This book contains articles on ignorance in the medical field and where the contributing researchers would like research directed.

Background Unit-based critical care nurse leaders (UBCCNL) play a role in exemplifying ethical leadership, addressing moral distress, and mitigating contributing factors to moral distress on their units. Despite several studies examining the experience of moral distress by bedside nurses, knowledge is limited regarding the UBCCNL’s experience. Research aim The aim of this study was to gain a deeper understanding of the lived experiences of Alabama UBCCNLs regarding how they experience, cope with, and address moral distress. Research design A qualitative descriptive (...) design and inductive thematic analysis guided the investigation. A screening and demographics questionnaire and a semi-structured interview protocol were the tools of data collection. Participant and research context Data were collected from 10 UBCCNLs from seven hospitals across the state of Alabama from February to July 2023. Ethical considerations This study was approved by the Institutional Review Board at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Informed consent was obtained from participants prior to data collection. Findings UBCCNLs experience moral distress frequently due to a variety of systemic and organizational barriers. Feelings of powerlessness tended to precipitate moral distress among UBCCNLs. Despite moral distress resulting in increased advocacy and empathy, UBCCNLs may experience a variety of negative responses resulting from moral distress. UBCCNLs may utilize internal and external mechanisms to cope with and address moral distress. Conclusions The UBCCNL’s experience of moral distress is not dissimilar from bedside staff; albeit, moral distress does occur as a result of the responsibilities of leadership and the associated systemic barriers that UBCCNLs are privier to. When organizations allocate resources for addressing moral distress, they should be convenient to leaders and staff. The UBCCNL perspective should be considered in the development of future moral distress measurement tools and interventions. Future research exploring the relationship between empathy and moral distress among nurse leaders is needed. (shrink)

Moral distress (MD) is well-documented within the nursing literature and occurs when constraints prevent a correct course of action from being implemented. The measured frequency of MD has increased among nurses over recent years, especially since the COVID-19 Pandemic. MD is less understood among nurse leaders than other populations of nurses. A qualitative systematic review was conducted with the aim to synthesize the experiences of MD among nurse leaders. This review involved a search of three databases (Medline, CINAHL, and APA (...) PsychINFO) which resulted in the retrieval of 303 articles. PRISMA review criteria guided authors during the article review and selection process. Following the review, six articles were identified meeting review criteria and quality was assessed using the Critical Appraisal Skills Programme (CASP) Checklist for qualitative studies. No ethical review was required for this systematic review. The six studies included in this review originated from the United States, Brazil, Turkey, and Iran. Leadership roles ranged from unit-based leadership to executive leadership. Assigned quality scores based upon CASP criteria ranged from 6 to 9 (moderate to high quality). Three analytical themes emerged from the synthesis: (1) moral distress is consuming; (2) constrained by the system; and (3) adapt to overcome. The unique contributors of MD among nurse leaders include the leadership role itself and challenges navigating moral situations as they arise. The nurse leader perspective should be considered in the development of future MD interventions. (shrink)

Dominic Smith’s Exceptional Technologies has a specific project, a bridge it is hoping to build, between a philosophy of technology which has become too standardised and a continental tradition tha...

The way health is conceptualized determines the actions taken to protect and promote it and, in turn, the actors responsible for such actions in an increasingly inter-dependent world. This essay presents a brief description of health policies in Peru during the last ten years in order to analyze the implications of paradigms of medical ethics, human rights and quality of care. These paradigms offer distinct ways of formulating, applying and evaluating health policies and understanding the relationship among different actors at (...) various levels. Building upon other detailed analyses of sexual and reproductive health policy in Peru (Coe, 2004; Miranda and Yamin, 2004), as well as critical appraisals of health services models (Gericke, Kurowski, Ranson and Mills, 2005; Krieger, Northridge, Gruskin, Quinn, Kriebel, Davey Smith, Bassett, Rehkopf and Miller, 2003), this article advocates the importance of construing and promoting health as a human right. (shrink)

