Justice Stephen J. Field was the champion of a form of liberalism often said to be especially friendly to capitalism, the approach to the Constitution traditionally identified with “Lochnerism,” i.e., a laissez-faire oriented judicial activism. More recently a form of judicial revisionism has arisen, challenging the accepted descriptions of “Lochnerism” and of Field's jurisprudence. This article is an attempt to extend the revisionist approach by arriving at a more satisfactory understanding of the grounding of Field's jurisprudence in the natural rights (...) philosophy. Field, it turns out, orienting around natural rights, was not so unambiguously friendly to capitalism as previous generations of scholars maintained, but his approach is surely friendlier than the constitutional theories that have replaced natural rights since Field's day. (shrink)

The practice of recontact in genomic medicine has the power to help rectify long‐standing inequities in genetic testing. However, if not delivered systematically, recontacting practices also have the potential to reinforce these same inequities. Recontact, which occurs when contact between a clinician and patient is reinitiated after a relationship has ended, is often in search of or in response to updated interpretation or results. Currently, recontact is happening in a patient‐driven and ad hoc manner, undermining its potential to benefit all (...) patients. In this paper, the authors position justice as an additional argument in favor of systematic recontact and an argument against the predominantly patient‐initiated model. They argue that patients from equity‐deserving groups should be early beneficiaries of an emerging responsibility to recontact patients. The authors share illustrative clinical vignettes and propose role‐specific and systems‐level solutions to rightfully position recontact as a tool to promote a more equitable clinical genomics future. (shrink)

Emergent forms of political protest and constitution often provide limit cases for their contemporary theoretical models, and transnational protest movements from Occupy to Democracy in Europe 2025...

William James once said that truth is “the good in the way of belief.” This has the ring of, well, truth. While it may appear as if James’ claim is straightforwardly true, I think that there are at least three different dimensions along which truth can be normatively related to belief. In this paper, I explore these different dimensions of truth’s value, considering both how they differ and how they relate. As we will see, our understanding of these different dimensions (...) of truth’s value can impact our understanding of its nature. I argue that a fuller understanding of the connections between truth’s normative dimensions pushes us in a decidedly pragmatist and pluralist direction—something of which I believe James would approve. (shrink)

An investigation into the way in which information technology has shaped how and what we know, from "Google-knowing" to privacy and social media.

Corporate social responsibility has been intensively discussed in business ethics literature, whereas the social responsibility of private consumers appears to be less researched. However, there is also a growing interest from business ethicists and other scholars in the field of consumer social responsibility. Nevertheless, previous discussions of ConSR reveal the need for a viable conceptual basis for understanding the social responsibility of consumers in an increasingly globalized market economy. Moreover, evolutionary aspects of human morality seem to have been neglected despite (...) the fact that private consumers are undoubtedly human beings. In addition to that, empirical studies suggest that many consumers believe themselves to be responsible but do not act according to their alleged values or attitudes. This raises the question of what deters them from doing so. Therefore, the contribution of this conceptual paper is threefold: we conceptualize ConSR in terms of a combination of a Max Weber-inspired approach with the social connection approach to shared responsibility proposed by Iris Marion Young; shed light on the previously neglected implications of an evolutionarily induced bounded morality for ConSR, and identify potential obstacles to socially responsible consumption, particularly against the backdrop of shared social responsibility and bounded morality. In this latter respect, the paper focuses specifically on the obstacles of low moral intensity, moral stupefaction, informational complexity, and the lack of perceived consumer effectiveness. In sum, the paper advances knowledge in the field of ConSR by using a transdisciplinary, literature-based approach. (shrink)

The status of learning styles theory in educational studies is uncertain as we inhabit the liminal phase between the theory’s death as proclaimed by educational psychologists who avow to have disproven it and whatever afterlife will follow. At this moment, with both past and future in view, that we have an opportunity to reflect on the foundational assumptions of the theory. Engaging in the growing community of Agambenian philosophy of education and the ongoing dialogue around educational potentiality, this article approaches (...) learning styles theory as a paradigm of educational Megarianism. In this frame, the error of the learning styles theorists was not in the construction of a particular typology, but in the metaphysical approach to pedagogy. The reflection upon learning styles as paradigm also contributes a paradigmatic case of educational Megarianism to the discussion of potentiality in Agambenian philosophy of education. (shrink)

This article explores the necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for the recognition of a ground of unlawful discrimination. It is important not only to have a coherent understanding of the currently enumerated grounds, but also to have a theoretical framework that can assist in enumerating new grounds through the open-ended “other status” aspect of many legal frameworks. To that end, this article argues that personal characteristics that are generally morally irrelevant, and that are socially salient in that they carry with (...) them a prevalence of inequality-laden attitudes, amount to necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for recognizing a ground of unlawful discrimination. Other conditions, such as immutability and the presence of relative group disadvantage, will be assessed and dismissed as contingent but not necessary conditions. (shrink)

These essays center around two questions: Does truth have an underlying nature? And if so, what sort of nature does it have?

