Non-suicidal self-injury has consistently been associated with self-reported difficulties in emotion reactivity and the regulation of negative emotions; however, less is known about the accuracy of these self-reports or the reactivity and regulation of positive emotions. The present study sought to investigate differences between women with and without a history of NSSI on: self-reported general tendencies of negative and positive emotion reactivity, self-reported general tendencies of negative and positive emotion regulation, and emotion regulation reported in response to a positive and (...) negative mood induction. The sample consisted of 36 women with a recent history of NSSI within the last 2 years and a comparison group with no history of NSSI. Participants completed self-report measures of negative and positive emotion reactivity and regulation. In a separate session, participants underwent both a negative and positive mood induction using a counterbalanced design and reported their experienced emotions. Results from two-way MANOVAs and ANOVAs revealed those with a history of NSSI reported significantly greater difficulties in negative emotion reactivity and regulation than the no-NSSI comparison group; however, no group differences emerged in self-reported reactivity or regulation of positive emotions. In contrast, repeated measures ANOVAs on data from the mood induction task found no group differences in reactivity or regulation for either negative or positive emotions. These findings highlight the possibility that although individuals with a history of NSSI evaluate their ability to manage negative emotions as significantly worse than individuals with no history of self-injury, this may not reflect their actual emotion regulatory processes. (shrink)

A persuasive monograph that answers the keyepistemological arguments against anti-individualism in thephilosophy of mind.

This book takes seriously the idea that at least some groups, such as corporations and governments, are genuine agents with mental states on which they act. For instance, in morally assessing a government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, we are interested in what the government knew at various points as the pandemic developed. And in predicting the outcome of the current war in Ukraine, we might ask what Russia believes about the West’s determination to defend Ukraine. The book examines a (...) range of phenomena central to the epistemic and moral assessment of groups: group evidence, group belief, the basis of group belief, group justified belief, group knowledge, group motivation, and group blameless ignorance. Overall, the book defends a ‘non-summative’ functionalist view of groups. On a non-summative account of group phenomena, it is neither necessary nor sufficient for a group to have a property α that some/most/all of its members have that same property. By contrast, on a summative account it is necessary and sufficient for a group to have a property α that some/most/all of its members have that same property. Across the book I provide new arguments for non-summativism and new accounts of key group phenomena many of which have been relatively neglected in existing literature. While I provide independent arguments for a non-summative view of each phenomenon discussed, the conclusions of the chapters are mutually reinforcing. For adopting a non-summative account of one group phenomenon motivates adopting a non-summative account of others. (shrink)

An essentialist theory of modality claims that the source of possibility and necessity lies in essence, where essence is then not to be defined in terms of necessity. Hence such theories owe us an account of why it is that the essences of things give rise to necessities in the way required. A new approach to understanding essence in terms of the notion of generalized identity promises to answer this challenge by appeal to the necessity of identity. I explore the (...) prospects for this approach, and argue that it fails. If one favours an account of essence in terms of generalized identity, then one will not, I argue, be able to satisfactorily defend an essentialist theory of modality against the challenge; if one wishes to defend an essentialist theory of modality, and thereby to give an explanation of how necessity arises from essence, one should not understand essence in terms of generalized identity. (shrink)

(Note: this is the lead article in a forthcoming issue of _Australasian Philosophical Review_ edited by Dana Goswick, with invited comments by Karen Bennett, Ricki Bliss, Jonathan Schaffer, Alexander Skiles. In June 2024 there will be an open call for other commentators; please contact Dana or Jessica if you are interested.) A wide range of scientific, religious/cosmological, and philosophical views presuppose that there is what I call `metaphysical structure', whereby (i) some goings-on in a given domain D are (absolutely (...) or comparatively) fundamental; and (ii) (comparatively) non-fundamental goings-on in D metaphysically depend on (absolutely or comparatively) fundamental goings-on in D. Such presuppositions motivate two broadly metametaphysical questions: (i) what makes it the case that some goings-on in a domain D are (absolutely or comparatively) fundamental? and (ii) what makes it the case that (comparatively) non-fundamental goings-on in a domain D metaphysically depend on (absolutely or comparatively) fundamental goings-on in D? Here I advance my preferred 'Fundamentality First' package deal approach to metaphysical structure, which couples a primitivist approach to fundamentality with a pluralist approach to metaphysical dependence. (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)