This is a transcript of Milne's manuscript notes for a talk which he gave to fellow members of the Cambridge University Natural Science Club in his rooms at Trinity College, Cambridge, on February 6, 1922. The notes are deposited in the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Special Collections and Western Manuscripts. The background and essential points of Milne's talk are analysed in the article preceding this one. As far as is known, the text has not hitherto been published. Milne's handwriting (...) is difficult to read, and square brackets [...] denote the addition of a word for clarity of meaning. Meg Weston Smith and Simon Rebsdorf have ventured to fill in some chapter titles just in order to help with the separation of the varying content, hence we have made up all the headlines. All italics correspond to underlined words in the original. The Bergson citations and the Eddington passage at the end of the original text have not been transcribed. (shrink)

Fricker shows that virtue epistemology provides a general epistemological idiom in which these issues can be forcefully discussed.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Caring for Landscapes of Justice in Perilous Settler EnvironmentsMishuana Goemanindians are the "singing remnants" or "graffiti," in the words of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson ("i am graffiti"). The forms this graffiti takes, our inscriptions on the landscape, are as numerous as our Nations, abundant as our ancestors who loved, lived, and passed down knowledge of our lands and histories. "You are the result of the love of thousands," writes Linda (...) Hogan, who beseeches us to listen to the environment surrounding us (159). Deborah Miranda (Coastal Esselen and Chumash) reminds us that we are also the result of violent histories, in her tribal memoir Bad Indians, a book that relishes the tales of her ancestors who resist and act out to survive. This harm, genocide, and settler mapping of worlds also must be attuned to in our surroundings and in "our bodies [that are] bridges over which our descendants cross, spanning unimaginable landscapes of loss" (Miranda 74). Visual cartographic mapping has been part and parcel of the erasure of California Indians, relegated to the small, contained, and past temporal space of a romanticized mission.This paper centers on the NDN Collective's work and the photography of Cara Romero's project Tongvaland and the works of Gabrielino Tongva artist Mercedes Dorame. The setting of these projects is in the sprawling landscape of Los Angeles, or the homelands of the Gabrielino Tongva people, who call it Tovaangar. I will examine the anti-colonial aesthetics and care practices mapped out in the work rather than presenting a "true" Indigenous map or alternative map. Mapping a history of the landscape by creating a "new" narrative or "true" narrative is not enough. As Maori scholar Linda Tuhwi Smith states, "[w]e believe that history is also about justice, that understanding history will enlighten our decisions about the future. Wrong. History is also about power. In fact, history is mostly about power. … [A] thousand accounts of the truth will not alter the fact that indigenous peoples are still marginal [End Page 50] and do not possess the power to transform history into justice" (34). The Gabrielino Tongva, who comprise an estimated 2,300 people, do not possess the population power and cannot access the form of voting or democracy to make the changes needed just by telling their truth. Across California, people know about the raw deal, the embezzlement, the genocide, and the so-called lost treaties. In fact, under Eisenhower, recompense was paid out in small amounts to Tongva families of the dispossessed. Instead, to continue with the words of Smith, "[i]t is also about reconciling and reprioritizing what is really important about the past with what is important about the present" (111). What Romero and the NDN Collective—made up of numerous tribal leaders, scholars, and other artists—did was relay and prioritize how they wanted to be seen in their homelands. These billboards invite us in, in a gift of sharing, or what tribal cultural leader Craig Torres related to me as a spirit of Maxxa, a sharing, gifting, or swapping of knowledge. Dorame's beautiful and critical installations in public art spaces reflect Maxxa—they invite the viewers to think through land from her curious arrangements. As artists, part of their practice is not that of a Western version of a tortured genius but instead is energized by pulling in community and creating a collective practice. They undo settler space together and with us. The cartographic practices of these California Indians' creative arts exemplify communities of care that must be considered when we think through the unmapping of settler terrains. This question requires an approach of radical care. As Hi'ilei Hobart and Tamara Kneese make clear, the notion of care is "inseparable from systemic inequalities and power systems" (Hobart and Kneese 1).The work of the NDN Collective and Dorame counters a settler-based, commercial map of Los Angeles. Indigenous people, relegated by the settler state as expendable and erasable graffiti, confront capitalist and state ordinances at various scales. Rather than understand this as a subjugated positionality, I posit that graffiti is the critique necessary and valuable to understanding interlocking structures of oppression. In the following words of Leanne... (shrink)

