Our aim in this article is twofold. First, we challenge the essentialized notion of adolescents and young people as perpetually driven to resist the authority of adults. At the same time, we disrupt linguistic conceptions of adolescent discourse, along with the discourse of youth at risk, by analyzing a transcript of classroom discourse that reflects an exchange between a highly regarded and well liked preservice teacher and his students. This representative transcript highlights the preservice teacher's ability to query, without a (...) concomitant ability to listen, respond, and build a classroom dialogue with his students; what we call here a Socratic monologue. Second, we link the notions of dialogue and responsiveness to Bakhtin's concept of answerability, emphasizing the joint construction of classroom discourse as an ethically answerable relation between teacher and students. He is currently doing research on new Asian pedagogies. Her research interests include applying sociocultural and critical lenses to the study of identity construction, in particular, the social construction of “at risk” identities for young people. Her current research documents the experiences of students and teachers in alternative high school programs. She is co-editor of Re/constructing “the adolescent”: Sign, symbol and body forthcoming from Peter Lang, Educational imaginings: On the play of texts and contexts with Shaun Rawolle published by Australian Academic Press, and Crossing boundaries: Perspectives across paradigms in educational research, with Paula Jervis-Tracey, also published by Australian Academic Press. (shrink)

The world of work over the past 3 years has been characterized by a great reset due to the COVID-19 pandemic, giving an even more central role to scholarly discussions of ethics and the future of work. Such discussions have the potential to inform whether, when, and which work is viewed and experienced as meaningful. Yet, thus far, debates concerning ethics, meaningful work, and the future of work have largely pursued separate trajectories. Not only is bridging these research spheres important (...) for the advancement of meaningful work as a field of study but doing so can potentially inform the organizations and societies of the future. In proposing this Special Issue, we were inspired to address these intersections, and we are grateful to have this platform for advancing an integrative conversation, together with the authors of the seven selected scholarly contributions. Each article in this issue takes a unique approach to addressing these topics, with some emphasizing ethics while others focus on the future aspects of meaningful work. Taken together, the papers indicate future research directions with regard to: (a) the meaning of meaningful work, (b) the future of meaningful work, and (c) how we can study the ethics of meaningful work in the future. We hope these insights will spark further relevant scholarly and practitioner conversations. (shrink)

Asexuality is overlooked in the philosophical literature and in wider society. Such neglect produces incomplete or inaccurate accounts of romantic life and harms asexual people. We develop an account of asexuality to redress this neglect and enrich discussion of romantic life. Asexual experiences are diverse. Some asexual people have sex; some have romantic relationships in the absence of sex. We accept the common definition of asexuality as the absence of sexual attraction and explain how sexual attraction and sexual desire differ (...) by giving an affordance‐like account of sexual attraction. Armed with that distinction, we show that asexuality is clearly different from celibacy or disorders of desire and that some existing philosophical theories of sexual desire struggle to accommodate asexual sexuality. We then build on asexual testimony about the diversity of non‐sexual attractions to answer two common objections levelled at asexual romance: that romantic relationships require sexual attraction or that sex in the absence of sexual attraction is insufficiently focused on someone as an individual. Finally, we describe some of the ways asexuality has been erased or denigrated in society, and the specific injustices and harms that result. (shrink)

Most philosophers acknowledge ways of overcoming blame, even blame directed at a culpable offender, that are not forgiving. Sometimes continuing to blame a friend for their offensive comment just isn't worth it, so we let go instead. However, despite being a common and widely recognised experience, no one has offered a positive account of letting go. Instead, it tends to be characterised negatively and superficially, usually in order to delineate the boundaries of forgiveness. This paper gives a more complete and (...) systematic account of this important practice. We argue that the basic distinction between forgiving and letting go of blame follows from distinctions that many philosophers already accept. We then develop a positive account in terms of the reasons one has to let go rather than forgive and show that letting go is as valuable a part of our shared moral lives as forgiveness. (shrink)

Two options are ‘incommensurate’ when neither is better than the other, but they are not equally good. Typically, we will say that one option is better in some ways, and the other in others, but neither is better ‘all things considered’. It is tempting to think that incommensurability is vagueness—that it is (perhaps) indeterminate which is better—but this ‘vagueness view’ of incommensurability has not proven popular. I set out the vagueness view and its implications in more detail, and argue that (...) it can explain most of the puzzling features of incommensurability. This argument proceeds without appeal to John Broome’s ‘collapsing principle’. (shrink)