The purpose of this paper is to explain Hume's account of the way both the scope and the degree of benevolent motivation is limited. I argue that Hume consistently affirms, both in the _Treatise<D> and in the second _Enquiry<D>, (i) that the scope of benevolent motivation is very broad, such that it includes any creature that is conscious and capable of thought, and (ii) that the degree of benevolent motivation is limited, such that a person is naturally inclined to feel (...) benevolence more strongly for one with whom he or she has a 'connexion', e.g., a family member or friend. (shrink)

Evidence-based medicine has always required integration of patient values with ‘best’ clinical evidence. It is widely recognized that scientific practices and discoveries, including those of EBM, are value-laden. But to date, the science of EBM has focused primarily on methods for reducing bias in the evidence, while the role of values in the different aspects of the EBM process has been almost completely ignored.

Pluralism about truth is the view that there is more than one way for a proposition to be true. When taken to imply that there is more than one concept and property of truth, this position faces a number of troubling objections. I argue that we can overcome these objections, and yet retain pluralism's key insight, by taking truth to be a multiply realizable property of propositions.

Michael P. Levine, Tamas Pataki. the case of racism. If one understands racism to be rooted in some underlying psychological structure, then while what is ordinarily called racist behavior may well be indicative of such an underlying structure, ...

Previous reports have demonstrated that the comprehension of sentences describing motion in a particular direction (toward, away, up, or down) is affected by concurrently viewing a stimulus that depicts motion in the same or opposite direction. We report 3 experiments that extend our understanding of the relation between perception and language processing in 2 ways. First, whereas most previous studies of the relation between perception and language processing have focused on visual perception, our data show that sentence processing can be (...) affected by the concurrent processing of auditory stimuli. Second, it is shown that the relation between the processing of auditory stimuli and the processing of sentences depends on whether the sentences are presented in the auditory or visual modality. (shrink)

Contemporary expressivists typically deny that all true judgments must represent reality. Many instead adopt truth minimalism, according to which there is no substantive property of judgments in virtue of which they are true. In this article, I suggest that expressivists would be better suited to adopt truth pluralism, or the view that there is more than one substantive property of judgments in virtue of which judgments are true. My point is not that an expressivism that takes this form is true, (...) but that it more readily accommodates the motivations that typically lead expressivists to their view in the first place. (shrink)

Introduces Christians to the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, equipping them to apply their faith to the complex moral, economic, and political problems of contemporary society.

The compatibility, or lack thereof, between Catholicism and American citizenship is continually raised by Catholic political theorists. With each new political crisis we face as a nation, proponents and opponents trot out their arguments in an attempt to prove that Americanism continues to nourish, or poison, the Body of Christ. This argument has been raging for nearly 200 years, and today an important contributor to this conversation is often overlooked: Orestes Brownson. While in his magnum opus, The American Republic, he (...) spoke eloquently of America’s providential and Catholic mission, in 1870 he confided in Isaac Hecker that he had lost all hope for America and saw her as a corrupting influence on the Church in America. In this essay I explore Brownson as for and against America, showing how his later book, Conversations: Liberalism and the Church, reveals a consistency between his apparently contradictory stances. (shrink)

In The Afterlife of Moses, Steinberg addresses the story of Moses and the Exodus as a foundational myth of politics, of the formation not of a nation but of a political community grounded in universal law. Motivated in part by this recent period of reactionary insurgency in the US, Europe, and Israel, this work of intellectual history articulates the way in which a critique of myths of origin as a principle of democratic government, affect, and citizenship has equal relevance in (...) these places and equal fragility. (shrink)