When we hope to explain and perhaps vindicate a practice that is internally diverse, philosophy faces a methodological challenge. Such subject matters are likely to have explanatorily basic features that are not necessary conditions. This prompts a move away from analysis to some other kind of philosophical explanation. This paper proposes a paradigm based explanation of one such subject matter: blame. First, a paradigm form of blame is identified—‘Communicative Blame’—where this is understood as a candidate for an explanatorily basic form (...) of blame. Second, its point and purpose in our lives is investigated and found to reside in its power to increase the alignment of the blamer and the wrongdoer's moral understandings. Third, the hypothesis that Communicative Blame is an explanatorily basic form of blame is tested out by seeing how far other kinds of blame can reasonably be understood as derivative, especially in respect of blame's point and purpose. Finally, a new and quasi-political worry about blame is raised. (shrink)

I shall first briefly revisit the broad idea of ‘epistemic injustice’, explaining how it can take either distributive or discriminatory form, in order to put the concepts of ‘testimonial injustice’ and ‘hermeneutical injustice’ in place. In previous work I have explored how the wrong of both kinds of epistemic injustice has both an ethical and an epistemic significance—someone is wronged in their capacity as a knower. But my present aim is to show that this wrong can also have a political (...) significance in relation to non-domination, and so to freedom. While it is only the republican conception of political freedom that presents nondomination as constitutive of freedom, I shall argue that non-domination is best understood as a thoroughly generic liberal ideal of freedom to which even negative libertarians are implicitly committed, for non-domination is negative liberty as of right—secured non-interference. Crucially on this conception, non-domination requires that the citizen can contest interferences. Pettit specifies three conditions of contestation, each of which protects against a salient risk of the would-be contester not getting a ‘proper hearing’. But I shall argue that missing from this list is anything to protect against a fourth salient threat: the threat that either kind of epistemic injustice might disable contestation by way of an unjust deflation of either credibility or intelligibility. Thus we see that both testimonial and hermeneutical injustice can render a would-be contester dominated. Epistemic justice is thereby revealed as a constitutive condition of non-domination, and thus of a central liberal political ideal of freedom. (shrink)

A scholarly edition of a work by Adam Smith. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

There are two kinds of forgiveness that appear as radically different from one another: one presents forgiveness as essentially earned through remorseful apology; the other presents it as fundamentally non-earned—a gift. The first, which I label Moral Justice Forgiveness, adopts a stance of moral demand and conditionality; the second, which I label Gifted Forgiveness, adopts a stance of non-demand and un-conditionality. Each is real; yet how can two such different responses to wrongdoing be of one and the same kind? This (...) paper explains how, by showing that the basic role each plays in moral-social life is the same; and that one is conceptually and therefore historically prior to the other. The result is pluralism, with each kind of forgiveness represented as distinctive in both its psychology and its normativity; and yet an ordered pluralism—with Moral Justice Forgiveness revealed as the root kind, and Gifted Forgiveness a culturally contingent iteration. (shrink)

This paper explores the relation between rational authority and social power, proceeding by way of a philosophical genealogy derived from Edward Craig's Knowledge and the State of Nature. The position advocated avoids the errors both of the 'traditionalist' (who regards the socio-political as irrelevant to epistemology) and of the 'reductivist' (who regards reason as just another form of social power). The argument is that a norm of credibility governs epistemic practice in the state of nature, which, when socially manifested, is (...) likely to imitate the structures of social power. A phenomenon of epistemic injustice is explained, and the politicizing implication for epistemology educed. (shrink)

We gain information from collective, often institutional bodies all the time—from the publications of committees, news teams, or research groups, from web sites such as Wikipedia, and so on—but do these bodies ever function as genuine group testifiers as opposed to mere group sources of information? In putting the question this way I invoke a distinction made, if briefly, by Edward Craig, which I believe to be of deep significance in thinking about the distinctiveness of the speech act of testimony. (...) The distinction is that between somebody’s functioning as a ‘good informant’ and their functioning merely as a ‘source of information’. The difference between these has, as he remarks, a crucial ethical aspect: What I have in mind is the special flavour of situations in which human beings treat each other as subjects with a common purpose, rather than as objects from which services, in this case true belief, can be extracted. In this paper I shall try to bring out the distinctive nature of the role of good informant in a way that helps to clarify what is at stake in asking whether there can be group testimony in the sense of genuinely collective testimony—that is to say, where the group testifier is a collective and not merely a sum of individuals testifying in one or another form of aggregated chorus. (shrink)

