We examine and test alternative models for explaining the relationships between resource stress, beliefs that gods and spirits influence weather, and customary beyond-household sharing behavior. Our model, the resource stress model, suggests that resource stress affects both sharing as well as conceptions of gods’ involvement with weather, but these supernatural beliefs play no role in explaining sharing. An alternative model, the moralizing high god model, suggests that the relationship between resource stress and sharing is at least partially mediated by religious (...) beliefs in moralizing high gods. We compared the models using a worldwide sample of 96 cultures from the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample, newly coded data on supernatural involvement with weather, and previously coded data on food and labor sharing. We conducted three types of analysis: multilevel and society-level regressions, and mediational path modeling using Monte Carlo simulations. Resource stress shows a robust effect on beliefs that high gods are associated with weather, that superior gods help the food supply through weather, and that minor spirits hurt the food supply through weather. Resource stress also predicts greater belief in moralizing high gods. However, no form of high god belief that we test significantly predicts more sharing. Mediational models suggest the religious beliefs do not significantly explain why resource stress is associated with food and labor sharing. Our findings generally accord with the view that resource stress changes religious belief and has a direct effect on sharing behavior, unmediated by high god beliefs. (shrink)

Previous examinations of the scope of moral concern have focused on aggregate attributions of moral worth. However, because trade‐offs exist in valuing different kinds of entities, tabulating total amounts of moral expansiveness may conceal significant individual differences in the relative proportions of moral valuation ascribed to various entities. We hypothesized that some individuals (“tree‐huggers”) would ascribe greater moral worth to animals and ecosystems than to humans from marginalized or stigmatized groups, while others (“human‐lovers”) would ascribe greater moral worth to outgroup (...) members than to the natural world. Additionally, because moral valuation is often treated as being zero‐sum, we hypothesized that there would be no difference in aggregate levels of moral concern between tree‐huggers and human‐lovers. Finally, because attributions of mental capacities substantially contribute to moral valuation, we predicted that tree‐huggers and human‐lovers would show different patterns of mind attribution for animals versus humans. Three studies (N = 985) yielded evidence in support of our hypotheses. First, over one‐third of participants valued nature over outgroups. Second, extending moral value to animals and nature was not indicative of more expansive moral concern overall; instead, tree‐huggers and human‐lovers were identical in their aggregate ascriptions of moral worth. Third, tree‐huggers had relatively amplified tendencies to attribute mental capacities to animals and relatively reduced tendencies to attribute mental capacities to outgroup members—thus having elevated rates of both anthropomorphism and dehumanization. These findings necessitate a reconceptualization of both the extension of moral worth and the attribution of minds. (shrink)

The National Health Service (NHS) was the first healthcare system globally to declare ambitions to become net carbon zero. To achieve this, a shift away from metered-dose inhalers which contain powerful greenhouse gases is necessary. Many patients can use dry powder inhalers which do not contain greenhouse gases and are equally effective at managing respiratory disease. This paper discusses the ethical issues that arise as the NHS attempts to mitigate climate change. Two ethical issues that pose a barrier to moving (...) away from metered-dose inhalers are considered: patients who decline an inhaler with a smaller carbon footprint and increased cost. I argue that while a patient is not morally justified in refusing a more environmentally sustainable inhaler due to the expected harms, a doctor may still prescribe a metered-dose inhaler if they believe that switching without consent might undermine trust or substantially worsen the patient’s health. Turning to cost, I argue that the imperative to combat climate change means the NHS should accept small increased financial costs for lower carbon inhalers, even though this provides no additional direct benefit for the patient. I then go on to consider the implications of the preceding analysis for policy and practice. I argue for a policy that minimises the impact of inhalers on the climate by advocating for a principle of environmental prescribing and explore decision-making in practice. While the arguments here pertain primarily to inhalers, the discussion has broader implications for debates around healthcare’s responsibility to be environmentally sustainable. (shrink)

It used to be a commonplace that the discipline of philosophy was deeply concerned with questions about the human condition. Philosophers thought about human beings and how their minds worked. They took an interest in reason and passion, culture and innate ideas, the origins of people’s moral and religious beliefs. On this traditional conception, it wasn’t particularly important to keep philosophy clearly distinct from psychology, history, or political science. Philosophers were concerned, in a very general way, with questions about how..

