We sometimes seem to face fundamental moral uncertainty, i.e., uncertainty about what is morally good or morally right that cannot be reduced to ordinary descriptive uncertainty. This phenomenon raises a puzzle for noncognitivism, according to which moral judgments are desire-like attitudes as opposed to belief-like attitudes. Can a state of moral uncertainty really be a noncognitive state? So far, noncognitivists have not been able to offer a completely satisfactory account. Here, we argue that noncognitivists should exploit the formal analogy between (...) moral uncertainty and moral multi-objective decision problems. Our ‘multi-objective story’ enables noncognitivists to save our moral uncertainty thought and talk by explaining how the underlying phenomenon could be noncognitive. (shrink)

Many fine-grained decisions concerning climate change involve significant, even severe, uncertainty. Here, we focus on modelling the decisions of single agents, whether individual persons or groups perceived as corporate entities. We offer a taxonomy of the sources and kinds of uncertainty that arise in framing these decision problems, as well as strategies for making a choice in spite of uncertainty. The aim is to facilitate a more transparent and structured treatment of uncertainty in climate decision making.

This paper presents a methodology to design and implement programs intended to decide cases, described as sets of factors, according to a theory of a particular domain based on a set of precedent cases relating to that domain. We useDialectical Frameworks, a recent development in AI knowledge representation, as the central feature of our design method. ADFs will play a role akin to that played by Entity–Relationship models in the design of database systems. First, we explain how the factor hierarchy (...) of the well-known legal reasoning system CATO can be used to instantiate an ADF for the domain of US Trade Secrets. This is intended to demonstrate the suitability of ADFs for expressing the design of legal cased based systems. The method is then applied to two other legal domains often used in the literature of AI and Law. In each domain, the design is provided by the domain analyst expressing the cases in terms of factors organised into an ADF from which an executable program can be implemented in a straightforward way by taking advantage of the closeness of the acceptance conditions of the ADF to components of an executable program. We evaluate the ease of implementation, the performance and efficacy of the resulting program, ease of refinement of the program and the transparency of the reasoning. This evaluation suggests ways in which factor based systems, which are limited by taking as their starting point the representation of cases as sets of factors and so abstracting away the particular facts, can be extended to address open issues in AI and Law by incorporating the case facts to improve the decision, and by considering justification and reasoning using portion of precedents. (shrink)

Scientific realists don’t standardly discriminate between, say, biology and fundamental physics when deciding whether the evidence and explanatory power warrant the inclusion of new entities in our ontology. As such, scientific realists are committed to a lush rainforest of special science kinds (Ross, 2000). Viruses certainly inhabit this rainforest – their explanatory power is overwhelming – but viruses’ properties can be explained from the bottom up: reductive explanations involving amino acids are generally available. However, reduction has often been taken to (...) lead to a metaphysical downgrading, so how can viruses keep their place in the rainforest? In this paper, we show how the inhabitants of the rainforest can be inoculated against the eliminative threat of reduction: by demonstrating that they are emergent. According to our account, emergence involves a screening off condition as well as novelty. We go on to demonstrate that this account of emergence, which is compatible with theoretical reducibility, satisfies common intuitions concerning what should and shouldn’t count as real: viruses are emergent, as are trout and turkeys, but philosophically gerrymandered objects like trout-turkeys do not qualify. (shrink)

