The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 12, Issue 1, Page 16-18, January 2012.

Research in evolutionary biology and philosophy of biology and cognition strongly suggests that human organisms modify their environment through active processes of niche construction. Recently, proponents of the free-energy principle and variational active inference have argued that their approach can deepen our understanding of the reciprocal causal relationship between organisms and their niche on various scales. This paper examines the feasibility and scope of variational formalisations and conceptualisations of the organism-niche nexus with a particular focus on the extended active inference (...) account. I will draw a conceptual distinction between selective niche construction, developmental niche construction, and organism-niche coordination dynamics and argue that these notions capture different causal patterns, each of which with a distinct scope. Against this background, I will analyse and discuss the extended active inference account and its strategy to integrate variational active inference with work on extended cognition. The proponents of extended active inference assume that their account can provide an explanation of selective niche construction, developmental niche construction, and organism-niche coordination dynamics. However, my key claim will be that this account has the potential to elucidate the workings of organism-niche coordination dynamics, but does not adequately capture the causal patterns of selective niche construction and developmental niche construction. (shrink)

Richard Heersmink argues that self‐narratives are distributed across embodied organisms and their environment, given that their building blocks, autobiographical memories, are distributed. This argument faces two problems. First, it commits a fallacy of composition. Second, it relies on Marya Schechtman's narrative self‐constitution view, which is incompatible with the distributed cognition framework. To solve these problems, this article develops an alternative account of self‐narratives. On this account, we actively connect distributed autobiographical memories through distributed conversational and textual self‐narrative practices. This account (...) enhances our understanding of the memory–narrative nexus and has implications for philosophical conceptions of self. (shrink)

Contemporary and emerging chatbots can be fine-tuned to imitate the style, tenor, and knowledge of a corpus, including the corpus of a particular individual. This makes it possible to build chatbots that imitate people who are no longer alive — deathbots. Such deathbots can be used in many ways, but one prominent way is to facilitate the process of grieving. In this paper, we present a framework that helps make sense of this process. In particular, we argue that deathbots can (...) serve as affective scaffolds, modulating and shaping the emotions of the bereaved. We contextualize this affective scaffolding by comparing it to earlier technologies that have also been used to scaffold the process of grieving, arguing that deathbots offer some interesting novelties that may transform the continuing bonds of intimacy that the bereaved can have with the dead. We conclude with some ethical reflections on the promises and perils of this new technology. (shrink)

Mental capacities, philosophers of mind and cognition have recently argued, are not exclusively realised in brain, but depend upon the rest of the body and the local environment. In this context, the concept of ‘scaffolding’ has been employed to specify the relationship between embodied organisms and their local environment. The core idea is that at least some cognitive and affective capacities are causally dependent upon environmental resources. However, in-depth examinations of specific examples of scaffolding as test cases for current theorising (...) about scaffolding have remained scarce. The aim of the current paper is to help close this gap. To this end, I will offer a characterisation of key aspects of ‘scaffolding’ that can help specify scaffolding relations. In a second step, I will analyse fictional textual narrative as a test case for accounts of cognitive and affective scaffolding. The key claim of this paper will be that fictional textual narrative can be considered as a scaffold that transforms our capacities in social understanding and empathising in the course of ontogeny. (shrink)

To date, the value of corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities has primarily been measured through the company’s reputation, with little attention given to exploring whether there are internal influences between CSR and other management practices. We argue that the efficacy of CSR extends beyond a company’s reputation for managing social and environmental concerns; in particular, it can influence other business practices such as risk management. Our results suggest that (a) overall, firms with better CSR performance are more likely to adopt (...) integrated risk management practices and (b) CSR activities that target both primary stakeholders and secondary stakeholders are equally important in facilitating the adoption of such risk management practices. Theoretically, we contribute to the CSR literature by providing a possible mechanism for risk reduction and insurance-like effects of CSR. Practically, we provide managerial implications demonstrating that the efficacy of CSR should not be viewed in isolation of other business practices. (shrink)

