I argue that racism is a form of necro-being entrapped in necro-tragedy. Necro-being, as I present it, is a condition that kills and prevents persons from being born. I defend a conception of tragedy: absolute necrotragedy; absolute irredeemable suffering in a non-moral universe. Explanations of racism are commonly subject to anomalies, for example, volitional accounts offer special desiderata to account for institutional racism; conversely for institutional accounts. I offer a way to see racism, given the existence of a vast array (...) of kinds of racism: a descriptive actuarial approach. The account is intended to avoid the quandaries and anomalies of ‘explanation.’ I use rational-intentional explanations (including accounts by Jorge Garcia and Charles Mills) and social kind racial realism as inadequate explanations and examples of explanations with anomalies. These accounts also help demonstrate that logical systems of racism are inadequate. All such accounts explain racism as a coherent system and offer correlative reasons for its wrongness. I consider death, mortality, morbidity, and irredeemable misery as primary indicators of racism across an array of types of racism globally: racial necro-being. (shrink)

According to the Interpersonal View of Testimony, testimonial justification is non-evidential in nature. I begin by arguing that the IVT has the following problem: If the IVT is true, then young children and people with autism cannot participate in testimonial exchanges; but young children and people with autism can participate in testimonial exchanges; thus, the IVT should be rejected on the grounds that it has over-cognized what it takes to give and receive testimony. Afterwards, I consider what I take to (...) be the two best motivations for the IVT and argue that they both fail. The overarching lesson, then, is that the IVT is unmotivated and false; we should think of testimonial justification as being evidential in nature. (shrink)

Explores the continuities and discontinuities in the work of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze.

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According to the Transmission View of Testimony : TVT: If a speaker testifies to a hearer that p, and if the hearer is justified in believing that p on the basis of that speaker's testimony, then the hearer's belief is justified by whatever justification the speaker has for believing that p. The aim of this paper is to develop and defend a novel objection to the TVT.

Do terminally ill patients who have exhausted all other available, government-approved treatment options have a constitutional right to experimental treatment that may prolong their lives? On May 2, 2006, a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, in a startling opinion, Abigail Alliance for Better Access to Developmental Drugs v. Von Eschenbach, held “Yes.” The plaintiffs, Abigail Alliance for Better Access to Developmental Drugs and Washington Legal Foundation, sought to enjoin the Food and Drug (...) Administration from refusing to allow the sale of investigational new drugs that had not yet received FDA approval. The terminally ill plaintiffs contended that they quite literally could not wait that long for the drugs. With no other treatment options available, the plaintiffs urged the court to recognize a fundamental, constitutional right to take potentially life-saving or life-prolonging drugs, even though the treatment had not been fully tested through human trials for safety and effectiveness and could not be legally marketed to the public. (shrink)

This article probes the relationship among constitutionalism, extra-legal prerogative power, and citizen judgment. While much has been written about the nature of Lockean prerogative, and while his theory serves as a direct inspiration for contemporary "normative extra-legalists," key participants in the debate over emergency powers, less attention has been paid to how the people judge prerogative. Attention to this issue is useful because an examination of the process of political judgment of extra-legalism in Locke leads to a complication of the (...) current extra-legalist vision of democratic mechanisms of accountability. The author argues that the extra-legal approach is right to consider the role of democratic publics in potentially constraining the exercise of emergency powers but wrong to formulate that role as one extra-constitutional power checking another extra-constitutional power. The author situates both prerogative power and citizen judgment of it at the threshold of the constitutional order. (shrink)

Abstract:The American College of Physicians in its ethics manual endorsed the idea that physicians ought to improve their ability to provide care to their patients more parsimoniously. This elicited a critical backlash; critics essentially claimed that what was being endorsed was a renamed form of rationing. In a recent article, Tilburt and Cassel argued that parsimonious care and rationing are ethically distinct practices. In this essay I critically assess that claim. I argue that in practice there is considerable overlap between (...) what they term parsimonious care and what they define as rationing. The same is true of the Choosing Wisely campaign endorsed by the American Board of Internal Medicine. In both cases, if the goal is to control healthcare costs by reducing the use of marginally beneficial care that is not cost effective, then a public conversation about the justness of specific choices is essential. (shrink)

