophers who believe in propositions, many, and perhaps even most, take them to be structured entities with individuals, properties, and relations as constituents. For example, the (...) proposition that Glenn loves Tracy has Glenn, the loving relation, and Tracy as constituents. What is it, then, that binds these constituents together and imposes structure on them? And if the proposition that Glenn loves Tracy is distinct from the proposition that Tracy loves Glenn yet both have the same constituents, what is about the way these constituents are structured or bound together that makes them two different propositions? In The Nature and Structure of Content, Jeffrey C. King formulates a detailed account of the metaphysical nature of propositions, and provides fresh answers to the above questions. In addition to explaining what it is that binds together the constituents of structured propositions and imposes structure on them, King deals with some of the standard objections to accounts of propositions: he shows that there is no mystery about what propositions are; that given certain minimal assumptions, it follows that they exist; and that on his approach, we can see how and why propositions manage to have truth conditions and represent the world as being a certain way. The Nature and Structure of Content also contains a detailed account of the nature of tense and modality, and provides a solution to the paradox of analysis. Scholars and students working in the philosophy of mind and language will find this book rewarding reading. (shrink)

This collection of previously unpublished essays addresses a number of issues arising out of philosophical controversies over the possibility of genuine moral dilemmas. Issues addressed include the form of a moral dilemma; the paradoxes a moral dilemma is said to entail; the question of whether a moral dilemma must exhibit inconsistency; the role of intractable circumstances in occasioning moral dilemmas; and the plausibility of supposing that there might be rational ways of addressing moral dilemmas in practice. The contributors, writing from (...) a number of widely differing points of view, include Simon Blackburn, Ruth Barcan Marcus, Alan Donagan, Terrance McConnell, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Mary Mothersill, Norman Dahl, David Brink, Peter Railton, Thomas E. Hill, Jr., Christopher Gowans, and H.E. Mason. (shrink)

This article considers how a generalized signalling game may self-assemble as the saliences of the agents evolve by reinforcement on those sources of information that in fact lead to successful action. On the present account, generalized signalling games self-assemble even as the agents co-evolve meaningful representations and successful dispositions for using those representations. We will see how reinforcement on successful information sources also provides a mechanism whereby simpler games might compose to form more complex games. Along the way, I consider (...) how an old game might be appropriated to a new context by reinforcement on successful associations between old and new saliences. (shrink)

John Rawls says that one of the requirements for stability is “[s]ociety as an employer of last resort” (PLP, lix). He explains: “[t]he lack of . . . the opportunity for meaningful work and occupation is destructive . . . of citizens’ self-respect” (PLP, lix). Rawls implies in these claims that the opportunity for meaningful work is a social basis of self-respect. This constitutes a significant shift in his account of self-respect, one that has been overlooked. I begin by clarifying (...) Rawls’s account of self-respect in A Theory of Justice, then consider some post-Theory developments in it. After exploring the nature of Rawls’s commitment to the opportunity for meaningful work, I ask why he comes to think it is a social basis of self-respect. I extract a partial answer from his writings, then speculate about his full reasoning. Finally, I consider whether Rawls is right that the opportunity for meaningful work is a social basis of self-respect. I give some reason to believe that he is. (shrink)

James Lenman argues that consequentialism fails as a moral theory because it is impossible to predict the long-term consequences of our actions. I agree that it is impossible to predict the long-term consequences of actions, but argue that this does not count as a strike against consequentialism. I focus on the principle of indifference, which tells us to treat unforeseeable consequences as cancelling each other out, and hence value-neutral. I argue that though we cannot defend this principle independently, we cannot (...) do without it in practical rationality. Thus abandoning the principle of indifference would involve abandoning all of rationality, not just consequentialist reasoning. I suggest that we should understand the principle as P. F. Strawson understands inductive reasoning – as being part of rationality. Correspondence:c1 Elinor.Mason@colorado.edu. (shrink)