This is a book about the American Dream: how to understand this central principle of American public philosophy, the ways in which it is threatened by a number of winner-take-all economic trends, and how to make it a reality for workers and their families in the 21st century. Integrating political philosophy and the history of political thought with recent work in economics, political science, and sociology, this book calls for renewed political and policy commitment to “just work.” -/- Such a (...) commitment is essential to combat the negative moral externalities of an economy where the fruits of growth are increasingly claimed by a relatively small portion of the population: slower growth, rising inequality, declining absolute mobility, dying communities, the erosion of social solidarity, lack of faith in political leaders and institutions, exploding debt, ethnic and nationalist backlash, widespread hopelessness, and the rapid rise in what economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case call deaths of despair. -/- Covid-19 threatens to pour gasoline on these winner-take-all fires, further concentrating economic and political power in the hands of those best suited to withstand (and even profit from) the pandemic-driven economic crisis. In this book, the author provides a model for understanding the American Dream and making it a reality in a post-Covid-19 economy. -/- A tour de force, this book is essential reading for scholars and researchers of political philosophy, political economy, political theory, and economics, as well as for the layperson trying to make sense of the post-pandemic world. (shrink)

In this article, I defend a version of ontological pluralism, specifically with an eye toward laying metaphysical groundwork for an account of divine naming inspired by Avicenna. I try to show (1) that Avicenna’s pluralism is well-motivated as a metaphysical thesis and (2) that it offers substantive philosophical support for a correlatively pluralist approach to divine naming. My argument proceeds by identifying two influential objections to ontological pluralism, and then offering replies to these objections with the help of Avicenna. The (...) first objection pertains to pluralism as a position in general metaphysics, whereas the second pertains to pluralism as a position in theological epistemology or divine naming. To the extent that these replies are successful, I argue that Avicennian pluralism is compelling on both counts as a philosophical position. (shrink)

This collection brings together prominent thinkers from numerous disciplines to address the legacy of Gillian Rose for political theology today. Rose’s work is notorious for its eclectic range, difficult style, and iconoclastic defiance of the conventions of postmodern critical theory. The theologians, religious scholars, ethicists, and theorists in this collection discuss Rose’s relationship to such topics as the Frankfurt School, social theory, feminism, literature, law, Hegel, Kant, and psychoanalysis. They situate her work within the wider context of political theology, as (...) it is understood in religious studies and continental philosophy. Though attentive to the theoretical issues raised by Rose’s work, these essays are also engage the role that work may play in political action today, examining issues such as refugee immigration in Europe, the rise of nationalism, and anticapitalist political organizing. The collection is a vital contribution to the rising body of literature on Rose and her importance to political philosophy, ethics, and theology, but it will also serve as an important orienting guide for readers new to Rose’s work and its demanding style. (shrink)

Philosophy is often depicted as generically distinct from literature, myth, and history, as a discipline that eschews narration and relies exclusively on abstract reason. This book takes issue with that assumption, arguing instead that political philosophers have commonly presented their readers with a narrative, rather than a logic, of politics. The book maintains that philosophical texts frequently persuade through the creation of a 'role' that they invite their audience to inhabit. The author also investigates the place of narrative in politics (...) in two ways. It offers a hypothesis of a broad connection between political identity and narrative, and it analyzes three major figures in the history of political thought - Locke, Hegel, and Nietzsche - to demonstrate that their work is best understood through the hypothesis. The author argues that each of these philosophers rewrites the past in an attempt to direct the future. (shrink)

To a first approximation, ‘bodily skill’ refers to the capacity to successfully utilize the body in the world to achieve goals. But the body is complex, and bodily skill manifests in many different ways. Further, work on bodily skill spans the philosophy of mind, action, and cognitive science, as well as the sciences of motor control and perception. This chapter aims to provide an overview of recent themes and key ideas. First, we review work on the nature of skill as (...) such. Second, we discuss ways theorists have discussed the implementation of skill in the human body, and a theoretical difficulty associated with explanations of implementation. Third, we discuss the importance of the idea of a hierarchical representational architecture for understanding skill’s implementation, and various ways this architecture can be made more sophisticated. Fourth, we discuss work that attempts to understand skill execution on-the-fly, and in particular, work that attempts to understand the connection between intentions and motor representations, and the connection between implicit sensorimotor adaptation and explicit planning and executive control. Fifth, we discuss work on the models that assist fine-grained skill execution, as well as the idea that even at rapid, fine-grained motoric levels, one finds intelligent systems and mechanisms supporting skill. Finally, we consider the place of bodily awareness in an account of bodily skill. (shrink)