Background: Within nursing, the concepts of home and homelike have been used indiscriminately to describe characteristics of healthcare settings that resemble a home more than an institution. Objectives: The aim of this study was to investigate the concept of home ( hem in Swedish). The main questions were as follows: What does the concept of home entail etymologically and semantically? Of what significance is the meaning of the concept to caring science and nursing? Design and methods: This study had a (...) qualitative design with a hermeneutical approach guided by Gadamer. Eriksson’s model of concept determination was partly used to determine the etymology and semantics, the essence and epistemic category of the concept of home. In this study, etymological dictionaries and 17 Swedish language dictionaries published between 1850 and 2001 were investigated. Ethical consideration: In all parts of this study, ethical guidelines have been followed concerning both gathering data from dictionaries and other sources and during the interpretation of these sources. Findings: The home, framed as the ethos of caring, can be drawn as a three-dimensional picture where the three dimensions have a common core, enclosed and inviolable. Symbolically, the picture of home can be seen as the ethos of the human being’s innermost room, the human being’s manner of being and the tone expressed in the external or abstract room where the human being lives and interacts with others. Conclusion: Based on the findings in this study, we conclude that home as ethos is an inner ethical dimension within the human being. Human beings who are in contact with their ethos, the self, feel at home and dare to follow the voice of their heart. Nurses who experience at-homeness have an ability to invite the patient into a caring relationship. The home and the feeling of being at home have significant meaning in terms of human beings’ health and well-being. (shrink)

Political communities across the world have recently sought to tackle rising rates of vaccine hesitancy and refusal, by implementing coercive immunization programs, or by making existing immunization programs more coercive. Many academics and advocates of public health have applauded these policy developments, and they have invoked ethical reasons for implementing or strengthening vaccine mandates. Others have criticized these policies on ethical grounds, for undermining liberty, and as symptoms of broader government overreach. But such arguments often obscure or abstract away from (...) the diverse values that are relevant to the ethical justifications of particular political communities’ vaccine‐mandate policies. We argue for an expansive conception of the normative issues relevant to deciding whether and how to establish or reform vaccine mandates, and we propose a schema by which to organize our thoughts about the ways in which different kinds of vaccine‐mandate policies implicate various values. (shrink)

This paper considers a puzzling conflict between two positions that are each compelling: it is irrational for an agent to pay to avoid `free' evidence before making a decision, and rational agents may have imprecise beliefs and/or desires. Indeed, we show that Good's theorem concerning the invariable choice-worthiness of free evidence does not generalise to the imprecise realm, given the plausible existing decision theories for handling imprecision. A key ingredient in the analysis, and a potential source of controversy, is the (...) general approach taken for resolving sequential decision problems { we make explicit what the key alternatives are and defend our own approach. Furthermore, we endorse a resolution of the aforementioned puzzle { we privilege decision theories that merely permit avoiding free evidence over decision theories for which avoiding free evidence is uniquely admissible. Finally, we situate this particular result about free evidence within the broader `dynamic-coherence' literature. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to explore the ethical foundations for a caring conversation. The analysis is based on the ethics of Paul Ricoeur and deals with questions such as what kind of person the nurse ought to be and how she or he engages in caring conversations with suffering others. According to Ricoeur, ethics (the aim of an accomplished life) has primacy over morality (the articulation of aims in norms). At the ethical level, self-esteem and autonomy were shown (...) to be essential for a person (nurse) to act with respect and responsibility. The ethical relationship of a caring conversation was found to be asymmetrical, because of the passivity inflicted by suffering. This asymmetry was found to be potentially unethical if not balanced with reciprocity. In the ethical context, the caring conversation is one in which the nurse makes room through the ethos of caritas for a suffering person to regain his or her self-esteem, and thus makes a good life possible. (shrink)

The rise of managerialism within healthcare systems has been noted globally. This paper uses the findings of a scoping study to investigate the management of poor performance among nurses and midwives in the United Kingdom within this context. The management of poor performance among clinicians in the NHS has been seen as a significant policy problem. There has been a profound shift in the distribution of power between professional and managerial groups in many health systems globally. We examined literature published (...) between 2000 and 10 to explore aspects of poor performance and its management. We used Web of Science, CINAHL, MEDLINE, British Nursing Index, HMIC, Cochrane Library and PubMed. Empirical data are limited but indicate that nurses and midwives are the clinical groups most likely to be suspended and that poor performance is often represented as an individual deficit. A focus on the individual as a source of trouble can serve as a distraction from more complex systematic problems. (shrink)