For several decades, research on situated cognition and affectivity has neglected cases in which environmental features in the niche have a negative impact on agents’ cognitive and affective wellbeing. Recently, however, a new research cluster has emerged that explores how things, technologies, and organisational systems across corporate, healthcare, and educational sectors wrongfully harm certain kinds of agents. This article contributes to this research cluster by integrating work on negative niche construction, structural oppression, enculturation, and self-narration. It thereby offers a new (...) perspective on the negative, structurally oppressive impact of the socio-culturally shaped niche on enculturated self-narration. The main argument is that master plots, understood as narrative arrangements that dominate in the socio-culturally shaped niche, contribute to the structural oppression of enculturated self-narrators with systematically undermined socio-cultural identities. An analysis of the influence of pronatalist master plotting on enculturated self-narration serves to illustrate and strengthen the overall argument. (shrink)

In recent years, philosophers of mind have explored the relationship between lived embodied experiences and self-narratives in bringing about a sense of self. This relationship has been vividly debated, with no consensus in the field. While some have argued that lived embodied experiences influence, but are not influenced by, self-narratives, others have maintained that lived embodied experiences and self-narratives influence each other across time. However, the very concept of ‘self-narrative’ and its scope of application has remained underspecified. The debate, I (...) will argue, can only be resolved if we arrive at a better theoretical understanding of self-narrative. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to develop a conceptual account of the notion of ‘self-narrative’ and a descriptive account of its scope of application. It will then be shown how these accounts can pave the way towards resolving the debate on the experience-narrative nexus. (shrink)

Many of our cognitive capacities are the result of enculturation. Enculturation is the temporally extended transformative acquisition of cognitive practices in the cognitive niche. Cognitive practices are embodied and normatively constrained ways to interact with epistemic resources in the cognitive niche in order to complete a cognitive task. The emerging predictive processing perspective offers new functional principles and conceptual tools to account for the cerebral and extra-cerebral bodily components that give rise to cognitive practices. According to this emerging perspective, many (...) cases of perception, action, and cognition are realized by the on-going minimization of prediction error. Predictive processing provides us with a mechanistic perspective that helps investigate the functional details of the acquisition of cognitive practices. The argument of this paper is that research on enculturation and recent work on predictive processing are complementary. The main reason is that predictive processing operates at a sub-personal level and on a physiological time scale of explanation only. A complete account of enculturated cognition needs to take additional levels and temporal scales of explanation into account. This complementarity assumption leads to a new framework—enculturated predictive processing—that operates on multiple levels and temporal scales for the explanation of the enculturated predictive acquisition of cognitive practices. Enculturated predictive processing is committed to explanatory pluralism. That is, it subscribes to the idea that we need multiple perspectives and explanatory strategies to account for the complexity of enculturation. The upshot is that predictive processing needs to be complemented by additional considerations and conceptual tools to realize its full explanatory potential. (shrink)

Self-narration, many philosophers assume, makes important contributions to our mental lives. Two views on self-narration can be distinguished. On the internalistic view, self-narration unfolds in the secluded mind and does not require overt communication. On the situated view, self-narration often depends on the conversational interaction with an interlocutor. The situated view has many advantages over its internalistic rival, including theoretical consistency and empirical plausibility. Yet, research on situated conversational self-narration has been shaped by a harmony bias, which consists in the (...) tacit assumption that interlocutors contribute to self-narration in ways that are beneficial and supportive, rather than malicious and harmful. This paper seeks to mitigate the harmony bias by considering the phenomenon of gaslighting, which is characterized by an interlocutor’s erosion of someone’s sense of epistemic and moral competence. In cases of narrative gaslighting, this erosion proceeds by maliciously interfering with the self-narrator’s mnemonic, interpretational, and conceptual abilities. Bringing together research on situated self-narration and gaslighting for the first time, it will be argued that the emerging account of narrative gaslighting has important implications for both. (shrink)

Eating meat appeals, but the cost is measured in millions of slaughtered animals. This has convinced many that vegetarianism is morally superior to a carnivorous diet. Increasingly, those who take pleasure in consuming animals find it a guilty pleasure. Are they correct? That depends on the magnitude of harm done to food animals but also on what sort of a good, if any, meat eating affords people. This essay aims to estimate both variables and concludes that standard arguments for moral (...) vegetarianism are significantly misplaced. That is because the contribution of meat eating to lives of excellence is underestimated and overall harms to animals consequent on practices of meat eating are overestimated. The answer to the question posed in the title is, therefore, "No.". (shrink)

