In this article, Dembroff argues that the category nonbinary should not be understood in terms of presentation or psychological states, but instead in terms of how its members are politically situated with respect to the binary expectations of Western gender ideology.

The first principle of chemical composition is that elements are actually present in their compounds. It is a golden thread running through the history of compositional thinking in chemistry since before the chemical revolution. Opposed to this principle, which I call Actually Present Elements (APE), is the idea that elements are merely potentially present in their compounds: although not actually present, it is possible to recover them. In this paper I follow that golden thread, and then discuss the status of (...) APE itself: is it true? What arguments were there for it, and when? I argue that APE is a metaphysical principle, albeit at a lower level of generality and abstraction than the term ‘metaphysical’ usually suggests. I critically examine a range of different views on how metaphysical principles might be involved in research programmes in empirical science, and conclude by endorsing Elie Zahar’s view that metaphysical principles such as APE are to be found at the very heart of science. Moreover, they can be recipients of empirical support just like other parts of scientific theory. (shrink)

I propose a new concept of solidarity, which I call “solidarity from below,” that highlights an aspect of solidarity widely recognized in popular uses of the term, but which has hitherto been neglected in the philosophical literature. Solidarity from below is the collective ability of otherwise powerless people to organize themselves for transformative social change. I situate this concept with respect to four distinct but intertwined questions that have motivated extant theorizing about solidarity. I explain what it means to conceptualize (...) solidarity from below as a form of power, rather than as a feeling, disposition, duty, or scheme of social arrangements. Finally, I suggest that the moral-relational aspects of solidarity emerge secondarily from the process of collective power, and not the other way around. (shrink)

"The doctrine of materialism is one of the perennial and most controversial ideas in the arts and sciences. Throughout history it has aroused strong passions, and in the Sixteenth and Twentieth centuries was a doctrine over which people were persecuted and killed. Yet it has been equally aligned with empirical, enlightened and tolerant thinking. This book explores the fascinating and important philosophy of materialism in an engaging and thought-provoking way. Opening with an overview of the ideas of some of the (...) most important materialists, including Lucretius, Epicurus, Hobbes and Hume up to Darwin and Marx, Brown and Ladyman show how materialism's origins were twofold: it was an early form of scientific explanation but also an intellectual outlook, or belief-system, about the world in general. They then explain how materialism's beginnings as imaginative vision of the true nature of things faced a major challenge from modern physics, in the form of quantum theory and the general theory of relativity. This posed major questions for materialism: how could it be reconciled with unobservable entities and new discoveries about the nature of space and time? As the authors show, out of this challenge materialism did not die but re-emerged - as the new doctrine of physicalism. Drawing on colourful examples throughout - from modern physics, the nature of the mind, and atheism - the authors argue that whilst materialism may not have all the answers, its humanism and staunch belief in observation, evidence and experiment remains our best hope in a fragmented and hyper-specialised world"--. (shrink)

For Kant and for feminists, self-respect is a morally central and morally powerful concern. In this paper I focus on some questions about the relation of self-respect to two other stances toward the self, humility and arrogance. Just as arrogance is usually treated as a serious vice, so humility is widely regarded as an important virtue. Indeed, it is supposed to be the virtue that opposes arrogance, keeping it in check or preventing it from developing in the first place. I’ve (...) argued elsewhere that, on Kant’s account, arrogance is a vice of disrespect for other people and for oneself. Humility is not, however, unproblematic from a Kantian perspective, and he is more concerned to identify bad forms of it than to praise it as a virtue or recommend it as a cure for arrogance. Feminist ethics draws our attention to the ways in which character traits, attitudes, beliefs, and stances take on differential moral valences in contexts of oppression, and what might be a virtue for members of dominant groups can be vices for members of subordinate groups. How, then, are we to understand and assess humility? The upshot of Kantian and feminist analyses is two-fold: First, humility is not the virtue opposing arrogance; rather, self-respect is. Second, humility is at best an ancillary, instrumental, contextual virtue and the servant of self-respect; but at worst, it is as serious a vice as arrogance, indeed, an aspect of it. (shrink)

