Judith Butler's (2006) account of vulnerability, resonant with other accounts offered by feminist theorists of embodiment (such as Margrit Shildrick [2000] and Rosalyn Diprose [2002]), underscores a "conception of the human . . . in which we are, from the start, given over to the other, one in which we are, from the start, even prior to individuation itself and, by virtue of bodily requirements, given over to some set of primary others" (31). She is concerned with how this state (...) of being—"not only constituted by our relations but also dispossessed by them as well" (24)—becomes recognized, or not, in the political production and recognition of vulnerability, and the suffering that occurs in the violent .. (shrink)

KEY POINTS In Canada, commercial data brokers collect deidentified patient data from pharmacies, private drug insurers, the federal government and medical clinics without patient consent. Although pharmaceutical companies are the data brokers’ primary customers, academics and nonprofit and public entities also use commercial data sets, given the absence of a coordinated public approach to collecting these data across Canada. Risks of commercialized patient data include loss of anonymity, surveillance and marketing, discrimination and violation of Indigenous data sovereignty. Coordinated infrastructure for (...) the collection and coordination of health data across Canada and updated privacy legislation would protect individuals and communities and enable appropriate data uses. (shrink)

Background During the COVID-19 pandemic, virtual visiting technologies were rapidly integrated into the care offered by intensive care units (ICUs) in the UK and across the globe. Today, these technologies offer a necessary adjunct to in-person visits for those with ICU access limited by geography, work/caregiving commitments, or frailty. However, few empirical studies explore the ethical issues associated with virtual visiting. This study aimed to explore the anticipated or unanticipated ethical issues raised by using virtual visiting in the ICU, such (...) that healthcare professionals can be informed about how to carry out virtual visits ethically, safely and productively. Methods We used a descriptive exploratory qualitative research approach recruiting a convenience sample of newly-graduated junior doctors facilitating ICU virtual visits in a tertiary academic centre. Eight newly graduated junior doctors, seven female and one male, aged 23–27, participated in semi-structured interviews. We analysed transcripts using an inductive coding approach. Results Five overarching themes emerged. Two of the themes namely, ‘fulfilling a moral instinct to connect families’ and ‘promoting autonomy’, arose from participants’ descriptions of how virtual visits aligned with healthcare standards and practices they considered ethical. Three further themes, ‘preserving dignity and privacy’, ‘managing emotional distress’, and ‘providing equitable access’ to virtual visiting technologies, highlight how virtual visits might exacerbate ethical issues related to family communications. Conclusion Virtual visiting may potentially both ameliorate and exacerbate aspects of ethical healthcare delivery for ICU patients and family members. ICU team members should consider unique ethical considerations related to using virtual visiting. We recommend virtual communications skills training for staff and advocate for the use of easily accessible educational resources for families who wish to visit critically unwell patients remotely. (shrink)

This paper provides suggestions for educators who have a desire to learn about, or are already committed to, challenging ableism and disablism. As philosophy teachers, we have the opportunity to facilitate student reflection regarding disability, which puts students in a position to make decisions about whether to retain their habitual ways of comporting themselves toward disabled people or to begin the process of forming new perceptual practices. I contend that existential phenomenology, as formulated by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Linda Martín Alcoff, (...) provides insights regarding the habitual formation of perceptual practices that are useful for thinking about ways that perception may be informed by ableism and disablism. Jessica Cadwallader demonstrates how their insights can be usefully applied to thinking about perceptions of disability. Through analysis of past encounters with people with disabilities, Cadwallader suggests that students change their habitual ways of responding to people with disabilities. While such reflections may be valuable for making habitual perceptual practices explicit, I would suggest that this is only a condition for the possibility of changing ablist perceptual practices rather than the change itself. Students are likely to enter the classroom lacking the insight that they are even engaging in perceptual practices informed by cultural narratives rather than simply perceiving people with impairments as they are. I argue that an approach to teaching on disability that thematizes perceptual practices regarding disability, and takes experiences of disabled people into account, would be more effective than the one Cadwallader describes. Understanding the ways that people with disabilities experience being constructed as a problem through ableist perceptual practices could help students recognize their own potential to impact others in positive and negative ways. (shrink)