To help frame the Festschrift for Gyula Klima (Metaphysics Through Semantics: The Philosophical Recovery of the Medieval Mind), this appreciation offers perspective on the scholar's person and project. Drawing on biographical details and reflecting on signal contributions, it seeks to honor a distinguished philosopher who deserves to be celebrated by friends and introduced to a new generation of readers. Download with frontmatter from: link[dot]springer[dot]com/content/pdf/bfm:978-3-031-15026-5/1?pdf=chapter%20toc.

In our society, some aspects of life are off-limits to commerce. We prohibit the selling of children and the buying of wives, juries, and kidneys. Tainted blood is an inevitable consequence of paying blood donors; even sophisticated laboratory tests cannot supplant the gift-giving relationship as a safeguard of the purity of blood. Like blood, health care is too precious, intimate, and corruptible to entrust to the market.The hospice movement in the United States is approximately 40 years old. During these past (...) four decades, the concept of holistic, multidisciplinary care for patients who are suffering from a terminal illness has evolved from a modest, grassroots constellation of primarily volunteer-run and community-governed endeavors to a multimillion dollar industry where the surviving nonprofits compete with for-profit providers, often publicly traded, managed by M.B.A.-trained executives, and governed by corporate boards. The relatively recent emergence of for-profit hospice reflects an increasing commercialization of health care in the United States, the potentially adverse impact of which has been well documented. (shrink)

Good Science is an account of psychological research emphasizing the moral foundations of inquiry. This volume brings together existing disciplinary critiques of scientism, objectivism, and instrumentalism, and then discusses how these contribute to institutionalized privilege and to less morally responsive research practices. The author draws on historical, critical, feminist, and science studies traditions to provide an alternative account of psychological science and to highlight the irreducibly moral foundations of everyday scientific practice. This work outlines a theoretical framework for thinking about (...) and practicing psychology in ways that center moral responsibility, collective commitment, and justice. The book then applies this framework, describing psychological research practices in terms of the their moral dilemmas. Also included are materials meant to aid in methods instruction and mentoring. (shrink)

Philosophers of science typically focus on the epistemic performance of scientific models when evaluating them. Analysing the effects that models may have on the world has typically been the purview of sociologists of science. We argue that the reactive (or “performative”) effects of models should also figure in model evaluations by philosophers of science. We provide a detailed analysis of how models in financial economics created the impetus for the growing importance of the phenomenon of “passive investing” in financial markets. (...) Considering this case motivates the position that we call contextualism about model evaluation, or _model contextualism_ for short. Model contextualism encompasses standard analyses of the epistemic performance of the model, but also includes their reactive aspects. It entails identifying the _epistemic and contextual import of the model_, the ways in which a model can engender change in the world (which we call the _channels of transmission_), and the _interactions between the epistemic and reactive import of a model_. (shrink)

In our paper ‘The ethical case for non-directed postmortem sperm donation’ we argued that it would be ethical for men to donate sperm after death for use by strangers. In their thoughtful response Fredrick and Ben Kroon lay out practical concerns regarding our proposal. They raise issues regarding the quality of sperm collected postmortem based on empirical studies. Second, they claim that concerns about quality would make women unlikely to use sperm collected after death. In this response we explore issues (...) of sperm quality in both living and dead donors. We consider whether there might be ways to ensure quality in both. Finally, we question whether quality should be a barrier to women choosing to use sperm donated after death. (shrink)

Volume 19, Issue 10, October 2019, Page 52-54.

This chapter discusses neurocognitive work relevant to moral psychology and the proposition that innate factors make important contributions to moral judgment. It reviews various sources of evidence for an innate moral faculty, before presenting brain-imaging data in support of the same conclusion. It is argued that our moral thought is the product of an interaction between some ‘gut-reaction’ moral emotions and our capacity for abstract reflection.