In this paper, I compare all three editions of Bennett Reimer’s A Philosophy of Music Education with early Chinese philosophy, in particular, classical Chinese aesthetics. I structure my analysis around a quartet of interrelated themes: aesthetic education, education of feeling, aesthetic experience, and ethics and aesthetics. This paper suggests that Reimer’s philosophical writings have some degree of transcultural applicability beyond Western thought, counterpointing criticisms that his philosophy is narrow, ethnocentric, and culturally limited. It also serves as a plausible point of (...) departure towards a transcultural theory of aesthetics for music education relevant to the pluralistic and globalized world in which we live. (shrink)

Developments in genetic engineering may soon allow biologists to clone organisms from extinct species. The process, dubbed “de-extinction,” has been publicized as a means to bring extinct species back to life. For theorists and philosophers of biology, the process also suggests a thought experiment for the ongoing “species problem”: given a species concept, would a clone be classified in the extinct species? Previous analyses have answered this question in the context of specific de-extinction technologies or particular species concepts. The thought (...) experiment is given more comprehensive treatment here. Given the products of three de-extinction technologies, twenty-two species concepts are “tested” to see which are consistent with the idea that species may be resurrected. The ensuing discussion considers whether or not de-extinction is a conceptually coherent research program and, if so, whether or not its development may contribute to a resolution of the species problem. Ultimately, theorists must face a choice: they may revise their commitments to species concepts or they may recognize de-extinction as a means to make progress in the species problem. (shrink)

Primary sexual traits, those structures and processes directly involved in reproduction, are some of the most diverse, specialized, and bizarre in the animal kingdom. Moreover, reproductive traits are often species-specific, suggesting that they evolved very rapidly. This diversity, long the province of taxonomists, has recently attracted broader interest from evolutionary biologists, especially those interested in sexual selection and the evolution of reproductive strategies. Primary sexual characters were long assumed to be the product of natural selection, exclusively. A recent alternative suggests (...) that sexual selection explains much of the diversity of. (shrink)

This article tries to show the irreducible connection between vulnerability and violence. This connection leads us back to the ethical level of experience. If vulnerability makes violence irreducible, then at least two reactions to violence are possible. On the one hand, a reaction is possible in which one attempts to negate vulnerability in order to close down the very thing within us that allows violence to enter. This negative reaction is actually the worst violence. On the other hand, a reaction (...) is possible in which one attempts to affirm vulnerability, even though its affirmation opens us to the violence that will happen. Affirming vulnerability is the least-violent reaction. If the formula for the worst violence is apocalypse without remainder, then the least violence is the maintenance of the remainder. The maintenance would happen only by not possessing the remainders, which places us in a new situation of poverty. (shrink)

Improving the health and life of individuals living in poverty requires new models and new approaches, moving healthcare away from today's medical mindset of acute care toward a conception of healthcare as value-based, which necessarily means connecting disparate impacts with the healthcare services that are delivered.

The field of community psychology has focused on individuals' and groups' behavior in interaction with their social contexts, with an emphasis on prevention, early intervention, wellness promotion, and competency development. Over the past few decades, however, community-based applications of the newest research methodologies have not kept pace with the development of theory and methodology with regard to multilevel data collection and analysis. The Handbook of Methodological Approaches to Community-Based Research is intended to aid the community-oriented researcher in learning about and (...) applying cutting-edge quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods approaches. The Handbook presents a number of innovative methodologies relevant to community-based research, illustrating their applicability to specific social problems and projects. These methodological approaches explore individuals and groups in interaction with their communities and provide examples of how to implement and evaluate interventions conducted at the community level. The chapters discuss how particular methodologies can be used to help gather and analyze data dealing with community-based issues. Furthermore, they illustrate the benefits that occur when community theorists, interventionists, and methodologists work together to better understand complicated person-environment systems and the change processes within communities. (shrink)