In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On Concepts and Theories of AddictionLennart Nordenfelt (bio)Keywordsaddiction, disease, will power, autonomy, holistic view of healthThe article "A Liberal Account of Addiction" is a good piece of analytic philosophy applied to psychiatry. It is well-informed both with regard to empirical matters and philosophical conceptualization. The arguments are often—but, as I will show, not always—quite convincing. The conclusions of the paper also have crucial consequences for practice, for the treatment (...) of patients, and for social policy.The authors argue that current scientific understandings of the problem of addiction are fundamentally flawed. They distinguish between two main positions in science: The Disease View and the Willpower View. According to the Disease View, drug-seeking behavior is the direct result of some physiological change in the drug seeker's brain. According to the Willpower View, the addict is no longer rational; he or she uses drugs as a result of a fundamentally non-voluntary process.The authors dismiss the Disease View in the following way. They first note that drug addicts are in many ways rational planners. The addicts may have to think a lot to find the best ways to find the heroin, cigarettes, or alcohol, and they normally act according to this planning. They are not in any simple sense "caused" to act in a particular way. Moreover, referring to recent neurological literature, the authors note that the changes caused by drug addiction—which have to do with activating reward pathways in the brain—are identical with the outcomes of many other human activities that we do not call addiction. "In fact, any pleasurable experience causes dopamine to be released within the brain, activating these reward pathways" (Foddy and Savulescu 2010, 4). These experiences can be the result of coffee drinking, sexual activity, and physical exercise. Thus, the physical changes in the brain are not effects peculiar to the pharmacology of the drugs; they are instead the effects of the pleasure that the subject has experienced.The argument against the Willpower View is lengthy and more involved. The proponent of the Willpower View must argue that there is some flaw in the subject's autonomy. The drug addict is in some sense unable to avoid taking the drug. The authors of the present article scrutinize this idea on the basis of distinguishing between different senses of autonomy: Substantive autonomy and procedural autonomy. They state that we must here be talking about procedural autonomy, namely, autonomy regarded as dependent only on our capacity to process information and make choices in accordance with our preferences. We cannot, as in the case of substantive autonomy, require that the preferences themselves be reasonable. [End Page 27] In such a case, many of our ordinary actions would be judged non-autonomous.The most reasonable Willpower accounts rely on the idea that addicted people in some sense lack self-control. The authors cite different interpretations of the concept of lacking self- control and they conclude that "none of these … theories can say that addicts are necessarily lacking in self-control unless they also make unreasonable normative or false factual claims about the nature of drug- or pleasure-oriented choices" (Foddy and Savulescu 2010, 10). For instance, according to one interpretation the subject does not endorse his own desire for drugs, but takes the drug anyway. According to another interpretation, the addict regrets taking the drug after having done so. Against such claims the authors claim that many addicts indeed endorse their desires for drugs and many addicts do not regret their addictive behavior.So what is the positive account proposed by the authors? They put forward what they call a Liberal View. It contains three claims about addiction: First, we do not know whether an addict values anything more than the satisfaction of his addictive desires; second, we do not know whether an addict behaves autonomously when he uses drugs; and third, addictive desires are just strong regular desires.According to the Liberal View, one has to accept that the addicts may have drug taking as their highest priority and that they do not have any reduced procedural autonomy. The authors say: "Once we abandon normative bias, we must accept... (shrink)

In policy-making the consumption of specially labelled products, and its role in improving the welfare of livestock, has attracted considerable attention. There is in many countries a diverse market for animal welfare-friendly products which is potentially confusing and may lack transparency. We ask whether special quality labels that involve medium levels of animal welfare, as compared with labels promoting premium levels of animal welfare, have a role to play in promoting improvements in animal welfare. The Danish pork market is our (...) reference case, but we also widen the context by comparing the markets for pork in three other European countries. Our findings suggest that in order to improve animal welfare through demand for welfare-friendly products it is important to maintain separate the market for products with strong animal welfare profiles from markets for products with medium levels of animal welfare where, often, animal welfare is bundled together with other food quality attributes. We conclude that such quality labels may indeed play an important role in promoting higher animal welfare standards provided that they offer real improvements in animal welfare as compared with standard products. They will be attractive to consumers with a positive, but not especially strong interest in animal welfare as an individual food attribute who would otherwise be inclined to purchase standard products. (shrink)