In a recent article, Ratcliffe and Byrne (2022) propose a multifactorial phenomenological account of the influence of narrative on grief. Specifically, they argue that certain kinds of narrative can help navigate and negotiate the phenomenological disturbance of practical identity associated with bereavement. In this critical note, I identify and discuss two problems of their account. First, Ratcliffe and Byrne’s (2022) considerations rest on conceptually ambiguous distinctions between different narrative categories (the conceptual ambiguity problem). Second, their account appears to neglect the (...) variability of both grief experiences and different kinds of narrative engagement (the variability problem). These problems need to be resolved to make progress in understanding the influence (if any) of narrative engagements on the phenomenology of grief. (shrink)

Marr’s seminal distinction between computational, algorithmic, and implementational levels of analysis has inspired research in cognitive science for more than 30 years. According to a widely-used paradigm, the modelling of cognitive processes should mainly operate on the computational level and be targeted at the idealised competence, rather than the actual performance of cognisers in a specific domain. In this paper, we explore how this paradigm can be adopted and revised to understand mathematical problem solving. The computational-level approach applies methods from (...) computational complexity theory and focuses on optimal strategies for completing cognitive tasks. However, human cognitive capacities in mathematical problem solving are essentially characterised by processes that are computationally sub-optimal, because they initially add to the computational complexity of the solutions. Yet, these solutions can be optimal for human cognisers given the acquisition and enactment of mathematical practices. Here we present diagrams and the spatial manipulation of symbols as two examples of problem solving strategies that can be computationally sub-optimal but humanly optimal. These aspects need to be taken into account when analysing competence in mathematical problem solving. Empirically informed considerations on enculturation can help identify, explore, and model the cognitive processes involved in problem solving tasks. The enculturation account of mathematical problem solving strongly suggests that computational-level analyses need to be complemented by considerations on the algorithmic and implementational levels. The emerging research strategy can help develop algorithms that model what we call enculturated cognitive optimality in an empirically plausible and ecologically valid way. (shrink)

Eric Fabri | : Le cinquième chapitre du Second traité du gouvernement de John Locke a été l’objet de nombreuses mésinterprétations dont l’origine est à chercher dans la volonté des commentateurs d’y trouver une « théorie de la propriété », là où ne se trouvait qu’une « théorie de l’appropriation ». Après une présentation du texte et de ses interprétations, l’article étudie le contexte d’écriture des Deux traités du gouvernement et la place qu’y occupe le cinquième chapitre pour démontrer que (...) l’intention de Locke dans ce chapitre était restreinte : il ne s’agissait que de légitimer l’appropriation originelle dans l’état de nature en vue de poser les jalons indispensables à la démonstration aboutissant au droit de résistance. La distinction faite entre « théorie de la propriété » et « théorie de l’appropriation » permet alors de comprendre comment les interprètes ont extrapolé les écrits de Locke et quels problèmes cette extrapolation pose aux théories modernes de la propriété d’inspiration lockéenne. | : Because most commentators searched a “theory of property” where only a “theory of appropriation” was to be found, the fifth chapter of Locke’s Second Treatise of Civil Government has often been misinterpreted. After recalling briefly Locke’s text and presenting the two major lines of interpretations, the article examines in detail the political destination of the Two Treatises and the role of the fifth chapter in their general economy. The objective is to demonstrate that Locke’s intention when writing this chapter was rather restricted : he only aimed at legitimating private appropriation in the State of Nature because it was a necessary preliminary step for concluding that resisting an arbitrary political power is legitimate. With the distinction between a « theory of property » and a « theory of appropriation » at hand, the article points out which indeterminacies allowed such divergent interpretations to coexist, and further explores the problems this distinction rises for modern theories of property like the Nozickean “entitlement theory”. (shrink)

Recent work on enculturation suggests that our cognitive capacities are significantly transformed in the course of the scaffolded acquisition of cognitive practices such as reading and writing. Phylogenetically, enculturation is the result of the co-evolution of human organisms and their socio-culturally structured cognitive niche. It is rendered possible by evolved cerebral and extra-cerebral bodily learning mechanisms that make human organisms apt to acquire culturally inherited cognitive practices. In addition, cultural learning allows for the intergenerational transmission of relevant knowledge and skills. (...) Ontogenetically, enculturation is associated with neural plasticity and the development of new motor routines and action schemas. It relies on scaffolded learning that structures novice-teacher interactions. The acquisition of reading and writing are paradigm examples of enculturation. Based on an empirically informed analysis of the components of enculturation, I will apply the emerging account of enculturated cognition to narrative practices. To date, research on the impact of narratives on the constitution of the self and our understanding of folk psychology has not paid much attention to the question how narratives are influenced by cumulative cultural evolution and our capacity to acquire reading and writing during ontogeny. I will argue that textual narratives, above and beyond oral narratives, provide genuinely new ways of narration. Therefore, the enculturated interaction with textual narratives has the potential to contribute to a better understanding of ourselves and other cognitive agents. (shrink)

Critics fault rational choice theory for dubious assumptions and limited explanatory power. The aims of rational choice are, however, as much normative as explanatory, and I argue that an abiding concern of political thought—the wrong of exploitation—gives moral weight to some of the more substantive assumptions underlying many rational choice prescriptions.