One of the most important students of Franz Brentano was Anton Marty, who made it his task to develop a philosophy of language on the basis of Brentano’s analysis of mind. It is most unfortunate that Marty does not receive the attention he deserves, primarily due to his detailed and distracting polemics. In the analysis presented here his philosophy of language and other aspects of his thought, such as his ontology , are examined first and foremost in their positive rather (...) than critical character. The analysis is moreover supplemented by translations of four important works by Marty, including his entire work On the Origin of Language. These are in fact the first English translations of any substantial writings by him. The resulting picture that emerges from the analysis and translations is that Marty has much to say that proves to be of enduring interest for the philosophy of language on a range of topics, especially the meanings of statements, of emotive expressions, and of names as regards both their communicative and their ontological aspects. The volume will be of interest not only to philosophers and historians of philosophy, but also to historians of linguistics and psychology. (shrink)

In this paper, I offer some reasons for thinking that knowledge is a social phenomenon. My argument is based on Helen Longino’s work on scientific knowledge, in particular her 2002 book The Fate of Knowledge. Longino’s basic idea is that a scientific hypothesis or theory is justified when it emerges (relatively) unscathed from social interactions between scientists. If we accept – as Longino and many others do – that knowledge requires justification, it follows that scientific knowledge is a social phenomenon. (...) I argue that much the same goes for other forms of empirical knowledge, such as historical knowledge, various forms of collective knowledge and our knowledge of the ‘social world’. But does it go for empirical knowledge in general? I offer some – admittedly far from conclusive – reasons for thinking that it might. I also argue that, even if it doesn’t, we still need to distinguish between two kinds of knowledge, one of which is constitutively social and the other of which isn’t. Scientific knowledge is a paradigm example of the former and simple perceptual knowledge is a paradigm example of the latter. The end result is a form of pluralism about knowledge. (shrink)

Robin Attfield introduces environmental ethics, exploring the values involved in issues such as pollution, habitat loss, and climate change. Considering the different groups involved in environmental ethics, and the attitudes of the world's religions to environmental stewardship, he calls for action from us all to manage our environment ethically.

When one takes an intersectional perspective on patterns of oppression and domination, it becomes clear that familiar forms of systemic injustice, such as misogyny and anti-Black racism, are inseparable. Some feminist theorists conclude, from this, that the systems behind these injustices cannot be individuated—for example, that there isn’t patriarchy and white supremacy, but instead only white supremacist patriarchy. This chapter offers a different perspective. Philosophers have long observed that a statue and a lump of clay can be individuated although inseparable, (...) and that statues and lumps of clay do different explanatory and predictive work for the same causal outcomes. This chapter suggests that the same is true of systems such as patriarchy and white supremacy. These systems, like the injustices they produce, are inseparable. But they can be individuated, and when they are individuated, they do different explanatory and predictive work. (shrink)

'Transgender’ is often described either as an identity, or else as the full spectrum of gender nonconformity. In this essay, I suggest that these descriptions do not align with the conceptual labor that we often ask ‘transgender’ to do: highlighting people who engage in forms of self-directed gender nonconformity that are heavily penalized.

This article analyzes the relationship between the ideas of cruelty and injustice in Judith Shklar’s political theory. Shklar’s The Faces of Injustice is sometimes read as an instantiation of the liberalism of fear, which regards cruelty and the fear that it inspires as the summum malum. I challenge this interpretation and instead argue that her account of injustice should be read independently of her commitment to the liberalism of fear. In doing so, I show how her exploration of the faces (...) of injustice—especially the importance she accords to passive injustice and the sense of injustice—raises important challenges for the liberal case for putting cruelty first. Although democratic attitudes and institutions constitute the best available remedy for the sense of injustice, on Shklar’s account, those who focus too much on the requirements of democratic citizenship risk treating injustice as a greater evil than cruelty, which could, in turn, facilitate cruelty and undermine liberal democracy. I conclude by suggesting that the republican-inspired theory of citizenship from The Faces of Injustice, which Shklar outlines in response to the problem of passive injustice, reflects a distinct strand of her political theory that goes beyond the more familiar defense of law-bound constitutional government associated with the liberalism of fear. (shrink)

While many of the phenomenological currents in philosophy allegedly utilize a peculiar method, the type under consideration here is characterized by Franz Brentano s ambition to make philosophy scientific by adopting no other method but that of natural science. Brentano became particularly influential in teaching his students (such as Carl Stumpf, Anton Marty, Alexius Meinong, and Edmund Husserl) his descriptive psychology, which is concerned with mind as intentionally directed at objects. As Brentano and his students continued in their investigations in (...) descriptive psychology, another side of Austrian phenomenology, namely object theory, became more and more prominent. The philosophical orientation under consideration in this collection of essays is accordingly a two-sided discipline, concerned with both mind and objects, and applicable to various areas of philosophy such as epistemology, philosophy of language, value theory, and ontology.". (shrink)

