Objectives To understand the ethical principles guiding college students’ abstention from pharmacological cognitive enhancement, and to determine the correlates associated with endorsing different principles. Design One-stage cluster sampling was used to implement a paper-based survey among undergraduate students attending one university in the U.S. Thematic analysis was used to explore the ethical principles guiding PCE abstention. Multivariate logistic regression analyses were used to examine sociodemographic correlates associated with endorsed ethical principles. Participants Of the 499 eligible students who completed the survey, (...) 259 students had a negative attitude towards PCE, did not engage in PCE, and provided reasons for abstention. Results The thematic analysis resulted in the identification of eight themes, with respondents often endorsing more than one theme per response. The three themes most endorsed were non-malfeasance, disapproval of drugs and dosage beneficence. The sociodemographic correlates associated with endorsing each theme varied across themes. Conclusions Students abstain from PCE for a multitude of reasons, many of which are guided by ethical principles. These findings may be incorporated into future prevention programming messages. (shrink)

The recent edition of theThebaidby Hall, Ritchie, and Edwards launched a successful attack on thecommunis opinioof a bipartite manuscript tradition, with one clearly superior family, and relatively few textual problems. In doing so, they underscored the need for renewed editorial work on the poem. Here I discuss five passages fromThebaid2 that have not received adequate attention from editors.

Ideas for How to Take Wicked Problems Seriously Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-5 DOI 10.1007/s10806-011-9348-9 Authors Kyle Powys Whyte, Department of Philosophy, Michigan State University, 503 S. Kedzie Hall, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA Paul B. Thompson, Department of Philosophy, Michigan State University, 503 S. Kedzie Hall, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA Journal Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics Online ISSN 1573-322X Print ISSN 1187-7863.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:What Virgil Should Have Said KYLE GERVAIS Mortem infelicem canimus famamque perennem Sidoniae praeclara ducis quae sustulit alte moenia—multum illa et furiis iactata et amore saucia, deseruit cum foedera barbarus hospes, vique deum quassa et fratris, dum conderet ensem fatiferum profugi sub pectore et iret ad umbras, arma virumque ciens magnam contundere Romam. I sing the tragic death and endless glory Of Sidon’s exiled queen, the famous walls (...) She raised on high, her wild and wounded love When savage guest betrayed his bonded word And gods and brother shook her—till she took The fateful sword he left and sought the shades To call a man in arms to topple Rome. note With thanks to Sarah Shaughnessy for the idea and advice, and to Michael Putnam, who taught me that Dido never really dies in the Aeneid. arion 28.2 fall 2020... (shrink)

Though many ethicists have the intuition that we should leave nature alone, Kyle Johannsen argues that we have a duty to research safe ways of providing large-scale assistance to wild animals. Using concepts from moral and political philosophy to analyze the issue of wild animal suffering (WAS), Johannsen explores how a collective, institutional obligation to assist wild animals should be understood. He claims that with enough research, genetic editing may one day give us the power to safely intervene without (...) perpetually interfering with wild animals’ liberties.---------------Questions addressed include: In what way is nature valuable and is interference compatible with that value? Is interference a requirement of justice? What are the implications of WAS for animal rights advocacy? What types of intervention are promising?---------------Expertly moving the debate about human relations with wild animals beyond its traditional confines, Wild Animal Ethics is essential reading for students and scholars of political philosophy and political theory studying animal ethics, environmental ethics, and environmental philosophy. (shrink)

I argue that popular understandings of white nationalist double speak strategies do not fully represent the practice of these strategies, and identify a linguistic tactic used by white nationalists that I call sugar-coating. Sugar-coating works by packing an otherwise unacceptable utterance together with some kind of reward, thereby promoting uptake. I contrast this with existing notions of double speak, such as figleaves (Saul 2017, 2021), dogwhistles (Haney-López 2014), and bullshit (Kenyon and Saul 2022). I argue that sugar-coating more accurately reflects (...) the practice of white nationalist recruitment rhetoric, as described in the Daily Stormer Style Guide. (shrink)

The nearly omnipotent character known only as “Q” dramatically enters the Star Trek universe when he puts all humanity in the person of Captain Jean‐Luc Picard, on trial in the first episode of TNG. Acting as self‐professed prosecutor, judge, and jury, Q promises Picard an “absolutely equitable” trial, only to coerce Picard into pleading “guilty” by threatening to kill his crew. Q could be like the “Leviathan” of Thomas Hobbes (1588‐1679), an absolute sovereign who has the power to keep people (...) from warring with each other, but who can't be held accountable or subject to any civil law in the use of that power. Enlisting Hobbes and Locke, this chapter examines the motives behind Q's enigmatic actions and sees what Q, deep down, might believe about justice. Hobbes begins with a basic right of nature that all people possess: our liberty to ensure the preservation of our own life. (shrink)

Sex selection and disability avoidance receive opposed treatment in bioethics literature, legislative practice and public opinion. However, some theorists question this state of affairs by drawing analogies between the harmful consequences of these practices. This paper shares their disapproval of gender selection and disability avoidance, but bases its resistance to these practices on an examination of the concepts of gender and disability. Here it identifies conceptual confusions as another cause of approval of sex selection and disability avoidance. Further, in clarifying (...) the nature of the concepts at issue, and their relationship with the subjects that they apply to, this discussion highlights the existence of relevant analogies between the concepts of gender and disability. Here the social construction and universality of gender and disability allow their differential treatment to be resisted at the conceptual level, creating a strong foundation for more consequentialist arguments against sex selection and disability avoidance. (shrink)

Shane Carruth's 2013 film Upstream Colour provides a model for considering identity and subject formation in what Steven Shaviro calls the “network society.” Shaviro argues that our contemporary mo...