An examination of the development of the theory of evolution from the Renaissance to the twentieth century.

Major depression is a prevalent mental disorder that leads to persistent negative mood and tremendous suffering in affected individuals. However, the biological realization of this disorder and associated symptom clusters remain poorly understood. Recently, phenomenological accounts of major depressive disorder and contributions to the emerging predictive processing account have provided valuable insights into the phenomenological and neuro-functional components that lead to manifestations of major depressive episodes. The purpose of this paper is to weave together these different strands of research to (...) develop a predictive processing account of major depressive disorder. In doing so, I will relate personal-level descriptions of associated phenomenal experiences to a sub-personal-level predictive processing account of the functional realization of major depression. I will argue that pervasive symptoms of the disorder, which include a diminished sense of agency, fatigue, social withdrawal, and rumination, are integrated by existential feelings of loss and impossibility. These phenomenal experiences, I will argue, are associated with dysfunctional processes of prediction error minimization, which are characterized by an overall decrease of the causal contributions of active inference and by distorted precision estimates. The emerging account promises to contribute to a better understanding of the complex processes that give rise to depressive experiences. (shrink)

The growing trend of required ethics instruction in the business school curriculum has created a need for relevant teaching materials. In response to this need the Journal of Business Ethics is introducing a new case section. This section provides a forum for publishing and accessing a range of materials that can be used in teaching business ethics. This article discusses how business ethics cases can facilitate the development of deductive, inductive and critical reasoning skills.

In antiquity the consensus gentium argument for God’s existence was believed to have merit (cf. Cicero, De Natura Deorum, Book II, sect.2,4), but has been considered blatantly fallacious during more recent times. In this article Bayes’ Theorem is applied to show that the argument is in fact a valid inductive argument. A two hypothesis and a four hypothesis version of the argument are analyzed. Perusal of available statistical evidence suggests that when better worldwide opinion polling data becomes available it will (...) turn out to be sound as well. (shrink)

Athenian officials in the fifth century maintained careful records of treasure owned by their gods, and of the expenditures and receipts of sacred moneys and dedications. These records are conventionally divided into two main types: ‘inventories’ or annual lists of the treasure located in a particular repository, and ‘accounts’ or documents recording the receipts and expenditures of sacred treasuries over a given period. A few documents seem to combine both these elements, and have been called ‘accounts-inventories’ In a well-known example, (...) Athena's treasurers maintained records of valuable items located in three cellae of the building moderns call the Parthenon. Moreover, they published their records of these items in three separate series of inscriptions, one each dedicated to the pronaos, the hekatompedos and the parthenon; these records are conventionally referred to as the ‘inventories’ of Athena's treasure and are extant from 434/3. (shrink)

This article explores Richard Rorty’s status in academic political theory in the decades after his conscious departure from disciplinary philosophy. Rorty found a receptive audience in this pluralistic field, and he became a point of orientation in a number of ongoing, research-agenda driving conversations, if often as an extreme example against which interlocutors could define themselves. In like fashion, Rorty refined his own self-conception as a patriotic liberal ironist in the course of his political theoretical engagements. I offer a sketch (...) of political theory’s landscape as a contrast to the reductivism and esotericism Rorty criticized in disciplinary philosophy, and survey his presence in the field over the years substantively, qualitatively, and quantitatively. (shrink)

There are two related problems in the Poetics : Aristotle’s contradictory statements about size, and Aristotle’s confusing use of two terms for size, μέγεθος and μῆκος. I argue that both problems can be solved if we understand that Aristotle only uses μέγεθος to refer to the size of the plot in relation to the size of the larger whole, and μῆκος to refer to absolute size (number of lines, run-time, fictional time, or number of plot parts), unrelated to any larger (...) whole. (shrink)

