In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Best Love of the Child: Being Loved and Being Taught to Love as the First Human Right ed. by Timothy P. JacksonMary M. Doyle RocheReview of The Best Love of the Child: Being Loved and Being Taught to Love as the First Human Right EDITED TIMOTHY P. JACKSON Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011. 416 pp. $28.00With The Best Love of the Child, Eerdmans adds to an already (...) impressive roster of books on children and families. While previous contributions to the field have challenged the appropriateness of rights in addressing the needs of children, Best Love explores the “best interest” standard that is commonly used by courts and international bodies to adjudicate cases involving children. The book’s fundamental claim is that what is “best” for children involves being loved and being taught to love. Although the essays in this volume acknowledge that the primary locus for the love and care of children is the family, they also engage other contexts including religious communities, courts, and legislative bodies.In a section dealing with social-psychological perspectives on this theme, Peter Benson and Eugene Roehlkepartain make the case that doing the best for children requires shifting from a deficit model that focuses on what children lack to a model that emphasizes their developmental assets. Other chapters in this section highlight the ways parents can pursue the best for children by introducing them to spiritual practices rooted in love for God and compassion [End Page 231] toward others, and by providing them with a narrative-rich environment that deepens bonds between adults and children.A section on historical perspectives continues this trajectory by highlighting the vocations of children from the late thirteenth century on to the early modern period. In his concluding essay in this section, Charles Reid links historical and contemporary concerns by focusing on the right to life and its implications for analyses of war and healthcare access.In a section on philosophical and theological perspectives, Cynthia Willett challenges liberal understandings of rights in view of the experiences of children and argues for an approach that recognizes a central paradox of human freedom: that relationships of interdependence do not weaken freedom but rather enhance it. This paves the way for developing a sense of collective responsibility for children based on shared commitments to justice and solidarity that reach beyond the privatized family. Richard Osmer tackles the concept of original sin in order to advance a vision of a missional church in which congregations work with families to encourage authoritative—rather than authoritarian—styles of parenting that model mutual forgiveness. Marcia Bunge’s contribution is the most practical, offering a list of practices for children, families, and congregations for nurturing children’s vocations.In a concluding section on legal perspectives, Michael Broyde notes that, in the context of custody cases in Jewish law, the primary question is not who loves the child the most but rather who can best meet the child’s needs in an atmosphere of respect. Margaret Brinig and Steven Nock argue that law can, in fact, foster the love of children and the potential children have for becoming loving themselves by promoting family structures that are stable and afforded status in the community. In this way families can model the covenantal relationships of unconditional love in which children thrive. The collection concludes with an essay by Don Browning that emphasizes weaving together love’s affective elements with the very practical activities of caring for children and respecting their emerging selves.By inviting thoughtful reflection on how loving and being loved are central to the well-being of children in families and other institutions, Best Love makes an important contribution to the interdisciplinary field of childhood studies. The book is best suited for graduate students, although the essays by Osmer and Bunge are relevant to pastoral settings. [End Page 232]Mary M. Doyle RocheCollege of the Holy CrossCopyright © 2015 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

What is it for a group to believe something? A summative account assumes that for a group to believe that p most members of the group must believe that p. Accounts of this type are commonly proposed in interpretation of everyday ascriptions of beliefs to groups. I argue that a nonsummative account corresponds better to our unexamined understanding of such ascriptions. In particular I propose what I refer to as the joint acceptance model of group belief. I argue that group (...) beliefs according to the joint acceptance model are important phenomena whose aetiology and development require investigation. There is an analogous phenomenon of social or group preference, which social choice theory tends to ignore. (shrink)

As the hospice movement continues to grow, caregivers are increasingly required to interact with dying patients for longer periods and in more intimate and more meaningful ways. Practical models of competent and compassionate communication and understanding need to be developed to accommodate the changing environment of the patient and caregiver and their relationship. We therefore: examine current death education trends in hospice care and education; and describe the need for a more expansive and transpersonal view, and ways of fulfilling that (...) need. The aware patient and the aware caregiver can learn much during the dying trajectory. We hope that someday the potential for expansiveness during the dying trajectory will be more commonly recognized and accommodated as a doorway to the transpersonal. (shrink)