The construct of wellbeing has been criticised as a neoliberal construction of western individualism that ignores wider systemic issues such as inequality and anthropogenic climate change. Accordingly, there have been increasing calls for a broader conceptualisation of wellbeing. Here we impose an interpretative framework on previously published literature and theory, and present a theoretical framework that brings into focus the multifaceted determinants of wellbeing and their interactions across multiple domains and levels of scale. We define wellbeing as positive psychological experience, (...) promoted by connections to self, community and environment, supported by healthy vagal function, all of which are impacted by socio-contextual factors that lie beyond the control of the individual. By emphasising the factors within and beyond the control of the individual and highlighting how vagal function both affects and are impacted by key domains, the biopsychosocial underpinnings of wellbeing are explicitly linked to a broader context that is consistent with, yet complementary to, multi-levelled ecological systems theory. Reflecting on the reciprocal relationships between multiple domains, levels of scale and related social contextual factors known to impact on wellbeing, our GENIAL framework may provide a foundation for a transdisciplinary science of wellbeing that has the potential to promote the wellbeing of individuals while also playing a key role in tackling major societal challenges. (shrink)

Aim of the study was to analyze the posttraumatic stress disorder risk nurses, detecting the relationship between distress experience and personality dimensions in Italian COVID-19 outbreak. A cross-sectional study was conducted based on 2 data detection. Mental evaluation was carried out in Laboratory of Clinical Psychology on n.69 nurses in range age 22–64 years old. Measurement was focused on symptoms anxiety, personality traits, peritraumatic dissociation and post-traumatic stress for all participants. No online screening was applied. Comparisons within the various demographic (...) characteristics demonstrated few significant differences between groups on DASS-21, PDEQ, and ISE-R scores. Correlation analysis was performed among PDEQ, DASS-21, BFI-10 and IES-R and confirmed between anxiety and peritraumatic dissociation and post-traumatic stress; then anxiety is positively correlated to agreeableness variable of BFI-10 test. The emotional distress was protracted overtime but in long-term personality traits resulted mediator facing subjective stress. Our finding drew details for protective and predictive risk factors as well as mental health issues of nurses dealing with pandemic: healthcare workers faced the protracted challenge caring COVID-19 patients over and over again: in short time the impact was relevant, and the prolonged exposition to the stressor was tackled by personal resources such as personality traits. (shrink)

According to the naïve, pre-theoretic conception, lying seems to be characterized by the intent to deceive. However, certain kinds of bald-faced lies appear to be counterexamples to this view, and many philosophers have abandoned it as a result. I argue that this criticism of the naïve view is misplaced; bald-faced lies are not genuine instances of lying because they are not genuine instances of assertion. I present an additional consideration in favor of the naïve view, which is that abandoning it (...) comes at an extremely high price; alternative accounts which eschew the intent-to-deceive condition on lying have difficulty distinguishing lies from non-literal speech. (shrink)

Emanuel Viebahn accounts for the distinction between lying and misleading in terms of what the speaker commits to, rather than in terms of what the speaker says, as on traditional accounts. Although this alternative type of account is well motivated, I argue that Viebahn does not adequately explain the commitment involved in lying. He explains the commitment in lying in terms of a responsibility to justify one's knowledge of a proposition one has communicated, which is in turn elaborated in terms (...) of being able to consistently dismiss a challenge to justify that knowledge. But whether one can consistently dismiss such a challenge, as Viebahn defines this, depends on whether one is responsible for justifying one's knowledge. Without further specification of the nature of this justificatory responsibility, it is difficult to assess whether it is one that liars have but misleaders lack. (shrink)

This chapter investigates the conflict between thought and speech that is inherent in lying. This is the conflict of saying what you think is false. The chapter shows how stubbornly saying what you think is false resists analysis. In traditional analyses of lying, saying what you think is false is analyzed in terms of saying something and believing that it is false. But standard cases of unconscious or divided belief challenge these analyses. Classic puzzles about belief from Gottlob Frege and (...) Saul Kripke show that suggested amendments involving assent instead of belief do not fare better. I argue that attempts to save these analyses by appeal to guises or Fregean modes of presentation will also run into trouble. I then consider alternative approaches to untruthfulness that focus on (a) expectations for one’s act of saying/asserting and (b) the intentions involved in one’s act of saying/asserting. Here I introduce two new kinds of case, which I call “truth serum” and “liar serum” cases. Consideration of these cases reveals structural problems with intention- and expectation-based approaches as well. Taken together, the string of cases presented suggests that saying what you think is false, or being untruthful, is no less difficult and interesting a subject for analysis than lying itself. Tackling the question of what it is to say what you think is false illuminates ways in which the study of lying is intertwined with fundamental issues in the nature of intentional action. (shrink)