This paper contributes to the (re-)conceptualisation of responsible innovation by proposing an evolutionary economic approach that focuses on the role of consumers in the innovation process. After a discussion of the philosophical foundations and ethical implications of this approach, which bears an explanatory potential that has not been adequately considered in previous discussions of responsible innovation, we present a first step towards capturing the important but often neglected role of consumers in innovation processes (including responsible innovation): We propose an agent-based (...) model that incorporates a multidimensional space of characteristics in which new products or services are represented by more than the mere aspect of price and quality. Instead, innovations are denoted by a large set of characteristics, including also negative or harmful ones. The model is used to illustrate that consumers’ heterogeneity and bounded rationality – even if considered in a simple manner – indeed play a crucial role in the creation and diffusion of responsible innovation which can and should be used for further work in this field and for possible extensions of the model. (shrink)

In a series of papers written over the last two decades, Terence Horgan has articulated a radical position on truth and metaphysics that he calls contextual semantics. According to Horgan, we can abandon referentialism – or the idea that truth is always and everywhere understood in terms of the referential relations between words and world – while still sensibly believing in a mind-independent world. The centerpiece of contextual semantics is that it allows for some flexibility about truth: statements of different (...) sorts can be true in different ways depending on the degree to which they correspond to the world. In this paper, I explore the consequences of this position.While I believe that contextual semantics has significant advantages, there is a deep tension between Horgan'stolerance of more than one kind of truth and his belief in one type of reality – a tension that threatens to undermine the entire position. (shrink)

In light of the structural dangers of revolutionary change highlighted in the political theory of Giorgio Agamben, this book joins a lively debate in philosophy of education on weak utopianism as an approach that foregrounds and respects the educational potentiality of teachers and students. Utopian moves in education call for revolutionary changes in pedagogical practice in pursuit of a particular vision of the good. Whether grounded in emancipatory politics, technological enthusiasm, or another social movement, utopian moves are seductive in their (...) promise of a better alternative. Weak Utopianism in Education draws together philosophy of education, political theory, scholarship of teaching and learning research, and utopian thought to advocate for a modest and humble approach to change. The theoretical foundation of weak utopianism opens space for educator's personal convictions and teaching philosophies to tinker with their own pedagogical practices. The book creates a common conceptual meeting ground for philosophers and practitioners in education. (shrink)

Some researchers and autistic activists have recently suggested that because some ‘autism-related’ behavioural atypicalities have a function or purpose they may be desirable rather than undesirable. Examples of such behavioural atypicalities include hand-flapping, repeatedly ordering objects (e.g., toys) in rows, and profoundly restricted routines. A common view, as represented in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) IV-TR (APA, 2000), is that many of these behaviours lack adaptive function or purpose, interfere with learning, and constitute the non-social behavioural (...) dysfunctions of those disorders making up the Autism Spectrum. As the DSM IV-TR continues to be the reference source of choice for professionals working with individuals with psychiatric difficulties, its characterization of the Autism Spectrum holds significant sway. We will suggest Extended Mind and Enactive Cognition Theories, which theorize that mind (or cognition) is embodied and environmentally embedded, as coherent conceptual and theoretical spaces within which to investigate the possibility that certain repetitive behaviours exhibited by autistics possess functions or purposes that make them desirable. As lenses through which to re-examine ‘autism-related’ behavioral atypicalities, these theories not only open up explanatory possibilities underdeveloped in the research literature, but also cohere with how some autistics describe their own experience. Our position navigates a middle way between the view of autism as understood in terms of impairment, deficit and dysfunction and one that seeks to de-pathologize the Spectrum. In so doing we seek to contribute to a continuing dialogue between researchers, clinicians and self- or parent advocates. (shrink)

Know-it-All Society is about how we form and maintain our political convictions, and the ways in which political ideologies, human psychology and technology conspire to make our society more dogmatic, less intellectually humble and ultimately less democratic.

This book focuses on some of the most pressing methodological, ethical, and technique-philosophical questions that are connected with the concept of artificial autonomous systems. (Series: Hermeneutics and Anthropology / Hermeneutik und ...

At the heart of this essay lies the problem of Christian universals.Sin-talk is arguably Christian theology’s primary contribution to any account of the human condition. Fashionable or unfashionabl...

According to alethic functionalism, truth is a higher-order multiply realizable property of propositions. After briefly presenting the views main principles and motivations, I defend alethic functionalism from recent criticisms raised against it by Cory Wright. Wright argues that alethic functionalism will collapse either into deflationism or into a view that takes true as simply ambiguous. I reject both claims.