Our 2021 article, "Dying Well in Nursing Homes During COVID-19 and Beyond: The Need for a Relational and Familial Ethic," addresses the response to the COVID-19 pandemic within nursing homes and the impact it had on the lives of residents, care providers, and families. We acknowledge that, at the height of the pandemic, when infection and death rates were soaring in these facilities, extreme "lockdown" measures may have been justified; but these measures resulted in significant relational costs. The collateral damage (...) caused by these lockdown measures included extreme isolation, loss of community, and experiences of confusion, depression, and mental decline for the elderly residents that... (shrink)

Political Loneliness: Modern Liberal Subjects in Hiding examines the loneliness that remains at work in modern life even as we find ourselves increasingly interconnected. While much has been said about this experience in the main currents of continental philosophy, this book opens new paths within this discourse by developing the problem of loneliness in a political register. The central claim of this book is that neoliberal subjectivity has rendered us lonely. Drawing especially on the work of Hannah Arendt, the author (...) suggests that the political structures we have inherited from the liberal tradition—such as the anonymity of the vote and the right to pursue one’s private self-interest as far as possible—have left us hidden from one another, unable to appear as members of a common world. The author further argues that it is precisely this experience of political loneliness that renders citizens in liberal and allegedly open societies desperate to belonging and willing, in turn, to surrender to delusional fellowships like totalitarianism. By developing the problem of loneliness in a political register, this book offers a framework for interpreting the rise of totalitarianism at the beginning of the twentieth century, no less than the ascendance of right-wing populism in Western liberal democracies today. It thus makes an important contribution to debates in current continental philosophy, liberal political theory, and critical theory regarding issues of alienation, political life, and community in the present age. (shrink)

We used a retrospective survey to model the patterns of appraisal, motivation, and coping that uniquely correspond with 12 positive emotions (affection/love, amusement, awe, challenge/det...

Against recent work by Haslanger and Leslie, I argue that we do not yet have good reason to think that we should single out generics about social groups out as peculiarly destructive, or that we should strive to eradicate them from our usage. Indeed, I suggest they continue to serve a very valuable purpose and we should not rush to condemn them.

To determine whether dispositions are causally relevant, we have to get clear about what causal relevance is. Several characteristics of causal relevance have been suggested, including Explanatory Power, Counterfactual Dependence, Lawfullness, Exclusion, Independence, and Minimal Sufficiency. Different accounts will yield different answers about the causal relevance of dispositions. However, accounts of causal relevance that are the most plausible, for independent reasons, render the verdict that dispositions are causally relevant.

In this paper, I write about nurses of colour who have made significant contributions to nursing, yet are actively ignored in traditional nursing textbooks related to colonized thinking. One consequence of this is that when we think about comparing the disparities of the past to the present day, we see that we have not made much of a difference. The disparity is still huge. I call on all of us as nurses to challenge ourselves to think beyond the box of (...) colonized thought to what we know is true. (shrink)

True to his longstanding bias against grand unifying theories, Hacking chooses to pursue these questions by focusing on a specific case of memory-thinking: the history of multiple personality. His excavation of the contemporary terrain leads him, however, to the surprisingly grand conclusion that the various sciences of memory—including neurological studies of localization, experimental studies of recall, and studies in the psychodynamics of memory—all emerged in connection with attempts to “scientize the soul,” as a result of which spiritual battles have been (...) recast as scientific controversies “where we suppose there is such a thing as knowledge to be had”. (shrink)

Upward mobility through the path of higher education has been an article of faith for generations of working-class, low-income, and immigrant college students. While we know this path usually entails financial sacrifices and hard work, very little attention has been paid to the deep personal compromises such students have to make as they enter worlds vastly different from their own. Measuring the true cost of higher education for those from disadvantaged backgrounds, Moving Up without Losing Your Way looks at the (...) ethical dilemmas of upward mobility—the broken ties with family and friends, the severed connections with former communities, and the loss of identity—faced by students as they strive to earn a successful place in society. -/- Drawing upon philosophy, social science, personal stories, and interviews, Jennifer Morton reframes the college experience, factoring in not just educational and career opportunities but also essential relationships with family, friends, and community. Finding that student strivers tend to give up the latter for the former, negating their sense of self, Morton seeks to reverse this course. She urges educators to empower students with a new narrative of upward mobility—one that honestly situates ethical costs in historical, social, and economic contexts and that allows students to make informed decisions for themselves. -/- A powerful work with practical implications, Moving Up without Losing Your Way paves a hopeful road so that students might achieve social mobility while retaining their best selves. (shrink)

