The COVID-19 pandemic has led a number of countries to introduce restrictive ‘lockdown’ policies on their citizens in order to control infection spread. Immunity passports have been proposed as a way of easing the harms of such policies, and could be used in conjunction with other strategies for infection control. These passports would permit those who test positive for COVID-19 antibodies to return to some of their normal behaviours, such as travelling more freely and returning to work. The introduction of (...) immunity passports raises a number of practical and ethical challenges. In this paper, we seek to review the challenges relating to various practical considerations, fairness issues, the risk to social cooperation and the impact on people’s civil liberties. We make tentative recommendations for the ethical introduction of immunity passports. (shrink)

This paper sketches an account of reparative justice for climate refugees, focusing on total land loss due to sea-level rise. I begin by outlining the harm of this loss in terms of self-determination and cultural heritage. I then consider, first, who is owed these reparations? Second, who should pay such reparations? Third, in what form should the reparations be paid? I end with thoughts on the project of reparative justice more generally, arguing that such obligations do not depend upon a (...) perfect account of how reparations might be fulfilled; we simply have an obligation to shoot the arrow as close to the target as we can. (shrink)

The claim that we have a moral obligation, where a choice can be made, to bring to birth the 'best' child possible, has been highly controversial for a number of decades. More recently Savulescu has labelled this claim the Principle of Procreative Beneficence. It has been argued that this Principle is problematic in both its reasoning and its implications, most notably in that it places lower moral value on the disabled. Relentless criticism of this proposed moral obligation, however, has been (...) unable, thus far, to discredit this Principle convincingly and as a result its influence shows no sign of abating. I will argue that while criticisms of the implications and detail of the reasoning behind it are well founded, they are unlikely to produce an argument that will ultimately discredit the obligation that the Principle of Procreative Beneficence represents. I believe that what is needed finally and convincingly to reveal the fallacy of this Principle is a critique of its ultimate theoretical foundation, the notion of impersonal harm. In this paper I argue that while the notion of impersonal harm is intuitively very appealing, its plausibility is based entirely on this intuitive appeal and not on sound moral reasoning. I show that there is another plausible explanation for our intuitive response and I believe that this, in conjunction with the other theoretical criticisms that I and others have levelled at this Principle, shows that the Principle of Procreative Beneficence should be rejected. (shrink)

This paper is an exploration of the Thomistic vice of despair, one of two vices opposed to the theological virtue of hope. Aquinas's conception of despair as a vice, and a theological vice in particular, distances him from contemporary use of the term "despair" to describe an emotional state. His account nonetheless yields a compelling psychological portrait of moral degeneration, which I explain via despair's link to its "root," the capital vice of sloth. Cases in which sloth and its offspring (...) vices progress into full-fledged despair raise intersecting issues about whether and how despair might be remediable. I conclude by considering puzzles regarding despair's disordered effects on the intellect and will and weighing three possible means of remedying it. (shrink)

Realist ideology critique (RIC) is a strand of political realism recently developed in response to concerns that realism is biased toward the status quo. RIC aims to debunk an individual's belief that a social institution is legitimate by revealing that the belief is caused by that very same institution. Despite its growing prominence, RIC has received little critical attention. In this article, I buck this trend. First, I improve on contemporary accounts of RIC by clarifying its status and the role (...) of motivated reasoning. Second, I show that realist ideology critics face a dilemma: either their account makes deeply implausible epistemological assumptions, or they temper its epistemology at the expense of rendering it toothless. I argue for each horn in turn before revealing the dilemma to be a false one by making a novel distinction between varying strengths of RIC based on their underlying epistemological assumptions. I propose Moderate RIC as a solution: upon discovering that one reason for your belief that a social institution is legitimate is likely malignantly epistemically circular, the belief should undergo further epistemic testing. I respond to three potential objections and suggest that Moderate RIC would make a fruitful addition to political theorists' methodological toolkit. (shrink)