[T]he dominated live in a world structured by others for their purposes — purposes that at the very least are not our own and that are in various degrees inimical to our development and even existence.We are perhaps used to the idea that there are various species of oppression: political, economic, or sexual, for instance. But where there is the phenomenon that Nancy Hartsock picks out in saying that the world is “structured” by the powerful to the detriment of the (...) powerless, there is another species of oppression at work, one that has not been registered in mainstream epistemology: epistemic oppression. The word ‘structured’ may be read materially, so as to imply that social institutions and practices favour the powerful, or ontologically, so as to imply that the powerful somehow constitute the world. But for present purposes I am interested only in an epistemological reading, which implies that the powerful have some sort of unfair advantage in “structuring” our understandings of the social world. I will try to present an account of what this initially vague idea involves. I hope thereby to explain an exact sense in which the powerful can have a kind of epistemic advantage that means the powerless are epistemically oppressed. (shrink)

Interpreting Bernard Williams’s ethical philosophy is not easy. His style is deceptively conversational; apparently direct, yet argumentatively inexplicit and allusive. He is moreover committed to evading ready-made philosophical “-isms.” All this reinforces the already distinct impression that the structure of his philosophy is a web of interrelated commitments where none has unique priority. Against this impression, however, I will venture that the contours of his philosophy become clearest if one considers that there is a single, unchanging root conviction from which (...) his ethical philosophy grows. Despite the perpetual motion of his philosophical thought—its erudition, originality, range, and unceasing forward momentum—still, I contend, there is something unchanging at the heart of it. I will show this by reference to three signature theses: internal reasons, the relativism of distance, and the porous borders of philosophy and history. I will argue that the root conviction of which these are the fruits is the conviction that the constraints of universal rationality seriously underdetermine how one should live. This, I believe, is the vision of the human ethical condition that constitutes the largely inexplicit yet utterly fundamental presupposition beneath Williams’s ethical philosophy taken as a whole. I label the object of this root conviction ethical freedom, and thus portray Williams as a philosopher of ethical freedom. (shrink)

I consider Katherine Hawley's commitment account of interpersonal trustworthiness alongside her sceptical challenge regarding the value of philosophically modelling institutional trustworthiness as distinct from reliability. I argue, pace Hawley's challenge, that there would be significant diagnostic and explanatory loss if we were to content ourselves with ideas of institutional (un)reliability alone; and I offer an illustrative case where institutional unreliability is only the half of it, indicating that when it comes to certain kinds of institutional dysfunction, we do need philosophical (...) models of institutional ‘distrustworthiness’ if we are to achieve a proper diagnosis. (shrink)

A number of authors have defended permissivism by appealing to rational supererogation, the thought that some doxastic states might be rationally permissible even though there are other, more rational beliefs available. If this is correct, then there are situations that allow for multiple rational doxastic responses, even if some of those responses are rationally suboptimal. In this paper, I will argue that this is the wrong approach to defending permissivism—there are no doxastic states that are rationally supererogatory. By the lights (...) of contemporary linguistics, ‘rational’ is an absolute gradable adjective, and as such, can only be applied to things that satisfy the top of the scale of rationality. For this reason, it is not possible to believe what is rational while also failing to believe what is rationally optimal. (shrink)

Our understanding of social experiences is central to our social understanding more generally. But this sphere of epistemic practice can be structurally prejudiced by unequal relations of power, so that some groups suffer a distinctive kind of epistemic injustice—hermeneutical injustice. I aim to achieve a clear conception of this epistemicethical phenomenon, so that we have a workable definition and a proper understanding of the wrong that it inflicts.