The third of Berman and Hafner’s early nineties papers on reasoning with legal cases concerned temporal context, in particular the evolution of case law doctrine over time in response to new cases and against a changing background of social values and purposes. In this paper we consider the ways in which changes in case law doctrine can be accommodated in a recently proposed methodology for encapsulating case law theories, and relate these changes the sources of change identified by Berman and (...) Hafner. (shrink)

This article reflects on the work of feminist bioethicists over the past ten years, reviewing how effective feminists have been in using relational theory to reorient bioethics and where we hope it will go from here. Feminist bioethicists have made significant achievements using relational theory to shape the notion of autonomy, bringing to light the relevance of patients' social circumstances and where they are situated within systems of privilege and oppression. But there is much work to be done to reorient (...) bioethics so that it is capable of addressing some current public health challenges. We argue that relational theory holds promise for beginning this work. (shrink)

The article reconsiders the nature and location of science in the development of genetic classification. Drawing on field studies of medical genetics, we explore how patient categorization is accomplished in between the clinic and laboratory. We focus on dysmorphology, a specialism concerned with complex syndromes that impair physical development. We show that dys-morphology is about more than fitting patients into prefixed diagnostic categories and that diagnostic process is marked by moments of uncertainty, ambiguity, and deferral. We describe how different forms (...) of evidence are brought into play and how patterns of physical features are identified as genetic or not. We suggest that clinical categorical work helps articulate the genetic as an emergent domain of medical classification and that moments of ambiguity and deferral create an imperative space that helps legitimate the need for more technoscience, and consequently, more clinical judgment with which to fix the genetic future. (shrink)

Although the concept of corporate social responsibility is fundamentally multidimensional, most studies use composite scores to assess corporate social performance. How relevant are such composite scores? How the CSR dimensions are weighted? Should the weighting scheme be the same across sectors? This article proposes an original weighting scheme of CSR strengths and concerns, at the sector level, which is proportional to media and nongovernmental organizations scrutiny. The authors show that previous CSP assessments underweight environmental and corporate governance concerns. Moreover, findings (...) suggest that firms that are exposed to the closest scrutiny are usually criticized on one single dimension: for instance, banks for bad corporate governance, and basic-resource firms for environmental damage. Composite scores based on equal weights hence misrepresent CSP and the difference in CSR between sectors. (shrink)

We examine the British newspapers' coverage of the death of Princess Diana and its immediate aftermath. Our main focus is on how the press dealt with the issue of their own potential culpability, as a feature of news reporting itself. The press deployed a series of descriptive categories and rhetorical oppositions, including regular press vs paparazzi; tabloid vs broadsheet; British vs foreign; supply vs demand ; and a number of general purpose devices such as a contrast between emotional reactions and (...) considered judgments. The study has two major aims: to analyse the textual workings of the press, as a medium of factual reportage operating within a range of normative requirements for factual objectivity, public concern, responsible journalism, meeting readers' demands, etc.; and to contribute to a generally applicable discourse analytic approach to how factual reports are assembled, used, and undermined, in an interplay of description and accountability. (shrink)

Conversational negation often behaves differently from negation as a logical operator: when rejecting a state of affairs, it does not present all members of the complement set as equally plausible alternatives, but it rather suggests some of them as more plausible than others (e.g., “This is not a dog, it is a wolf/*screwdriver”). Entities that are semantically similar to a negated entity tend to be judged as better alternatives (Kruszewski et al., 2016). In fact, Kruszewski et al. (2016) show that (...) the cosine similarity scores between the distributional semantics representations of a negated noun and its potential alternatives are highly correlated with the negated noun-alternatives human plausibility ratings. In a series of cloze tasks, we show that negation likewise restricts the production of plausible alternatives to similar entities. Furthermore, completions to negative sentences appear to be even more restricted than completions to an affirmative conjunctive context, hinting at a peculiarity of negation. (shrink)