Fifteen original essays open up a novel area of inquiry: the distinctively ethical dimensions of women's experiences of and in aging. Contributors distinguished in the fields of feminist ethics and the ethics of aging explore assumptions, experiences, practices, and public policies that affect women's well-being and dignity in later life. The book brings to the study of women's aging a reflective dimension missing from the empirical work that has predominated to date. Ethical studies of aging have so far failed to (...) emphasize gender. And feminist ethics has neglected older women, even when emphasizing other dimensions of 'difference.' Finally work on aging in all fields has focused on the elderly, while this volume sees aging as an extended process of negotiating personal and social change. (shrink)

I respond to some questions raised by Frances Kamm with respect to my book Rights and Demands (2018). The book focuses on demand-rights and asks how we accrue them. In other words, how does one accrue the standing to demand an action of someone or rebuke them for non-performance? My response to Kamm emphasizes how I understand “directed duties” in this context. Contrary to the standard practice of rights theorists, I do not start from the assumption that directed duties are (...) constituted by “plain” duties in the context of other factors (about which rights theorists disagree). Rather, I understand my duty to you as the correlative and equivalent of your standing to demand the action in question. I offer a number of further clarifications and conclude by distinguishing the targets of my discussion from other phenomena of interest to moral philosophers, such as complaining and blaming. (shrink)

A feature of David Lewis's account of conventions in his book "Convention" which has received admiring notices from philosophers is his use of the mathematical theory of games. In this paper I point out a number of serious flaws in Lewis's use of game theory. Lewis's basic claim is that conventions cover 'coordination problems'. I show that game-Theoretical analysis tends to establish that coordination problems in Lewis's sense need not underlie conventions.

Critiques of the ‘global’ have, in recent years, concerned the alleged implication of cultural dominance and secondly—and more philosophically—discerned therein foundationalism/essentialism. These charges will be examined. I next turn to the bearing of organizational/faculty matters on our theme, drawing on teaching experience in more than one country. The relocation of philosophy cannot but raise questions about how the subject itself is conceived. In the final section I suggest that the original humanist import of philosophical studies needs recovery, with ‘globality’ examined (...) critically not only over space but across time. This would involve not only due appreciation of argument (for no discipline lacks this) but of language, standpoint and attitude. (shrink)

During the age of colonial expansion, European merchant companies used paper technologies as tools of control. This article analyses a set of tables produced in the 1690s by employees of the Dutch East India Company, as they recorded their daily efforts on a new method of desalinating ocean water. These printed “formulieren” should be viewed not only as a novel extension of the nautical logbook but also as an early phase in the development of questionnaires. Adapted from clerical formularies, these (...) structured tabular records are an early instance of a single-purpose data collection document, one linked with a new piece of technology, for which performance was to be measured daily. These sparse columns allow us to recover the practices of the “watermakers” themselves: some filled out the tables diligently, others gave rough estimates after the fact. Each of these men approached a supposedly standard technology in a different way, allowing us to uncover surprising individualism from within columns of numbers. (shrink)

This analysis summarizes conclusions on an evolutionary model for the origin of moral and religious capacities in the genus Homo. The authors’ published model (2020, Routledge) is now extended to the emergence of nascent theological thinking, augmenting the previous line of theory based on genomics, cognitive science, neuroscience, paleoneurology, cognitive archaeology, ethnography, and modern social science. This analysis concludes that findings support the earliest theological thinking in Homo sapiens, but not in an earlier species, Homo erectus, and clarifies why and (...) when it likely began. Types of anatomy, behavior, neurology, and cognition are presented that support tendencies to frame a structure of religious principles and a set of supernatural figures that early humans would consider right, just, exemplary, and even sacred. Stages of emergent physical, behavioral, and cognitive features are presented in tables. While based on published research results in the sciences, the model is presented here with anticipation of future testing. (shrink)

Tomasello argues in the target article that a sense of moral obligation emerges from the creation of a collaborative “we” motivating us to fulfill our cooperative duties. We suggest that “we” takes many forms, entailing different obligations, depending on the type of the relationship in question. We sketch a framework of such types, functions, and obligations to guide future research in our commentary.

