This paper surveys the current philosophical discussion of the ethics of risk imposition, placing it in the context of relevant work in psychology, economics and social theory. The central philosophical problem starts from the observation that it is not practically possible to assign people individual rights not to be exposed to risk, as virtually all activity imposes some risk on others. This is the ‘problem of paralysis’. However, the obvious alternative theory that exposure to risk is justified when its total (...) benefits exceed its total costs faces the standard distributional challenges of consequentialism. Forms of contractualism have been proposed as a solution, but how exactly such theories can be formulated remains problematic, especially when confronted with the difficult cases of mass, novel, risk such as climate change. (shrink)

This paper extends previous attempts at understanding the nature of organizational integrity and its increasingly important role for companies which, after all, bear a moral and societal responsibility. Interpretations of organizational integrity in business ethics literature incorporate aspects ranging from the behavior of managers and employees to corporate structures and incentive systems. We argue that virtue ethics builds an indispensable framework for understanding the origin of the concept of integrity and transfer these findings to an organizational level. Hence, we first (...) define organizational integrity, and second operationalize it in a closed three-step process, consisting of morally sound corporate commitments, their transparent institutionalization within the company, and their implementation into actions. We consider the main goal of organizational integrity to be of a preventative investment nature. Organizational integrity is a company investment that translates into avoiding fines for potential violations of the law or ethical missteps, as well as an investment in the company’s reputation. In turn, organizational integrity can protect a company from disruptions that can threaten its existence. Defining and operationalizing the concept of organizational integrity provides the foundation for future scientific research and the basis for developing practical guidance for organizations and managers. (shrink)

Kendall Walton’s project in ‘Categories of Art’ (1970) is to answer two questions. First, does the history of an artwork’s production determine its aesthetic properties? Second, how – if at all – should knowledge of the history of a work’s production influence our aesthetic judgments of its properties? While his answer to the first has been clearly understood, his answer to the second less so. Contrary to how many have interpreted Walton, such knowledge is not necessary for making aesthetic judgments; (...) perceiving an artwork as belonging to a (correct) category of art requires no art-historical knowledge whatsoever. Moreover, contextualist attempts to incorporate art-historical knowledge via the mechanism of cognitive penetration are incompatible with Walton’s claim that categories of art must be perceptually distinguishable. Here I propose a way of elaborating Walton’s view that avoids this difficulty and reconciles contextualism with aesthetic perception, the view that we perceive aesthetic properties. (shrink)

What would political thought look like without the foundation of ethics? Drawing on the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy, Madeleine Fagan puts forward a radical and far-reaching refusal of foundational ethics. She proposes that politics isn't built on ethics, where the two are separate things: politics and ethics are actually inseparable. The 'ethical' should not be understood as a label; it does not mean 'good' or it is not an evaluation or guide. Rather, both the (...) ethical and the political are descriptions of the context in which we find ourselves. Fagan shows us how it has become necessary to rethink the relationship between ethics and politics, based on how we practice both. In doing so, she overturns a series of common assumptions about poststructuralist ethics. It brings together an exploration of the ethical and political thought of Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy for the first time. It provides an advanced introduction to poststructuralist ethical thought in politics and international relations. It focuses on the practical political implications of poststructuralist thought. (shrink)

Perceptual learning is an enduring change in the perceptual system – and our resulting perceptions – due to practice or repeated exposure to a perceptual stimulus. It is involved in the acquisition of perceptual expertise: the ability to make rapid and reliable high-level categorizations of objects unavailable to novices. Attentional weighting is one process by which perceptual learning occurs. Advancing our understanding of this process is of particular importance for understanding what is learned in perceptual learning. Attentional weighting seems to (...) favour the hypothesis that what experts learn is simply to better direct their attention to elements of the stimulus relevant to making post-perceptual categorizations. Here I argue against this hypothesis. Attentional weighting is an integral component of the process that allows experts to come to represent high-level properties in perceptual experience. (shrink)