The basic work for this book was carried out during the spring of 1989 in Edinburgh, where I had been granted a research position at The Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. I should like to express here my indebtedness to the Institute for the opportunity thus afforded me. I should also like to say how very grateful I am for the stimulating conversations I had there with Professor Timothy Sprigge and Dr. Elizabeth Telfer. Dr. Telfers’s own treatise Happiness (...) has been a major influence on my view of the questions involved. The basic view of health and illness presented in this book is more fully set out in my On the Nature of Health. As in the case of my previous larger projects, I have received a great amount of support and may wise comments from Professor Ingmar Pörn, Helsinki. Three Danish experts – Anton Aggernaes, Erik Ostenfeld and Peter Sandøe – have made valuable comments. Professor Heng ten Have, Nijmegen, has improved my reading of the philosophy of Jeremy Bentham. I should also like to thank my colleagues at the Department of Health and Society, University of Linköping, for helping me to avoid a number of the pitfalls that can so easily stumble into when it comes to a treatise like this. Especially I should like to mentioned Per-Erik Liss, Ingemar Nordin and Bo Petersson, all three of whom have read and commented on the entire manuscript. A Swedish version of this book, Livskvalitet och hälsa, came out in 1991. I have been made quite a number of corrections and additions, one type of addition being replies to critical points made in reviews of the Swedish version. I should like to thank Malcolm Forbes for valuable help putting my English into publishable condition. Linköping, May 1993 Lennart Noredenfelt. (shrink)

This book presents a unique examination of mental illness. Though common to many mental disorders, delusions result in actions that, though perhaps rational to the individual, might seem entirely inappropriate or harmful to others. This book shows how we may better understand delusion by examining the nature of compulsion.

Resilience is often promoted as a boundary concept to integrate the social and natural dimensions of sustainability. However, it is a troubled dialogue from which social scientists may feel detached. To explain this, we first scrutinize the meanings, attributes, and uses of resilience in ecology and elsewhere to construct a typology of definitions. Second, we analyze core concepts and principles in resilience theory that cause disciplinary tensions between the social and natural sciences. Third, we provide empirical evidence of the asymmetry (...) in the use of resilience theory in ecology and environmental sciences compared to five relevant social science disciplines. Fourth, we contrast the unification ambition in resilience theory with methodological pluralism. Throughout, we develop the argument that incommensurability and unification constrain the interdisciplinary dialogue, whereas pluralism drawing on core social scientific concepts would better facilitate integrated sustainability research. (shrink)

The author is concerned with a minimal system dl of deontic logic, His main purpose being to draw attention to the existence of interpretations of dl that give rise to various systems of what may be called "atheoretical logic." by this we understand logical systems dealing with expressions that are--Very probably at least--Neither true nor false, Such as sentences expressing promises, Intentions, Wishes, Commands, And similar things. As it is well known, The status of atheoretical logic in this sense is (...) somewhat problematic for the reason that logical relations might be held to apply to true or false sentences only. However, The author here disregards this much discussed difficulty and proceeds to construct systems of atheoretical logic out of dl in a "philosophically naive" manner. (staff). (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to improve on the logical and measure-theoretic foundations for the notion of probability in the law of evidence, which were given in my contributions Åqvist [ (1990) Logical analysis of epistemic modality: an explication of the Bolding–Ekelöf degrees of evidential strength. In: Klami HT (ed) Rätt och Sanning (Law and Truth. A symposium on legal proof-theory in Uppsala May 1989). Iustus Förlag, Uppsala, pp 43–54; (1992) Towards a logical theory of legal evidence: semantic analysis (...) of the Bolding–Ekelöf degrees of evidential strength. In: Martino AA (ed) Expert systems in law. Elsevier Science Publishers BV, Amsterdam, North-Holland, pp 67–86]. The present approach agrees with the one adopted in those contributions in taking its main task to be that of providing a semantic analysis, or explication, of the so called Bolding–Ekelöf degrees of evidential strength (“proof-strength”) as applied to the establishment of matters of fact in law-courts. However, it differs from the one advocated in our earlier work on the subject in explicitly appealing to what is known as “Pro-et-Contra Argumentation”, after the famous Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess. It tries to bring out the logical form of that interesting kind of reasoning, at least in the context of the law of evidence. The formal techniques used here will be seen to be largely inspired by the important work done by Patrick Suppes, notably Suppes [(1957) Introduction to logic. van Nostrand, Princeton and (1972) Finite equal-interval measurement structures. Theoria 38:45–63]. (shrink)