The book compares modern Jewish and Hindu thought through discussing selected writers with reference to common issues treated by them, issues which are still relevant today. The writers are Mahatma Gandhi, Max Nordau, A.D. Gordon, Martin Buber, Sri Aurobindo, Rav Kook and Rabindranath Tagore. The issues include the following: the critique of civilisation, the concept of labour, self-definition vis-a-vis 'east' and 'west', the pursuit of 'realisation' either individually or collectively, the use of evolution as a resource concept, and the critique (...) of nationalism which ran parallel to its pursuit. (shrink)

The Cambridge Analytica–Facebook scandal led to widespread concern over the methods deployed by Cambridge Analytica to target voters through psychographic profiling algorithms, built upon Facebook user data. The scandal ultimately led to a record-breaking $5 billion penalty imposed upon Facebook by the Federal Trade Commission in July 2019. The FTC action, however, has been criticized as failing to adequately address the privacy and other harms emanating from Facebook’s release of approximately 87 million Facebook users’ data, which was exploited without user (...) authorization. This Essay summarizes the FTC’s response to the Cambridge Analytica–Facebook scandal. It concludes that the scandal focuses attention on the need to explore the potential for embedding due process-type inquiries and protections within the enforcement actions by regulatory agencies such as the FTC. These protections are increasingly important in addressing the problem of “black boxing the voter” that is now presented by data- and algorithmic-driven companies such as Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. (shrink)

A striking feature of the life of practical agency is the substantial latitude it includes. One suggestion for how to explain this latitude is that such latitude points to pluralism in the very way that reasons favor: some reasons favor deontically, and other reasons only commend. However, there is a critical question about the comparative lives of such reasons. They presumably admit of different strengths, and are thus capable of ordering options. While one might agree that we have latitude to (...) decline following the direction of a reason that merely commends, it seems that once we face two or more such reasons that offer competing recommendations, only the action supported by the better reason is a candidate for action. Against this challenge, this chapter argues that commendatory reasons have the ability to defend, in the cases we care about, the moral and rational acceptability of doing the less worthy. (shrink)

In addition to its obvious successes within the kinetic theory the ideal gas law and the modeling assumptions associated with it have been used to treat phenomena in domains as diverse as economics and biology. One reason for this is that it is useful to model these systems using aggregates and statistical relationships. The issue I deal with here is the way R. A. Fisher used the model of an ideal gas as a methodological device for examining the causal role (...) of selection in producing variation in Mendelian populations. The model enabled him to create the kind of population where one could measure the effects of selection in a way that could not be done empirically. Consequently we are able to see how the model of an ideal gas was transformed into a biological model that functioned as an instrument for both investigating nature and developing a new theory of genetics. (shrink)

The goal of this pilot study is to investigate expressions of the collective disquiet of people in the first months of Covid-19 pandemic, and to try to understand how they manage covert risk, especially with religion and magic. Four co-authors living in early hot spots of the pandemic speculate on the roles of science, religion, and magic, in the latest global catastrophe. They delve into the consolidation that should be occurring worldwide because of a common, viral enemy, but find little (...) evidence for it. They draw parallels to biblical works, finding evidence of a connection between plague and “social strife.” They explore changes in the purviews of science, religion, and magic, and how and why they have changed, as three systems of covert risk management. They speculate on the coming wave of grief when the world populations finally decide that too many people have died, and they envision cultural changes on the other side of the pandemic, to lifestyles, travel, reverse urbanization, and living and working in smaller communities. Using an unusual approach named “crowd-sourced ethnography”, they conduct un-traditional ethnography and speculate on management of covert risk in their native countries. (shrink)