The aim of this chapter is to explore various ways of thinking about the concept of manipulation in order to capture both current and potentially future instances of machine manipulation, manipulation on the part of everything from the Facebook advertising algorithm to super-intelligent AGI. Three views are considered: a conservative one, which slightly tweaks extant influence-based theories of manipulation; a dismissive view according to which it doesn't matter much if machines are literally manipulative, provided we can classify them as so (...) doing to make sense of our interactions with them; and an ameliorative analysis, according to which we should change our concept of manipulation better to make sense of machine manipulation. We tentatively favor the latter. (shrink)

Derek Parfit's “reductionist” account of personal identity (including the rejection of anything like a soul) is coupled with the rejection of a commonsensical intuition of essential self-unity, as in his defense of the counter-intuitive claim that “identity does not matter.” His argument for this claim is based on reflection on the possibility of personal fission. To the contrary, Simon Blackburn claims that the “unity reaction” to fission has an absolute grip on practical reasoning. Now David Lewis denied Parfit's claim that (...) reductionism contravenes common sense, so I revisit the debate between Parfit and Lewis, showing why Parfit wins it. Is reductionism about persons then inherently at odds with the unity reaction? Not necessarily; David Velleman presents a reductionist theory according to which fission does not conflict with the unity reaction. Nonetheless, relying on the distinction between person level descriptions of first-person states and the first-person perspective itself, I argue that Velleman's theory does not eliminate fission-based conflict with the unity reaction. Footnotesa * Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the philosophy departments at Rutgers University and Bowling Green State University. I am indebted to many members of these audiences, and to the other contributors to this volume, for their comments—especially Frank Arntzenius, Michael Bradie, David Copp, John Finnis, Jerry Fodor, Brian Loar, Barry Loewer, Colin McGinn, Fred Miller, Mark Moyer, David Oderberg, Marya Schechtman, David Schmidtz, David Sobel, and Sara Worley. Special thanks to David Sanford. I am also grateful to graduate students in my seminar at Bowling Green during the spring of 2003, for urging me to take seriously the grip of the unity reaction; I am especially grateful for the comments of Nico Maloberti, Jonathan Miller, John Milliken, Robyn Peabody, Jennifer Sproul, Jessica Teaman, and Sherisse Webb. (shrink)

This paper attempts to revive a once-lively program in the philosophy of language—that of reducing linguistic phenomena to facts about mental states and actions. I argue that recent skepticism toward this project is generated by features of traditional implementations of the project, rather than the project itself. A picture of language as essentially a mechanism for cooperative information exchange attracted theorists to metasemantic accounts grounding language use in illocutionary action (roughly, using an utterance to elicit a propositional attitude). When this (...) picture is rejected, a metasemantics grounding language in locutionary action (using an utterance to direct attention) emerges as a more viable proposal, dissolving an intractable issue for traditional theories: The metasemantics of subsentential expressions. (shrink)

This paper defends the use-based metasemantic project against the problem of meaning without use, which allegedly shows the predictions of use-based metasemantic accounts to be indeterminate with respect to unusably long or complex expressions. This criticism is commonly taken to be decisive, prompting various retreats and contributing to the project’s eventual decline. Using metasemantic conventionalism as a case study, I argue the following: either such expressions do not belong to used languages or their meanings are uniquely determined by use. Thus, (...) the alleged problem of meaning without use offers no challenge to the use-based metasemantic project generally, nor to conventionalism in particular. (shrink)