Job characteristics play an essential role for the well-being of employees. When job characteristics are unfavorable, the experienced exchange relationship with one’s supervisor may become relevant to weaken negative consequences. We conducted a diary study over ten consecutive working days with 112 academics. Based on conservation of resources theory, we assumed that daily LMX constitutes a resource for employees that moderates the link between job characteristics and job satisfaction as well as emotional exhaustion. Additionally, we proposed lagged-effects of morning job (...) characteristics and LMX on next-day morning job satisfaction and emotional exhaustion. Findings from hierarchical linear modeling demonstrated that on the day-level higher perceived levels of job control in the morning were associated with higher perceived job satisfaction and lower perceived emotional exhaustion in the afternoon. The experience of increased time pressure in the morning was negatively related to perceived day-level afternoon job satisfaction and positively to perceived day-level afternoon emotional exhaustion. Within one day, perceived LMX moderated the relationship between perceived job control and perceived job satisfaction in the afternoon. We only found lagged effects of the interaction between afternoon job control and afternoon LMX on next-day morning job satisfaction. We discuss daily LMX as a resource for employees both within one day and from day-to day, along with future research directions on the buffering role of LMX. (shrink)

In this paper I focus on the topic of chronic illness in the context of quality of life. I offer a conceptual explanation of these notions and then try to systematise the various species of suffering connected with chronic illness. Suffering in illness rarely attracts systematic analysis. Part of the reason for this is that the topic is in a way an aspect of common sense. It has an air of self-evidence and seems not to require analysis. However, it is (...) my contention that the nature of human suffering is not at all selfevident. In many ways we know very little about the content and extent of suffering. And, although it may not be sensible to borrow traditional scientific techniques for the study of suffering, we need as much intellectual penetration and rigorous analysis in order to clarify the nature of suffering as for any other scientific investigation. Moreover, there are good reasons for saying that we ought to direct much more of our attention to this humanistic aspect of medicine. We ought to remember that the existence of suffering is one of the main motives, if indeed not the most important motive, for undertaking the medical enterprise. (shrink)

In this article I respond to Björn Hofmann’s criticism of some elements in my theory of health. Hofmann’s main objective is to question “Nordenfelt’s basic premise that you can be ill without having negative first-person experiences, and to investigate the consequences of abandoning the premise.” One of Hofmann’s critical points is that my theory of health does not lend voice to the individual. My response is essentially conducted in four steps: (1) I question the aim of conceptual analysis that Hofmann (...) proposes for the analysis of the notion of health. (2) I maintain that my analysis, in spite of Hofmann’s contention, lends voice to the individual. It does so via my notion of subjective illness but also via my notion of vital goal. (3) I argue that conditions, such as coma, paralysis and mania are salient instances of ill health and that these may become neglected if the use of the terms “ill” and “illness” is restricted to instances where negative subjective experiences are present. (4) I rehearse my main arguments for selecting disability as the core element of ill health and respond to Hofmann’s contention that persons who are in great pain can sometimes nevertheless perform perfectly. (shrink)

BackgroundSuicide research aims to contribute to a better understanding of suicidal behaviour and its prevention. However, there are many ethical challenges in this research field, for example, regarding consent and potential risks to participants. While studies to-date have focused on the perspective of the researchers, this study aimed to investigate the views and experiences of members of Human Research Ethics Committees (HRECs) in dealing with suicide-related study applications.MethodsThis qualitative study entailed a thematic analysis using an inductive approach. We conducted semi-structured (...) interviews with a purposive sample (N = 15) of HREC Chairs or their delegates from Australian research-intensive universities. The interview guide included questions regarding the ethical concerns and challenges in suicide-related research raised by HREC members, how they dealt with those challenges and what advice they could give to researchers.ResultsThe analysis identified four main themes: (1) HREC members’ experiences of reviewing suicide-related study applications, (2) HREC members’ perceptions of suicide, suicide research, and study participants, (3) Complexity in HREC members’ decision-making processes, and (4) HREC members’ relationships with researchers.ConclusionsReliance on ethical guidelines and dialogue with researchers are crucial in the assessment of suicide-related study applications. Both researchers and HREC members may benefit from guidance and resources on how to conduct ethically sound suicide-related studies. Developing working relationships will be likely to help HRECs to facilitate high quality, ethical suicide-related research and researchers to conduct such research. (shrink)