Does the scope of beliefs that people can form on the basis of perception remain fixed, or can it be amplified with learning? The answer to this question is important for our understanding of why and when we ought to trust experts, and also for assessing the plausibility of epistemic foundationalism. The empirical study of perceptual expertise suggests that experts can indeed enrich their perceptual experiences through learning. Yet this does not settle the epistemic status of their beliefs. One might (...) hold that the background knowledge of experts is the cause of their enriched perceptual experience – what is known as cognitive permeation – and so their subsequent beliefs are only mediately justified because they are epistemically dependent on this background knowledge. I argue against this view. Perceptual expertise is not the result of cognitive permeation but is rather the result of perceptual learning, and perceptual learning does not involve cognition in a way that entails cognitive permeation. Perceptual expertise thus provides a means of widening the scope of the immediately justified beliefs that experts can form. (shrink)

The acquaintance debate in aesthetics has been traditionally divided between pessimists, who argue that testimony does not provide others with aesthetic knowledge of artworks, and optimists, who hold that acquaintance with an artwork is not a necessary precondition for acquiring aesthetic knowledge. In this paper I propose a reconciliationist solution to the acquaintance debate: while aesthetic knowledge can be had via testimony, aesthetic judgment requires acquaintance with the artwork. I develop this solution by situating it within a virtue aesthetics framework (...) based on Ernest Sosa's virtue epistemology. I go on to apply the solution to the debates on moral testimony and expert testimony. An interesting variant on Gettier cases emerges: cases in which subjects have knowledge, but it has been formed by the wrong competence. (shrink)

While the view that we perceive aesthetic properties may seem intuitive, it has received little in the way of explicit defence. It also gives rise to a puzzle. The first strand of this puzzle is that we often cannot perceive aesthetic properties of artworks without training, yet much aesthetic training involves the acquisition of knowledge, such as when an artwork was made, and by whom. How, if at all, can this knowledge affect our perception of an artwork’s aesthetic properties? The (...) second strand of the puzzle arises when we widen the scope of aesthetic experience. The very same aesthetic properties that seem to require training for their perception in artworks do not appear to require training to perceive in objects of everyday aesthetic appreciation and natural phenomena. In this paper I argue that a prominent extant attempt to explain how training is compatible with aesthetic perception—cognitive permeation—is an inadequate solution. I also develop a positive view of aesthetic perception that provides a unified solution to both strands of the puzzle. (shrink)

Emmanuel Levinas is variously used to provide a conceptualization of ethics from which to deduce an ethical politics, an account of the movement from ethics to politics or an exhortation to continually interrupt politics in the name of ethics. What all these approaches share is a reading of Levinas where ethics and politics are separated and ethics is prioritized. My argument in this article is that if the concept of the Third is given due weight in Levinas's work then this (...) separation and prioritization is untenable. The reading advanced foregrounds the Third and in doing so demonstrates that the unproblematized ‘ethics’ often drawn from Levinas is more complex than might initially appear. I argue that if the Third is taken seriously then Levinas's work leads to a requirement to think in terms of the ethico-political, so complicating any attempt to deduce politics from ethics which draws on this. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that predictive processing (PP) theory cannot account for the phenomenon of affect-biased attention prioritized attention to stimuli that are affectively salient because of their associations with reward or punishment. Specifically, the PP hypothesis that selective attention can be analyzed in terms of the optimization of precision expectations cannot accommodate affect-biased attention; affectively salient stimuli can capture our attention even when precision expectations are low. We review the prospects of three recent attempts to accommodate affect with (...) tools internal to PP theory: Miller and Clark’s (2018) embodied inference; Seth’s (2013) interoceptive inference; and Joffily and Coricelli’s (2013) rate of change of free energy. In each case we argue that the account does not resolve the challenge from affect-biased attention. For this reason, we conclude that prediction error minimization is not sufficient to explain all mental phenomena, contrary to the claim that the PP framework provides a unified theory of all mental phenomena or the brain ‘s cognitive functioning. Nevertheless, we suggest that empirical investigation of the interaction between affective salience and precision expectations should prove helpful in understanding the limits of PP theory, and may provide new directions for the application of a Bayesian perspective to perception. (shrink)