Scholars often assume that Old Comedies based on mythological stories differed from other Old Comedies primarily by their mythological plot material, and that therefore they shared the structural features of the surviving plays of Aristophanes. I show that the evidence may instead indicate that these Old Comedies did not as a rule have a parabasis or an agon. The structure of mythological Old Comedy could then have resembled the satyr play more closely than Aristophanic Old Comedy, meaning genre did not (...) necessarily determine form. (shrink)

Fifth-century Athens is praised as the cradle of democracy and sometimes treated as a potential model for modern political theory or practice. In this daring reassessment of classical Athenian democracy and its significance for the United States today, Loren J. Samons provides ample justification for our founding fathers' distrust of democracy, a form of government they scorned precisely because of their familiarity with classical Athens. How Americans have come to embrace "democracy" in its modern form—and what the positive and (...) negative effects have been—is an important story for all contemporary citizens. Confronting head-on many of the beliefs we hold dear but seldom question, Samons examines Athens's history in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. in order to test the popular idea that majority rule leads to good government. Challenging many basic assumptions about the character and success of Athenian democracy, _What's Wrong with Democracy? _offers fascinating and accessible discussions of topics including the dangers of the popular vote, Athens's acquisitive foreign policy, the tendency of the state to overspend, the place of religion in Athenian society, and more. Sure to generate controversy, Samons's bold and iconoclastic book finds that democracy has begun to function like an unacknowledged religion in our culture, immune from criticism and dissent, and he asks that we remember the Athenian example and begin to question our uncritical worship of democratic values such as freedom, choice, and diversity. (shrink)

Contract is the dominant model for political philosophy's understanding of government grounded on the consent of the governed. However, there are at least five disabilities attached to classical social contract theory: the grounding contract never actually occurred; its provisions are vague and contestable; the stringency of the obligation thereby established is dubious; trans-generational consent is questionable; interpretive methods for giving effect to the contract are ill-specified. By contrast, the biblical story of the covenant Israel embraces at Sinai is shown to (...) be more adequately attentive to each of these five desiderata. The essay then focuses on the U.S. Constitution, arguing that in many ways it is more reflective of covenantal legitimating themes than those of social contract. The result is a promisingly different mode of understanding government by the consent of the governed. (shrink)

In this essay Loren Lomasky wryly proposes that the views of Rawls and Nozick might not be as radically divergent as is conventionally supposed. To demonstrate this proposition, Lomasky invents “Twin Harvard” counterparts of Rawls and Nozick. The twist is that Twin Rawls turns out to be a leading libertarian theorist while Twin Nozick endorses a regime of sweeping redistribution. In each case the position follows from familiar elements in the theories of their respective, real-world counterparts. Lomasky concludes that (...) Twin Rawls actually makes better use of familiar Rawlsian themes-such as the veil of ignorance, strains of commitment, and the priority of liberty-than does Rawls himself. Moreover, Rawls's own attempts at combating libertarianism are seen to be weak, sometimes embarrassingly so. Libertarianism is a specter that he devoutly wishes to exorcize, but cannot. Conversely, the rejection of libertarianism by Twin Nozick (and Nozick?) is striking but shallow. Footnotesa A draft of this essay was prepared while I was enjoying a residential fellowship from the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, Charles Sturt University, in Canberra, Australia. I have benefited from discussions following talks at the Social and Political Theory program seminar at the Australian National University and the Harvard College Department of Government. (shrink)

This book presents the foundations of a liberal individualistic theory of rights, and explains what rights we have and do not have, why we have them, who is and who is not a holder of rights, and the place of rights within the overall structure of morality. The author argues for the moral importance of individual commitments to 'projects', and demonstrates the implications of this for a variety of problems and issues.

In this article I defend John Dewey's use of the concept of "culture" in light of his anthropological sources and suggest that this cultural turn has much to teach contemporary scholars. Contrary to critics, I argue that Dewey's reconstructive aims are indeed well served by "culture" as a term for the complex set of symbolic and material resources shaping habit. Common misreadings of Dewey could be avoided by a better understanding of this anthropological appropriation; moreover, Dewey's emphasis on culture should (...) caution neuropragmatists against reductively scientistic models of human experience. I conclude, finally, with a call for democratic theorists today to engage with Dewey's later, anthropologically-informed writings. (shrink)