My overarching purpose is to illustrate the philosophical fruitfulness of expanding epistemology not only laterally across the social space of other epistemic subjects, but at the same time vertically in the temporal dimension. I set about this by first presenting central strands of Michael Williams' diagnostic engagement with scepticism, in which he crucially employs a Default and Challenge model of justification. I then develop three key aspects of Edward Craig's ‘practical explication' of the concept of knowledge so that they may (...) be seen to resonate positively with Williams's epistemological picture: the admixture of internalist and externalist features; the proto-contextualism; and, finally, the distinctively genealogical antisceptical impetus. In this way I aim to support and augment the socialized anti-sceptical case mounted by Williams, and so to show that expanding epistemology in the temporal dimension can be a productive move in central debates in epistemology. Philosophical Papers Vol. 37 (1) 2008: pp. 27-50. (shrink)

The data in this special issue are both encouraging and discouraging. On the positive side, researchers are making theoretical breakthroughs into the psychology of the academic cheater, which may result in practical interventions. Yet the studies illustrate the sheer magnitude of the problem and the resources needed to address unethical behavior among the younger members of the American academe. In short, this special issue shows that the "Internet revolution" facilitates new types of academic dishonesty (Sisti, this issue; Stephens, Young, & (...) Calabrese, this issue); that academic cheating is often an intentional, planned act that results from a Machiavellian tendency to neutralize moral sanctions against cheating (Harding, Mayhew, Finelli, & Carpenter, this issue); that motivations to cheat differ across students (Davy, Kincaid, Smith, & Trawick, this issue; Wowra, this issue); and that academic cheating is a symptom of a larger problem (Lovett-Hooper, Komarraju, Weston, & Dollinger, this issue; Wowra, this issue). (shrink)

The current literature on the value of knowledge is marred by two unwarranted presumptions, which together distort the debate and conceal what is perhaps the most basic value of knowledge, as distinct from mere true belief. These presumptions are the Synchronic Presumption, which confines philosophical attention to the present snapshot in time; and the Analytical Presumption, which has people look for the value of knowledge in some kind of warrant. Together these presumptions conceal that the value of knowledge might inhere (...) not in a necessary condition, but simply in a property that most knowledge possesses; and, in particular, that it might inhere, as I argue it does, in a certain property of 'resilience': the tendency to survive misleading counter-evidence over time owing to the subject's being in a position to weight it against evidence already possessed. (shrink)

Formal epistemologists often claim that our credences should be representable by a probability function. Complete probabilistic coherence, however, is only possible for ideal agents, raising the question of how this requirement relates to our everyday judgments concerning rationality. One possible answer is that being rational is a contextual matter, that the standards for rationality change along with the situation. Just like who counts as tall changes depending on whether we are considering toddlers or basketball players, perhaps what counts as rational (...) shifts according to whether we are considering ideal agents or creatures more like ourselves. Even though a number of formal epistemologists have endorsed this type of solution, I will argue that there is no way to spell out this contextual account that can make sense of our everyday judgments about rationality. Those who defend probabilistic coherence requirements will need an alternative account of the relationship between real and ideal rationality. (shrink)

The notion of recognition is an ethically potent resource for understanding human relational needs; and its negative counterpart, misrecognition, an equally potent resource for critique. Axel Honneth’s rich account focuses our attention on recognition’s role in securing basic self-confidence, moral self-respect, and self-esteem. With these loci of recognition in place, we are enabled to raise the intriguing question whether each of these may be extended to apply specifically to the epistemic dimension of our agency and selfhood. Might we talk intelligibly—while (...) staying in tune with Honneth’s concepts and their Hegelian key—of a generic idea of epistemic recognition? Such an idea might itself be seen to apply at the same three levels to indicate: first, basic epistemic self-confidence; second, our status as epistemically responsible; and third, a certain epistemic self-esteem that reflects the epistemic esteem we receive from others. The papers in this volume surely sound a chord in the affirmative, and together they steer us towards a multifaceted conception of how epistemic injustice is related to epistemic misrecognition, and indeed how we might construe a positive relation of epistemic recognition. (shrink)