What kind of moral principle could be sufficiently restrictive to avoid the kind of large-scale risks that have resulted in catastrophe in the past, while at the same time not be so restrictive as to halt desirable progress? Is there such a principle that is not merely a precautionary principle, but one that could be based on firm moral grounds? In this article, I set out to explore a simple idea: might it be the case that reparability could serve as (...) a moral constraint against risky policy decisions? The idea is simple, but comes in two forms. First, that it is morally wrong to impose a risk for harm that is, in principle, irreparable, such that it would bring about a permanent loss of a kind qua kind. Second, that it is morally wrong to impose a risk for a reparable (but not compensable) harm that exceeds what realistically could be repaired. I set out here to do two things. First, I describe the moral problem to be addressed for any principle-guiding decisions about risk. A central claim in this article is that risk decisions are epistemically impaired decisions, and that we must, alongside outcome uncertainty, also take both epistemic uncertainty and moral uncertainty into account. Second, I introduce the idea of reparability as a moral constraint in the form of two versions of the Reparability Principle. Such a principle, I argue, could have some interesting advantages that seem both morally intuitive and that come with some advantages against some of the epistemic challenges posed by risk impositions. (shrink)

The article argues against the common notion ofdisciplinary medical traditions, i.e. Obstetrics, asmacro-structures that quite unilinearily structure thepractices associated with the discipline. It shows that the various existences of Obstetrics, their relations with practices and vice versa, the entities these obstetrical practices render present and related, and the ways they are connected to experiences, are more complex than the unilinear model suggests. What allows participants to go from one topos to another – from Obstetrics to practice, from practice to politics, (...) from politics to experience – is not self-evidently induced by Obstetrics, but needs to be studied as a surprising range of passages that connect (or don't). Techniques and devices to supervise the delivery, to render present the fetus during pregnancy, and to monitoring birth, are described in order to show that such techniques acquire different roles in connecting and creating Obstetrics as a system andobstetrical practices. (shrink)

This article explores the often-disparate commitments the chaplain has made to both the institutional church as well as the hospital system through the lens of the baptismal rite. As baptism is primarily a religious act meant to initiate new members into the Christian faith and a specific community, the chaplain must grapple with the meaning of baptism in the hospital system, a place of crisis and transient community. It is the numinous presence that binds the chaplain’s disparate commitments together in (...) the liminal space between the clinical and ecclesial within which the chaplain exists. The numinous expands the boundaries of institutions often at odds. The chaplain finds meaning and purpose by bearing witness and remaining committed to this numinous presence that binds. (shrink)

This dissertation is a philosophical contribution to the theories on trust and on risk communication. The importance of trust in risk communication has been argued for and empirically studied since the 80s. However, there is little agreement on the notion of trust and the precise function of trust. This thesis sets out to study both aspects from a philosophical point of view. The dissertation consists of five essays and an introduction. Essay I is a comment on risk perception theory and (...) the psychometric model in particular. The essay argues that sometimes individuals take risks simply because they are in a vulnerable position and have no other choice. Four factors are identified as crucial in risks from vulnerability: poor outset conditions, lack of reasonable options, hope and liability to disinformation. Essay II addresses the democratic approach to risk communication and the ideal of risk communication as a dialogue between more or less equal stakeholders. The essay develops a typology of different risk communication practices and influence distributions and concludes that the form of risk communication most commonly referred to in the literature is of the most imbalanced kind where all three types of influence falls to the same party. Essay III argues that trust can be understood as comfortable defocusing. Trust as comfortable defocusing means that when a person trusts, he or she is comfortable with letting certain things be in the hands or in the control of the trusted other. Departing from this idea a definition of trust is proposed consisting of three elements: the truster’s comfortable defocusing from the trusted person’s part of caring for X, based on a belief about the trusted person’s care for X, concerning something of concern to the truster. Essay IV explores the concept of trustworthiness and under which conditions trust can be betrayed in a morally justified way. It is argued that two aspects are essential for every reasonable notion of trustworthiness: reliability in terms of commitment to trust and predictability in terms of compliance with norms. In order to be untrustworthy in a morally justified way two major conditions need to be fulfilled: first, what is expected from the trustee needs to be either immoral or part of an ongoing immoral or unjust relationship between truster and trustee and, secondly, the trustee must not be in a position to explicitly reject trust. Essay V examines two of the most employed distinctions within the trust literature, that of trust/confidence and of trust/reliance. These distinctions are evaluated against a set of five criteria. It is argued that both these distinctions are employed to cover several distinguishing properties, thus adding to conceptual confusion. (shrink)