Paediatric Intensive Care Units (PICU) are complex interdisciplinary environments where challenging, high stakes decisions are frequently encountered. We assert that appropriate decisions are more likely to be made if the decision-making process is comprehensive, reasoned, and grounded in thoughtful deliberation. Strategies to overcome barriers to high quality decision-making including, cognitive and implicit bias, group think, inadequate information gathering, and poor quality deliberation should be incorporated. Several general frameworks for decision-making exist, but specific guidance is scarce. In this paper, we provide (...) specific guidance on collaborative complex decision-making for PICUs. The proposed approach is on principles of procedural justice and pragmatic hermeneutics. The process encompasses set-up/planning, information gathering, question formulation, analysis (perspectives, values, and principles), action plan development, decision documentation, and a review and appeal mechanism. The process can be adapted to suit other clinical contexts. Research evaluating the process, exploring how best to develop education for clinicians, and how to build a culture that values high quality deliberation, is worthwhile. (shrink)

Maternal grandmothers play a key role in allomaternal care, directly caring for and provisioning their grandchildren as well as helping their daughters with household chores and productive labor. Previous studies have investigated these contributions across a broad time period, from infancy through toddlerhood. Here, we extend and refine the grandmothering literature to investigate the perinatal period as a critical window for grandmaternal contributions. We propose that mother-daughter co-residence during this period affords targeted grandmaternal effort during a period of heightened vulnerability (...) and appreciable impact. We conducted two focus groups and 37 semi-structured interviews with Himba women. Interviews focused on experiences from their first and, if applicable, their most recent birth and included information on social support, domains of teaching and learning, and infant feeding practices. Our qualitative findings reveal three domains in which grandmothers contribute: learning to mother, breastfeeding support, and postnatal health and well-being. We show that informational, emotional, and instrumental support provided to new mothers and their neonates during the perinatal period can aid in the establishment of the mother-infant bond, buffer maternal energy balance, and improve nutritional outcomes for infants. These findings demonstrate that the role of grandmother can be crucial, even when alloparenting is common and breastfeeding is frequent and highly visible. Situated within the broader anthropological and clinical literature, these findings substantiate the claim that humans have evolved in an adaptive sociocultural perinatal complex in which grandmothers provide significant contributions to the health and well-being of their reproductive-age daughters and grandchildren. (shrink)

Vom Blickpunkt der Wissenschaftslehre des Kritischen Rationalismus aus erscheint der Gedanke, es solle über die Grenzen der Disziplinen hinweg theoretisiert und geforscht werden, als keine atemberaubende Erfindung. Das Wort Interdisziplinarität ist nicht eindeutig, was man aber sinnvollerweise darunter verstehen kann, betrachtet der kritische Rationalismus als eine Konsequenz des Realismus. Deswegen weist das Thema Realismus auf den Kontext hin, in dem das Problem der Interdisziplinarität gestellt werden kann. Das kommt in den Beiträgen des ersten Teils des Sammelbandes zum Ausdruck. Die im (...) zweiten Teil versammelten Abhandlungen betreffen Fragen, die sich aus der “disziplinenübergreifenden” Anwendung der kritisch-rationalen Ansätze auf spezielle Probleme ergeben. (shrink)

The self seems to be a unitary entity remaining stable across time. Nevertheless, current theorizing conceptualizes the self as a number of interacting sub-systems involving perception, intention and action (self-model). One important function of such a self-model is to distinguish between events occurring as a result of one's own actions and events occurring as the result of somebody else's actions. We conducted an fMRI experiment that compared brain activation after an abrupt mismatch between one's own movement and its visual consequences (...) with an abrupt mismatch between one's own movement and somebody else's visually perceived hand movement. A right fronto-parietal network was selectively active during a sudden mismatch between one's own observed and performed hand action. (shrink)