Ideas are important in shaping the policy choices of governments. But many ideas that have not been successful in the past continue to be used by policymakers, and some good ideas tend not to be adopted. This Element will focus on why governments make these poor policy choices. We will discuss a number of examples of 'zombie ideas' that refuse to die, and then discuss the factors that are associated with their survival. Those factors occur at the elite, the organizational (...) and the societal level. We will also examine some 'ghost' ideas that may well be successful but have a difficult time being adopted, and the factors that are associated with the exclusion of these ideas from the policy process. (shrink)

I respond to Lennart Nordenfelt's analysis of dignity by questioning his attempt to establish an objective standard by which dignity can be determined. I approach this by considering the way in which claims to dignity may be contested and defended. This leads, in the cases of dignity of merit and dignity of moral status, to an apparent relativism. This relativism is checked by further consideration of dignity of identity, and in particular by consideration of the nature of the processes (...) that serve to humiliate people. It is suggested that acts of humiliation attack certain competences that human beings develop as embodied, social beings. Menschenwürde may then be articulated as an account of human nature, in terms of the human potential to develop a series of core competences. This account of human nature aspires to universality, and as such offers an objective ground to dignity. This paper is a product of the research project on Dignity and Older Europeans Programme, Contract No QLG6, 2001, 00888). (shrink)

Drawing on Lennart Nordenfelt’s distinction between the four distinct senses of dignity, I elucidate the meaning of dignity in the context of research involving human subjects. I acknowledge that different interpretations of the personal senses of dignity may be acceptable in human subject research, but that inherent dignity (Menschenwürde) is not open to interpretation in the same way. In order to map out the grounds for interpreting dignity, I examine the unique application of the principle of respect for dignity (...) in Canada’s research ethics guidelines. These guidelines are unique because they consider dignity to be a foundational concept and the protection of the dignity of research subjects is regarded as a measure that prevents “the impoverishment of humanity as a whole”. While the conception of humanity invoked here is incomplete, Canada’s research ethics guidelines nevertheless represent a more European approach to biomedical policy. Finally, in order to correct a pervasive blind spot in contemporary policy on research involving human subjects, I sketch a functional model for attributing inherent dignity that avoids the untenable connotations of speciesism. (shrink)

In “Gentle Murder, Or The Adverbial Samaritan”, James William Forrester presents what he describes as “the most powerful version yet put forward” of Lennart Åqvist's Good Samaritan paradox in deontic logic. Forrester suggests that the paradox may make it necessary to reject the standard deontic inference principle. This desperate conclusion, as Forrester acknowledges, would imply that all of standard deontic logic “must be in a bad way”. But Forrester's “paradox” is not nearly so deep or intractable as he maintains.

In the present paper it is argued that genetic interventions on human embryos are in principle permissible if they promote the health of the persons that these embryos will one day become and impermissible if they compromise their health. This so called health-intervention principle is reached by, inter alia, rejecting alternative approaches to the problem of the permissibility of genetic intervention. The health-intervention principle can be interpreted in different ways depending on how the notion of health is understood. The central (...) part of the paper is an attempt to find a concept of health which is such that it makes the health-intervention principle normatively plausible. For this purpose I examine two influential competing theories of health: Cristopher Boorse’s biostatistical theory of health and Lennart Nordenfelt’s welfare theory of health. I argue that the health-intervention principle is more plausible if health is understood in the latter sense, although it is not ruled out that the principle may be given an even more plausible explication in terms of some other notion of health. (shrink)

Aristotle and Confucius are pivotal figures in world history; nevertheless, Western and Eastern cultures have in modern times largely abandoned the insights of these masters. Remastering Morals provides a book-length scholarly comparison of the ethics of Aristotle and Confucius. May Sim's comparisons offer fresh interpretations of the central teachings of both men. More than a catalog of similarities and differences, her study brings two great traditions into dialog so that each is able to learn from the other. This is essential (...) reading for anyone interested in virtue-oriented ethics. (shrink)

This book offers a readable and compelling introduction to the work of one of the twentieth century's most important and elusive thinkers. Other books have tried to explain Deleuze in general terms. Todd May organizes his book around a central question at the heart of Deleuze's philosophy: how might we live? The author then goes on to explain how Deleuze offers a view of the cosmos as a living thing that provides ways of conducting our lives that we may not (...) have dreamed of. Through this approach the full range of Deleuze's philosophy is covered. Offering a lucid account of a highly technical philosophy, Todd May's introduction will be widely read amongst those in philosophy, political science, cultural studies and French studies. (shrink)