Compersion is an important concept for non-monogamous people. Often described as jealousy's opposite, compersion labels positive feelings toward the intimacy of a beloved with other people. Since many people think jealousy is ordinary, intransigent, and even appropriate, compersion can seem psychologically and ethically dubious. I make the case for compersion, arguing it focuses on the flourishing of others and is thus not akin to pride, vicarious enjoyment, or masochistic pleasure. People cultivate compersion by softening their propensity to be jealous and (...) by attending to the flourishing of others, which requires them to tackle entitlement and temper vulnerability. I argue that jealousy is not a valuable emotional disposition; its instrumental benefits are minor, unstable, and have to be traded against the harms of aggression. Arguments that conclude that jealousy is a virtue rest on contentious premises and overlook the practical question as to whether jealousy and compersion could be cultivated together. (shrink)

In the UK, healthcare workers are again considering whether to strike, and the moral status of strike action is being publicly debated. Mpho Selemogo argued that we can think productively about the ethical status of healthcare strikes by using the ethical framework often applied to armed conflict (2014). On this view, strikes need to be just, proportionate, likely to succeed, a last resort, pursued by a legitimate organisation and publicly communicated. In this article, I argue for a different approach to (...) the just war comparison. Selemogo adopts a traditional, collectivist conception of just war reasoning but this is not the only view. So-called ‘individualist’ approaches to the morality of war can also be applied to strike action. Taking an individualist perspective complicates the traditional picture of a dispute arising between three well-defined groups of healthcare workers, employers and the innocent subjects of collateral damage: patients and the public. We arrive instead at a more complicated moral picture: some people might be more morally liable to be harmed than others during a strike, or can justly bear increased risks, and some are more obliged to strike than others. I describe this shift of framework before critically examining some of the traditionaljus ad bellumconditions as applied to strikes. (shrink)

Scholars have long been aware of striking similarities between a crucial passage in Book II of Plato’s Republic and the longest papyrus fragment surviving from Antiphon’s On Truth. Previous scholarship has identified some views common to both texts but has not explained how these views hang together in a unified and coherent ethical outlook. A deeper investigation into these two texts turns up a blueprint for Greek immoralist arguments, a finding which should be of considerable interest to scholars of ancient (...) Greek ethics and political philosophy. The paper argues that both texts include an argument whose demonstrandum is that it is by nature good or advantageous to commit injustice when one can do so undetected; that this argument in each case involves a set of background premises that constitute a blueprint for immoralist arguments in Classical Athens; and that the immoralist ethical theory of Republic II is an outline distilled from several more detailed theories, including the one belonging to On Truth. (shrink)

Would you rather your friends, family, and partners envy you, or admire you, when you flourish? Many people would prefer to be admired, and so we often strive to tame our envy. Recently, however, Sara Protasi offered an intriguing defence of “emulative envy” which apparently improves us and our relationships, and is compatible with love. I find her account unconvincing, and defend loving admiration in this article. In Section 2, I summarize Protasi's nuanced account of envy. In Section 2, I (...) argue that irrespective of how we analyze emotions in general we can argue that it is preferable to prioritize the cultivation of some emotions over others. In Section 4, I challenge Protasi's assumptions about the affinity between love and envy. My core argument is in Section 5 where I examine envy's impact on the envier, the envied, and relationships. Envy impedes an authentic relationship to the goods and goals in the envier's life, alienates the envied, and stifles joint-action. From all perspectives admiration typically fares better. After briefly considering the objection that admiration may impede love in Section 6, I conclude, in section seven, that admiration should be preferred to emulative envy in our intimate relationships. (shrink)

The police are required to establish probable cause before engaging in custodial interrogation. Much custodial interrogation relies on a fraudulent epistemic environment (FEE) in which the police knowingly use deception and dishonesty to gain an advantage over a suspect regarding a material issue, injuring the interests of the suspect. Probable cause, then, is a sort of evidentiary and epistemic standard that legally justifies the police’s use of deceptive and dishonest custodial interrogation tactics that are on par with fraud. However, there (...) are both deontological and consequentialist considerations that show why the police’s use of an FEE is often unjustified. Accordingly, the paper argues that even if the use of an FEE is based on probable cause, there are other (non-epistemic) reasons to think evidence with probative value (such as a confession) should be excluded when derived from an FEE and there is no acute threat of harm to others. (shrink)