An approach to explaining the nature and source of logic and its laws with a rich historical tradition takes the laws of logic to be laws of thought. This view seems intuitively compelling, after all, logic seems to be intimately related with how we think. But how exactly should we understand it? And what arguments can we give in favour? I will propose one line of argument for the claim that the laws of logic are laws of thought. I will (...) motivate the claim that there is a certain phenomenon, namely, that there are logical principles which are immune to rational doubt. I will then give an argument to the best explanation; I will argue that the best explanation of this phenomenon is to take the laws of logic to be constitutive-normative laws of thought. The proposal, and some responses to potential objections, will have a notably Kantian flavour. (shrink)

Knowledge ascriptions are a central topic of research in both philosophy and science. In this collection of new essays on knowledge ascriptions, world class philosophers offer novel approaches to this long standing topic.

It has become recently popular to suggest that knowledge is the epistemic norm of practical reasoning and that this provides an important constraint on the correct account of knowledge, one which favours subject-sensitive invariantism over contextualism and classic invariantism. I argue that there are putative counterexamples to both directions of the knowledge norm. Even if the knowledge norm can be defended against these counterexamples, I argue that it is a delicate issue whether it is true, one which relies on fine (...) distinctions among a variety of relevant notions of propriety which our intuitions may reflect. These notions variously apply to the agent herself, her character traits, her beliefs, her reasoning and any resultant action. Given the delicacy of these issues, I argue that the knowledge norm is not a fixed point from which to defend substantive and controversial views in epistemology. Rather, these views need to be defended on other grounds. (shrink)

Stanley and Williamson have defended the intellectualist thesis that knowing-how is a subspecies of knowing-that by appeal to the syntax and semantics of ascriptions of knowing-how. Critics have objected that this way of defending intellectualism places undue weight on linguistic considerations and fails to give sufficient attention to empirical considerations from the scientific study of the mind. In this paper, I examine and reject Stanley's recent attempt to answer the critics.

We introduce the concept of assertion, survey existing views about it, and detail the contents of the remainder of the book.

Kant distinguishes cognition and thought. Mere thoughts do not conform to the conditions that Kant places on cognition and hence do not represent objects of experience. They are, nevertheless, intelligible, and play a vital role in our mental and moral lives. I offer the beginnings of an account of mere thought using Kant's resources. I consider four key cases of intelligible representations that lack objective validity: unschematized categories; transcendental ideas; philosophical concepts; thoughts that violate principles of the understanding.

The main contribution of this paper is a new account of how a community may introduce a term for a natural kind in advance of knowing the correct scientific account of that kind. The account is motivated by the inadequacy of the currently dominant accounts of how a community may do this, namely those proposed by Kripke and by Putman. Their accounts fail to deal satisfactorily with the facts that (1) typically, an item that instantiates one natural kind instantiates several (...) - 'the higher-level natural kinds problem', and (2) natural kinds often occur in nature in impure form - 'the composition problem' .On the account I propose, a term for a natural kind gains its reference by being associated with a recognitional capacity for that kind. I show how members of a scientifically ignorant community could have a recognitional capacity for a natural kind, say gold, as opposed to a certain kind of appearance, for instance the appearance that gold actually has. I argue that members of such a community can have recognitional capacities for particular natural kinds despite the actual or possible existence of duplicate kinds, e.g. water. After developing the account in detail, I show how it can deal with the two problems faced by Kripke's and Putnam's problem. The case of natural kind terms is crucial to the central debate in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind about whether we can refer non-descriptively to objects and kinds in the world. I take the account I propose to be a non-descriptive account of linguistic reference to natural kinds that can be used to support externalism in the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

I will ask the conditional question: if folk attributions of "know" are not sensitive to the stakes and/or the salience of error, does this cast doubt on contextualism or subject-sensitive invariantism (SSI)? I argue that if it should turn out that folk attributions of knowledge are insensitive to such factors, then this undermines contextualism, but not SSI. That is not to say that SSI is invulnerable to empirical work of any kind. Rather, I defend the more modest claim that leading (...) versions of SSI are not undermined by one particular kind of experimental result, namely the recent suggestion that knowledge attributions are insensitive to the stakes. (shrink)

According to received wisdom, Kant takes the laws of logic to be normative laws of thought. This has been challenged by Tolley (2006). In this paper, I defend the received wisdom, but with an important modification: Kant's logical laws are constitutive norms for thought. The laws of logic do tell us what thinking is, not because all thoughts are in conformity with logical laws, but because all thoughts are, by nature, subject to the standard of logic.