The burgeoning science of ethics has produced a trend toward pessimism. Ordinary moral thought and action, we’re told, are profoundly influenced by arbitrary factors and ultimately driven by unreasoned feelings. This book counters the current orthodoxy on its own terms by carefully engaging with the empirical literature. The resulting view, optimistic rationalism, shows the pervasive role played by reason, and ultimately defuses sweeping debunking arguments in ethics. The science does suggest that moral knowledge and virtue don’t come easily. However, despite (...) the heavy influence of automatic and unconscious processes that have been shaped by evolutionary pressures, we needn’t reject ordinary moral psychology as fundamentally flawed or in need of serious repair. Reason can be corrupted in ethics just as in other domains, but a special pessimism about morality in particular is unwarranted. Moral judgment and motivation are fundamentally rational enterprises not beholden to the passions. (shrink)

Larry May argues that the best way to understand war crimes is as crimes against humanness rather than as violations of justice. He shows that in a deeply pluralistic world, we need to understand the rules of war as the collective responsibility of states that send their citizens into harm's way, as the embodiment of humanity, and as the chief way for soldiers to retain a sense of honour on the battlefield. Throughout, May demonstrates that the principle of humanness is (...) the cornerstone of international humanitarian law, and is itself the basis of the traditional principles of discrimination, necessity, and proportionality. He draws extensively on the older Just War tradition to assess recent cases from the International Tribunal for Yugoslavia as well as examples of atrocities from the archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross. (shrink)

In recent decades, economists have developed methods for measuring the country-wide level of inequality of opportunity. The most popular method, called the ex-ante method, uses data on the distribution of outcomes stratified by groups of individuals with the same circumstances, in order to estimate the part of outcome inequality that is due to these circumstances. I argue that these methods are potentially biased, both upwards and downwards, and that the unknown size of this bias could be large. To argue that (...) the methods are biased, I show that they ought to measure causal or counterfactual quantities, while the methods are only capable of identifying correlational information. To argue that the bias is potentially large, I illustrate how the causal complexity of the real world leads to numerous non-causal correlations between circumstances and outcomes and respond to objections claiming that such correlations are nonetheless indicators of unfair disadvantage, that is, inequality of opportunity. (shrink)

The secretory pathway delivers proteins synthesized at the rough endoplasmic reticulum (RER) to various subcellular locations via the Golgi apparatus. Currently, efforts are focused on understanding the molecular machineries driving individual processes at the RER and Golgi that package, modify and transport proteins. However, studies are routinely performed using non‐dividing cells. This obscures the critical issue of how the secretory pathway is affected by cell division. Indeed, several studies have indicated that protein trafficking is down‐regulated during mitosis. Moreover, the RER (...) and Golgi apparatus exhibit gross reorganization in mitosis. Here I provide a relatively neglected perspective of how the mitotic cyclin‐dependent kinase (CDK1) could regulate various stages of the secretory pathway. I highlight several aspects of the mitotic control of protein trafficking that remain unresolved and suggest that further studies on how the mitotic CDK1 influences the secretory pathway are necessary to obtain a deeper understanding of protein transport. (shrink)

Directed duties are duties that an agent owes to some party – a party who would be wronged if the duty were violated. A ‘direction problem’ asks what it is about a duty in virtue of which it is directed towards one party, if any, rather than another. I discuss three theories of moral direction: control, demand and interest theories. Although none of these theories can be rejected out of hand, all three face serious difficulties.