Catharine MacKinnon has claimed that pornography is the subordination of women. Rae Langton has defended the plausibility and coherence of this claim by drawing on speech act theory. I argue that considering the role of context in speech acts poses serious problems for Langton's defence of MacKinnon. Langton's account can be altered in order to accommodate the role of context. Once this is done, however, her defence of MacKinnon no longer looks so plausible. Finally, I argue that the speech act (...) approach (adapted to account for context) offers an appealing way to make sense of disagreements over pornography; but also that this will probably not be so appealing to most proponents of the speech acts approach. (shrink)

In this study we analyze the overlapping perspectives of legitimacy theory, institutional theory, resource dependence theory, and stakeholder theory. Our purpose is to explore how these theories can inform and be built upon by one another. Through our analysis we provide a broader theoretical understanding of these theories that may support and promote social and environmental accounting research. This article starts with a detailed analysis of legitimacy theory by bringing some recent critical discussions on legitimacy and corporations in the management (...) literature into accounting research. The notion forwarded by legitimacy theory then serves as an overarching concept to examine the relationship between and among theories. We conclude that two theoretical considerations are important for future social and environmental accounting research. First, it must be acknowledged that some business entities initiate social activities based on direct interactions with stakeholders, whereas others may also undertake similar activities to manage their societal level of legitimacy. Second, from analyzing the perspectives of legitimacy theory, institutional theory, resource dependence theory, and stakeholder theory, it is possible to reach compatible interpretations of business social phenomena, and the selection and application of these theories should depend upon the focus of study. (shrink)

Health and Social Justice (Ruger 2009a) developed the ?health capability paradigm,? a conception of justice and health in domestic societies. This idea undergirds an alternative framework of social cooperation called ?shared health governance? (SHG). SHG puts forth a set of moral responsibilities, motivational aspirations, and institutional arrangements, and apportions roles for implementation in striving for health justice. This article develops further the SHG framework and explains its importance and implications for governing health domestically.

climate are both linked to an organization's ability to retain healthcare professionals and increase their level of job satisfaction, leaders have a corollary responsibility to address moral distress. We recommend that leaders should provide access to ethics education and resources, offer interventions such as ethics debriefings, establish ethics committees, and/or hire a bioethicist to develop ethics capacity and to assist with addressing healthcare provider moral distress....

While there is a growing body of work on moral issues and global governance in the fields of global justice and international relations, little work has connected principles of global health justice with those of global health governance for a theory of global health. Such a theory would enable analysis and evaluation of the current global health system and would ethically and empirically ground proposals for reforming it to more closely align with moral values. Global health governance has been framed (...) as an issue of national security, human security, human rights, and global public goods. The global health governance literature is essentially untethered to a theorized framework to illuminate or evaluate governance. This article ties global health justice and ethics to principles for governing the global health realm, developing a theoretical framework for global and domestic institutions and actors. (shrink)

Psychiatrists working with war veterans have, in recent years, constructed ‘moral injury’ as a separate manifestation of war trauma that is distinct from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. This paper argues that for moral degradation to occur, it necessarily involves one’s commissions or omissions that transgresses one’s personal morality, and hence, distinguishes sufferers of moral injury from PTSD sufferers who were witnesses to traumatic and morally abhorrent events. To this end, it clarifies how some of the situations surrounding moral injury are misunderstood, (...) by discussing the process of moral reasoning in the context of moral dilemmas, dirty hands, and moral blind alleys. Finally, it concludes that when we conceptualise moral injury as being caused by one’s commissions and omissions in moral dilemmas, we find that shame and guilt are situation-appropriate responses with a role to play in what ethics mean. (shrink)