This article considers the ways in which a series of artworks by French artist Jean-Baptiste Greuze focus on the father’s ethical education of his male children, reading these as a close visualization of the pedagogical theories of Rousseau. Through paintings that contemplate family life, religious sentiment, filial piety, obedience versus disobedience, illness, and death, Greuze’s images of male youth coalesce with the ethics promoted in Rousseau’s novel Emile—stressing in particular the compassion and good conscience that a boy should develop under (...) the guidance of his father to become a man of virtue. In so doing, the artist responds to some of the key historic issues and social beliefs affecting male youth during his era: the necessity of apprenticed boys to leave home; an idealization of country living and farming as the best occupation for the adult male; and an overwhelming concern, widespread during this heightened period of warfare and unrest preceding the French Revolution, that young men go astray when they become soldiers. (shrink)

Varied forms of mobility are rapidly transforming communities across the world. In Africa’s cities and urban peripheries, the results of human movements include ever more diverse sets of new arrivals living alongside longer-term residents as they seek protection, profit, and passage elsewhere. Some move on and others return home, while still others shift within in search of new opportunities or security. In the absence of muscular state institutions or dominant cultural norms, these areas have become estuarial zones in which varied (...) communities of convenience are taking shape. Unlike well-documented urban gateways or ghettos, these communities range from radical forms of exclusion to remarkable modes of accommodation that enable people to extract usufruct rights: to live in but not become fully part of the cities they occupy. Using examples from Maputo, Johannesburg, and Nairobi, this article explores the nature of these estuaries in ways that challenge the conceptual foundations typically informing debates over migrant rights, integration, and the boundaries of belonging. This means eroding clear distinctions between hosts and guests along with a call to reevaluate the relative importance of state institutions and policies. Most fundamentally, it questions new residents’ interests in localized political and social recognition and participation. The article concludes by suggesting the need to reconsider the forms and scale of community through which the newly urbanized claim rights and the nature of the rights they desire. (shrink)

In his Dialogues and Natural Religion, David Hume offered an inductive argument claiming that the observed mixture of good and evil in the world inductively justifies belief in indifferent first causes. The existence of a benevolent, omniscient God is rejected because it is much less probable. I show that a more comprehensive analysis of Hume’s argument applying Bayes’s Theorem indicates that if the good in our world greatly outweighs the evil, theists can then claim the inductive evidence actually provides confirmation (...) for classical theism. I provide some reasons for believing that good greatly exceeds evil. Views that good modestly exceeds evil or is balanced by evil are also considered. (shrink)

Transgender and gender expansive (TGE) youth often seek a variety of gender-affirming healthcare services, including pubertal suppression and hormone therapy requiring that TGE youth and their parents participate in informed consent and decision making. While youth must demonstrate the ability to understand and appreciate treatment options, risks, benefits, and alternatives as well as make and express a treatment choice, standardized approaches to assess the capacity of TGE youth to consent or assent in clinical practice are not routinely used. This scoping (...) review identified the currently available data regarding adolescent capacity to consent to gender-affirming medical treatments. Articles relevant to assessing adolescent capacity for clinical decision-making were identified using OVID Medline, Web of Science, and PubMed. Articles were reviewed and thematically analyzed. Eight relevant articles were identified using three tools for measuring adolescent clinical decision-making capacity: Measure of Understanding, Measure of Competence, and MacArthur Competence Assessment Tool (MacCAT). These studies explored hypothetical treatment decisions, mental health treatment decisions, HIV treatment decisions, genetic testing decisions, and gender-affirming medical decisions. Only one study specifically examines the capacity of TGE youth to consent to medical treatments. Age was correlated with capacity in most, but not all studies. Other studies found cognitive measures (IQ, literacy, numeracy) may impact important aspects of capacity (understanding and reasoning). For clinicians caring for TGE youth, tools such as the MacArthur Competence Assessment Tool for Treatment (MacCAT-T) may prove useful, in conjunction with consideration of youth developmental abilities and utilization of shared decision-making practices. A standardized, collaborative approach to assessing TGE youth capacity would benefit TGE youth and their parents, and allow clinicians to more easily resolve ethical concerns. (shrink)

Kant's progressive philosophy of history is an integral aspect of his critical system, yet it is often ignored or even treated as an embarrassment by contemporary scholars. In this article, I defend Kant and argue for the continuing relevance of his regulative assumption of historical progress. I suggest, furthermore, that the first-person stance of practical belief exemplified in Kant's conception of hope offers new resources for thinking about the relationship between the ideal and the real in political theory.