1. Preliminary Reconnaissance: Realism, Instrumentalism, and Interpretation On the one hand, I think it is fair to say that philosophers recognize a special problem or question about how we are to “interpret” scientific theories only in light of their concerns about whether we are really entitled to believe what those theories say when they are interpreted in what we see as the most natural or straightforward or intuitive way. On the other hand, this fundamental worry reaches all the way back (...) to the inception of scientific inquiry itself, no matter how liberally we conceive of that enterprise. Before the relatively recent professionalization of academic fields, such concerns were well-represented among the figures who served simultaneously as both the leading practitioners and the leading philosophers of science. This is nicely illustrated by the strident debates throughout this community in the 18th and 19th centuries concerning whether only pure inductive methods were legitimate for scientific inquiry and/or whether the competing “method of hypothesis” could produce any genuine knowledge of nature (see Laudan 1981 Ch. 8). (shrink)

There are potentialities to be harnessed in a fusion between elements of Alicia Juarrero’s views and a Polanyian framework. In this brief response piece, I address the latent Polanyian dimensions of Juarrero’s ontic approach to dynamical systems.

Ethics, Policy & Environment, Volume 15, Issue 2, Page 172-187, June 2012.

Turner and Feldman address an important environmental justice issue: ‘Under conditions of social and economic inequality, only some people…will have the clout and the funding to get the powers...

A growing number of epistemologists have endorsed the Ignorance Norm for Inquiry. Roughly, this norm says that one should not inquire into a question unless one is ignorant of its answer. I argue that, in addition to ignorance, proper inquiry requires a certain kind of knowledge. Roughly, one should not inquire into a question unless one knows it has a true answer. I call this the Knowledge Norm for Inquiry. Proper inquiry walks a fine line, holding knowledge that there is (...) an answer in the left hand and ignorance of the answer in the right. (shrink)

Hypocrites are often thought to lack the standing to blame others for faults similar to their own. Although this claim is widely accepted, it is seldom argued for. We offer an argument for the claim that nonhypocrisy is a necessary condition on the standing to blame. We first offer a novel, dispositional account of hypocrisy. Our account captures the commonsense view that hypocrisy involves making an unjustified exception of oneself. This exception-making involves a rejection of the impartiality of morality and (...) thereby a rejection of the equality of persons, which we argue grounds the standing to blame others. (shrink)

The analysis of desire ascriptions has been a central topic of research for philosophers of language and mind. This work has mostly focused on providing a theory of want reports, that is, sentences of the form ‘S wants p’. In this paper, we turn from want reports to a closely related but relatively understudied construction, namely hope reports, that is, sentences of the form ‘S hopes p’. We present two contrasts involving hope reports and show that existing approaches to desire (...) fail to explain these contrasts. We then develop a novel account that combines some of the central insights in the literature. We argue that our theory provides an elegant account of our contrasts and yields a promising analysis of hoping. (shrink)

_Lux: A Decade of Artists' Film and Video_ Edited by Steve Reinke and Tom Taylor Toronto: YYZ Books, 2000 ISBN 0-920397-26-3 373 pp.

( ) Di erence in Semantic Displacement a. Total Reconstruction: Mary kaupir ikke skó. ¬ Mary kaupir skó b. Variable Binding: Which book Mary had read e set of propositions such that x Mary had read x, x a book. A guard stands before every bank x if x is a bank then a guard stands before x..

This paper defends a theory of fictional truth. According to this theory, there is a fact of the matter concerning the number of hairs on Sherlock Holmes' head, and likewise for any other meaningful question one could ask about what's true in a work of fiction. We argue that a theory of this form is needed to account for the patterns in our judgments about attitude reports that embed fictional claims. We contrast our view with one of the dominant approaches (...) to fictional truth, which originates with David Lewis. Along the way we explore the relationship between fiction, counterfactuals, and vagueness. (shrink)

This paper presents a puzzle involving embedded attitude reports. We resolve the puzzle by arguing that attitude verbs take restricted readings: in some environments the denotation of attitude verbs can be restricted by a given proposition. For example, when these verbs are embedded in the consequent of a conditional, they can be restricted by the proposition expressed by the conditional’s antecedent. We formulate and motivate two conditions on the availability of verb restrictions: a constraint that ties the content of restrictions (...) to the “dynamic effects” of sentential connectives and a constraint that limits the availability of restriction effects to present tense verbs with first-person subjects. However, we also present some cases that make trouble for these conditions, and outline some possible ways of modifying the view to account for the recalcitrant data. We conclude with a brief discussion of some of the connections between our semantics for attitude verbs and issues concerning epistemic modals and theories of knowledge. (shrink)