Despite advances in theory, often driven by feminist ethicists, research ethics struggles in practice to adequately account for and respond to the agency and autonomy of people considered vulnerable in the research context. We argue that shifts within feminist research ethics scholarship to better characterise and respond to autonomy and agency can be bolstered by further grounding in discourses from the social sciences, in work that confirms the complex nature of human agency in contexts of structural and other sources of (...) vulnerability. We discuss some of the core concepts and critiques emerging from the literature on women and children's agency in under‐resourced settings, highlighting calls to move from individualistic to relational models of agency, and to recognise the ambiguous, value‐laden, and heterogeneous nature of the concept. We then draw out what these conceptual shifts might mean for research ethics obligations and guidance, illustrating our analysis using a case vignette based on research ethics work conducted in South Africa. We conclude that if research practices are to be supportive of agency, it will be crucial to scrutinise the moral judgements which underpin accounts of agency, derive more situated definitions of and responses to agency, and enable people and participants to influence these based on their own experiences and self‐perceptions. (shrink)

In this book, McMahon argues that a reading of Kant’s body of work in the light of a pragmatist theory of meaning and language leads one to put community reception ahead of individual reception in the order of aesthetic relations. A core premise of the book is that neo-pragmatism draws attention to an otherwise overlooked aspect of Kant’s "Critique of Aesthetic Judgment," and this is the conception of community which it sets forth. While offering an interpretation of Kant’s aesthetic theory, (...) the book focuses on the implications of Kant’s third critique for contemporary art. McMahon draws upon Kant and his legacy in pragmatist theories of meaning and language to argue that aesthetic judgment is a version of moral judgment: a way to cultivate attitudes conducive to community, which plays a pivotal role in the evolution of language, meaning, and knowledge. (shrink)

In this article, we develop a hierarchical Bayesian model of learning in a general type of artificial language‐learning experiment in which learners are exposed to a mixture of grammars representing the variation present in real learners’ input, particularly at times of language change. The modeling goal is to formalize and quantify hypothesized learning biases. The test case is an experiment (Culbertson, Smolensky, & Legendre, 2012) targeting the learning of word‐order patterns in the nominal domain. The model identifies internal biases of (...) the experimental participants, providing evidence that learners impose (possibly arbitrary) properties on the grammars they learn, potentially resulting in the cross‐linguistic regularities known as typological universals. Learners exposed to mixtures of artificial grammars tended to shift those mixtures in certain ways rather than others; the model reveals how learners’ inferences are systematically affected by specific prior biases. These biases are in line with a typological generalization—Greenberg's Universal 18—which bans a particular word‐order pattern relating nouns, adjectives, and numerals. (shrink)

In this paper, I make the case for the view that there are many different kinds of dispositions, a view I call dispositional pluralism. The reason I think that this case needs to be made is to temper the tendency to make sweeping generalization about the nature of dispositions that go beyond conceptual truths. Examples of such generalizations include claims that all dispositions are intrinsic, essential, fundamental, or natural.! In order to counter this tendency, I will start by noting the (...) extent to which it is at odds with the semantics of dispositions, according to which there are many kinds of disposition ascriptions. From there, I will try to support a metaphysical claim that there are different kinds of dispositions. To bridge the gap between semantics and metaphysics, I appeal to epistemology. I'll consider the question "when do we have good reason to believe that a disposition ascription is true?" If our disposition ascriptions are true, then we are right about what kinds of dispositions things have, and what kinds of dispositions there are. I claim that our evidence for different kinds of dispositions is on a par; we have reason to believe that various kinds of dispositions are instantiated. (shrink)

One of the ethical issues that has been raised recently regarding emerging neurotherapies is that people will be coerced explicitly or implicitly in the workplace or in schools to take cognitive enhancing drugs. This article builds on this discussion by showing how the law may pressure people to adopt emerging neurotherapies. It focuses on a range of private law doctrines that, unlike the criminal law, do not come up very often in neuroethical discussions. Three doctrines—the doctrine of mitigation, the standard (...) of care in negligence, and child custody determinations in family law—are addressed to show how the law may pressure people to consent to treatment by offering a choice between accepting medical treatment and suffering a legal disadvantage. The doctrines considered in this article apply indirect pressure to submit to treatment, unlike court-ordered medical treatment, which applies direct pressure and is not addressed here. The outcome of this discussion is to show that there is a greater range of social pressures that may encourage the uptake of novel neurotherapies than one might initially think. Once treatments that were developed and offered with therapeutic benefits in mind become available, their existence gives rise to unintended legal consequences. This certainly does not mean we should cease developing new therapies that may be of tremendous benefit to patients, but it does raise some questions for physicians and for legal policy-makers. How should physicians, who are required by medical ethical principles to obtain valid consent to treatment, react to a patient’s reluctant consent that is driven by legal pressure? From the legal policy perspective, are our legal doctrines satisfactory or should they be changed because, for example, they unduly promote the collective interest over individual freedom to reject medical treatment or because they channel us toward economically efficient treatments to the detriment of more costly but potentially superior approaches of dealing with behavioural problems? (shrink)