Engineering ethics education is a complex field characterized by dynamic topics and diverse students, which results in significant challenges for engineering ethics educators. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a systematic approach to determine what to teach and how to teach in an ethics curriculum. This is a topic that has not been adequately addressed in the engineering ethics literature. This systematic approach provides a method to: (1) develop a context-specific engineering ethics curriculum using the Delphi technique, a (...) process-driven research method; and (2) identify appropriate delivery strategies and instructional strategies using an instructional design model. This approach considers the context-specific needs of different engineering disciplines in ethics education and leverages the collaboration of engineering professors, practicing engineers, engineering graduate students, ethics scholars, and instructional design experts. The proposed approach is most suitable for a department, a discipline/field or a professional society. The approach helps to enhance learning outcomes and to facilitate ethics education curriculum development as part of the regular engineering curriculum. (shrink)

In this paper, I focus on the most important form of argument for anti-intellectualism, one that exploits alleged connections between knowledge and practical reasoning. I first focus on a form of this argument which exploits a universal principle, Sufficiency, connecting knowledge and practical reasoning. In the face of putative counterexamples to Sufficiency, a number of authors have attempted to reformulate the argument with a weaker principle. However, I argue that the weaker principles suggested are also problematic. I conclude that, so (...) far, there is no good argument for anti-intellectualism that rests on connections between knowledge and practical reasoning.Send article to KindleTo send this article to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Note you can select to send to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be sent to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply. Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.PRACTICAL REASONING, DECISION THEORY AND ANTI-INTELLECTUALISMVolume 9, Issue 1Jessica BrownDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2011.4Your Kindle email address Please provide your Kindle [email protected]@kindle.com Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Dropbox To send this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Dropbox. PRACTICAL REASONING, DECISION THEORY AND ANTI-INTELLECTUALISMVolume 9, Issue 1Jessica BrownDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2011.4Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Send article to Google Drive To send this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about sending content to Google Drive. PRACTICAL REASONING, DECISION THEORY AND ANTI-INTELLECTUALISMVolume 9, Issue 1Jessica BrownDOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2011.4Available formats PDF Please select a format to send. By using this service, you agree that you will only keep articles for personal use, and will not openly distribute them via Dropbox, Google Drive or other file sharing services. Please confirm that you accept the terms of use. Cancel Send ×Export citation Request permission. (shrink)

In the Postulates of Empirical Thinking, a section of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant presents an account of the content and role of our concept of real possibility in terms of formal conditions of experience. However, much later in the Critique he introduces the idea of a material condition of possibility. What is this material condition of possibility, and how does it fit with the conception of possibility in terms of formal conditions? This essay argues that the key to (...) answering these questions—as well as to understanding Kant’s criticism of rational theology, in which the discussion of the material condition of possibility appears—is Kant’s account of how we can individuate objects. (shrink)

Abstract: This paper proposes a way to understand Kant's modalities of judgment—problematic, assertoric, and apodeictic—in terms of the location of a judgment in an inference. Other interpretations have tended to understand these modalities of judgment in terms of one or other conventional notion of modality. For example, Mattey (1986) argues that we should take them to be connected to notions of epistemic or doxastic modality. I shall argue that this is wrong, and that these kinds of interpretation of the modality (...) of judgments cannot be reconciled with a key claim made by Kant, namely, that the modality of a judgment does not contribute to its content, and has nothing to do with the matter that is judged. I offer an alternative interpretation based upon Kant's explicating these modalities in terms of the location of a judgment in an inference, whereby the modality of a judgment is determined by the role a judgment plays in a given course of reasoning. If I am right, then Kant in fact presents an intriguing thesis pertaining to the inferential status and potential of all our judgments. (shrink)