The classical literature on Confucianism exhorted leaders to practice five core virtues as the basis for becoming a noble person and for sustaining harmonious communities built on trust and good example. We present a theory about how the senior management in modern corporations, by enacting the five Junzi virtues through virtuous environmental, social, and governance policies and practices, might inspire virtue-based relationships between superiors and subordinates and between employees. We argue that if middle managers and employees observe and experience that (...) their firm’s ESG policies and practices are virtuous, they would feel encouraged to practice those virtues in their own behavior, and thus embody and promote interpersonal harmony. We provide three types of illustration for our theory. First, we map the five Junzi virtues to the content of a specimen ESG report. Second, we map seven subtypes of servant leadership behavior of middle managers to the five Junzi virtues. Third, we map seven types of employee organizational citizenship behavior to the five Junzi virtues. (shrink)

This article analyses Adam Smith's and Sophie de Grouchy's accounts of sympathy to show how they arrive at strikingly different views on whether inequality is a threat to, or precondition of, social order. Where many scholars have recently sought to recover Smith's egalitarianism, I instead focus on how his account of sympathy in The Theory of Moral Sentiments naturalises socioeconomic inequalities, while also highlighting the wider inegalitarian implications of his analysis. I demonstrate that Grouchy was alert to these implications and (...) reveal how her own account of sympathy challenges the moral psychology underlying Smith's position on inequality. By reconstructing Grouchy's response to Smith, I illustrate how retrieving the insights of long‐overlooked thinkers can reorient the way we understand key debates in the history of philosophy, since Grouchy was far more concerned than Smith with exposing how economic inequality imperils the prospects of relating to one another as equals. (shrink)

In recent years philosophers have done impressive work explicating the nature and moral importance of a kind of self-respect Darwall calls “recognition self-respect,” which involves valuing oneself as the moral equal of every other person, regarding oneself as having basic moral rights and a legitimate claim to respectful treatment from other people just in virtue of being a person, and being unwilling to stand for having one’s rights violated or being treated as something less than a person. It is generally (...) agreed that such self-respect is something all persons have a right to and ought to have and that it is morally objectionable for a person or a society to preclude or injure someone’s self-respect. But scant attention has been paid to another kind of self-respect, the kind that has to do not with the fact that you are a person but with the kind of person you are, that has to do not with rights but with character. I call this kind of self-respect “evaluative self-respect.” The central task of this paper is to explicate the moral value of evaluative self-respect. I do this by looking at the role it plays in the life of someone who is sincerely concerned to be a good person. This is not to deny that evaluative self-respect can go wrong, and I look at how it can go wrong. In particular, evaluative self-respect is, like everything else in human life, vulnerable to the distorting forces of oppression. But, I argue, evaluative self-respect can have moral value even when it goes wrong, and it can be a liberatory resource in the lives of the oppressed. (shrink)

I defend an account of moral responsibility for implicit bias that is sensitive to both normative and pragmatic constraints: an acceptable theory of moral responsibility must not only do justice to our moral experience and agency, but also issue directives that are psychologically effective in bringing about positive changes in judgment and behavior. I begin by offering a conceptual genealogy of two different concepts of moral responsibility that arise from two distinct sources of philosophical concerns. We are morally responsible for (...) our actions in first sense only when those actions reflect our identities as moral agents—that is, when they are attributable to us as manifestations of our character, attitudes, ends, commitments, or values. On the other hand, we are responsible in the second sense when it is appropriate for others to enforce certain demands and expectations on those actions—in other words, to hold us accountable for them. I argue that we may sometimes lack attributability for actions caused by implicit bias, but that even then we are still accountable for them. Next, I expand beyond individual actions at a particular time to patterns of action across time, to consider what we can reasonably be expected to do when it comes to avoiding and eliminating implicit bias in our selves. By thinking of these expectations as grounded in imperfect duties, I show, we can expand our moral repertoire to include non-appraising critical moral responses, in addition to appraisal-based responses such as blame and punishment. Finally, I move beyond the actions of individuals to address the question of responsibility for eliminating the social conditions that breed implicit biases in the first place. I argue that accountability requires us not only to conform to a system of demands and expectations, but also to collectively organize to reform the system itself. By elaborating these multiple dimensions of moral responsibility—attributability versus accountability, particular versus patterns of action, individual versus collective—I demonstrate that the project of developing better practices of moral responsibility is continuous with, and thus contributes to, larger struggles for social equality and justice. (shrink)