This article offers a new theory of suffering as significantly disrupted agency. In presenting it, I here make three significant contributions. First, I subject the leading account of suffering as undesired unpleasant experience (Brady, 2018) to its first dose of sustained scrutiny. Second and drawing on this discussion, I identify and liberate eight desiderata for any account of suffering. Third, I present the novel account of suffering as significantly disrupted agency and argue that it satisfies these desiderata. Moreover, I argue (...) that elaborating this proposal with a minimal model of agency allows us to capture both the suffering of a wide range of organisms and the complex dynamics of suffering as it is endured. I conclude by briefly highlighting some of the potential implications of the theory for further theoretical and practical inquiries. (shrink)

Dugald Stewart claims that conjectural history is ‘the peculiar glory of the latter half of the eighteenth century’. Yet it is hard to see why, in his view, conjectural histories are not merely confabulated just-so stories. This paper examines Stewart's views about the epistemic and moral value of conjectural history.

What virtues do good stewards typically have and can these virtues move people to be good stewards of nature? Why focus on the virtues of stewards rather than on trying to construct and defend morally obligatory rules to govern human behavior? I argue that benevolence and loyalty are crucial for good stewardship and these virtues can and do motivate people to act as good stewards of nature. Moreover,since it is a matter of dispute whether rational considerations can move us to (...) perform a given act in the absence of disposition to do so, I argue we should try to determine which moral dispositions (if any) will motivate people to be concerned for the environment so that the development of environmentally sensitive character may be encouraged. (shrink)

Proponents of “the affective appeal” :787–812, 2014; Zagzebski in Philos Phenomenol Res 66:104–124, 2003) argue that we can make progress in the longstanding debate about the nature of moral motivation by appealing to the affective dimension of affective episodes such as emotions, which allegedly play either a causal or constitutive role in moral judgements. Specifically, they claim that appealing to affect vindicates a version of Motivational Internalism—roughly, the view that there is a necessary connection between moral judgment and motivation—that is (...) both more empirically respectable and less theoretically controversial than non-affective versions. We here argue that the affective appeal fails: versions of Internalism which appeal to affect are neither more empirically supported, nor clearly less controversial, than versions of Internalism which make no such appeal. Although affect doubtless has an important role to play in explaining moral motivation, we are sceptical that establishing any such role advances the debate. (shrink)

IntroductionThose in mental health-related consumer movements have made clear their demands for humane treatment and basic civil rights, an end to stigma and discrimination, and a chance to participate in their own recovery. But theorizing about the politics of recognition, 'recognition rights' and epistemic justice, suggests that they also have a stake in the broad cultural meanings associated with conceptions of mental health and illness.ResultsFirst person accounts of psychiatric diagnosis and mental health care (shown here to represent 'counter stories' to (...) the powerful 'master narrative' of biomedical psychiatry), offer indications about how experiences of mental disorder might be reframed and redefined as part of efforts to acknowledge and honor recognition rights and epistemic justice. However, the task of cultural semantics is one for the entire culture, not merely consumers. These new meanings must be negotiated. When they are not the result of negotiation, group-wrought definitions risk imposing a revision no less constraining than the mis-recognizing one it aims to replace. Contested realities make this a challenging task when it comes to cultural meanings about mental disorder. Examples from mental illness memoirs about two contested realities related to psychosis are examined here: the meaninglessness of symptoms, and the role of insight into illness. They show the magnitude of the challenge involved - for consumers, practitioners, and the general public - in the reconstruction of these new meanings and realities.ConclusionTo honor recognition rights and epistemic justice acknowledgement must be made of the heterogeneity of the effects of, and of responses to, psychiatric diagnosis and care, and the extent of the challenge of the reconstructive cultural semantics involved. (shrink)