People are shocked to discover the desperate conditions facing young women in the so-called « sensitive » neighborhoods; but this very real state of affairs is only a logical consequence of failing public policies, which display little concern for supporting egalitarian relations between the sexes. Under close analysis, the dynamics of cooperation and autonomy among immigrant women in the suburbs proves to be interethnic, innovative, and oriented toward the conquest of public space. Urban policy ignores these women. So who do (...) they threaten? (shrink)

Data visualization researchers and designers have explored a range of approaches to ensure that non-expert audiences understand and derive value from their work. Using anthropomorphized data graphics—or anthropographics—is one strategy that can help create a connection between data and audiences. Anthropographics have been defined as “visualizations that represent data about people in a way that is intended to promote prosocial feelings or prosocial behavior.” However, during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, anthropographics were used in data visualizations that had an expanded range of (...) rhetorical goals beyond promoting prosocial feelings and behavior—for instance, informing people about the pandemic, persuading them to adopt certain behaviors, or memorializing those killed by the virus. In particular, anthropographics were used in visualized simulations to model possible futures for audiences, showing the spread and impact of the virus in various scenarios. These simulations used anthropomorphizing strategies in text as well as in graphics, along with interactive options that enabled audiences to explore personal connections with the data. As demonstrated through a close reading of several of these COVID-19 simulations, anthropographics can be viewed holistically as a design strategy that incorporates text and interactivity as well as graphical marks in representing data. Findings from this analysis suggest several additions to the design space for anthropographics. (shrink)

Perceptual learning is commonly understood as conferring some benefit to the learner, such as allowing for the extraction of more information from the environment. However, perceptual learning can be biased in several different ways, some of which do not appear to provide such a benefit. Here we outline a systematic framework for thinking about bias in perceptual learning and discuss how several cases fit into this framework. We argue these biases are compatible with an understanding in which perceptual learning is (...) beneficial, but that its benefits are tied to both a person's narrow interests and the training environment or domain, and so if there are changes to either of these, then benefits can turn into liabilities, though these are often temporary. (shrink)

_The Tender Bud_ is the moving story of one woman's journey through breast cancer. The woman in question happens to be a senior psychiatrist of broad learning and deep clinical insight. Madeleine Meldin weathered the crisis of breast cancer without the support of an immediate family and in the context of ongoing professional burdens. This book is the journal that she wrote for herself as an aid to coping with the personal upheaval of diagnosis, mastectomy, and the aftermath of (...) treatment. It was written while these events unfolded. With arresting candor, Meldin chronicles her emotions at each stage of her odyssey - the recurrent cycles of denial, anxiety, and despair; the conflicting feelings engendered by her physicians, surgeons, and the treatment "establishment" in general; her struggle between resignation and emergent hopefulness. Unique to Meldin's account is her ongoing juxtaposition of the different dimensions of "having cancer." Simply and gracefully, she chronicles the everyday dimension of cancer, with its obligation to proceed maturely and dispassionately with medical and surgical care, to meet one's professional responsibilities, to maintain the appearances that allow one to carry on with one's life. Meldin excels at showing how even the most mundane experiences of everyday life - conversations with friends and colleagues, the selection of clothes, a trip to the hairdresser - became saturated with her illness, with her sense of herself as a cancer patient. (shrink)

It has recently become popular to suggest that cognition can be explained as a process of Bayesian prediction error minimization. Some advocates of this view propose that attention should be understood as the optimization of expected precisions in the prediction-error signal (Clark, 2013, 2016; Feldman & Friston, 2010; Hohwy, 2012, 2013). This proposal successfully accounts for several attention-related phenomena. We claim that it cannot account for all of them, since there are certain forms of voluntary attention that it cannot accommodate. (...) We therefore suggest that, although the theory of Bayesian prediction error minimization introduces some powerful tools for the explanation of mental phenomena, its advocates have been wrong to claim that Bayesian prediction error minimization is ‘all the brain ever does’. (shrink)