Discussions of extended cognition have increasingly engaged with the empirical and methodological practices of cognitive science and psychology. One topic that has received increased attention from those interested in the extended mind is music cognition. A number of authors have argued that music not only shapes emotional and cognitive processes, but also that it extends those processes beyond the bodily envelope. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the case for extended music cognition. Two accounts are examined in detail: (...) Joel Krueger’s “musically extended emotional mind” and Tom Cochrane’s “expression and extended cognition.” Each account is evaluated using three “anti-extension” arguments. I argue that Krueger and Cochrane’s accounts offer important steps toward extended music cognition, but that each account remains underdeveloped in various ways. To supplement existing approaches, I propose a complementary extended computational approach to music cognition. The claim is that music cognition forms part of an extended system in virtue of involving computational processes that range across environmental and in-the-head elements. The paper concludes by showing how the ECMC deals with each of the three anti-extension challenges and responds to objections. (shrink)

John Broome has argued that value incommensurability is vagueness, by appeal to a controversial about comparative indeterminacy. I offer a new counterexample to the collapsing principle. That principle allows us to derive an outright contradiction from the claim that some object is a borderline case of some predicate. But if there are no borderline cases, then the principle is empty. The collapsing principle is either false or empty.

The police are routinely recognized for displaying heroic virtues associated with combat. I take a contrarian position in this paper. Part I begins with the claim that if bravery is to be prioritized in policing, then bravery should be part of the police’s routine roles and responsibilities. However, bravery is not central to what the police do every day, and, therefore, shouldn’t be prioritized (in recruiting, training, and so on). Conversely, Part II claims that if the virtue of honesty is (...) centrally connected to the police role, then it should be prioritized in policing. Because honesty is deeply connected to the police’s routine roles and responsibilities, it should be prioritized. By turning away from misconceptions about the police, the hope is that we will be in a better position to see both the practical and the moral importance of virtue in policing. (shrink)

What are the principles that ground our moral obligations? One obvious answer is that they are prescriptive rules that govern conduct by imposing obligations much like (certain) legal rules govern conduct by imposing legal obligations. This "rule conception of moral principles" merits our attention for at least three reasons. It's the obvious and most straightforward way to develop the analogy between morality and law, and between moral principles and legal rules. It appears to fit some prominent theories of morality and (...) justice (e.g., Brad Hooker's rule-consequentialism, David Gauthier's contractarianism, and John Rawls's contractualism), and thus to possibly derive support from its fit with them. And it promises to account for the ability of moral principles to do the explanatory, counterfactual-supporting, and necessity-grounding work that they do. Moreover, it seems to be an integral part of some prominent theories (e.g., those of Gauthier, Kant, and Christine Korsgaard). However, I will argue that we should reject it. Moreover, by warranting the rejection of an obvious rival, the arguments presented herein strengthen the case for a dispositional (or powers) conception of moral principles, and perhaps for certain other conceptions, as well. (shrink)

In Making Things Happen, James Woodward influentially combines a causal modeling analysis of actual causation with an interventionist semantics for the counterfactuals encoded in causal models. This leads to circularities, since interventions are defined in terms of both actual causation and interventionist counterfactuals. Circularity can be avoided by instead combining a causal modeling analysis with a semantics along the lines of that given by David Lewis, on which counterfactuals are to be evaluated with respect to worlds in which their antecedents (...) are realized by miracles. I argue, pace Woodward, that causal modeling analyses perform just as well when combined with the Lewisian semantics as when combined with the interventionist semantics. Reductivity therefore remains a reasonable hope. (shrink)

Very little research into women farmers in developed countries has been produced by economists, but much of what has been studied by scholars in other disciplines has economic implications. This article reviews such research produced by scholars in all disciplines to explore to what extent women farmers are becoming more equal to men farmers and to suggest further contributions to the literature. As examples, topics that has been widely researched in developing countries but have received almost no attention in developed (...) countries include comparisons of men and women farmers’ productivity and their access to and use of resources. Discoveries in these and other areas will be important not only for their insights into the agricultural industry in developed countries, but also because they will inform, and be informed by, research on women farmers in developing countries. (shrink)