Promiscuous realism is the thesis that there are many equally legitimate ways of classifying the world’s entities. Advocates of promiscuous realism are typically taken to hold the further the- sis, often undistinguished, that kind terms usefully deployed in scientific generalisations are no more natural than those deployed for any other purposes. Call this further thesis promiscuous nat- uralism. I here defend a version of promiscuous realism which denies promiscuous naturalism. To do so, I introduce the notion of a promiscuous kind: (...) a kind that is maximally usefully referenced in predictive and explanatory generalisations, none of which are scientific generalisations. I first defend the claim that pain is a promiscuous kind before extending these considerations to everyday mental kinds more generally. I draw on further reflections from both everyday life and contem- porary psychology to make credible the novel suggestion that our everyday theory of our minds is for the explanation and prediction of individuals. Combined with the complex idiosyncrasy of individual minds, this suggested aim of everyday theory gives us reason to think that promiscuity is prevalent among everyday mental kinds. (shrink)

Previous research reveals that when leaders enact environmentally specific transformational leadership, they positively affect corporate environmental responsibility. While this research provides important insights into how leaders create and shape corporate environmental responsibility, confidence in the validity of these findings is limited because the psychometric properties of the measurement of environmentally specific transformational leadership has not yet been assessed. The goal of the current research was to develop and validate a measure of environmentally specific transformational leadership. To this end, four studies (...) were conducted, which together produced a reliable and valid scale from which future research can stem. Theoretical and practical limitations are discussed. (shrink)

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was met with condemnation from the European Union and the United States as an "unprovoked and unjustified military aggression" that undermines the liberal international order. However, some international relations scholars, such as John Mearsheimer, argue that Russia had genuine security concerns with regard to Ukraine and that the invasion was a response to the threat of NATO membership for Ukraine. Both liberal and realist perspectives on the invasion rely on the assumption of rational, (...) cost-benefit calculations by actors, but cultural factors and irreconcilable non-material interests may also be at play in shaping the actions and motivations of states. Understanding the cultural and national identity factors at play in the invasion of Ukraine is complex and difficult, but they cannot be ignored in attempting to understand and address the conflict. (shrink)

The current qualitative study investigated prevalence and types of academic integrity violations in psychology graduate students and solicited student recommendations for how academic institutions, professors, and peers may act to discourage or prevent its occurrence. Students were recruited through email lists and asked to participate in an online study with a series of open-ended questions assessing integrity violations and prevention recommendations. Results revealed academic integrity violations were relatively infrequent and most were of relatively low severity. Common antecedents to integrity violations (...) included inadequate preparation, task difficulty, and external stressors such as health ailments that interfered with preparation. Most violators reported engaging in a rational decision making process, weighing the pros and cons of cheating, and most did not reveal the violation to anyone. The majority of violations resulted in no negative consequences to the student and 44 % reported they would do it again. Students recommended better dissemination of integrity policies, greater oversight of graduate students, harsher punishments for violations, and consistent reporting of violations as prevention strategies. Results highlight how academic dishonesty in psychology graduate students may be a product of multiple time and resource demands, coupled with low self-efficacy to meet or negotiate these demands. Despite reports of external pressures being the top reason for academic integrity violations, few recommendations focused on decreasing external pressures as a mechanism to curb cheating. (shrink)

Psychiatric ethics spans several overlapping domains, including the guidelines for ethical research in psychiatry, the professional ethics required in the practice of psychiatry, and a broader set of moral and ethical problems and dilemmas distinctive to, or at least magnified by, the mental health care setting. Reviewed here are selected issues arising in the last two domains, some seemingly inevitable components of mental disorder and its cultural history and others resultant from recent changes and discoveries. Even as science explains and (...) demystifies mental disorder, it is concluded, new ethical problems will continue to arise in psychiatry and certain recalcitrant problems will likely persist. (shrink)