In the year since He Jiankui announced the birth of twin girls whose genes were edited as embryos, reactions and revelations have continued, including the recent announcement that He and two colleagues have been sentenced to jail time and hefty fines. But what of Nana and Lulu, now infants, whose lives and futures are often missing in discussions of He's ethical violations? Their status remains a mystery. Other than learning that they were born prematurely by emergency C-section, we know nothing (...) about their well-being. We know even less about a third gene-edited child said to have been born last summer.Meanwhile, the controversy over He's reckless actions—and the debate about reproductive... (shrink)

Many examples of calibration in climate science raise no alarms regarding model reliability. We examine one example and show that, in employing Classical Hypothesis-testing, it involves calibrating a base model against data that is also used to confirm the model. This is counter to the "intuitive position". We argue, however, that aspects of the intuitive position are upheld by some methods, in particular, the general Cross-validation method. How Cross-validation relates to other prominent Classical methods such as the Akaike Information Criterion (...) and Bayesian Information Criterion is also discussed. (shrink)

Previous accounts of how people develop expertise have focused on how deliberate practice transforms the cognitive and perceptual representations and processes that give rise to expertise. However, the likelihood of developing expertise with a particular tool may also depend on the degree to which that tool fits pre‐existing perceptual and cognitive abilities. The present studies explored whether the abacus—a descendent of the first human computing devices—may have evolved to exploit general biases in human visual attention, or whether developing expertise with (...) the abacus requires learning special strategies for allocating visual attention to the abacus. To address this question, we administered a series of visual search tasks to abacus experts and subjects who had little to no abacus experience, in which search targets and distractors were overlaid atop abacus “beads.” Across three studies, we found that both experts and naïve subjects were faster to detect targets in semantically relevant components of the abacus, suggesting that abacus training is not required to exhibit attentional biases toward these components of the abacus. This finding suggests that the attentional biases that scaffold numerical processing of the abacus may emerge from general properties of visual attention that are exploited by the design of the abacus itself. (shrink)

Food insecurity in the United States is a profound public health challenge that hospitals are uniquely situated to address. Through the enactment of the Hospital Readmission Reduction Program, the Affordable Care Act provides a strong economic incentive for hospitals to actively confront food insecurity within the communities they serve. While there is a spectrum of nutrition interventions that hospitals can look to when engaging in these efforts, healthy food prescriptions and medically tailored meals are two particularly innovative and promising approaches (...) that could help hospitals reduce readmissions by addressing the nutritional needs of vulnerable patients. (shrink)

English summary: This volume presents eight contributions by representatives of classical philology, church history, philosophy and religious studies, dealing with elucidating the possible relations between Origen the Christian theologian and Origen the Platonic philosopher. Thus, the volume contains discussions of the - not yet conclusively answered - question of whether the Christian Origen and the Platonic Origen might in fact have been one and the same person; it also investigates the Platonic traits of the Christian Origen, which are easily recognizable (...) in some of his works, and the reception both the philosopher and the Christian Origen had in late antiquity, in authors such as the Platonists Porphyry and Proclus as well as the Christian theologian Eusebius of Caesarea. German description: Der hier vorgelegte Band versammelt insgesamt acht Beitrage (von Vertretern der Klassischen Philologie, der Kirchengeschichte, der Philosophie und der Religionswissenschaft), die sich mit den moglichen Beziehungen zwischen dem christlichen Theologen Origenes und dem platonischen Philosophen Origenes beschaftigen. Dabei geht es nicht nur um die (immer noch nicht abschliessend beantwortete) Frage, ob der Christ Origenes und der Platoniker Origenes vielleicht sogar dieselbe Person sind, sondern auch um den (in manchen Werken deutlich erkennbaren) Platonismus des christlichen Theologen Origenes und die Rezeption dieses oder dieser Origene(i)s in der Spatantike: bei den Platonikern Porphyrios und Proklos und bei dem christlichen Theologen Eusebius von Caesarea. Mit Beitragen von: Balbina Babler, Peter Gemeinhardt, Jens Halfwassen, Theo Kobusch, Winrich Lohr, Heinz-Gunther Nesselrath, Christoph Riedweg, Ilinca Tanaseanu-Dobler, Andrea Villani. (shrink)