Assume that the only thing before you is a statue made of some alloy. Call those who think that there is one thing before you in such a case monists. Call those who think there are at least two things before you in such a case pluralists. The most common arguments for pluralism run as follows. The statue is claimed to have some property P that the piece of alloy lacks (or vice versa), and hence it is concluded that they (...) are distinct. Most often, the predicates employed in such arguments to express the crucial property are predicates expressing ‘temporal properties’, such as existing at a certain time; or ‘modal properties’, such as possibly being spherical; or ‘constitution properties’, such as being made of a certain sort of material. In a recent paper, Kit Fine has noted that such predicates suffer from various defects that make it possible for the monist to plausibly resist the relevant versions of the pluralist's arguments. For this reason, Fine considers a number of predicates that do not suffer from these defects, and constructs new versions of the above argument using them. Fine argues that any attempt on the monist's part to resist his versions of the argument force the monist to adopt implausible positions in the philosophy of language. As against this, I argue that the monist has perfectly plausible responses to Fine's arguments that require the monist to adopt only quite reasonable positions in the philosophy of language. (shrink)

Informed consent is the single most important concept for understanding decision-making capacity. There is a steady pull in the clinical world to transform capacity into a technical concept that can be tested objectively, usually by calling for a psychiatric consult. This is a classic example of medicalization. In this article I argue that is a mistake, not just unnecessary but wrong, and explain how to normalize capacity assessment.Returning the locus of capacity assessment to the attending, the primary care doctor, and (...) even to ethics consultation in today's environment will require a substantial effort to undo a strong but illusory impression of capacity assessment. Hospital attorneys as well as clinical ethicists with a sophisticated understanding of health law can be in the vanguard of this reorientation. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the hoary theological doctrine of divine concurrence poses no deep threat to Leibniz’s views on theodicy and creaturely activity even as those views have been traditionally understood. The first three sections examine respectively Leibniz’s views on creation, conservation and concurrence, with an eye towards showing their sys­tematic compatibility with Leibniz’s theodicy and metaphysics. The fourth section takes up remaining worries arising from the bridging principle that conservation is a continued or continuous creation, and argues (...) that they can be allayed once two readings of the prin­ciple are distinguished. What emerges from the discussion as a whole is, I hope, a clearer picture of Leibniz’s views on the nature of monadic causation, his understanding of the relationship between divine and creaturely activity, and his position with respect to later medieval and early modern debates over secondary causation. (shrink)

Main deficiency of active people. Active men are usually lacking in higher activity—I mean, individual activity. They are active as officials, businessmen, scholars, that is, as generic beings....Active people roll like a stone, conforming to the stupidity of mechanics. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human.

This paper explores how fair trade social enterprises manage paradoxes in stakeholder-oriented governance models. We use narrative accounts from board members, at governance events and board documents to report an exploratory study of paradoxes in three FTSEs which are partly farmer-owned. Having synthesized the key social enterprise governance literature and framed it alongside the broader paradox theory, we used narratives to explore how tensions are articulated, how they can be applied within an adapted paradox framework, and how governance actors seek (...) to mitigate paradoxes. The paper contributes to current debates in social enterprise scholarship concerning hybridity :455–476, 2010; in Institutional logics in action, Part B, 2012), hybrid organizing :397–441, 2014) and operational tensions :407–442, 2013) by illustrating empirically how the central social/enterprise paradox manifests in FTSEs governance arrangements. We build on the paradox categories proposed by Lüscher and Lewis :221–240, 2008) and adapted in Smith et al. :407–442, 2013) by developing a recursive model of legitimacy-seeking governance processes, conceptualizing how boards seek to mitigate, but not necessarily resolve, paradoxes. (shrink)

This paper concerns how rule-following behavior might evolve in the context of a variety of Skyrms–Lewis signaling game, how such rules might subsequently evolve to be used in new contexts, and how such appropriation allows for the composition of evolved rules. We will also consider how the composition of simpler rules to form more complex rules may be significantly more efficient than evolving the complex rules directly. And we will review an example of rule following by pinyon and scrub jays (...) as an illustration of the appropriation of a rule to a new context :142–150, 2013a; Barrett, Philos Sci, 2014). The proposal here is that the composition of rules might occur in a way that is precisely analogous to such simple appropriation. Finally, we will briefly consider how any finite truth-functional operation might evolve by the sequential appropriation of simpler rules. (shrink)