Economies - and the government institutions that support them - reflect a moral and political choice, a choice we can make and remake. Since the dawn of industrialization and democratization in the late eighteenth century, there has been a succession of political economic frameworks, reflecting changes in technology, knowledge, trade, global connections, political power, and the expansion of citizenship. The challenges of today reveal the need for a new moral political economy that recognizes the politics in political economy. It also (...) requires the redesign of our social, economic, and governing institutions based on assumptions about humans as social beings rather than narrow self-serving individualists. This Element makes some progress toward building a new moral political economy by offering both a theory of change and some principles for institutional design. (shrink)

Since her death in 1986 and the publication of her letters and diaries in 1990, interest in the philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir has never been greater. In this engaging and timely volume, Margaret A. Simons and an international group of philosophers present 16 essays that reveal Beauvoir as one of the century’s most important and influential thinkers. As they set Beauvoir’s work into dialogue with Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Foucault, Levinas, and others, these essays consider questions such as Beauvoir’s (...) philosophical relationship with Sartre; her ethic of the erotic; her views on marriage, motherhood, and female friendship; and her interpretations of oppression and liberation. This book discusses the full range of Beauvoir’s work, including The Second Sex, her unpublished diaries, autobiographical writings, novels, and philosophical essays, and broadens the scope and interpretive context of her unique philosophy. Contributors are Nancy Bauer, Debra Bergoffen, Suzanne Laba Cataldi, Edward Fullbrook, Eva Gothlin, Sara Heinämaa, Laura Hengehold, Stacy Keltner, Michèle Le Doeuff, Ann Murphy, Shannon M. Mussett, Margaret A. Simons, Ursula Tidd, Andrea Veltman, Karen Vintges, Julie Ward, Gail Weiss. (shrink)

The parasol, whatever the conditions of use, ultimately functions as a social symbol as it satisfies no utilitarian need. The operative mechanism of that symbol varies from culture to culture but the parasol is polysemous even at its least complicated, when held by the person to be protected without allusion to foreign social systems and in the context of single-sex usage. For example, as an implement of fashionable feminine attire of over a century ago, the parasol signified the maintenance of (...) a standard of beauty that precluded extended activities out of doors and the delicate constitution of the lady thus protected, both with further implications of ‘good breeding’ and economic inutility; and the wasteful employment of items that must be changed with the costume and discarded before unserviceable to suit the dictates of fashion. Both facets—termed ‘conspicuous leisure’ and ‘conspicuous consumption’ by Veblen—conjointly served to advertise the wealth of the individual man on the basis of whose property such extravagance and non-productive practice could be sustained. (shrink)

For more than sixty years, surgeons have used bioethical strategies to promote patient self‐determination, many of these now collectively described as “informed consent.” Yet the core framework—understanding, risks, benefits, and alternatives—fails to support patients in deliberation about treatment. We find that surgeons translate this framework into an overly complicated technical explanation of disease and treatment and an overly simplified narrative that surgery will “fix” the problem. They omit critical information about the goals and downsides of surgery and present untenable options (...) as a matter of patient choice. We propose a novel framework called “better conversations.” Herein, surgeons provide context about clinical norms, establish the goals of surgery, and comprehensively delineate the downsides of surgery to generate a deliberative space for patients to consider whether surgery is right for them. This paradigm shift meets the standards for informed consent, supports deliberation, and allows patients to anticipate and prepare for the experience of treatment. (shrink)

Because medicine can preserve and restore health and function, it is widely acknowledged as a basic good that a just society owes its members. Yet there is controversy over the scope of what should be provided, to whom, how, when and why. This comprehensive and authoritative book - by well-known philosophers, doctors, lawyers, political scientists, and economists - lays a theoretical foundation for understanding the debate, assesses how health care is distributed in different countries and to various social groups, and (...) analyzes practical issues in constructing a socially just health care system. (shrink)