I give an account of the compositional semantics of unconditionals that explains their relationship to if -conditionals in the Lewis/Kratzer/Heim tradition. Unconditionals involve an alternative-denoting adjunct that supplies domain restrictions pointwise to a main-clause operator such as a modal. The differences from if -clauses follow from the structure of the adjuncts; both are conditionals in the Lewisian sense. In the course of treating unconditionals, I provide a concrete implementation of conditionals where conditional adjuncts in general are a species of correlative, (...) and show what detaching this hypothesis from if involves. (shrink)

Patient requests for a healthcare provider of a particular race or sexual orientation create a conflict of obligations. On the one hand, providers have a duty to deliver clinically indicated care consistent with patient preferences. On the other hand, providers have legal, professional, and organizational assurances that they should not suffer workplace discrimination. Protecting healthcare providers from harm while maintaining obligations to patients requires unambiguous messaging to both parties. Providers need to be clear that their organization will not be complicit (...) in discrimination against them, instead supporting their needs and preferences for management of the situation. In a context of patient-centered care, harm principle-based boundaries of respect for autonomy must be defined. A Caregiver preference guideline developed and used at University Health Network, Toronto provides a standardized way for the organization to decide when it will honor patient requests for providers of a particular background. This process stresses dialogue, assessment of clinical feasibility, and empowerment and support for affected care providers. (shrink)

Venturing into novel terrain poses physical risks to a female and her offspring. Females have a greater tendency to avoid physical harm, while males tend to have larger range sizes and often outperform females in navigation-related tasks. Given this backdrop, we expected that females would explore a novel environment with more caution than males, and that more-cautious exploration would negatively affect navigation performance. Participants explored a novel, large-scale, virtual environment in search of five objects, pointed in the direction of each (...) object from the origin, and then navigated back to the objects. We found that females demonstrated more caution while exploring as reflected in the increased amounts of pausing and revisiting of previously traversed locations. In addition, more pausing and revisiting behaviors led to degradation in navigation performance. Finally, individual levels of trait harm avoidance were positively associated with the amount of revisiting behavior during exploration. These findings support the idea that the fitness costs associated with long-distance travel may encourage females to take a more cautious approach to spatial exploration, and that this caution may partially explain the sex differences in navigation performance. (shrink)

Anonymized reflection was employed as an innovative way of teaching ethics in order to enhance students' ability in ethical decision making during a `Care of the Dying Patient and Family' module. Both qualitative and quantitative data were collected from the first two student cohorts who experienced anonymized reflection ( n = 24). The themes identified were the richness and relevance of scenarios, small-group work and a team approach to teaching. Students indicated that they preferred this style of teaching. This finding (...) was verified by a postal questionnaire conducted four months later. The conclusions drawn from this study suggest that using anonymized reflection is an effective method for teaching ethics to nurses and indicates that learning about ethical issues in this way reduces uncertainties. (shrink)

In some sentences, demonstratives can be substituted with definite descriptions without any change in meaning. In light of this, many have maintained that demonstratives are just a type of definite description. However, several theorists have drawn attention to a range of cases where definite descriptions are acceptable, but their demonstrative counterparts are not. Some have tried to account for this data by appealing to presupposition. I argue that such presuppositional approaches are problematic, and present a pragmatic account of the target (...) contrasts. On this approach, demonstratives take two arguments and generally require that the first, covert argument is non-redundant with respect to the second, overt argument. I derive this condition through an economy principle discussed by Schlenker (2005). (shrink)

This paper is about two requirements on wish reports whose interaction motivates a novel semantics for these ascriptions. The first requirement concerns the ambiguities that arise when determiner phrases, such as definite descriptions, interact with ‘wish’. More specifically, several theorists have recently argued that attitude ascriptions featuring counterfactual attitude verbs license interpretations on which the determiner phrase is interpreted relative to the subject’s beliefs. The second requirement involves the fact that desire reports in general require decision-theoretic notions for their analysis. (...) The current study is motivated by the fact that no existing account captures both of these aspects of wishing. I develop a semantics for wish reports that makes available belief-relative readings but also allows decision-theoretic notions to play a role in shaping the truth conditions of these ascriptions. The general idea is that we can analyze wishing in terms of a two-dimensional notion of expected utility. (shrink)

In 2017 we published a paper in this journal proposing a philosophical framework for recognizing ecological communities as natural entities, the Evolutionary Community Concept. That paper attracted a lengthy reply; herein we take the opportunity to clarify critical aspects of the ECC and use a case study to demonstrate how the ECC can be made operational. We maintain the ECC provides a framework useful for establishing objectives associated with ongoing and proposed restoration and conservation efforts.