Stanley Klein and Shaun Nichols describe the case of patient R.B., whose memories lacked the sense of “mineness” usually conveyed by memory. Klein and Nichols take R.B.’s case to show that the sense of mineness is merely a contingent feature of memory, which they see as raising two problems for memory-based accounts of personal identity. First, they see it as potentially undermining the appeal of memory-based accounts. Second, they take it to show that the conception of quasi-memory that underpins many (...) memory-based accounts is inadequate. I argue that Klein and Nichols’ characterization of R.B.’s experience is implausible; as a result, the problems that they describe for memory-based accounts of personal identity do not arise. (shrink)

Our society currently faces many complex and perplexing issues related to biotechnology, including the need to define the outer boundaries of genetic research on human beings and the need to protect individual and group rights to human tissue and the knowledge gained from the study of that tissue. Scientists have increasingly become interested in studying so-called “population isolates” to discover the nature and location of genes that are unique to particular groups. Indigenous peoples are often targeted by scientists because “the (...) relative isolation of the communities ensures minimal gene flow.” Such studies raise a number of issues related to privacy rights, property rights, informed consent, and group rights versus individual rights. These issues recently came to light in a case brought by the Havasupai Tribe and its members over the use of blood samples, handprints, and genealogy information initially taken by researchers at Arizona State University for a diabetes project. These materials were then allegedly used by researchers at ASU and other institutions for a multitude of unauthorized purposes, including research into the frequency of mental health disorders and the origin of human populations. Consequently, the affected members sued for damages under several legal theories. However, underlying all of these claims was the allegation that this unauthorized use of genetic resources and data not only injured the individuals who gave samples, but also caused a collective harm to the Havasupai Tribe and the cultural and spiritual beliefs of its members. (shrink)

Pragmatism has enjoyed a major resurgence in Anglo-American philosophy over the course of the last decade or two, and Robert Brandom’s work – particularly his 1994 tome Making it Explicit (MIE) – has been at the vanguard of this resurgence (Brandom 1994).2 But pragmatism comes in several surprisingly distinct flavours. Authors such as Hubert Dreyfus find their roots in certain parts of Heidegger and in phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty, and they privilege embodied, preconceptual skills as opposed to discursive practices as (...) the basic sites of meaning and agency (Dreyfus 1991; Dreyfus 1992; Todes 2001). With strong inheritances from Dewey and Wittgenstein, Richard Rorty has championed a pragmatism whose core emphasis is on the rejection of transcendental truth and high metaphysical theorizing (Rorty 1982), and this anti-theoretical banner has been taken up by several prominent ethicists, among others. For his part, Brandom, who purports to offer a systematic theory of language and meaning grounded on a foundation of pragmatic normative relationships between speakers, looks back instead to Sellars and Quine for his stripe of pragmatism. Near the start of MIE, he writes: The explanatory strategy pursued here is to begin with an account of social practices, identify the particular structure they must exhibit in order to qualify as specifically linguistic practices, and then consider what different sorts of semantic contents those practices can confer on states, performances, and expressions caught up in them in suitable ways. (Brandom 1994, xiii) Despite his professed pragmatism, Brandom is no foe of high theory or metanarratives, and he is vastly more interested in language and theoretical reason than in the rest of human bodily activity. For Brandom, inferentially articulated discourse forms an autonomous domain of normativity, while our bodily encounters with the world in perception and in action serve as language entry and exit points respectively.. (shrink)

Recent theoretical models suggest that the difference between human and nonhuman primate life-history patterns may be due to a reliance on complex foraging strategies requiring extensive learning. These models predict that children should reach adult levels of efficiency faster when foraging is cognitively simple. We test this prediction with data on Meriam fishing, spearfishing, and shellfishing efficiency. For fishing and spearfishing, which are cognitively difficult, we can find no significant amount of variability in return rates because of experiential factors correlated (...) with age. However, for shellfish collecting, which is relatively easy to learn, there are strong age-related effects on efficiency. Children reach adult efficiency more quickly in fishing as compared to shellfish collecting, probably owing to the size and strength constraints of the latter. (shrink)

Contemporary moral psychology has focused on the notion of a universal moral sense, robust to individual and cultural differences. Yet recent evidence has revealed individual differences in the psychological processes for moral judgment: controlled cognition, mental-state reasoning, and emotional responding. We discuss this evidence and its relation to cross-cultural diversity in morality.