Ethical mysticism, by S. Coit.--The ethical import of history, by D. S. Muzzey.--The tragic and heroic in life, by W. M. Salter.--Distinctive features of the ethical movement, by A. W. Martin.--Ethical experience as the basis of religious education, by H. Neumann.--"All men are created equal," by G. E. O'Dell.--How far is art an aid to religion? by P. Chubb.--Evolution and the uniqueness of man, by H. J. Bridges.--The spiritual outlook on life, by H. J. Golding.--The ethics of Abu'l Ala al (...) Ma'arri, by N. Schmidt.--Life's unused moral force, by H. Snell.--Is the ideal real? by G. A. Smith.--Some ethical tendencies in the professions, by R. D. Kohn.--On the art of living, by W. Boerner.--The relation of the ethical ideal to social reform, by J. L. Elliott.--Concerning tolerance, by R. F. Dewey.--Ethical culture in Germany after the war, by R. Penzig.--A confession of faith, by S. B. Weston.--"Hearing the witnesses," by J. Gutmann. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on the different styles of moral relativism. The history of moral relativist thinking features different branches to the family tree, each representing a different impetus to relativism, and so producing a different style of moral relativist thought. At the root, however, is a broadly subjectivist parent idea that morality is at least in part the upshot of a shared way of life, and shared ways of life tend to vary markedly from culture to culture. The discussions cover (...) the branches of moral historicism, moral reasons, moral truth, and moral plurality. (shrink)

Do consumers’ ordinary actions of purchasing certain goods make them complicit in global labour injustice? To establish that they do, two things much be shown. First, it must be established that they are not more than complicit, for example that they are not the principal perpetrators. Second, it must be established that they meet the conditions for complicity on a plausible account. I argue that Kutz’s account faces an objection that makes Lepora and Goodin’s better suited, and defend the idea (...) that consumers are complicit in at least two of the ways distinguished by the latter. In the final section of the paper, I consider whether consumers’ responsibility for complicity in global labour injustice is likely to be as strong as responsibility from another source, namely benefiting from that injustice. (shrink)

Formal methods developed for modeling levels of selection problems have recently been applied to the investigation of major evolutionary transitions. We discuss two new tools of this kind. First, the ‘near-variant test’ can be used to compare the causal adequacy of predictively equivalent representations. Second, ‘state-variable gestalt-switching’ can be used to gain a useful dual perspective on evolutionary processes that involve both higher and lower level populations.

Our ideas about forgiveness seem to oscillate between idealization and scepticism. How should we make sense of this apparent conflict? This paper argues that we should learn something from each, seeing these views as representing opposing moments in a perennial and well-grounded moral ambivalence towards forgiveness. Once we are correctly positioned, we shall see an aspect of forgiveness that recommends precisely this ambivalence. For what will come into view will be certain key psychological mechanisms of moral-epistemic influence – other-addressed and (...) self-addressed mechanisms of moral social construction – that enable forgiveness to function well when it is well-functioning, but which are also intrinsically prone to deterioration into one or another form of bad faith. Thus forgiveness is revealed as necessarily containing seeds of its own corruption, showing ambivalence to be a generically appropriate attitude. Moreover, it is emphasized that where forgiver and forgiven are relating to one another in the context of asymmetries of social power, the practice of forgiveness is likely to be further compromised, notably increasing the risk of negative influence on the moral-epistemic states of either the forgiver or the forgiven, or both. (shrink)

An ethics-based epistemology is necessary for environmental philosophy—a sharply different approach from the epistemology-based ethics that the field has inherited, mostly implicitly, from mainstream ethics. In this paper, we try to uncover this inherited epistemology and point toward an alternative. In section two, we outline a general contrast between an ethics-based epistemology and an epistemology-based ethics. In section three, we examine the relationship between ethics and epistemology in an ethics-based epistemology, drawing extensively on examples from indigenous cultures. We briefly explore (...) several striking implications of an ethics-based epistemology in sections four and five. (shrink)

Even though the virtues may be interconnected, it seems obviously possible to have one of the virtues without having them all. Some have defended the unity thesis against this concern by arguing that the virtues are still unified in their ideal forms. The problem with this defense is that it simply admits that the unity thesis, as traditionally conceived, is mistaken, taking the unity of the virtues to be limited to the ideal case. In this paper, I outline a blueprint (...) for how the ideal virtue response can be used to defend the original unity thesis. (shrink)

Kant's introduction of a distinctive form of philosophical investigation and proof, known as transcendental, inaugurated a new philosophical tradition. Transcendental Philosophy and Naturalism assesses the present state and contemporary relevance of this tradition. The contributors aim to understand the theoretical structures involved in transcendental explanation, and to assess the contemporary relevance of the transcendental orientation, in particular with respect to contemporary philosophical naturalism. These issues are approached from both naturalistic and transcendental perspectives.