While the role of discourse connectives has long been acknowledged in argumentative frameworks, these approaches often take a coarse-grained approach to connectives, treating them as a unified group having similar effects on argumentation. Based on an empirical study of the straw man fallacy, we argue that a more fine-grained approach is needed to explain the role of each connective and illustrate their specificities. We first present an original corpus study detailing the main features of four causal connectives in French that (...) speakers routinely use to attribute meaning to another speaker, which is a key element of straw man fallacies. We then assess the influence of each of these connectives in a series of controlled experiments. Our results indicate each connective has different effects for the persuasiveness of straw man fallacies, and that these effects can be explained by differences in their semantic profile, as evidenced in our corpus study. Taken together, our results demonstrate that connectives are important for argumentation but should be analyzed individually, and that the study of fallacies should include a fine-grained analysis of the linguistic elements typically used in their formulation. (shrink)

Peter Geach's puzzle of intentional identity is to explain how the claim ‘Hob thinks a witch has blighted Bob's mare, and Nob wonders whether she killed Cob's sow’ is compatible with there being no such witch. I clarify the puzzle and reduce it to the familiar problem of negative existentials. That problem is a paradox of representations that seem to include denials of commitment , to carry commitment to what they deny commitment to, and to be true. The best proposed (...) solutions can be understood through this paradox; I evaluate them, and defend a new solution. (shrink)

Regina Rini argues that ambiguity about whether behaviour instantiates oppression is constitutive of microaggression. I give reasons to doubt this: people can be clear that someone’s behaviour towards them instantiates oppression; ambiguity does not seem to feature centrally in apologies for microaggression; ambiguity can be present when someone is a victim of microaggression due to external causes such as fatigue; ambiguity can be introduced or dispelled by the corroborating input of third parties, some of whom have expertise as oppressed people (...) themselves. These points lend support to a structural account of microaggression where ambiguity is an optional aggravating feature of some microagressive behaviour. (shrink)

An influential tradition in the philosophy of causation has it that all token causal facts are, or are reducible to, facts about difference-making. Challenges to this tradition have typically focused on pre-emption cases, in which a cause apparently fails to make a difference to its effect. However, a novel challenge to the difference-making approach has recently been issued by Alyssa Ney. Ney defends causal foundationalism, which she characterizes as the thesis that facts about difference-making depend upon facts about physical causation. (...) She takes this to imply that causation is not fundamentally a matter of difference-making. In this paper, I defend the difference-making approach against Ney’s argument. I also offer some positive reasons for thinking, pace Ney, that causation is fundamentally a matter of difference-making. (shrink)

Neuroscience investigations of emotional influences on social cognition have been dominated by the somatic marker hypothesis and dual-process theories. Taken together, these lines of inquiry have not provided strong evidence that emotional influences on social cognition rely on neural systems which code for bodily signals of arousal nor distinguish emotional reasoning from other modes of reasoning. Recent findings raise the possibility that emotionally influenced social cognition relies on two stages of neural changes: once when emotion is elicited and a different (...) set of changes at the time of social cognitive judgment. These findings suggest that affect infusion models may be a fruitful framework for bridging neuroscience and psychological understanding of the role of emotion in social cognition. (shrink)

Around the world, many schools were closed as one of the measures to contain the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. School closure brought about important challenges to the students' learning process. This context requires strong self-regulatory competences and agency for autonomous learning. Moreover, online remote learning was the main alternative response to classroom learning, which increased the inequalities between students with and without access to technological resources or for those with low digital literacy. All considered, to level the playing field (...) for students without digital resources, there is an urgent need to promote self-regulatory competences through offline intervention solutions. The current paper describes a project with this purpose, using radio broadcasting and letters to reach elementary students without digital resources. Moreover, potential reach and participants' perspectives of the project implementation are presented and discussed. The project draws on a prior evidence-based story-tool intervention grounded on a self-regulated learning framework. The original intervention was set previous to the COVID-19 pandemic and was implemented in the classroom context (N= 1,103 students). Once the schools had been closed down, the mode of intervention was adapted with the collaboration of the community. Alternative solutions were developed as follows: (i) story chapters were read on the radio and students received to their homes a printed script, prompting reflection, and suggesting related activities; (ii) students were provided with the story-tool to read autonomously and received letters from the main characters of the story which included, for example, suggestions for activities and reflection. These two alternative modes of intervention delivery potentially reached 394 elementary students, including students with digital resources. Interviews conducted with a group of students were provided information about the positive aspects of these two modes of intervention delivery, perceived learning (e.g., planning), constraints, and suggestions to improve the project. The current work is likely to merit attention from researchers and educational practitioners, given the need to use offline alternatives to provide support for students without digital resources to engage in autonomous learning during the pandemic period. This project may also be used as an alternative or a complementary solution to online modality. (shrink)

Jennifer Homsby; The Facts in Question: A Response to Dodd and to Candlish, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 99, Issue 1, 1 June 1999, Pages 241–.