Bas Van Fraassen is a nifty philosopher of science. He received his PhD in Pittsburgh in 1966, under the guidance of Adolf Grünbaum, he taught at Yale University, the university of Toronto, the University of Southern California, he has been McCosh Professor of Philosophy in Princeton, and eventually joined the department of philosophy at San Francisco State University, where he has the title of Distinguished Professor of Philosophy. He first gained attention with his book An Introduction to the Philosophy of (...) Time and Space where he tried to develop a formal theory of space and time based on the notion of causality. The book had an enormous legacy, with experts of the likes of John Earman and David Malament joining the debate. However, he achieved V.I.P. status with his classic The Scientific Image, where he defends a combination of empiricism and antirealism towards unobservable entities based on a re-definition of what the scientific enterprise is. His last achievement is the tome Scientific Representation: Paradoxes of Perspectives, where he combines his scientific empiricism with the view that theories are best thought as models or structures, rather than sets of sentences. In this interview, we talk about his philosophical influences and the birth of The Scientific Image during a journey through North-Africa, Turkey and Eastern Europe, we talk about saving the phenomena and suspending judgement over the existence of unobservable entities, living in world full of mysteries and leaving unanswerable questions unanswered, rationality and irrationality, living in a simulation, the historical interplay between theorizing and experimenting, the meaning of particle detectors for an empiricist, the unity of science and physicalism, the condemnation of Galilei by the Church, and the distinction between Appearance and Reality…. (shrink)

In his 1950 lecture entitled “Language,” Martin Heidegger announces a turn in the philosophy of language: for the opening theme, “man speaks,” he substitutes a countervailing theme: “language speaks”. Heidegger saw himself living in an era in which the historical determination of the inquiry into language that began with the Greek conception of human being as the animal with language had developed into a relentlessly technical way of thinking that viewed language instrumentally. By abandoning this conception, displacing the occurrence of (...) language away from “man” and toward language itself, Heidegger enacts a dehumanization of language that attempts to open a different avenue for thought.... (shrink)

People with disabilities (PWD) comprise a significant part of the population yet experience some of the most profound health disparities. Among the greatest barriers to quality care are inadequate health professions education related to caring for PWD. Drawing upon the expertise of health professions educators in medicine, public health, nursing, social work, and physician assistant programs, this forum showcases innovative methods for teaching core disability skills and concepts grounded in disability studies and the health humanities. Each of the essays offers (...) practical guidance for developing curricular interventions appropriate for students at various levels of training and familiarity with disability to be implemented in classroom discussions, case-based learning, lectures, panels, and clinical simulations across the full spectrum of pre-health and health professions education. (shrink)

Hegel regarded his Enyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences as the work which most fully presented the scope of his philosophical system and its method. It is somewhat surprising, therefore, that scholars regularly accord it only a secondary status. This Critical Guide seeks to change that, with sixteen newly-written essays from an international group of leading Hegel scholars that shed much-needed light on both the whole and the parts of the Encyclopedia system. Topics include the structure and aim of the Encyclopedia (...) system as a whole, the differences between the greater and lesser Logics, the role of nature in Hegel's thinking, and the shapes of absolute spirit as art, religion, and philosophy. This book will be invaluable to students and scholars with an interest in Hegel and the history of philosophy. (shrink)

Quantitative health risk assessment is a procedure for estimating the likelihood that exposure to environmental contaminants will produce certain adverse health effects, most commonly cancer. One instance of its use has been a California air toxics public “right-to-know” law. This article examines the ways in which credible health risk measurements were produced and challenged during the implementation of the California public policy. Fieldwork and documentary analysis finds that stakeholders negotiated within the formal constraints of the risk assessment procedures but still (...) expressed their competing visions for the implementation of the risk communication policy. The abstract results of the method were contextualized according to different time frames and allocations of uncertainty. Furthermore, the article demonstrates that the political process privileged consistency of measurement over accuracy, revealing political negotiations at a fundamentally technical level. The struggle and variation in interpretations can be explained best by the demand to organize the program around the discordant values of democratic accountability and technical efficiency. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Setting specific, challenging goals motivates employees to exert greater effort in their jobs. However, goal-setting may have unintended consequences of also motivating unethical behavior. The present study explores these consequences in the context of other features of goal-setting in organizations, how goals are framed and rewarded, to determine the tradeoff between performance and ethical behavior. Undergraduate students were incentivized to complete math problems using different outcome frames and incentive structures and were also provided an opportunity to cheat. Findings demonstrate (...) that when goals rewarded with piece-rate incentives are framed as a loss, performance increased, though cheating behavior increased as well. (shrink)