Since antiquity, philosophers and engineers have tried to take life’s measure by reproducing it. Aiming to reenact Creation, at least in part, these experimenters have hoped to understand the links between body and spirit, matter and mind, mechanism and consciousness. Genesis Redux examines moments from this centuries-long experimental tradition: efforts to simulate life in machinery, to synthesize life out of material parts, and to understand living beings by comparison with inanimate mechanisms. Jessica Riskin collects seventeen essays from distinguished scholars (...) in several fields. These studies offer an unexpected and far-reaching result: attempts to create artificial life have rarely been driven by an impulse to reduce life and mind to machinery. On the contrary, designers of synthetic creatures have generally assumed a role for something nonmechanical. The history of artificial life is thus also a history of theories of soul and intellect. Taking a historical approach to a modern quandary, Genesis Redux is essential reading for historians and philosophers of science and technology, scientists and engineers working in artificial life and intelligence, and anyone engaged in evaluating these world-changing projects. (shrink)

Over the past century or more, cognitive neuropsychologists have discussed many of the issues raised in this volume. On the basis of this literature, we argue that autism is not a single homogeneous condition, and so can have no single cause. Instead, each of its symptoms has a cause, and the proper study of autism is the separate study of each of these symptoms and its cause. We also offer evidence to support the radical view advanced by Stoljar and Gold (...) in this volume, namely, that in explaining such syndromes the cognitive level of explanation has priority over the neuroscientific. (shrink)

The interpretation of pronouns and anaphora in ordinary English has been analyzed within a variety of frameworks in formal semantics as involving variables and variable-binding operators. This chapter challenges the widely held assumption that English nominals, including pronouns, can be understood within the syntactic-derivational and model-theoretical frameworks of predicate logic. The first section of the chapter outlines a program for a directly referential semantics of English nominals and contrasts it with the formalist program that has been dominant in the semantic (...) tradition since Frege and Russell. The second section describes two semantic models for pronouns consistent with the program outlined in the first section. Finally, the third section argues for an understanding of reference as a form of perception. The semantic reference of pronouns depends on the causal history of a particular use of the expression, rather than on language-internal semantic rules. (shrink)

Under resource dependence theory, firms should benefit from diverse boards of directors. Ethical arguments also highlight that boards should be as diverse as the stakeholders and communities that they serve. In an attempt to increase diversity and women’s presence on boards of directors, legislative efforts have enacted gender quotas. We examine how such efforts are perceived by U.S. market participants. We expect that when a firm operating under a quota law meets only the minimum requirement, investors will view the female (...) directors through the lens of token status theory and invest fewer resources in that firm than they will in a firm that exceeds the quota minimum or has the same composition but is not under a quota law. Through an experiment with 207 MTurk participants, we manipulated whether a firm was or was not under a quota law and whether the number of female board members was just at or exceeded the law’s minimum compliance. We find evidence that under a quota system, U.S. market participants tend to view female directors as tokens when the firm is just at the quota minimum, and these perceptions both affect their view of the firm’s prospects and negatively influence investment decisions. Importantly, however, we find that these negative effects can be offset and that resource dependence theory holds if the firm _exceeds_ the quota, signaling that the hiring of female directors is not simply compliance-dependent and subsequently leading U.S. market participants to invest more resources in the firm. (shrink)

Many if not all evidential languages have a mirative evidential: an indirect evidential that can, in some contexts, mark mirativity (the expression of speaker surprise) instead of indirect evidence. We address several questions posed by this systematic polysemy: What is the affinity between indirect evidence and speaker surprise? What conditions the two interpretations? And how do mirative evidentials relate to other mirative markers? We propose a unified analysis of mirative evidentials where indirect evidentiality and mirativity involve a common epistemic component. (...) A mirative interpretation requires a close temporal proximity between the speech event and the event of the speaker's learning the at-issue content. (shrink)

In this paper, it is argued that selection and drift might be distinct. This contradicts recent arguments by Brandon (forthcoming) and Matthen and Ariew (2002) that such a distinction “violates sound probabilistic thinking” (Matthen and Ariew 2002, 62). While their arguments might be valid under certain assumptions, they overlook a possible way to make sense of the distinction. Whether this distinction makes sense, I argue, depends on the source of probabilities in natural selection. In particular, if the probabilities used in (...) defining fitness values are at least partly a result of abstracting from or ignoring certain features of the environment, then selection and drift might in fact be causally distinct. (shrink)