Since 1997 there has been a significant increase in the number and percentage of Kansas farmers who are women. Using Reskin and Roos’ model of “job queues and gender queues” I analyze changes in the agricultural industry in Kansas that resulted in more women becoming “principal farm operators” in the state. I find there are three changes largely responsible for women increasing their representation in the occupation: an increase in the demand for niche products, a decrease in the average farm (...) size, and greater societal acceptance of women as farmers. This study adds to the growing literature on women principal farm operators in developed countries, and is among the first to explore why women are becoming a larger percentage of the occupation in the United States. (shrink)

Background: The public domain of midwifery practice, represented by the educational and hospital institutions could be blamed for a subconscious ethical dilemma for midwifery practitioners. The result of such tension can be seen in complaints from maternity service users of dehumanised care. When expectations are not met, women report dehumanising experiences that carry long term consequences to both them and their child. Objectives: To revisit the ethical foundation of midwifery practice to reflect the feminist Ethic of Care and reframe what (...) is valuable to women and midwives during the childbirth experience. Research Design: A comprehensive literature review is presented from the midwifery and feminist ethics discourse. Ethical Considerations: Nil to report. Findings: Women are vulnerable during childbirth as they need care, yet they prioritise elements of relationship in their experience. The Ethic of Care approach equalises the relationship between the midwife and the woman, providing the space for relationship building and allowing midwives to meet the expectations of their accepted responsibility. Discussion: Some midwives manage to balance the demands of the institution with the needs of the woman. This is described as both an emotional and professionally challenging balancing act. Conclusion: Until there is a formal acknowledgement of the different ethical approach to midwifery practice from within the profession and the Institution, midwifery identity and practice will continue to be compromised. (shrink)

In this paper, I draw a parallel between the stability of physical systems and that of economic ones, such as the US financial system. I argue that the use of equilibrium assumptions is central to the analysis of dynamic behavior for both kinds of systems, and that we ought to interpret such idealizing strategies as footholds for causal exploration and explanation. Our considerations suggest multi-scale modeling as a natural home for such reasoning strategies, which can provide a backdrop for the (...) assessment and prevention of financial crises. Equilibrium assumptions are critical elements of the epistemic scaffolding that make up multi-scale models, which we should understand as a means of constructing explanations of dynamic behavior. (shrink)

Although employed throughout health-related rhetoric and research today, prevention it is an ambiguous and complicated category when applied to mental and behavioral health. It is analyzed here, along with four ethical issues arising when public health preventative methods and goals involve mental health: age of intervention; resource priorities between prevention and treatment; substantive issues in preventive pedagogies and trade-offs framed by differences of approach. Illustrations include some of the most widespread and ambitious recent preventive models: those aiming to avert subsequent (...) mood disorders of depression and anxiety; those that would curb self-harming behavior, and efforts to anticipate and avoid or delay psychosis. To suppose that public mental health can be entirely modeled on other public health programs is mistaken. Instead, it must proceed with awareness of the particular features typifying many mental disorders. These include features of the disorders themselves; the preliminary nature of scientific knowledge about them; the contested applicability of traditional disease models to them; the dearth of established research data available about preventive interventions currently in place or proposed; and the effects of stigma and discrimination on any such interventions. (shrink)

As scholars integrate empirical approaches to ethical questions in healthcare, relational autonomy theory must inform research design and change practice. Qualitative approaches are well suited to issues where patient values play a central role, and they can be combined with relational autonomy theory to investigate the factors influencing autonomy-rich experiences. This paper draws upon my experience conducting bioethics research related to clinical trial decision-making to develop a systematic method for applying relational autonomy as a theoretical lens to qualitative health research. (...) The resultant practical guide utilizes Susan Sherwin’s theory of relational autonomy and presents an empirical method responsive to autonomy-relevant questions. (shrink)

There is reason for genuine puzzlement about Hume's aim in ‘The Natural History of Religion’. Some commentators take the work to be merely a causal investigation into the psychological processes and environmental conditions that are likely to give rise to the first religions, an investigation that has no significant or straightforward implications for the rationality or justification of religious belief. Others take the work to constitute an attack on the rationality and justification of religious belief in general. In contrast to (...) these views, I argue that Hume aims to establish two important claims in ‘The Natural History of Religion’. First, almost all popular religions, including popular monotheism, are deeply superstitious. Second, superstitious monotheism is incompatible with the variety of theism supported by the argument from design. This incompatibility puts significant pressure on the rational acceptability of popular religions. (shrink)