McKinsey-style reductio arguments aim to show that anti-individualism is incompatible with privileged access, the claim that a subject can have a priori knowledge of her thought contents. I defend my version of the reductio against the objections of Falvey, and McLaughlin and Tye. However, I raise and discuss a more serious objection--that it may be difficult for a subject to know a priori that she is agnostic about a concept, given that agnosticism involves being unsure whether a concept applies to (...) things of a certain type when there is a determinate fact whether or not the concept so applies. (shrink)

The target article raises important questions about the applicability of experimental social psychology research on topics with policy implications. This commentary focuses on the importance of attending to a variety of factors to improve ecological validity as well as considering the ultimate factors shaping behavior and the role of natural categories in the stability of stereotypes and their influence.

What is the nature of the evidence provided by thought experiments in philosophy? For instance, what evidence is provided by the Gettier thought experiment against the JTB theory of knowledge? According to one view, it provides as evidence only a certain psychological proposition, e.g. that it seems to one that the subject in the Gettier case lacks knowledge. On an alternative, nonpsychological view, the Gettier thought experiment provides as evidence the nonpsychological proposition that the subject in the Gettier case lacks (...) knowledge (e.g., Williamson 2007). Given the centrality of thought experiments to philosophical enquiry, the correct account of thought experiment evidence is important for understanding the nature of philosophical methodology. Further, Williamson argues that a misguided adherence to the psychological view of thought experiment evidence encourages scepticism about philosophy since it opens a gap between our evidence and the nonpsychological subject matter of philosophy. The main aim of this paper is to defend the psychological view against recent objections. In particular, I argue that even if thought experiment evidence is psychological, it can still provide justification for non-psychological claims which are the subject matter of philosophy. (shrink)

Since the publication of Kit Fine's “Essence and Modality”, there has been lively debate over how best to think of essence in relation to necessity. The present aim is to draw attention to a definition of essence in terms of modality that has not been given sufficient attention. This neglect is perhaps unsurprising, since it is not a proposal made in response to Fine's 1994 paper and ensuing discussion, but harks back to Ruth Barcan Marcus's earlier work in the 1960s (...) and 1970s on essentialist claims. At the core of Barcan Marcus's account is Minimal Essentialism, of which there are several extensions, in particular, for cases of referential predicates (such as “x is identical to Socrates”), Individuating Essentialism, and Aristotelian Essentialism. I argue that Minimal Essentialism fares favourably against a host of familiar examples. I close with some historical observations, that the distinction between essence and necessity was already commonplace in the early days of quantified modal logic and its philosophy. (shrink)

Following Burge, many anti-individualists suppose that a subject can possess a concept even if she incompletely understands it. While agreeing that this is possible, I argue that there is a limit on the extent to which a subject can incompletely understand the set of concepts she thinks with. This limit derives from our conception of our ability to reflectively evaluate our own thoughts or, as Burge puts it, our ability to engage in critical reasoning. The paper extends Burge’s own work (...) on critical reasoning. He argued that critical reasoning imposes a limit on the extent to which we can be mistaken about what thoughts we are having; in general, we can know non-empirically what we are thinking . He does not explicitly consider whether critical reasoning also imposes a limit on incomplete understanding of thoughts. (shrink)

The aim of this chapter is to explore to some extent the relationship between identity and necessity in logic and metaphysics. First, I provide a historically-based summary of proofs of the necessity of identity, highlighting the importance of the role that self-identity plays. Second, I introduce two examples of metaphysical topics where the necessity of identity has played a pivotal role: the necessary a posteriori, and the coincidence of material objects. I argue that important aspects of these debates rest on (...) how we represent identity. Third, I consider some recent work on generalized identity. This opens up new prospects for explaining why identity is necessary. (shrink)