Social constructionists about race frequently hold that race does not travel, that race is socially constructed, and that racial passing is possible. Ron Mallon has argued that these three principles cannot be consistently held at once. This article argues otherwise.

Against the neo-Darwinian assumption that genetic factors are the principal source of variation upon which natural selection operates, a phenotype-first hypothesis strikes us as revolutionary because development would seem to constitute an independent source of variability. Richard Watson and his co-authors have argued that developmental memory constitutes one such variety of phenotypic variability. While this version of the phenotype-first hypothesis is especially well-suited for the late metazoan context, where animals have a sufficient history of selection from which to draw, appeals (...) to developmental memory seem less plausible in the evolutionary context of the early metazoans. I provide an interpretation of Stuart Newman’s account of deep metazoan phylogenesis that suggests that spandrels are, in addition to developmental memory, an important reservoir of phenotypic variability. I conclude by arguing that Gerd Müller’s “side-effect hypothesis” is an illuminating generalization of the proposed non-Watsonian version of the phenotype-first hypothesis. (shrink)

The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Volume 60, Issue 1, Page 5-37, March 2022.

BackgroundNarrative medicine is a well-recognized and respected approach to care. It is now found in medical school curricula and widely implemented in practice. However, there has been no analysis of the perception and usage of narrative medicine across different medical specialties and whether there may be unique recommendations for implementation based upon specialty. The aims of this study were to explore these gaps in research.MethodsFifteen senior physicians who specialize in internal medicine, pediatrics, or surgery (5 physicians from each specialty) were (...) interviewed in a semi-structured format about the utilization, benefits, drawbacks (i.e., negative consequences), and roles pertaining to narrative medicine. Qualitative content analysis of each interview was then performed.ResultsThree themes emerged from our analysis: roles, practice, and outcomes. Through these themes we examined the importance, utilization, barriers, benefits, and drawbacks of narrative medicine. There was consensus that narrative medicine is an important tool in primary care. Primary care physicians (general internists and general pediatricians) also believed that narrative medicine is not as important for non-primary care providers. However, non-primary care providers (surgeons) generally believed narrative medicine is valuable in their practice as well. Within specialties, providers’ choice of language varied when trying to obtain patients’ narratives, but choice in when to practice narrative medicine did not differ greatly. Among specialties, there was more variability regarding when to practice narrative medicine and what barriers were present. Primary care physicians primarily described barriers to eliciting a patient’s narrative to involve trust and emotional readiness, while surgeons primarily described factors involving logistics and patient data as barriers to obtaining patients’ narratives. There was broad agreement among specialties regarding the benefits and drawbacks of narrative medicine.ConclusionsThis study sheds light on the shared and unique beliefs in different specialties about narrative medicine. It prompts important discussion around topics such as the stereotypes physicians may hold about their peers and concerns about time management. These data provide some possible ideas for crafting narrative medicine education specific to specialties as well as future directions of study. (shrink)

Drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s “little ethics” and Chung-ying Cheng’s work on Confucian and Kantian ethics, this essay reinforces the broad outlines of a cross- cultural framework for reconciling conflicts between the good and the right, teleology and deontology, and perfectionism and liberalism so that we can recognize dynamic concerns across the grand sweep of moral life. Ricoeur and Cheng describe roughly parallel sets of relations and highlight similar dynamics among three planes of ethical life.

In Sorgner's 2009 paper "Nietzsche, the Overhuman, and Transhumanism", he argues, contra Bostrom, that the transhumanist movement's postman is fundamentally similar to Nietzsche's overman. In this paper, Sorgner's thesis is challenged. It is argued that transhumanism, as presented both popularly and academically, is fundamentally incompatible with Nietzsche's overman, as presented in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. This argument focuses on three significant characteristics's of Zarathustra's description of the overman: the role of earthly existence, immortality, and the rejection of collective values.