What makes for a good life, or a beautiful one, or, perhaps most important, a meaningful one? Throughout history most of us have looked to our faith, our relationships, or our deeds for the answer. But in A Significant Life, philosopher Todd May offers an exhilarating new way of thinking about these questions, one deeply attuned to life as it actually is: a work in progress, a journey—and often a narrative. Offering moving accounts of his own life and memories alongside (...) rich engagements with philosophers from Aristotle to Heidegger, he shows us where to find the significance of our lives: in the way we live them. May starts by looking at the fundamental fact that life unfolds over time, and as it does so, it begins to develop certain qualities, certain themes. Our lives can be marked by intensity, curiosity, perseverance, or many other qualities that become guiding narrative values. These values lend meanings to our lives that are distinct from—but also interact with—the universal values we are taught to cultivate, such as goodness or happiness. Offering a fascinating examination of a broad range of figures—from music icon Jimi Hendrix to civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer, from cyclist Lance Armstrong to The Portrait of a Lady’s Ralph Touchett to Claus von Stauffenberg, a German officer who tried to assassinate Hitler—May shows that narrative values offer a rich variety of criteria by which to assess a life, specific to each of us and yet widely available. They offer us a way of reading ourselves, who we are, and who we might like to be. Clearly and eloquently written, A Significant Life is a recognition and a comfort, a celebration of the deeply human narrative impulse by which we make—even if we don’t realize it—meaning for ourselves. It offers a refreshing way to think of an age-old question, of quite simply, what makes a life worth living. (shrink)

This book examines the political perspective of French thinker and historian Jacques Ranci&ère. Ranci&ère argues that a democratic politics emerges out of people&’s acting under the presupposition of their own equality with those better situated in the social hierarchy. Todd May examines and extends this presupposition, offering a normative framework for understanding it, placing it in the current political context, and showing how it challenges traditional political philosophy and opens up neglected political paths. He demonstrates that the presupposition of equality (...) orients political action around those who act on their own behalf&—and those who act in solidarity with them&—rather than, as with the political theories of John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and Amartya Sen, those who distribute the social goods. As May argues, Ranci&ère&’s view offers both hope and perspective for those who seek to think about and engage in progressive political action. (shrink)

According to policy makers, telemedicine offers “huge opportunities to improve the quality and accessibility of health services.” It is defined as diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring, with doctors and patients separated by space but mediated through information and communication technologies. This mediation is explored through an ethnography of a U.K. teledermatology clinic. Diagnostic image transfer enables medicine at a distance, as patients are removed from knowledge generation by concentrating their identities into images. Yet that form of identity allows images and the (...) expert gaze to be brought into potentially lifesaving proximity. Following Latour’s thread, images must be captured and then mobilized to the knowledge base, where they must be stabilized into standard diagnoses, then combined with different images, waiting lists, skin lesions, dermatologists, paper records, and beds, so that ultimately, outcomes are produced. This huge task requires new knowledges and a widening of agency that, if unacknowledged, may see telemedicine projects continue to founder. (shrink)

At least since the middle of the twentieth century, philosophers have tended to identify weakness of will with akrasia—i.e. acting, or having a disposition to act, contrary to one‘s judgments about what is best for one to do. However, there has been some recent debate about whether this captures the ordinary notion of weakness of will. Richard Holton (1999, 2009) claims that it doesn’t, while Alfred Mele (2010) argues that, to a certain extent, it does. As Mele recognizes, the question (...) about an ordinary concept here is one apt for empirical investigation. We evaluate Mele’s studies and report some experiments of our own in order to investigate what in the world the ordinary concept of weakness of will is. We conclude that neither Mele nor Holton (previously) was quite right and offer a tentative proposal of our own: the ordinary notion is more like a prototype or cluster concept whose application is affected by a variety of factors. (shrink)

The main message of Neuroethics is that neuroscience forces us to reconceptualize human agency as marvelously diverse and flexible. Free will can arise from unconscious brain processes. Individuals with mental disorders, including addiction and psychopathy, exhibit more agency than is often recognized. Brain interventions should be embraced with cautious optimism. Our moral intuitions, which arise from entangled reason and emotion, can generally be trusted. Nevertheless, we can and should safely enhance our brain chemistry, partly because motivated reasoning crops up in (...) everyday life and in the practice of neuroscience itself. Despite serious limitations, brain science can be useful in the courtroom and marketplace. Recognizing all this nuance leaves little room for anxious alarmism or overhype and urges an emphasis on neurodiversity. The result is a highly opinionated tour of neuroethics as an exciting field full of implications for philosophy, science, medicine, law, and public policy. (shrink)