Background: Noninvasive prenatal testing (NIPT) is a new prenatal screening technology that became commercially available in the United States in 2011. NIPT's increased accuracy and low false positive rate compared to previous screening methods enable many women to avoid invasive diagnostic testing and receive much desired reassurance. NIPT has received much attention for both its benefits and drawbacks. Methods: Observation of genetic counseling sessions and qualitative interviews with women offered NIPT at a large academic medical center were conducted. Two ethnographic (...) cases studies derived from the overall data set are used to illustrate the study findings. Results: Many fundamental ethical questions about prenatal screening, such as abortion or the value of disabled children, often do not emerge during clinical sessions, enabling most women to defer thinking about these issues until the future, when and if the need should arise. It may only be in the rare case when a woman receives a positive test result that she may be forced to confront ethical issues that she had up until then been able to avoid. Conclusions: Women want, and are grateful to have, access to NIPT, which offers much desired reassurance. This desire for reassurance may come at the expense of having contemplated the potential negative outcomes and limitations of testing. In the rare circumstance where women do not receive reassuring results, they may be unprepared and shocked by what NIPT can and cannot reveal. The routinization of NIPT as the latest and best available prenatal screening test does not necessarily create new ethical issues, but this study highlights ethical continuities following its arrival. However, the continued expansion of NIPT to include more conditions and women will increase the number of women who receive positive results, including false positives, and who may be shocked and unprepared as a result. (shrink)

I argue that public officials and health workers ought to respect and protect women’s rights to make risky choices during childbirth. Women’s rights to make treatment decisions ought to be respected even if their decisions expose their unborn children to unnecessary risks, and even if it is wrong to put unborn children at risk. I first defend a presumption of medical autonomy in the context of childbirth. I then draw on women’s birth stories to show that women’s medical autonomy is (...) often ignored during labor. Medical interventions are performed during childbirth without women’s consent. Childbirth is risky and some coercive medical interventions may be understood as attempts to protect children and to prevent mothers from acting impermissibly. However, even if it is wrong to make risky choices during childbirth, women have rights to do wrong in these cases. Therefore, coercive medical interventions are impermissible during childbirth and institutions should adopt specific protections for obstetric autonomy. (shrink)

Este artigo é sobre a folksonomia como uma ferramenta que contribui para as atividades colaborativas de grupos de usuários na rede social acadêmica Passei Direto, com o objetivo de analisar a folksonomia como ferramenta de apoio em grupos colaborativos nessa rede social, por meio de estudo de caso holístico e exploratório, sendo realizada observação direta intensiva. A justificativa baseou-se na necessidade de compreender a potencialidade das atividades cooperativas e a solução das necessidades informacionais. Concluiu-se que a folksonomia é uma ferramenta (...) de apoio em grupos colaborativos no Passei Direto, onde os usuários, no uso de tags em práticas de indexação, visam a enriquecer e ampliar as possibilidades de acesso às informações. No entanto, apesar de representar uma ferramenta de forte cunho colaborativo, a folksonomia também deixa lacunas no tocante à recuperação da informação, dada a falta de padronização e controle dessa ferramenta, embora essas características façam parte da sua essência. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article analyzes the moral-psychological stakes of Jay Garfield's reading of Buddhist ethics as moral phenomenology and applies that thesis to the pedagogical mechanisms of the Tibetan Buddhist lojong tradition. I argue that moral phenomenology requires that the practitioner work on a part of her subjectivity not ordinarily accessible to agential action: the phenomenological structures that condition experience. This makes moral phenomenology a highly ambitious ethical project. I turn to lojong as an example of a Buddhist practice that claims to (...) accomplish this ambitious task. As a training toward the ethical ideal of bodhicitta, lojong utilizes practices of meditation and contemplation to disrupt the habitual, affective responses that arise from the conventional phenomenological orientation to the world, replacing them with imagined responses of radically compassionate altruism. This ultimately inculcates a transformation of the phenomenological structures that underlie both ethical action and conscious experience, fulfilling the aim of moral phenomenology. (shrink)

Questions of persistence and change are central to metaphysics. There is almost always a role for sortal or essential properties to play in theories of persistence. However, one might reasonably be suspicious of many of the claims about sortal properties and essential properties on which so many accounts of persistence conditions rest. The aim of this paper is to think through what persistence looks like if we don't help ourselves to these assumptions. In so doing, we shall uncover a deep (...) and difficult problem when it comes to identity facts and their relation to qualitative facts. Towards the end of the paper, I sketch a potential line of response that builds upon our seeming awareness of a genuinely persisting self. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to make some headway in understanding the notion of zero-grounding. The account of grounding in terms of generalized identity, proposed by Correia and Skiles (2019), is employed to clarify issues of ground and zero-ground. I discuss some options for accommodating zero-grounding. According to one option, we slide dangerously close to violating the irreflexivity of ground. According to another option, zero-grounding leads to a worrying kind of overdetermination. A third option offers a way out, but (...) a challenge remains of how best to make sense of it. I further contend that these arguments broaden to concern any notion of grounding according to which groundees are “nothing over and above” their grounds. Ultimately, the aim of this paper is exploratory. It lays out some of the different options and challenges that face the grounding theorist who wants to make sense of zero-grounding. (shrink)