The relationship whereby one physical theory encompasses the domain of empirical validity of another is widely known as “reduction.” Elsewhere I have argued that one influential methodology for showing that one physical theory reduces to another, associated with the so-called “Bronstein cube” of theories, rests on an oversimplified and excessively vague characterization of the mathematical relationship between theories that typically underpins reduction. I offer what I claim is a more precise characterization of this relationship, which here is based on a (...) more basic notion of reduction between distinct models of a single physical system. Reduction between two such models, I claim, rests on a particular type of approximation relationship between group actions over the models’ state spaces, characterized by a particular function between the model state spaces and a particular subset of the more encompassing model’s state space. Within this approach, I show formally in what sense and under what conditions reduction is transitive, so that reduction of a model 1 to another model 2 and reduction of model 2 to a third model 3 entails direct reduction of model 1 to model 3. Building on this analysis, I consider cases in which reduction of a model 1 to a model 3 may be effected via distinct intermediate models 2a and 2b, and motivate a set of formal consistency requirements between distinct “reduction paths” having the same models as their “end points”. These constraints are explicitly shown to hold in the reduction of a model of non-relativistic classical mechanics to a model of relativistic quantum mechanics, which may be effected by a composite reduction that proceeds either via a model of non-relativistic quantum mechanics or a model of relativistic classical mechanics. I offer some brief speculations as to whether and how this sort of consistency requirement might serve to constrain the reductions relating other theories and models, including the relationship that the Standard Model and general relativity must bear to any viable unification of these frameworks. (shrink)

Amartya Sen has suggested that the moral significance of freedom undermines the view that well-being alone possesses fundamental moral worth. Sen’s efforts to establish this claim, however, seem to fall short: he attempts to establish freedom’s independent moral significance by pointing to the value of autonomy, but explains the value of autonomy in terms of its role as an element of well-being. Nonetheless, I take it that Sen is very much on the right track: well-being is not the only fundamental (...) moral value, and an examination of freedom’s moral significance really will bring this out. I thus offer my own version of the freedom-based critique of well-being’s exclusive moral claim, focusing not on autonomy but what Sen has called “well-being freedom.” The value of this variety of freedom derives, I will suggest, not from the value of well-being itself but the value of well-being potential. Well-being freedom matters not only because promoting it is a way of promoting human well-being, but also because respecting it is a way of respecting the dignity of human nature. The freedom-based critique of well-being’s moral uniqueness succeeds even if Sen’s particular version of it does not. (shrink)

Epilepsy surgery is the most effective therapeutic approach for children with drug resistant epilepsy. Recent advances in neurosurgery, such as the Laser Interstitial Thermal Therapy, improved the safety and non-invasiveness of this method. Electric and magnetic source imaging plays critical role in the delineation of the epileptogenic focus during the presurgical evaluation of children with DRE. Yet, they are currently underutilized even in tertiary epilepsy centers. Here, we present a case of an adolescent who suffered from DRE for 16 years (...) and underwent surgery at Cook Children's Medical Center. The patient was previously evaluated in a level 4 epilepsy center and treated with multiple antiseizure medications for several years. Presurgical evaluation at CCMC included long-term video electroencephalography, magnetoencephalography with simultaneous conventional EEG and high-density EEG in two consecutive sessions, MRI, and fluorodeoxyglucose - positron emission tomography. Video long-term EEG captured nine focal-onset clinical seizures with a maximal evolution over the right frontal/frontal midline areas. MRI was initially interpreted as non-lesional. FDG-PET revealed a small region of hypometabolism at the anterior right superior temporal gyrus. ESI and MSI performed with dipole clustering showed a tight cluster of dipoles in the right anterior insula. The patient underwent intracranial EEG which indicated the right anterior insular as seizure onset zone. Eventually LITT rendered the patient seizure free. Retrospective analysis of ESI and MSI clustered dipoles found a mean distance of dipoles from the ablated volume ranging from 10 to 25 mm. Our findings highlight the importance of recent technological advances in the presurgical evaluation and surgical treatment of children with DRE, and the underutilization of epilepsy surgery in children with DRE. (shrink)