My particular focus in this article is on getting clearer about what Nietzsche’s experimentalism entails. Some immediate resistance may form in response to this proposal, based on my use of the term experimentalism. As Walter Kaufmann has pointed out in a discussion of experimentalism, Nietzsche himself does not discuss his work using this concept; in the original German, Nietzsche uses the terms “Experiment” and “Versuch.”1 In light of this, two main concerns may be raised about my proposal that experimentalism is (...) worth some of our time and attention: whether it is necessary or helpful to focus discussion on yet another “ism” within Nietzsche scholarship and given that experimentalism is not Nietzsche’s.. (shrink)

Transformative experiences are epistemically and personally transformative: prior to having the experience, agents cannot predict the value of the experience and cannot anticipate how it will change their core values and preferences. Paul (2014, 2015) argues that these experiences pose a puzzle for standard decision-making procedures because values cannot be assigned to outcomes involving transformative experience. Responding philosophers are quick to point out that decision procedures are built to handle uncertainty, including the uncertainty generated by transformative experience. My paper enters (...) here and contributes two points. First, religious experiences are transformative experiences that are especially resistant to these responses. Second, a procedure that appeals to voluntarist reasons—reasons arising from an act of the will—can allow an agent to rationally decide to undergo or avoid an outcome involving transformative experience. Combining these two points results in some interesting implications with respect to practical aspects of religion. (shrink)

In the UK, it has been proposed that alongside the current advice to abstain from alcohol completely in pregnancy, there should be increased screening of pregnant women for alcohol consumption in order to prevent instances of fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. The Scottish Intercollegiate Guidelines Network published guidelines in 2019 recommending that standardised screening questionnaires and associated use of biomarkers should be considered to identify alcohol exposure in pregnancy. This was followed in 2020 by the National Institute for Health and Care (...) Excellence Draft Quality Standard, which recommended that pregnant women should have information on their alcohol consumption recorded throughout their pregnancy and this information transferred to the child’s health records. Most recently, Public Health England has stated that the alcohol intake of all women should be recorded throughout pregnancy, not just at the initial booking appointment and that tools such as blood biomarkers and meconium testing should be researched in order to determine true prevalence rates of alcohol in pregnancy. We argue that this proposed enhanced screening undermines women’s autonomy and their legal right to be sufficiently informed to consent to screening. We argue that there is no evidence that this kind of screening will result in a reduction of fetal harm and there is a danger that undermining the autonomy of women and the trust relationship between women and healthcare professionals may even increase harm to future children. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence is again attracting significant attention across all areas of social life. One important sphere of focus is education; many policy makers across the globe view lifelong learning as an essential means to prepare society for an “AI future” and look to AI as a way to “deliver” learning opportunities to meet these needs. AI is a complex social, cultural, and material artifact that is understood and constructed by different stakeholders in varied ways, and these differences have significant social (...) and educational implications that need to be explored. Through analysis of thirty-four in-depth interviews with stakeholders from academia, commerce, and policy, alongside document analysis, we draw on the social construction of technology to illuminate the diverse understandings, perceptions of, and practices around AI. We find three different technological frames emerging from the three social groups and argue that commercial sector practices wield most power. We propose that greater awareness of the differing technical frames, more interactions among a wider set of relevant social groups, and a stronger focus on the kinds of educational outcomes society seeks are needed in order to design AI for learning in ways that facilitate a democratic education for all. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 45, Issue 2, pp 237 - 266 This essay explores the vicissitudes of resistance as the central concept of both Freud and Hegel. Read through the prism of psychoanalysis, Hegel appears less as a philosopher of inexorable progress than as a thinker of repetition, delay, and stuckness. It is only on this seemingly unpromising basis that the radical potential of both thinkers can be retrieved.