The purpose of this entry is to provide a systematic introduction to medieval views about the nature and ontological status of relations. Given the current state of our knowledge of medieval philosophy, especially with regard to relations, it is not possible to discuss all the nuances of even the best known medieval philosophers' views. In what follows, therefore, we shall restrict our aim to identifying and describing (a) the main types of position that were developed during the Middle Ages, and (...) (b) the most important considerations that shaped their development. We shall have occasion along the way, however, to examine in detail certain aspects of the views of important representatives of all the main medieval positions, including Peter Abelard (1079 1142), Gilbert of Poitiers (1085 1154), Albert the Great, (1200 1280), Thomas Aquinas (1225 1274), John Duns Scotus (1265 1308), Henry Harclay (1270 1317), Peter Auriol (1280 1322), and William Ockham (1285 1347). (shrink)

A new understanding of Kant’s theory of a priori knowledge and his natural philosophy emerges from Jeffrey Edwards’s mature and penetrating study. In the Third Analogy of Experience, Kant argues for the existence of a dynamical plenum in space. This argument against empty space demonstrates that the dynamical plenum furnishes an a priori necessary condition for our experience and knowledge of an objective world. Such an a priori existence proof, however, transgresses the limits Kant otherwise places on transcendental arguments (...) in the _Critique of Pure Reason_ because it establishes a _material_ transcendental condition of possible experience. This finding motivates Edwards to examine the broader context of Kant’s views about matter, substance, causal influence, and physical aether in connection with the developmental history of his theory of transcendental idealism. Against the backdrop of early modern metaphysics and contemporaneous physical theory, Edwards explicates the origins of the Third Analogy in Kant’s early work on the metaphysics of nature. The argument against empty space presented in the Third Analogy reveals a central aspect of Kant’s transcendental theory of experience that Edwards explains lucidly. By clarifying the epistemological standpoint at issue in the Third Analogy, he shows that the fundamental revisions to which Kant subjects his theory of knowledge in the _Opus postumum_ not only originate in his precritical metaphysics of nature but are developments of an argument central to the _Critique of Pure Reason_ itself. Edwards’s work is important to scholars working in the history of philosophy and the history and philosophy of science, as well as to Kant specialists. (shrink)

It is generally accepted, following Landauer and Bennett, that the process of measurement involves no minimum entropy cost, but the erasure of information in resetting the memory register of a computer to zero requires dissipating heat into the environment. This thesis has been challenged recently in a two-part article by Earman and Norton. I review some relevant observations in the thermodynamics of computation and argue that Earman and Norton are mistaken: there is in principle no entropy cost to the acquisition (...) of information, but the destruction of information does involve an irreducible entropy cost. (shrink)

After years of skepticism and denials regarding the significance of concussions in sport, the issue is now front and center. This is fitting, given that the impact of concussions in sport is profound. Thus, it is with trepidation that one ventures to direct some attention onto brain injuries other than concussions incurred through sport. Given a closer look, however, it may be that considering various kinds of brain injuries, with different causes, will help us better understand the range and seriousness (...) of brain injuries in sport. My focus is on emotional trauma in sport. I argue that severe emotional pathology is evidence of underlying brain injury. Any attempt to minimize the significance of emotional disturbance that results from emotional trauma as ‘merely’ psychological in nature is thus misguided. (shrink)

The modern practice of organ donation after cardiocirculatory death (DCD) emerged in the 1990s as a response to the alarmingly wide gap between the number of transplantable organs available through organ donation after neurological death and the urgent organ transplantation needs of persons in end-organ failure. Various important ethical dimensions of DCD have been considered and debated by prominent organ donation/transplantation theorists and clinicians.In this article, consideration of some of these ethical elements provides a foundation for a proposed set of (...) ethically informed, pragmatic conditions that could assist in the development of health policies to guide the practice of organ donation after cardiocirculatory death. (shrink)