How many senses can a given name have, with its reference held fixed? One, more than one? One answer that most would agree to is that sense is unique for each utterance of a name, that is, that a name can have no more than one sense on any given occasion. But is sense unique in any stronger sense than this? The answer that is typically attributed to Frege is that there is not, that, as Tyler Burge puts it, 1 (...) Frege “treats proper names as having different senses while applying to the same person.” There are a number of possibilities for the locus of this multiplicity of sense; the following remark by Ruth Marcus indicates the possibilities: “the sense of a term is whatever is grasped or understood by a speaker on a particular occasion of use and may vary from occasion to occasion as well as from speaker to speaker.”2 Of the views canvassed by Marcus, we can draw out a more conservative one, and one more extreme. On the more conservative view, Frege is holding that sense may vary from speaker to speaker; on the more extreme view, Frege holds not only this, but that sense may vary from context to context. Endorsements of the two views are not hard to find. For example, typical sorts of endorsement of the conservative view are found in Harold Noonan’s remark that “different senses [are] associated with the name ‘Aris-. (shrink)

I argue against the claim that there are principled as well as pragmatic reasons for compromise in politics, even within the context of reasonable moral disagreements such as the abortion controversy.

I argue that our best science supports the rationalist idea that, independent of reasoning, emotions aren’t integral to moral judgment. There’s ample evidence that ordinary moral cognition often involves conscious and unconscious reasoning about an action’s outcomes and the agent’s role in bringing them about. Emotions can aid in moral reasoning by, for example, drawing one’s attention to such information. However, there is no compelling evidence for the decidedly sentimentalist claim that mere feelings are causally necessary or sufficient for making (...) a moral judgment or for treating norms as distinctively moral. I conclude that, even if moral cognition is largely driven by automatic intuitions, these shouldn’t be mistaken for emotions or their non-cognitive components. Non-cognitive elements in our psychology may be required for normal moral development and motivation but not necessarily for mature moral judgment. (shrink)

The rhetoric of disgust is common in moral discourse and political propaganda. Some believe it's pernicious, for it convinces without evidence. But scientific research now suggests that disgust is typically an effect, not a cause, of moral judgment. At best the emotion on its own only sometimes slightly amplifies a moral belief one already has. Appeals to disgust are thus dialectically unhelpful in discourse that seeks to convince. When opponents of abortion use repulsive images to make their case, they convince (...) few, even if they rally their base. When champions of animal rights show graphic depictions of the torturous conditions of animals in factory farms, they convince only those previously ignorant of the severity of such conditions. Ultimately, disgust may be less pernicious than it is useless. (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)

French philosophy since World War II has been preoccupied with the issue of difference. Specifically, it has wanted to promote or to leave room for ways of living and of being that differ from those usually seen in contemporary Western society. Given the experience of the Holocaust, the motivation for such a preoccupation is not difficult to see. For some thinkers, especially Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, and Gilles Deleuze, this preoccupation has led to a mode of philosophizing that (...) privileges difference as a philosophical category. Nancy privileges difference as a mode of conceiving community, Derrida as a mode of conceiving linguistic meaning, Levinas as a mode of conceiving ethics, and Deleuze as a mode of conceiving ontology. _Reconsidering Difference_ has a twofold task, the primary one critical and the secondary one reconstructive. The critical task is to show that these various privilegings are philosophical failures. They wind up, for reasons unique to each position, endorsing positions that are either incoherent or implausible. Todd May considers the incoherencies of each position and offers an alternative approach. His reconstructive task, which he calls "contingent holism," takes the phenomena under investigation—community, language, ethics, and ontology—and sketches a way of reconceiving them that preserves the motivations of the rejected positions without falling into the problems that beset them. (shrink)

What ethical questions does neuroscience raise and help to answer? Neuroethics blends philosophical analysis with modern brain science to address central questions within this growing field: · Is free will an illusion? · Does brain stimulation impair a patient's autonomy? · Does having a mental disorder excuse bad behavior? · Is addiction a brain disease? · Should we trust our gut feelings in ethics and politics? · Should we alter our brains to become better people? · Is human reasoning bound (...) to be biased by our values? · Can brain science be trusted to read the minds of criminals and consumers? This book provides an opinionated tour through captivating cases and a close examination of the philosophical issues and scientific evidence. Joshua May's lively and accessible writing style makes it an indispensable resource for students and scholars in both the sciences and humanities. **Named a Top 10 Outstanding Academic Title of 2024 by Choice Reviews**. (shrink)