Continence is a key moment of care that can tell us about the wider care of people living with dementia within acute hospital wards. The spotlight is currently on the quality of hospital care of older people across the UK, yet concerns persist about their poor treatment, neglect, abuse, and discrimination within this setting. Thus, within hospitals, the care of people living with dementia is both a welfare issue and a human rights issue. The challenge of continence care for people (...) living with dementia can be seen as the ‘canary in the coal mine’ for the unravelling of dignity within the acute setting. This paper draws on an ethnographic study within five hospitals in England and Wales, selected to represent a range of hospital types, geographies and socio‐economic catchments. Observational fieldwork was carried out over 154 days in acute hospitals known to admit large numbers of people living with dementia. This paper starts to fill the gap between theory and data by providing an in‐depth ethnographic analysis examining the ways in which treatment as a person is negotiated, achieved or threatened. We examine how the twin assaults on agency of a diagnosis of dementia and of incontinence threaten personhood. The acute threats to this patient group may then act to magnify perils to treatment as a person. Our findings suggest that personal dignity and the social construction of moral personhood are both threatened and maintained in such a setting. We show how empirical ethnographic data can lend weight to, and add detail to, theoretical accounts of moral personhood and dignity. (shrink)

Systems of Pain/Networks of Resilience is a transcript of a video, a chapter in an interdisciplinary research project. Artist Meghan Moe Beitiks interviewed people with personal or pro...

This paper seeks to discern the Kierkegaardian echoes present in the writings of the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard. While these thinkers share a number of commonalities such as their resistance to categorisation and their imaginative and complex writing styles, Lyotard’s engagement with Kierkegaard has been largely dismissed as inconsequential. However, a modest yet consistent device invoked by Lyotard is Kierkegaard’s paradox of faith from Fear and Trembling. While these references to Kierkegaard read as terse blips in Lyotard’s texts, this paper (...) argues that the Kierkegaardian echoes that can be heard in Lyotard’s writings are crucial for a deeper understanding of Lyotard’s ethical turn. Rather than being insignificant, Lyotard’s direct as well as second-hand engagement with Kierkegaard has profound effects on his philosophy of the differend. By exploring Lyotard’s enigmatic, yet brief appeals to the paradox of faith, this paper shows that Lyotard strikes a chord with Kierkegaard by using the paradox of faith as an intertextual reference to a critique of Hegelian mediation and for discussing the ethical dilemmas inherent to one of the most shocking and incomprehensible events of the twentieth century, Auschwitz. (shrink)

György Lukacs was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, writer, and literary critic who shaped mainstream European Communist thought. _Soul and Form_ was his first book, published in 1910, and it established his reputation, treating questions of linguistic expressivity and literary style in the works of Plato, Kierkegaard, Novalis, Sterne, and others. By isolating the formal techniques these thinkers developed, Lukács laid the groundwork for his later work in Marxist aesthetics, a field that introduced the historical and political implications of text. For (...) this centennial edition, John T. Sanders and Katie Terezakis add a dialogue entitled "On Poverty of Spirit," which Lukács wrote at the time of _Soul and Form_, and an introduction by Judith Butler, which compares Lukács's key claims to his later work and subsequent movements in literary theory and criticism. In an afterword, Terezakis continues to trace the Lukácsian system within his writing and other fields. These essays explore problems of alienation and isolation and the curative quality of aesthetic form, which communicates both individuality and a shared human condition. They investigate the elements that give rise to form, the history that form implies, and the historicity that form embodies. Taken together, they showcase the breakdown, in modern times, of an objective aesthetics, and the rise of a new art born from lived experience. (shrink)