This article examines motifs of falling, recoiling, and turning across Chester Himes’ oeuvre as figurations of Black susceptibility to racial violence. These images reference and reconstruct an event from Himes’ early adulthood: his catastrophic fall down an elevator shaft. Taking a psychoanalytically oriented approach, I analyze the metonymic connections between these motifs, rather than reading them in their chronological order, using Jean Laplanche’s theory of après-coup. I argue that the recursive quality of these images in Himes’ work is not merely (...) an unconscious repetition or conscious working through of a traumatic biographical event but part of an endeavor to imagine different ways to inhabit and survive the structural trauma of Jim Crow America. (shrink)

Because no single person or group holds knowledge about all aspects of research, mechanisms are needed to support knowledge exchange and engagement. Expertise in the research setting necessarily includes scientific and methodological expertise, but also expertise gained through the experience of participating in research and/or being a recipient of research outcomes. Engagement is, by its nature, reciprocal and relational: the process of engaging research participants, patients, citizens and others brings them closer to the research but also brings the research closer (...) to them. When translating research into practice, engaging the public and other stakeholders is explicitly intended to make the outcomes of translation relevant to its constituency of users. In practice, engagement faces numerous challenges and is often time-consuming, expensive and ‘thorny’ work. We explore the epistemic and ontological considerations and implications of four common critiques of engagement methodologies that contest: representativeness, communication and articulation, impacts and outcome, and democracy. The ECOUTER methodology addresses problems of representation and epistemic foundationalism using a methodology that asks, “How could it be otherwise?” ECOUTER affords the possibility of engagement where spatial and temporal constraints are present, relying on saturation as a method of ‘keeping open’ the possible considerations that might emerge and including reflexive use of qualitative analytic methods. This paper describes the ECOUTER process, focusing on one worked example and detailing lessons learned from four other pilots. ECOUTER uses mind-mapping techniques to ‘open up’ engagement, iteratively and organically. ECOUTER aims to balance the breadth, accessibility and user-determination of the scope of engagement. An ECOUTER exercise comprises four stages: engagement and knowledge exchange; analysis of mindmap contributions; development of a conceptual schema ; and feedback, refinement and development of recommendations. ECOUTER refuses fixed truths but also refuses a fixed nature. Its promise lies in its flexibility, adaptability and openness. ECOUTER will be formed and re-formed by the needs and creativity of those who use it. (shrink)

Organizational integrity is a key concept with and through which a company can assume its responsibility for ethical and societal issues. It is a basic premise for sustainable corporate success, as ethical risks ultimately become economic risks for a company. Recent research shows the potential of integrity‐based governance models to reduce corporate risks and to improve business performance. However, companies are not yet able to assess nor evaluate their level of organizational integrity in a sound and systematic way. We aim (...) to develop a theoretical model as a basis for the measurement of organizational integrity by conceptualizing the construct and sizing the theoretical model's scope. We suggest that the theoretical model follows a holistic approach and involves three types of dimensions: prerequisite dimensions, independent dimensions, and dependent dimensions. The organizational integrity triad—consisting of active commitments to self‐imposed norms and principles, their transparent institutionalization into corporate processes and structures, and their implementation into action—plays a key role in this context. (shrink)

Ontological accounts of shame claim that the emotion has to do with our basic human vulnerability: on this view, one is ashamed over having had this vulnerability exposed before others. Against this view, I argue that it is not our vulnerable dependency on others itself which causes us to feel ashamed, but our rejection in the face of such vulnerability. Shame is not the result of simply being looked at, then, but of being looked at and not being seen. In (...) this sense, the shame we do feel over being vulnerable before, and dependent on, others is not a necessary part of human relations, but a sign that something has gone wrong within them; it is personal, not ontological. (shrink)

Les collectifs constitués sur l'internet interviennent-ils dans la cité ? Existe-t-il des mécanismes qui permettent de passer des interactions électroniques à des interventions perçues comme émanant d'un groupe ? En prenant comme terrain d'étude des listes de discussion par mail sur des thématiques liées à la santé et au handicap, on verra émerger trois niveaux d'action collective : les actions individuelles qui visent à des formes de reconnaissance collective ; l'agrégation d'actions individuelles, en particulier à travers des outils de représentation (...) propres à chaque liste ; la structuration en collectifs actifs dans l'espace politique. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the central relation between publicity, linguistic meaning, and the mental in the light of philosophical issues concerning intentionality. The concept of intentionality provides a way to articulate how the determinants of linguistic meaning are both public and private. A strength of this approach is that it accommodates desiderata of explaining compositionality and successful communication that initially seemed at odds with each other. A further benefit is that thinking about the case of linguistic meaning can help re-focus our (...) understanding of the metaphysical status of the intentional objects of our thoughts. (shrink)