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)

The doctrine of emptiness (śūnyavāda) is of significant soteriological importance for the Madhyamaka Buddhism. Therefore it is a reasonable prima facie demand that interpretations of emptiness must accord with this fact. This hermeneutic consideration has been taken to present particular problems for Mark Siderits' semantic interpretation of śūnyavāda. This paper examines Siderits' attempted reconciliation of his semantic interpretation of śūnyavāda with its purported soteriological aspects. I question whether Siderits can successfully respond to these problems in order to adequately incorporate the (...) hermeneutic requirement. I argue that the semantic view is not immune to the problems that it was formulated to avoid. It too can be asserted. What is more, the semantic view can generate its own particular forms of attachment which can obscure soteriological goals. These conclusions lead me to question the general project of trying to develop a soteriologically efficacious interpretation of śūnyavāda in the first place. (shrink)

Moral obligations rest on circumstances. But what are these obligating reasons and in virtue of what are they such reasons? Nomological conceptions define such reasons in terms of moral laws. I argue that one such conception cannot be correct and that others do not support the familiar and plausible view that obligating reasons are pro tanto reasons, either because they entail that this view is false or else because they cannot explain—or even help to explain—how it could be true. I (...) also argue that a particular dispositional conception of obligating reasons does support this view of obligating reasons by enabling an explanation of how it could be true. Moreover, my arguments show that the dispositional moral metaphysic on which this conception is predicated can do something that nomological alternatives cannot: explain why obligating reasons and moral obligations are pro tanto reasons and obligations. (shrink)

Jennifer Homsby; The Facts in Question: A Response to Dodd and to Candlish, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 99, Issue 1, 1 June 1999, Pages 241–.

In his book The Myth of Evil, Phillip Cole argues that we ought to abandon the concept of evil. Cole claims that the concept of evil forms part of a dualistic worldview that divides normal people from inhuman, demonic, and monstrous wrongdoers. Such monsters are found in fiction, Cole suggests, but not in reality, so evil is of no explanatory use. Yet even if there were actual evil persons, Cole maintains, evil would be a redundant, pseudo-explanatory concept, a psychological black (...) hole that is of no use in our explanations of why people do wrong. Contrary to Cole's claims, evil does have the requisite form to function as an explanation, and thus, if there are any actual evil actions or persons, evil will be explanatorily useful. Cole is right to suggest that evil cannot provide a complete explanation for any actions, but none of our virtue or vice concepts can do so, and they are none the worse for that. Cole is also right to suggest that the concept of evil is often used to play certain narrative roles, but he fails to see that evil can play those roles only if it has an explanatorily useful form. While it is true that evil could be paraphrased out of explanations of actions without any loss of information, that does not show that the concept is explanatorily redundant. In fact, Cole's preferred alternative explanations of extreme wrongdoing that eschew appeals to evil are themselves inadequate because they fail to account for the directed and intentional nature of some extremely wrong actions. (shrink)

This essay argues that attention to Adam Smith’s ironic framing of his historical narratives in the Wealth of Nations shows his critique of modern commercial society to have been more radical than is generally recognized. These narratives traced the pathologies of European development and the complex chains of causation that linked Smith’s readers—with often destructive and even catastrophic results—to other human beings distant from themselves. While Smith gave reasons to doubt that sympathy for distant others could bring about reform, I (...) argue that he used irony and what he called ridicule to make the book’s British audience aware of the violence of the global commercial system and their place in it as both abettors and lesser victims of its abuses. (shrink)