The concept of the exception has heavily shaped modern political theory. In modernity, Kierkegaard was one of the first philosophers to propound the exception as a facilitator of metaphysical transcendence. Merging Kierkegaard’s metaphysical exception with early modern political theorist Jean Bodin’s theory of sovereignty, Carl Schmitt introduced sovereignty to metaphysics. He thereby made an early modern concept usable in a post-metaphysical world. This essay carries Schmitt’s appropriation one step further. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s replacement of transcendental metaphysics with contingent creaturehood, (...) it reintroduces the anti-foundationalist concept of repetition that was implicit in Kierkegaard’s paradigm but which was not made lucid until Benjamin crafted from the Schmittian exception a vision of political life grounded in creaturely existence. -/- . (shrink)

This chapter presents the advantages of the use of functional regions of interest along with its specific concerns, and provides a reference to Karl J. Friston related to the subject. Functionally defined ROI help to test hypotheses about the cognitive functions of particular regions of the brain. fROI are useful for specifying brain locations and investigating separable components of the mind. The chapter provides an overview of the common and uncommon misconceptions about fROI related to assumptions of homogeneity, factorial designs (...) versus independent localizers, a summary measure, and the naming of fROI. (shrink)

Feminism is an antiauthoritarian movement that has sought to unmask many traditional “authorities” as ungrounded. Given this, it might seem as if feminists are required to abandon the concept of authority altogether. But, we argue, the exercise of authority enables us to coordinate our efforts to achieve larger social goods and, hence, should be preserved. Instead, what is needed and what we provide for here is a way to distinguish legitimate authority from objectionable authoritarianism.

In this essay, I defend an account of right action that I shall call “asymmetrical virtue particularism.” An action, on this account, is right just insofar as it is overall virtuous. But the virtuousness of an action in any particular respect, X, is deontically variant; it can fail to be right-making, either because it is deontically irrelevant or because it is wrong-making. Finally, the account is asymmetrical insofar as the viciousness of actions is not deontically variant; if any action is (...) vicious in some respect Y, then Y is always a wrong-making feature of any action whatever that has Y. (shrink)

The oblivion of the interval -- Being in place -- The aporia between envelope and things -- Dualism in Bergson -- Interval, sexual difference -- Beyond man: rethinking life and matter -- Conclusion: interval as relation, interval as becoming.

Recent events have revived questions about the circumstances that ought to trigger therapists' duty to warn or protect. There is extensive interstate variation in duty to warn or protect statutes enacted and rulings made in the wake of the California Tarasoff ruling. These duties may be codified in legislative statutes, established in common law through court rulings, or remain unspecified. Furthermore, the duty to warn or protect is not only variable between states but also has been dynamic across time. In (...) this article, we review the implications of this variability and dynamism, focusing on three sets of questions: first, what legal and ethics-related challenges do therapists in each of the three broad categories of states (states that mandate therapists to warn or protect, states that permit therapists to breach confidentiality for warnings but have no mandate, and states that give no guidance) face in handling threats of violence? Second, what training do therapists and other professionals involved in handling violent threats receive, and is this training adequate for the task that these professionals are charged with? Third, how have recent court cases changed the scope of the duty? We conclude by pointing to gaps in the empirical and conceptual scholarship surrounding the duty to warn or protect. (shrink)

Henri Bergson's philosophy has attracted increasing feminist attention in recent years as a fruitful locus for re-theorizing temporality. Drawing on Luce Irigaray's well-known critical description of metaphysics as phallocentrism, Hill argues that Bergson's deduction of duration is predicated upon the disavowal of a sexed hierarchy. She concludes the article by proposing a way to move beyond Bergson's phallocentrism to articulate duration as a sensible and transcendental difference that articulates a nonhierarchical qualitative relation between the sexes.