Swear words of English and French, both real and fictional ones, significantly tend to contain the least sonorous consonants, compared to the rest of the lexicon. What can explain the overrepresentation of such sounds among swear words? This might be a case of sound symbolism, when sounds are unconsciously associated with a meaning. We examine the pragmatic vs. semantic nature of the meaning involved, as well as two explanations in terms of iconicity. This unusual sound-meaning pairing would involve an emotional-contextual, (...) non-truth-conditional meaning, and be powerful enough that it influences a strong sociolinguistic convention – which words are swear words and which ones are not – suggesting that sounds convey meaning in yet unsuspected ways. (shrink)

In standard belief models, priors are always common knowledge. This prevents such models from representing agents’ probabilistic beliefs about the origins of their priors. By embedding standard models in a larger standard model, however, pre-priors can describe such beliefs. When an agent’s prior and pre-prior are mutually consistent, he must believe that his prior would only have been different in situations where relevant event chances were different, but that variations in other agents’ priors are otherwise completely unrelated to which events (...) are how likely. Due to this, Bayesians who agree enough about the origins of their priors must have the same priors. (shrink)

New techniques in genome editing have led to a controversial debate about the opportunities and uncertainties they present for agricultural food production and consumption. In July 2018, the Court of Justice of the European Union defined genome editing as a new process of mutagenesis, which implies that the resulting organisms count as genetically modified and are subject, in principle, to the obligations of EU Directive 2001/18/EG. This paper examines how key protagonists from academia, politics, and the economy strategically framed the (...) debate around genome editing in agriculture in Germany prior to its legal classification by the Court of Justice. It is based on an analysis of 96 official statements, including position papers, press releases, and information brochures. Our study reveals eight strategic frames used in the discourse on genome editing and uncovers the strategies used to disconnect from or connect with the previous discourse on green genetic engineering in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Building on competitive framing theory, the study provides explanations for the use and emergence of counter-framing strategies and their success or failure in the debate around genome editing. (shrink)