Religion is often understood to play a positive role in shaping moral attitudes among believers. We assessed the relationship between church members’ levels of felt connectedness to their respective congregations and perceived similarity in personal and congregational moral values, and whether there was a relationship between these and the amount of time spent in synchronous movement or singing during worship. The similarity between personal and perceived congregational moral importance was correlated with feelings of closeness to one’s congregation but not by (...) the amount of time spent in synchronous movement or singing. Differences in moral foundations scores and in moral importance of specific issues were found between different theological traditions. These findings demonstrate that, for churchgoers, there is a relationship between the use of music or synchronous movement in a church service and feelings of social bonding and there is also a relationship between the degree to which churchgoers identify with their church community and the degree to which they believe their priorities match those of their church. Furthermore, differences in theological tradition appear to be reflected in differences in moral values. (shrink)

In conjunction with the growing feminist literature on pregnancy and visualization, this paper uses Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic to demonstrate how the effort to make the interior of the pregnant body visible in medical discourse was a crucial part of the development of the modern medical gaze. In doing so I develop two concurrent arguments. First, I argue that the pathological corpse of the Clinic can conceptually serve as a double for the pregnant body as it emerged in (...) modern medicine in the 20th century. At the same time I use the insights of the Clinic to illustrate changes in pregnancy from early modernity to the 20th century. In early modernity, the pregnant body was understood in terms of generation, as a tree that bears fruit; by the 19th century, the pregnant body was a machine that reproduced the species. This transition can be seen in the overlap of pathology and pregnancy in early modernity, an overlap that continued throughout the 19 century and is inadvertently reinforced through the practice of ultrasound. (shrink)

Manuscripts excavated and looted from tombs in recent decades have greatly enriched our understanding of Western Han verse. Some of these documents have been designated by scholars as poems, and a few have even been assigned to particular poetic genres. In this article, however, I am less concerned with sorting texts into neat formal or generic categories and more interested in exploring the range of texts and contexts in which verse was employed. To that end, I introduce, analyze, and at (...) least partially translate five new or little-known texts retrieved from various Western Han sites that make extensive use of rhyme and metrical rhythm: *Xiangma jing 相馬經 from Mawangdui M3, Tang Le 唐勒 from Yin- queshan M1, Wang Ji 妄稽 and Fan yin 反淫 from the looted Peking University manuscript corpus, and *Daowang fu 悼亡賦 from Haihunhou M1. Some of these documents are very similar to sources in the transmitted literature, while others are quite different from any verse previously known from the period. Taken together, however, they greatly enhance our understanding of the different ways verse functioned in various Western Han cultural contexts. (shrink)

Situationist experiments such as the Milgram experiment and the Princeton Seminary experiment have prompted philosophers to warn us against succumbing to fear of embarrassment and sliding down slippery slopes. Yet it would be a mistake to conclude that situationism is all bad news for moral agents. Fear of embarrassment can often motivate right actions, and slippery slopes can slide us away from wrongdoing. The reason that philosophers have seen situationism as bringing all bad news is that they have focused on (...) the very demanding moral goals of virtuous and autonomous action, while ignoring important moral goals that are less demanding. Fear of embarrassment does undermine virtuous and autonomous action, but that very same fear can help us to act resolutely and rightly, and allows us to manipulate would-be wrongdoers into doing the right thing. This is good news. (shrink)

This special issue of Science, Technology, & Human Values contains articles concerned with ethics in and around scientific practice. These articles ask how organizational routines both produce and diffuse concerns about the risks and benefits of scientific research and products, and why context remains elusive in formal ethical analysis. These cases are from diverse settings, with several touching on issues of economic inequality and participation in scientific research. Each article describes in some way how cultural and institutional configurations shape ethical (...) thinking and the distribution of goods and harms in science. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on one of the common fallacies in Western philosophy, 'false dilemma (FD)'. According to Andrea A. Lunsford, John J. Ruskiewicz, and Keith Walters, a FD tends to “reduce a complicated issue to excessively simple terms” or, when intentionally created, tends to “obscure legitimate alternatives”. FD reflects incorrect thinking because it presents a problem or issue as having only two possible solutions when in fact there are more. Liam Dempsey noted that shows such as The Daily Show and (...) The Colbert Report often employed FD in order to highlight the “theatrics” that are found in political events or the use of FD by politicians. Politics aside, an FD exists anytime an extreme dichotomy of choices appears as the only possible answers. Advertisers also create an FD when creating a situation with only two outcomes and the only correct or positive outcome leads to their brand. (shrink)