Lies come in different sizes. There are little white lies, slight stretches, exaggerations, fibs, and whoppers. Such terms can reflect different aspects of lies, but one of these is how far a lie is from what the liar really thinks. This paper proposes that this dimension of lie-size reflects a scalar aspect of sincerity. Drawing inspiration from the study of truthlikeness, the paper elucidates this aspect of sincerity, which I call “truthful-likeness”. Truthful-likeness reflects how sincere a reply to a question (...) is, based on how close the speaker takes the reply to be to their best available one. A related measure, expected subjective truth factor, reflects how sincere a constative act that is not a reply to a question is, based on how close to being true the speaker thinks it is. (shrink)

Algorithms and data-driven technologies are increasingly being embraced by a variety of different sectors and institutions. This paper examines how algorithms and data-driven technologies, enacted by an organization like Facebook, can induce similarity across an industry. Using theories from organizational sociology and neoinstitutionalism, this paper traces the bureaucratic roots of Big Data and algorithms to examine the institutional dependencies that emerge and are mediated through data-driven and algorithmic logics. This type of analysis sheds light on how organizational contexts are embedded (...) into algorithms, which can then become embedded within other organizational and individual practices. By investigating technical practices as organizational and bureaucratic, discussions about accountability and decision-making can be reframed. (shrink)

O autor Darlei Dall’Agnol é formado em Filosofia pela Universidade de Caxias do sul e cursou mestrado em Filosofia na Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, com uma dissertação sobre ética e linguagem em Wittgestein; fez Doutorado em Filosofia na Universidade de Bristol, Inglaterra, defendendo tese sobre valor intrínseco na ética de Moore. Publicou vários livros na área de Ética e possui inúmeros artigos e capítulos de livros publicados no Brasil e no exterior. Algumas das obras desse autor são: (...) Ética e Linguagem: uma Introdução ao Tractatus de Wittgenstein, Valor Intrínseco – Metaética, ética normativa e ética prática em G. E. Moore, ambas com publicação em 2005. (shrink)

Women, particularly those in public positions (e.g. journalists, politicians, celebrities, activists) are subject to disproportionate amounts of abuse on social media platforms like Twitter. This abuse occurs in a landscape that those platforms designed, and maintain. Focusing in particular on Twitter, as typical of the kind of platform we’re interested in, we argue that it is the platform not (usually) the individuals who use it, that bears collective responsibility as a corporate agent for misogyny. Social media platforms, however, should not (...) overstep the prevention of misogyny into interference in open political debates. (shrink)

This paper explores how Pope Francis’ critique of “the technocratic paradigm” in Laudato Si’ can contribute to an environmental ethics governed by asymmetries of power and agency. The technocratic paradigm is here theorized as linked to forms of anthropocentrism that together engender a dangerous alliance between the powers of technology and technologies of power. The meaning and import of this view become clearer when the background of these ideas gets excavated in the works of Romano Guardini. The contemporary manifestation of (...) Guardini’s warnings appears in the form of myriad environmental injustices wrought by structures of power linked to technology. To counter such injustices, we must discern which types of technologies to develop and how to limit technocratic approaches for the sake of other values. The integral ecological outlook favored by Francis may be interpreted as a kind of eco-politics, or even, controversially, an eco-technology, with the cultivation of technologies of contemplation. Applying Peter Sloterdijk’s conceptions of anthropotechnics and monogeism to the Ignatian Exercises animating the Jesuit Francis’ work, we can see how such technologies hold potential for Catholicism to collaborate better with secular strategies in relating to Earth’s agency in a new eco-politics. Such an eco-politics could furnish an alternative to bio-politics, especially if governed by aspects of the Franciscan form-of-life identified by Giorgio Agamben. Such a project ultimately moves us beyond Laudato Si’ and the work of Romano Guardini, pointing up the limitations of Laudato Si’ in engaging the agency of the Earth. (shrink)

This book gives voice to a variety of college and university workers regarding the issue of respect on campus. Authors consider issues of respect from a variety of unique perspectives to determine how they might better assess their own roles in contributing to a more respectful future.