Keeping a conversation going is the social glue of friendships. The DSM criteria for autism list difficulties with back-and-forth conversation but does not necessitate that all autistic children will be equally impacted. We carried out three studies (two pre-registered) with verbally-fluent school children (age 5-9 years) to investigate how autistic and neurotypical children maintain a conversation topic. We also investigated within-group relationships between conversational ability and cognitive and socio-cognitive predictors. Study 1 found autistic children were more likely than neurotypical controls (...) to give off-topic and generic minimal responses (e.g. ‘mm’, ‘oh’) and were less likely to give non-verbal responses (e.g. nodding or use of facial affect to respond). Nonetheless, the autistic group provided topic-supporting responses 62% of the time, indicating some aspects of conversation topic maintenance are a relative strength. Studies 2 and 3 found large individual differences in topic-supporting conversational responding amongst both neurotypical and autistic children. These were positively related to theory of mind ability and age in both groups. Conversational skills lie on a continuum for the general population and differences by diagnostic group are a matter of degree. Given the importance for peer relationships, we suggest a whole-classroom approach to supporting conversation skills in all children. (shrink)

Imagine two friends. Anna inherits nothing and works for every penny she has, while Mary inherits millions. How should a world that respects individual autonomy and private property rights treat Anna’s earnings and Mary’s inheritance? Should it tax them the same, or tax one more heavily than the other? If the latter, which one? The conventional wisdom holds that although some “right” libertarian theories justify taxing income, none justify taxing inheritances. Such taxes are “expropriations” and “an especially cruel injury” that (...) “run[] roughshod over [a] deceased’s interest in the ends his property will serve.” This essay explores the standard libertarian objections to taxing gifts and bequests and argues that libertarians overstate their case when distinguishing the taxation of gratuitous transfers from other types of taxation. At minimum, the benefit theory of taxation embraced by many minimal statists and classical liberals mandates that the receipt of gifts and bequests should be taxed to the recipient. Moreover, the goals of curbing inherited political power and preventing wealthy families from insulating their members from market competition provide two additional explanations for why taxing inheritances to recipients is compatible with classical liberal values. (shrink)

Bernard Williams’ philosophy is shaped by a distinctive and abiding interest in the borderlands between Philosophy and History. He famously considers moral philosophy, and particularly moral theory, to over‐step the border that marks the real ‘limits’ of the discipline, and in his later work he explicitly advances the idea of doing ‘impure’ philosophy, by which he meant philosophy that mixed itself with history. By examining the complex impression left on Williams’ historical self‐consciousness by his engagements with two very different figures (...) in the history of philosophy, namely Descartes and Wittgenstein, I will explore a number of ways in which philosophy and history are closely intertwined for Williams. This will draw out the positive vision he modelled for us of ‘impure’ philosophy—a philosophical style he took to contribute to nurturing philosophy as a humanistic discipline. (shrink)

Cultural norms may dictate how grief is displayed. The present study explores the display behaviours and rules in the bereavement context from a cross-cultural perspective. 86 German-speaking Swiss and 99 Chinese bereaved people who lost their first-degree relative completed the adapted bereavement version of the Display Rules Assessment Inventory. Results indicated that the German-speaking Swiss bereaved displayed more emotions than the Chinese bereaved. The Chinese bereaved, but not the German-speaking Swiss bereaved, thought that bereaved people should display more emotions than (...) they actually did when they were with their close others (but not when they were alone). Bereaved people endorsed more emotional expression “when alone” than “when with close others”, demonstrating a social disconnection tendency, which was more evident in the Chinese sample. Bereaved people endorsed more expression of positive emotions (e.g. affection/love) and less expression of powerful negative emotions (e.g. blame/guilt, anger) across cultures. Compared to their Chinese counterparts, the German-speaking Swiss sample indicated more actual expressions for most emotion types (i.e. joy/happiness, affection/love, sadness, anger, and denial) but thought bereaved people should express more joy/happiness and less blame/guilt. The results suggest that bereaved people’s display behaviours and rules are influenced by culture, situation, and type of emotion. (shrink)