Background: Discussion of the influence of money on bioethics research seems particularly salient in the context of research on the ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI) of human genomics, as this research may be financially supported by the ELSI Research Program. Empirical evidence regarding the funding of ELSI research and where such research is disseminated, in relation to the specific topics of the research and methods used, can help to further discussions regarding the appropriate influence of specific institutions and institutional (...) contexts on ELSI and other bioethics research agendas. Methods: We reviewed 642 ELSI publications (appearing between 2003 and 2008) for reported sources of funding, forum for dissemination, empirical and nonempirical methods, and topics of investigation. Results: Most ELSI research is independent of direct grant-based funding sources; 66% reported no such sources of funding. The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) is the most dominant source of funding; 16% of publications acknowledged at least one source of NHGRI grant funding. Funding is acknowledged more frequently in empirical than nonempirical publications and more frequently in publications in public health journals than in any other ELSI research dissemination forums. Dominant research topics vary by publication forum and by reported funding. Conclusions: ELSI research is surprisingly independent of direct grant-based funding, yet correlations are apparent between this type of funding and publication placement, topics addressed, and methods used, implying a not insignificant influence on ELSI research agenda setting. However, given the relatively low percentage of publications acknowledging external grant-based funding, as well as other significant correlations between publication placement and topics addressed, additional institutional contexts, perhaps related to professional advancement or valuation, may shape research agendas in ways that potentially exceed the direct influences of grant-based funding in this area. In some cases, grant-based funding may actually counter other potentially problematic institutional influences. (shrink)

With growing awareness of a crisis in pollinator health, the practice of urban hobbyist beekeeping has grown in Canada with practitioners arguing that this activity can help to foster healthier honey bees and more mindful beekeeping practices. However, urban hobbyist beekeepers have been critiqued for encouraging improper beekeeping practices and over-saturation of honey bees in cities. Drawing on a multispecies ethnography based in London, Ontario and Toronto, including participant observation with the Toronto Beekeeping Collective and the London Urban Beekeeping Collective (...) and interviews with 26 urban beekeepers, I argue that urban hobbyist beekeepers develop a sensuous and embodied relationship with honey bees that typifies playful work. By integrating participant perspectives with social reproduction theory, I demonstrate that the playful work of urban hobbyist beekeeping allows practitioners to engage with non-human nature outside of the constraints of capitalist labour regimes, enabling the expression of delight, enchantment, and curiosity. This relationship between beekeepers and honey bees encourages the development of bee-centred practices in which the preferences and physiological needs of the bees are consciously put ahead of the needs of the beekeeper. The possibility for honey bee flourishing is increased significantly when bee-centred beekeeping is coupled with integrated pest management. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the role of values in theory selection is an important issue within medical education. I review the underdetermination argument, which is the idea within philosophy of science that the data serving as evidence for theories are by themselves not sufficient to support a theory to the exclusion of alternatives. There are always various explanations compatible with the data, and we ultimately appeal to certain values as our grounds for choosing one theory over another. I (...) explore some of the ways contemporary feminist philosophers have chosen to grapple with the problem of underdetermination and proposed solutions to systematize how values might be incorporated into theory choice, drawing primarily from the work of Helen Longino and Elizabeth Anderson. I conclude by discussing how value‐laden inquiry should be incorporated within medical education to promote reflection towards medicine’s normative underpinnings. (shrink)

Crime fiction by women writers across the globe has in recent years begun to explore the position of women detectives within post-feminist cultural contexts, moving away from the explicit refusal of the heterosexual romance plot in earlier feminist ‘hard-boiled’ fiction. In this article, I analyse Hawa Jande Golakai's The Lazarus Effect (2011) and The Score (2015) as part of the tradition of crime fiction by women writers in South Africa. Joining local crime writers such as Angela Makholwa, Golakai not only (...) questions orthodox conceptions of gender and sexuality in traditional iterations of the crime novel, but also combines elements of chick-lit with the crime plot. Reading the archetypal quest structure of the two genres against the background of Sara Ahmed's cultural critique of happiness, I argue that Golakai inventively recasts the recent sub-genre of the chick-lit mystery from the perspective of an Afropolitan detective. Her detective tenaciously undercuts the future-directed happiness script that structures conventional chick-lit and detective novels with their respective focus on finding a fulfilling heterosexual, monogamous romantic relationship, and the resolution of the crime and restoration of order. In this way, the novels defy the frequently assumed apolitical nature of chick-lit texts and also allow us to reimagine the idea of Afropolitanism, outside of its dominant consumerist form, as a critical Afropolitanism that emerges from an openness to be affected by the unhappiness and suffering of others. (shrink)