Indecent Theology has provided both Feminist Theology and Liberation Theology with new contours for rethinking bodies, power, dominance, and submission. With regard to the logic of dominance that radically pushes the margins of the margins into a form of inexistent living, I suggest a material turn to rethink the contours that are evoked with Indecent Theology. Materialism has long stood as a philosophy opposing the overwhelming dominance of language and the poststructuralist emphasis that has emerged as the ‘linguistic turn’. Considering (...) ‘new materialism’ as a theoretical platform to reread Indecent Theology provides theologies and ethics an opportunity to re-imagine indecent methodologies through indecency, a sort of ethical perversion. I suggest an indecent turn in mobilizing materialism and kink as theories to reread indecent theology for a productive queer materialist sexual theology. The feminist liberation theology of Marcella Althaus-Reid pushes both feminism and liberation into new contours of power and submission and initiates new contours of queer sexuality into the discourse. When analysing Althaus-Reid’s work, we are brought to attention to the margins of the margins, an awareness of the struggle for power and control by those deemed less than. There are contours of power at and in the margins of the margins, those who occupy ‘bottom space’. From a kink/bdsm orientation, I propose to reread Alrhaus-Read’s feminist liberation theology as decolonial erotics that helps to generate a productive materialist queer sexuality. The overarching methodology of this article is a quasi-auto ethnographic investigation into the ways in which the contours of race, class, gender, sex, sexuality, and ability affect power and submission and in turn reframes both queer theology and queer sexuality that is rooted in the living out of a very particular theology and ethics, which is rooted in queer relating. Theology can neither materialize in a vacuum nor in isolation. An indecent turn to a queer sexual theology that is rooted in a queer relationality demands attention to the interdependence of queer relating that is materialized through the interdependency of the growing queer desires of bodies, power, dominance, and submission. (shrink)

Between the Psyche and the Social is the first collection that specifically features the field of psychoanalytic social theory emerging in and between psychoanalysis, feminism, postcolonial studies, and queer theory, and across the disciplines of philosophy, literary, film, and cultural studies. This collection of essays takes the psychoanalytic study of social oppression in some new directions by engaging—indeed, stirring up—unconscious fantasies and ethical tensions at the heart of social subjectivity.

Media organizations are simultaneously key elements of an effective democracy and, for the most part, commercial entities seeking success in the market. They play an essential role in the formation of public opinion and the influence on personal choices. Yet most of them are commercial enterprises seeking readers or viewers, advertising, favorable regulatory decisions for their media, and other assets. This creates some intrinsic difficulties and produces some sharp tensions within media ethics. In this article, we examine such tensions - (...) in theory and practice. We then consider the feasibility of introducing an ethics regime to the media industry - a regime that would be effective in a deregulated environment in protecting public interest and social responsibility. In the article, we also outline a rationale and a methodology for the institutionalization of an acceptable and workable media ethics regime that aims to protect the integrity of the industry in a future of undoubtedly increasing commercial pressure. (shrink)

This article explores the shadow side of transhumanist aspirations to transform humanity using cognitive enhancement technologies (CET). The central problem concerns how the desired transhuman anthropogenesis alters the ethical capacities of the human person. Focusing on the intersection between autonomy and equity, the article posits that inequity enhances individual autonomy for some at the expense of others, hence degrading collective autonomy. This process is already unfolding under neoliberalism, as analyzed via Byung-Chul Han’s theory of psychopolitics. Han’s psychopolitics reveals how the (...) imagined increases in autonomy brought by CET would not yield an authentic enhancement of autonomy, but rather result in further undesirable permutations of humanity. It would erode autonomy while increasing inequity, thus degrading empathy and solidarity. Franco Berardi’s critique of semiocapitalism nuances Han’s theory in support of collective autonomy and an anthropogenesis guided by contemplative empathy. Conjoined, they amplify the possibilities for alternative therapeutic forms of transformational CET. (shrink)

Blok makes a compelling case for renewed consideration of philosophical method in the pressing context of environmental threats, plunging readers into the depths of Heidegger’s philosophical method...