This study bases itself in the epistemological and methodological development of a broad and interdisciplinary dialogue where various voices in the form of different domains converse in order to establish an integrated whole. The research contributes to the actual corporative question regarding spirituality in the workplace, specifically aimed at the individual in the middle-career phase. This phase is characterised as a re-evaluation period aimed at personal and professional growth. A shift in emphasis to the meaning and sense of work is (...) linked to spiritual intelligence as spirituality can be described and understood as a type of intelligence. The study shows that the middle-career experience provides opportunity for an altered future view. Lifestyle coaching serves as facilitating process and offers guidance in answering existential questions which are included in the spiritual. The probable outcome promises to add meaning as a manifesting component in a dynamic and transforming life strategy. (shrink)

This thesis is a philosophical contribution to the theories on risk communication. The topic of risk communication is approached from several different angles, but with a normative focus on equality and vulnerability. Essay I is a comment on risk perception theory and the psychometric model in particular. In risk perception research individual risk taking is described as either a result of valuing the benefits from risk taking or a failure of comprehending the severity or probability of risks. The essay argues (...) that sometimes individuals take risks simply because they are in a vulnerable position and have no other choice. Four factors are identified as crucial in risks from vulnerability: poor outset conditions, lack of reasonable options, hope and liability to disinformation. Essay II addresses the democratic approach to risk communication and the ideal of risk communication as a dialogue between more or less equal stakeholders. The Essay argues that even the more innovative and dialogue oriented approaches to risk communication are unequal. This is often blurred by the confusion between the described ideal and the description of these newer approaches. This inequality is analysed in a three-fold way: influence over the communication process; influence over and access to information; and influence over risk decisions. The Essay develops a typology of different risk communication practices and influence distributions and concludes that the form of risk communication most commonly referred in the literature is the most imbalanced kind where all three types of influence falls to the same party. Essay III explores the concept of trust, an often-mentioned objective for risk communication. The concept of trust is analyzed from previous philosophical approaches, and the idea of trust as comfortable defocusing is introduced. It is argued that not only the gains for the trustee but also the gains and risks for the truster, generally and in the case from risk communication, can be explained by this notion. It is concluded that public trust for institutions or organizations need not be framed on an individual level. Instead, the vulnerability of trusting can be counter-acted by a delegation of different stances, including both control and trust, among different individuals and institutions in society. (shrink)

This article takes as its point of departure unexpected similarities in the ways that the experimental educator, writer and filmmaker Fernand Deligny and Jean-Luc Nancy conceptualize community. Deligny is remembered for his alternative community for non-speaking children with autism, established in the Cévennes in 1967 and founded on the absence of language and relationality as it is commonly understood. This article probes the paradox that in this community we find a rapprochement with Nancy's relational ontology. Drawing on Deligny's theoretical responses (...) to the dynamics he witnessed and the cartographical methods employed to trasce the movements of the children as they roamed, and placing these in dialogue with Nancy's texts on community through the decades, I suggest a kinship between the two thinkers which opens onto broader questions about the relationship between theories and practices of community. (shrink)

This article draws on Claude Lévi-Strauss and Michel de Certeau’s theorizations of bricolage in order to explore Bernard Stiegler’s philosophical practice. Taking as its point of departure the elements of intellectual biography provided by Stiegler in Acting Out (2009), it explores his (re)deployment of existing philosophical concepts and the sedimentary nature of his own thought. The article then moves to consider the presence of concepts and practices of mystagogy in Taking Care of Youth and the Generations (2010), arguing that these (...) are a restaging of the dynamics of Acting Out on a collective, rather than an individual scale. Ultimately, the article turns to Stiegler’s late aesthetic writing to explore how his theorization of the roles of amateur and artist might point us towards the lineaments of his unfinished “mystagogy.”. (shrink)