This paper suggests that the stories that thoroughbred breeders tell about racehorse reproduction can contribute to an understanding of their ideas about relatedness between humans. It examines the thoroughbred pedigree as it is presented in the English sales catalogue as a locus of complex ideas about heredity, fertility, and procreation. It argues that resistance within the industry to new reproductive technologies, including artificial insemination, can be understood in terms of ideas about relatedness between horses and, by implication, between people.This paper (...) is based upon extensive participant observation conducted within the horseracing industry based in the town of Newmarket, England. (shrink)

This paper identifies and critiques a tendency for public health risk communication to be ‘sneakily’ persuasive. First, I describe how trends in the social and health sciences have facilitated an approach to public health risk communication which focuses on achieving behaviour change directly, rather than informing people's decisions about their health behaviour. I then consider existing discussions of the merits of informing versus persuading in public health communication, which largely endorse persuasive approaches. I suggest such accounts are unsatisfying insofar as (...) their definitions of persuasion often fail to recognise its directional nature and the distorting effect this has on the total picture of the evidence. I re-characterise persuasion as directional influence aimed at achieving a particular outcome in the recipient and acknowledge that persuasive influence may also be manipulative. I then contrast this with (non-directional) information provision. I suggest that much persuasive public health risk communication is ‘sneaky’: it appears to be informative, but in fact presents a distorted picture of the evidence (in accordance with my characterisation of persuasion). I argue that such sneakily persuasive public health risk communication is unethical on the basis that it fails to adhere to the norms of cooperative communication. (shrink)

This paper discusses the ethics of public health communication. We argue that a number of commonplace tools of public health communication risk qualifying as non-honest and question whether or not using such tools is ethically justified. First, we introduce the concept of honesty and suggest some reasons for thinking it is morally desirable. We then describe a number of common ways in which public health communication presents information about health-promoting interventions. These include the omission of information about the magnitude of (...) benefits people can expect from health-promoting interventions, and failure to report uncertainty associated with the outcomes of interventions. Next we outline some forms of behaviour which are generally recognised by philosophers as being non-honest, including deception, manipulation, and so on. Finally, we suggest that many of the public health communicative practices identified earlier share features with the non-honest behaviours described and suggest this warrants reflection upon whether such non-honesty is justified by the goals of public health communication. (shrink)

Access to abortion is becoming increasingly restricted for many women in the United States. Besides the longstanding financial barriers facing low-income women in most states, a newer source of scarcity has emerged. The relatively small number of physicians willing to perform the procedure is compromising the ability of women in certain parts of the country to obtain an abortion.Do physicians have a duty to respond to this situation? Do they have a professional responsibility to ensure that abortions are reasonably available (...) to the women who want to terminate their pregnancies? Or, is abortion so morally and socially controversial as to remove any professional obligation to provide reasonable access?Both law and medical ethics have traditionally protected physicians’ freedom to refuse to perform any procedure, including abortion, that conflicts with their religious or other moral beliefs. (shrink)

This season’s issue includes two articles on a quickly expanding topic in bioethics: the ethics of enhancement. There are many kinds of enhancement both actual and imagined: we can enhance people’s physical, aesthetic, cognitive, or moral capacities, for instance; individuals might choose particular enhancements, parents might choose them for their future children, or states might institute them at the widespread population level; the enhancements might be technologically complex or take the form of low-tech education and training; they might be permanent (...) genetic features or swappable technological prosthetics; and so forth. Many discussions of the ethics of enhancement are concerned.. (shrink)