Yogācāra, one of the two principal schools of Indian Mahayana Buddhism, arose in the first or second century CE and was introduced into Tibet and China in the fourth and fifth centuries CE, where it quickly became a dominant form. Roughly comparable to phenomenology in the West (and acknowledged as an influence by Husserl and Merleau-Ponty), it rejects ontology in favor of experiential foundations and claims that knowledge is produced by individual or collective consciousness. In the late nineteenth through mid-twentieth (...) centuries, in response to the introduction of evolutionary theory and its specious corollary of Social Darwinism, Chinese Buddhists asked what kind of philosophy could both accommodate the scientific enterprise and enable a better understanding of a social dynamics that could oppose racial, class, and colonial hierarchies. They turned to yogācāra; thinkers like Lu Cheng called into question unexamined materialist and empiricist assumptions that naturalized moral/rational egoism and hierarchy. He argued that scientific and social-scientific findings could be established epistemically by intersubjective agreement, coherence, and causal efficacy. Jessica Zu recovers this influential yogācāra movement in premodern and modern China and in turn asks why it has had no purchase in the West. Part of the reason is the epistemic policing of the boundary between philosophy and religion and its colonialist privileging of Western thought-we don't speak of Kant or Hegel as "Christian" philosophers. If we expand our conceptual universe to include world philosophies, antiessentialist Chinese process thinking is a valuable resource for combating systemic oppression and fostering social justice. (shrink)

One of Kant’s categories—a priori concepts the possession and applicability of which are necessary conditions of possible experience—is a concept of necessity. But it is unclear why the concept of necessity, as Kant defines it, should be a category thus understood. My aim is to offer a reading of Kant that fills this lacuna: the category of necessity is required to make necessity as it features in the world of experience understandable: a concept that the understanding can grasp and employ (...) in cognition of objects. Kant’s view has potential wider significance for accounts of the function of necessity judgments. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine a contextualist thesis that has been little discussed in comparison with contextualism about knowledge, namely contextualism about evidential support. This seems surprising since, prima facie, evidential support statements seem shifty in a way parallel to knowledge ascriptions. I examine but reject the suggestion that contrastivism about evidential support is motivated by arguments analogous to those used to motivate contrastivism about knowledge including sceptical closure arguments, the nature of inquiry, the existence of explicitly contrastive evidential support (...) statements, and the intuitive shiftiness of some binary evidential support statements. I end by discussing the relations between contextualism about evidential support, evidence and knowledge. In particular, I argue that my discussion of contrastivism about evidential support undermines Neta's contextualist view about evidence, and his broader suggestion that the shiftiness of evidence statements explains the shiftiness of knowledge ascriptions. (shrink)

A quick tour through an average U.S. hospital gives pause to anyone with even a rudimentary concern for environmental issues. To a careful observer, the typical U.S. hospital presents an array of challenges to the health of ecosystems. For example, hospitals consume vast quantities of natural resources. The most obvious of these are fossil fuels, which form the basic building blocks of the industrialized medical care industry. Aside from the worry that our healthcare systems are technologically and functionally dependent upon (...) nonrenewable, relatively scarce, and politically volatile resources, our heavy reliance on fossil fuels has important ill effects, including unfavorable health outcomes for humans. For example, the combustion of fossil fuels is the driving force behind global warming, which will likely result in increasing heat-related mortality and morbidity and may contribute to the spread and resurgence of infectious diseases around the world. Also, the combustion of coal and oil releases pollutants such as sulfur oxides, nitrogen oxides, and ground-level ozone that contribute to various respiratory ailments. In addition to being energy intensive, the modern hospital uses a great deal of water, wood, paper, metals, minerals, plastics, chemicals, food, and land. (shrink)