In this paper, we develop a non-reductive variant of the regularity theory of causation proposed in Andreas and Günther (Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 105: 2–32, 2024). The variant is motivated as a refinement of Lewis’s (Journal of Philosophy 70:556–567, 1973) regularity theory. We do not pursue a reductive theory here because we found a challenge for Baumgartner's (Erkenntnis 78:85–109, 2013) regularity theory which applies to our previous theory as well. The challenge is sidestepped by a framework of law-like propositions resembling structural (...) equations. We furthermore improve the deviancy condition of our previous theory. Finally, we show that the present theory can compete with the most advanced regularity and counterfactual accounts. (shrink)

Imitation research has focused on turn‐taking contexts in which one person acts and one person then copies that action. However, people also imitate when engaging in joint actions, where two or more people coordinate their actions in space and time in order to achieve a shared goal. We discuss how the various constraints imposed by joint action modulate imitation, and the close links between perception and action that form the basis of this phenomenon. We also explore how understanding imitation in (...) the context of joint action yields new insights into cultural phenomena such as teaching and innovation. (shrink)

Gerade die dem Menschen am besten vertraute Tatsache, nämlich dass er sich der ihn umgebenden Welt und seiner selbst bewusst ist, stellt ihn auch vor eines der größten Rätsel. Obwohl Philosophie, Natur- und Humanwissenschaften seit langem bemüht sind, durch intensive Reflexionsprozesse einerseits, durch Verwendung des umfangreichen empirisch erarbeiteten Faktenmaterials der Naturwissenschaften andererseits, plausible und intellektuell nachvollziehbare Modelle für die Begründung dieses grundlegenden Phänomens zu erarbeiten. Eng verbunden mit dieser grundlegenden Problematik sind die Fragen nach den biologischen Korrelaten des Bewusstseins und (...) nach seinen Inhalten, den sog. Qualia, nach verschiedenen Begriffen, der Struktur des Denkens und der Sprache. Ebenso drängend ist das Problem verschiedener besonderer Bewusstseinszustände wie im Schlaf, in der Meditation oder in der Trance. Exponenten verschiedener Fachgebiete versuchen in dem vorliegenden Band, Ansätze zur Lösung dieser Fragen zu präsentieren. (shrink)

The United States wastes approximately 40% of its food supply. This article will examine the implications of this waste for food insecurity and climate change. It will also explore how the law and social entrepreneurship can be used to confront this public health challenge.

Volume 20, Issue 10, October 2020, Page 36-39.

While we are familiar with socialist and fascist aesthetics, liberalism is not usually thought to permit a political role for literature. Nussbaum has attempted to fill this lacuna. She sketches a “liberal aesthetics” by linking three aspects of literature to her normative proposal. The representation of suffering is connected to the capability approach; the presentation of ethical dilemmas to political liberalism; and the reaction of pity to legal and political judgment. Literature is thus hoped to contribute to the stability of (...) liberal democracies. For over 25 years, individual works by Nussbaum on the value of literature have been critiqued on aesthetic grounds: for not dealing with form, for denying the polyphony of texts, for having a limited conception of readerly identification, and for using an elitist and generically limited selection of material. As of yet, no criticisms have, however, considered the full oeuvre of Nussbaum’s defense of literature, and none have examined this aspect of her work in light of her political philosophy. By placing the aesthetic and political aspects of Nussbaum’s work in conversation, this article investigates the proposed relationship between literature and liberalism. It argues that each component of Nussbaum’s liberal aesthetics contains a political danger: foreclosing discussion of intergenerational responsibility; obscuring questions about which doctrines are permissible in the public sphere; and encouraging stereotypes of marginalized people. Literature, understood like this, may risk exacerbating present tensions within liberalism, rather than bolstering its stability. (shrink)