Does the critical discourse about resilience reiterate the problematic dichotomy between suffering and agency that the concept of resilience inscribes? In this discussion piece, I engage with Brad Evans’ and Julian Reid’s reflections on resilience. Although I share with Evans and Reid a normative critique of resilience, I am critical of their discussion of vulnerability. Rather than arguing that vulnerability precludes political transformation, as Evans and Reid do, or that vulnerability enables political coalition, as in Judith Butler’s account of precarity, (...) one should ask: how is vulnerability framed? I argue for framing vulnerability through a critical theory of the victim which explores the interconnections between injurability and agency rather than treating them as oppositional terms. (shrink)

An influential argument in bioethics involves appeal to disgust, calling on us to take it seriously as a moral guide (e.g. Kass, Miller, Kahan). Some argue, for example, that genetic enhancement, especially via human reproductive cloning, is repellant or grotesque. While objectors have argued that repugnance is morally irrelevant (e.g. Nussbaum, Kelly), I argue that the problem is more fundamental: it is psychologically irrelevant. Examining recent empirical data suggests that disgust’s influence on moral judgment may be like fatigue: an exogenous (...) influence, yielding a “performance error” that does not reflect our understanding of moral matters. This conclusion also challenges appeals to repugnance on other topics (such as homosexuality) and generally downplays the importance of disgust in moral discourse. (shrink)

Biography of the paleontologist, priest, writer, and co-discoverer of Peking man who developed a theory claiming to unify cosmic evolution and Christianity.

Contrary to assumptions that changes in brain networks are possible only during crucial periods of development, research in the past decade has supported the idea of a permanently plastic brain. Novel experience, altered afferent input due to environmental changes and learning new skills are now recognized as modulators of brain function and underlying neuroanatomic circuitry. Given findings in experiments with animals and the recent discovery of increases in gray and white matter in the adult human brain as a result of (...) learning, the old concept of cognitive reserve, that is the ability to reinforce brain volume in crucial areas and thus provide a greater threshold for age-dependent deficits, has been reinforced. The challenge we face is to unravel the exact nature of the dynamic structural alterations and, ultimately, to be able to use this knowledge for disease management. Understanding normative changes in brain structure that occur as a result of environmental changes and demands is pivotal to understanding the characteristic ability of the brain to adapt. (shrink)

This chapter discusses contemporary scientific research on the role of reason and emotion in moral judgment. The literature suggests that moral judgment is influenced by both reasoning and emotion separately, but there is also emerging evidence of the interaction between the two. While there are clear implications for the rationalism-sentimentalism debate, we conclude that important questions remain open about how central emotion is to moral judgment. We also suggest ways in which moral philosophy is not only guided by empirical research (...) but continues to guide it. (shrink)

This article argues that protection of the environment requires reconsidering basic liberal ideas relating to value and growth. It selects a central thinker in the liberal tradition, John Locke, as a starting point. The article first shows how Locke’s political writings at first glance might support a “possessive individualist” position that gives primacy to individuals and their rights to property in a way that blocks governmental action to protect the environment, much as some modern versions of liberalism and libertarianism maintain. (...) However, there are other aspects of Locke’s writings that undermine this position. In particular, a reconsideration of his views on private property in combination with his views on the harm principle, the common good, and future generations can support the position that an individual’s right to exploit nature is indeed limited. These elements of Locke are strengthened considerably if Locke’s view of nature is updated by reconsidering nature as composed of ecosystems and as providing ecosystem goods and services. That land should continue to produce abundantly is foundational to Locke, and the failure to protect the ecosystems that provide key services supporting this abundance harms both the property of others and the viability of society: preservation of these constitute a collective good that transcends the individual good. The protection of ecosystem services also works to protect the value of individual holdings as well as the value of land still held in common. Finally, Locke’s writing supports the view that it is the role of government to act to protect the abundance of nature, even against the wishes of an individual property owner.Article first published online: 25 Feb 2017. (shrink)

As the year 2022 ends, we continue to face challenging issues and uncertainties about what should be the right approach to various ethical problems society face. In approaching these problems we reflect on our existing guiding values but also discover new ones. We then try to figure out how our actions and decisions could align with our well-considered judgments until we achieve some degree of reflective equilibrium.

Determinism seems to rule out a robust sense of options but also prevent our choices from being a matter of luck. In this way, free will seems to require both the truth and falsity of determinism. If the concept of free will is coherent, something must have gone wrong. I offer a diagnosis on which this puzzle is due at least in part to a tension already present in the very idea of free will. I provide various lines of support (...) for this hypothesis, including some experimental data gathered by probing the judgments of non-specialists. (shrink)