The works of Hannah Arendt and Albert Camus--two of the most compelling political thinkers of the "resistance generation" that lived through World War II--can still provide penetrating insights for contemporary political reflection. Jeffrey C. Isaac offers new interpretations of these writers, viewing both as engaged intellectuals who grappled with the possibilities of political radicalism in a world in which liberalism and Marxism had revealed their inadequacy by being complicit in the rise of totalitarianism. According to Isaac, self-styled postmodern writers (...) who proclaim the death of grandiose ideologies often fail to recognize that such thinkers as Camus and Arendt had already noted this. But unlike many postmodernists, these two sought to preserve what was worthy in modern humanism--the idea of a common human condition and a commitment to human rights and the dignity of individuals. Isaac shows that both writers advanced the idea of a democratic civil society made up of self-limiting groups. Although they criticized the typical institutions of mass democratic politics, they endorsed alternative forms of local and international organization that defy the principle of state sovereignty. Isaac also shows how Arendt's writings on the Middle East, and Camus's on Algeria, urged the creation of such institutions. The vision of a "rebellious politics" that Arendt and Camus shared is of great relevance to current debates in democratic theory and to the transformations taking place in Europe and the states of the former Soviet Union. (shrink)

As social theorists seek to understand the contemporary challenges of radical populism, we would do well to reconsider the febrile insights of the psychoanalytic social theorist Erich Fromm. It was Fromm who, at the beginning of the 1930s, conceptualized the emotional and sociological roots of a new ‘authoritarian character’ who was meek in the face of great power above and ruthless to the powerless below. It was Fromm, in the 1950s, who argued that societies, not only individuals, could be sick. (...) This essay traces the intertwining of psychoanalytic and sociological methods that allowed Fromm to create such new ideas. At the same time, it highlights how Fromm’s sociology was hampered by an economistic Marxist approach to the institutions and culture of democratic capitalist societies. Such theoretical restriction prevented Fromm from conceptualizing how institutions like democracy, science, and psychotherapy can provide resources for widespread emotional recuperation and civil repair. (shrink)

The ‘best interests’ decision making standard is used in clinical care to make necessary health decisions for non-capacitated individuals for whom neither explicit nor inferred wishes are known. It has been also widely acknowledged as a basis for enrolling some non-capacitated adults into clinical research such as emergency, critical care, and dementia research. However, the best interests standard requires that choices provide the highest net benefit of available options, and clinical research rarely meets this criterion. In the context of modern (...) norms of bioethics, the best interests standard rarely supports surrogate consent for research and should not be accepted as a routine provision. (shrink)

On Bohm''s formulation of quantum mechanics particles always have determinate positions and follow continuous trajectories. Bohm''s theory, however, requires a postulate that says that particles are initially distributed in a special way: particles are randomly distributed so that the probability of their positions being represented by a point in any regionR in configuration space is equal to the square of the wave-function integrated overR. If the distribution postulate were false, then the theory would generally fail to make the right statistical (...) predictions. Further, if it were false, then there would at least in principle be situations where a particle would approach an eigenstate of having one position but in fact always be somewhere very different. Indeed, we will see how this might happen even if the distribution postulate were true. This will help to show how loose the connection is between the wave-function and the positions of particles in Bohm''s theory and what the precise role of the distribution postulate is. Finally, we will briefly consider two attempts to formulate a version of Bohm''s theory without the distribution postulate. (shrink)

Lidz also ponders the theory of syntactic bootstrapping by asking why it is that learners are considered to retain little of extralinguistic environments (i.e., their observations) during word learning, while being able to retain detailed representations of linguistic context, for example, the multiple syntactic frames in which a verb appears. Lidz argues that learners value syntactic information over extralinguistic context from the beginning of learning, consistent with syntactic bootstrapping as a key device for verb learning.