There is an intuitive and seemingly significant difference between lying and falsely implicating. This difference has received scrutiny both historically and recently, mostly in the context of the following two questions. First, how should lying be defined so as to distinguish it from falsely implicating? Second, is the difference between lying and falsely implicating really significant, and if so, how and why is it significant? Answers to the first question typically invoke assertion, claiming (roughly) that to lie is to assert (...) something you take to be false, as opposed to merely implicating something you take to be false. The task is then to spell out the account of assertion that is needed for a satisfactory definition of lying. Answers to the second question divide over whether the difference between lying and falsely implicating has moral significance. This chapter will review and critically evaluate the current state of the literature on these two questions. One conclusion will be that it is not clear that lying can be defined by breaking it down into the components of asserting something, on the one hand, and taking that something to be false (or not taking it to be true), on the other. Another conclusion will be that a puzzle has emerged about the significance of the difference between lying and falsely implicating. There is strong reason to think that the difference is not a moral one, yet alternative explanations of its felt significance are unsatisfying. Finally, an effort will be made to link the two questions by examining the role that norms for assertion might play both in defining lying and in explaining the significance of the difference between lying and falsely implicating. (shrink)

Significant changes in the natural environment over the past 40 years pose key challenges to health and health care in the 21st century. Health care has not yet given serious attention to what the current environmental situation means for human health, or for maintaining an effective health care system. Bioethics is in a good position to help health professionals engage environmental questions. But bioethics, as a field, will first need to explore and integrate ecological thinking —thinking based in the concept (...) of connectedness and committed to viewing humans are part of nature rather than exempt from it. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue that care ethics faces a fundamental challenge in addressing structural vulnerabilities. I argue that one of its main strengths – its focus on alleviating individuals’ material needs – also generates a weakness regarding one of its other key aims – namely, respecting the voice of the concrete other. As a result, I will argue that a full application of care ethics in response to structural vulnerabilities must moderate or supplement its focus on material needs.

The pandemic has been the most vivid agent of change that many of us have known. But it has not changed everything: plenty of the institutions, norms, and practices that sustain racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and cisheteropatriarchy have either weathered the storm of the crisis or been nourished by its effects. And yet enough has changed for us to see that the pandemic has profoundly recontextualised those structures and systems of violence, bringing us into a fresh negotiation with, for example, (...) the question of how we discuss and imagine freedom. Responding in part to this unexpected provocation, activist-scholars Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson forged a collaboration from the lockdown of 2020, corresponding by letter to create their forthcoming book, Rehearsals for Living, due to be published by Haymarket Books (US) and Knopf (Canada) in 2022. In this interview, we asked them to explain the epistolary form of the book and expand on the concept of “rehearsal”, before inviting them to reflect on a series of issues that animate our current crises: the politics of recognition; the notion of apocalypse; ways to disrupt linear temporalities; practises of reciprocity against proprietary logics; the gendered violence of state apparatuses; and worldbuilding as a method of resistance. In their expansive answers, Robyn and Leanne draw on their experiences as organisers and educators, commenting on anticolonial struggles, the Movement for Black Lives, and the rise of abolition discourse. Stressing the need to build a multiplicity of shared homespaces in the face of racial/colonial capitalism and organized abandonment, they challenge us to rethink the predicaments and possibilities of the present, enabling us to imagine futures liberated of extractivist, carceral governance – “planting more liberatory futures in the present”, as Robyn puts it. The task of sowing those seeds is a collective praxis of rewriting the narratives that constitute us, refusing to hear that nothing can change and insisting that everything must. (shrink)

Within the philosophy of language, pragmatics has tended to be seen as an adjunct to, and a means of solving problems in, semantics. A cognitive-scientific conception of pragmatics as a mental processing system responsible for interpreting ostensive communicative stimuli (specifically, verbal utterances) has effected a transformation in the pragmatic issues pursued and the kinds of explanation offered. Taking this latter perspective, I compare two distinct proposals on the kinds of processes, and the architecture of the system(s), responsible for the recovery (...) of speaker meaning (both explicitly and implicitly communicated meaning). (shrink)

_Thoughts and Utterances_ is the first sustained investigation of two distinctions which are fundamental to all theories of utterance understanding: the semantics/pragmatics distinction and the distinction between what is explicitly communicated and what is implicitly communicated.