The general aim of this thesis is to present and analyse traffic safety from an ethical perspective and to explore some conceptual and normative aspects of moral responsibility. Paper I presents eight ethical problem areas that should be further analysed in relation to traffic safety. Paper II is focused on the question of who is responsible for traffic safety, taking the distribution of responsibility adopted through the Swedish policy called Vision Zero as its starting point. It is argued that a (...) distinction should be made between backwardlooking and forward-looking responsibility and that Vision Zero should be understood in terms of this distinction. Paper III discusses responsibility ascriptions in relation to public health problems like obesity and lung cancer. It is argued that what makes discussions about who is responsible for such problems complicated is that we have two aims when ascribing responsibility to someone. First, we want responsibility ascriptions to be fair and morally justified. Second, we also want to achieve progress and solve problems through ascribing responsibility to someone. It is argued that the two aims influence debates concerning who is responsible for problems like obesity and lung cancer and that we should attempt at striking a balance that is both perceived as fair and that is efficient. Paper IV discusses two potential arguments against the suggestion that alcohol interlocks should be mandatory in all cars, namely 1) that it displaces the responsibility of individual drivers, and 2) that it constitutes a paternalistic interference with drivers. The first objection is found unconvincing, while the second only has limited bite and may be neutralized if paternalism is accepted for the sake of greater net liberty. It is argued that if technological development can make mandatory interlocks cost-efficient, the policy seems a commendable public health measure. In Paper V, the question discussed is to what extent individuals should be ascribed moral responsibility for the environmentally damaging consequences of their actions. It is argued that responsibility depends on the reasonableness of the alternatives open to an individual when acting. The lack of reasonable alternatives should reduce the degree of individual responsibility. (shrink)

From the Publisher: The military claims to be an honourable profession, yet military torture is widespread. Why is the military violating its own values? Jessica Wolfendale argues that the prevalence of military torture is linked to military training methods that cultivate the psychological dispositions connected to crimes of obedience. While these methods are used, the military has no credible claim to professional status. Combating torture requires that we radically rethink the nature of the military profession and military training.

The proportion of the world’s population living in urban areas is increasing rapidly, with the vast majority of this growth in developing countries. As growing populations in urban areas demand greater food supplies, coupled with a rise in rural to urban migration and the need to create livelihood options, there has been an increase in urban agriculture worldwide. Urban agriculture is commonly discussed as a sustainable solution for dealing with gaps in the local food system, and proponents often highlight the (...) many social, environmental, and economic benefits. We argue that the sustainability of urban agriculture should not be assumed. There is a need for research to take a bottom-up approach, exploring the influence that city-level conditions have on livelihood decisions by farmers and how this shapes the practice of urban agriculture. This paper uses a case study for an in-depth look at urban agriculture in Delhi, India to understand from the farmers’ perspective how urban agriculture is practiced and what factors influence farmers’ livelihood decisions. Using a team-based, multi-method Rapid Assessment Process, data were collected through preliminary key informant interviews, field observations, semi-structured interviews with urban farmers, and geographic information systems mapping. This research provides an in-depth description of market-oriented urban agriculture in a developing country, explores how farmers’ livelihood decisions are embedded in the urban context, and discusses the potential of urban agriculture as a sustainable city-system. (shrink)

In this article I examine views of groundlessness that appear in three very different philosophical traditions: bardo teachings in Tibetan Buddhism, Michel Foucault's heterotopia, and Gloria Anzaldúa's nepantla. While each of these concepts is formulated in response to specific psychological, philosophical, and political questions, I argue that they each describe—in intimate, first-personal terms—experiences of rupture or dissolution of one's own selfhood and/or thought. Using this formulation of groundlessness as a lens for reading these three concepts alongside one another, I offer (...) a descriptive analysis of each of them, drawing out the moral-psychological ramifications of the nonfoundationalist claim that there is no fundamental “ground” to subjectivity or thought. I argue that bardos, heterotopias, and nepantla each exemplify how the rupture of groundless experience can become a vehicle for moral-psychological transformation by serving as an opportunity to recognize the pliability and spaciousness of a dynamic and unfixed selfhood. (shrink)