Dating from her years as a philosophy student at the Sorbonne, this is the 1926-27 diary of the teenager who would become the famous French philosopher, author, and feminist, Simone de Beauvoir. Written years before her first meeting with Jean-Paul Sartre, these diaries reveal previously unknown details about her life and offer critical insights into her early philosophy and literary works. Presented here for the first time in translation and fully annotated, the diary is completed by essays from Barbara Klaw (...) and Margaret A. Simons that address its philosophical, historical, and literary significance. The volume represents an invaluable resource for tracing the development of Beauvoir’s independent thinking and influence on the world. (shrink)

Prandtl's work on the boundary layer theory is an interesting example for illustrating several important issues in philosophy of science such as the relation between theories and models and whether it is possible to distinguish, in a principled way, between pure and applied science. In what follows I discuss several proposals by the symposium participants regarding the interpretation of Prandtl's work and whether it should be characterized as an instance of applied science. My own interpretation of this example (1999) emphasised (...) the degree of autonomy embedded in Prandtl's boundary layer model and the way it became integrated in the larger theoretical context of hydrodynamics. In addition to extending that discussion here I also claim that the characterization of applied science which formed the basis for the symposium does not enable us to successfully distinguish applied science from the general practice of 'applying' basic scientific knowledge in a variety of contexts. (shrink)

This article examines different conceptions of causation and their implications for understanding educational phenomena and conducting educational research. Specifically, I discuss four research designs for pursuing questions about causation in education. Two of these research designs take a variance approach to causation , while the other two take a process approach . The point of the discussion is to illustrate, first, their respective strengths and, second, their necessary interdependence. Ultimately, I argue that just as both hammers and saws are needed (...) to build a good house, both variance and process approaches are needed to build a good understanding of causation in education. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article raises three concerns about Buchanan's argument related to the individualist description of ideology and psychological description of the obstacles to justice, as well as the way in which he separates empirical and normative beliefs, which, the article argues, are much more closely connected in all the examples that he raises. In the end, however, it agrees with Buchanan's central contention concerning the cognitive biases that interfere with progress towards justice, but, it argues, these operate at a more (...) sub‐conscious level than described by Buchanan. (shrink)

scholars often use letter correspondences to uncover missing historical information. For example, while searching for the influential but unacknowledged women in the history of pragmatism, Charlene Haddock Seigfried discovered John Dewey’s letters to Elsie Ripley Clapp. Using these letters, Seigfried defended Clapp’s name as an early pragmatist. Similarly, Joan Smith cited Dewey’s letter to John T. McManis to show that Ella Flagg Young likewise influenced Dewey’s work. More recently, Eduardo Mendieta has defended a different approach to letters, and argues that (...) we should take the letters, diaries, and notebooks of certain philosophers more seriously—not just for the historical or... (shrink)

The concept of knowledge (science) plays a central role in the work of early modern proto-feminist philosopher Gabrielle Suchon. Nevertheless, there has been no comprehensive treatment of her epistemology. This article offers the first extended analysis of Suchon’s theory of knowledge and describes the role of that theory in her arguments for the equality of men and women. I argue that Suchon combines an Aristotelian theory of knowledge and its place in the best life of contemplation with an Augustinian narrative (...) of the Fall to conclude that women's happiness is unjustly compromised as a result of their exclusion from the very institutions that would allow them to accomplish an essentially human task: the reparative labor of learning. I argue further that Suchon’s theory of knowledge deserves greater attention as a distinctive contribution to early modern epistemology. Suchon’s melding of Aristotelian epistemology with an Augustinian narrative of the epistemic consequences of original sin allows her to construe intellectual labor as key to the rectification of the fallen human mind. Through this emphasis on the moral value of intellectual labor, Suchon’s epistemology offers distinctive social and political implications, namely the reform of institutions that exclude women from the process of learning. (shrink)

The authors surveyed hospitals across the country on their policies regarding overlapping surgery, and found large variation between hospitals in how this practice is regulated. Specifically, institutions chose to define “critical portions” in a variety of ways, ultimately affecting not only surgical efficiency but also the autonomy of surgical trainees and patient experiences at these different hospitals.