Women’s entry into the legal academy in significant numbers—first as students, then as faculty—was a 1970s and 1980s phenomenon. During those decades, women in law schools struggled: first, for admission and inclusion as individual students on a formally equal footing with male students; then for parity in their numbers in classes and on faculties; and, eventually, for some measure of substantive equality across various parameters, including their performance and evaluation both in and in front of the classroom, as well as (...) in the quality of their experiences as students and faculty members and in the benefits to be reaped from their tenure. This part of the story of women’s entry into the legal academy in the 1970s and 1980s—a story of attempted admission, then inclusion, then integration and assimilation, and then, finally, equality—is now a familiar one, at least in broad outline. It is not, in its entirety, an uplifting story. According to a raft of articles produced by women law students in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, women law students during those decades participated less in the classroom, were called on and responded to differently when they did participate, suffered from more law-school-induced anxiety disorders and other mental health issues, graduated with lower GPAs and less law review experience, published fewer notes and filled fewer editorial positions on those journals, held fewer leadership positions overall while in law school, and had far more difficulties connecting with mentors, teachers, and would-be recommenders among the faculty than male students. Women law professors during those decades were tenured at significantly lower rates than men and, particularly at high prestige schools and at schools with fewer female faculty among the tenured ranks, were hired at lower rates that did not reflect their number in the pool of qualified applicants, had trouble asserting or maintaining authority in the classroom or being perceived as having authority, taught lower-prestige courses and received low teaching evaluations, and, like their students, were published far less frequently in the major and most prestigious law reviews. Much of this, albeit not all, has not changed much for either students or faculty. As women in law schools enter the posttenure and midcareer phase, many of the old problems persist while new ones appear: women faculty are invited to participate on panels less often than men, and both women students and faculty are underrepresented as authors in law reviews. Although gender-neutral parental leave is now available to faculty at most law schools, many such policies are still ad hoc. There is considerable worry, although no hard evidence, over whether men disproportionately use the time off to write rather than care for children. Women are still disproportionately overrepresented in some fields and underrepresented or unrepresented in others, and those fields correlate in unsurprising ways with levels of prestige: the more women in a field, the less prestigious. As elsewhere in the workforce, women faculty in legal education suffer from sexual harassment, most of which is unremedied. Women still suffer a pay gap in law schools that remains unaddressed at most universities, as it does elsewhere in academia. There is a sizeable literature on these depressing phenomena that stubbornly do not seem to abate. In these comments, however, I want to focus on another, less appreciated, part of the story of women’s entry into the legal academy in the 1970s and 1980s: the emergence of a body of scholarship—sometimes called feminist legal theory—produced by some of these women legal scholars over the same time period. The story I want to focus on, in other words, is not that of second- or third-wave women’s struggles within the academy, either for admission, acceptance, assimilation, or equality in law schools. Rather, this Article focuses on the story of the scholarship some of those second-wave assimilated women produced once they got there. Feminist jurisprudence, understood largely as scholarship on issues pertaining to gender equality, was launched in the 1970s, endures today, and continues to shape debates. Feminist legal theory, however, was in effect a subfield within feminist jurisprudence and, as its name implies, was an attempt to fashion a broad- based theoretical account of the relationship of law in liberal legal regimes to women’s subordination, patriarchy, and gender and sexual inequality— particularly in a post–civil rights era, when women enjoyed broad access to rights of formal equality, reproductive liberty, and liberal antidiscrimination law. Feminist legal theory so understood—a body of scholarship in search of a theoretical understanding of the relation of law to women’s subordination or, more simply, of law and patriarchy—was birthed in the 1970s, nurtured in the 1980s, and matured in the 1990s. I suggest in this Article that it is now seemingly in decline, and may soon disappear altogether. The reasons for this trajectory, I believe, are to date unexplored. Some reasons are fairly self-evident. Feminist legal theory was a product of three time-specific factors peculiar to the 1970s and 1980s: it reflected the political and the legal struggles of second-wave feminism. The critical theory schools were, to varying degrees, present or thriving in the academy in the 1970s and 1980s, within which feminist legal theory was birthed, grew, and then coexisted with critical theory, albeit at times very uneasily; and this feminist theory reflected second-wave women faculty and students’ mixed experiences of assimilation, success, and alienation in law schools themselves, as briefly recited above. Those three factors—the background politics, the presence of critical theory in law schools, and the differences in women’s experience of those schools—are all themselves either disappearing or dissipating in felt urgency, albeit in different ways and at different speeds, and that dissipation clearly is a part of the story of feminist legal theory’s decline. There are other reasons for its decline as well, however. Some are internal to feminism and feminist theory, and some pertain to the changing nature of legal scholarship from the 1980s to the present. I explore these reasons in Part II below. The story of the development of a distinctively feminist legal theory during the 1970s through the 1990s, and the story of its decline in the 2000s, is of obvious relevance to the history of second- and third-wave feminism. It should also be of interest for what it reveals about the nature of legal scholarship as it was understood, received, and produced in those decades. Its decline likewise reveals something about the changing nature of legal scholarship and the legal academy today. Thus, one conclusion I draw is that the feminist legal theory of the 1970s through the 1990s—regardless of the truth or lasting power of its claims—stands as an example of a type of legal scholarship that was somewhat distinctive to those decades. That form of legal scholarship, furthermore, likely can only emanate from the legal academy. For a host of reasons, we are currently in danger of losing this entire genre of intellectual work, which would be the polity’s loss, not just feminism’s or the legal academy’s. (shrink)

A simple exogenous growth model gives conservative estimates of the economic implications of machine intelligence. Machines complement human labor when they become more productive at the jobs they perform, but machines also substitute for human labor by taking over human jobs. At first, expensive hardware and software does only the few jobs where computers have the strongest advantage over humans. Eventually, computers do most jobs. At first, complementary effects dominate, and human wages rise with computer productivity. But eventually substitution can (...) dominate, making wages fall as fast as computer prices now do. An intelligence population explosion makes per-intelligence consumption fall this fast, while economic growth rates rise by an order of magnitude or more. These results are robust to automating incrementally, and to distinguishing hardware, software, and human capital from other forms of capital. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper argues that decolonial theory can offer a distinctive and valuable ethical lens. Decolonial perspectives give rise to an ethics that is fundamentally global but distinct from, and critical of, moral cosmopolitanism. Decolonial ethics shares with cosmopolitanism a refusal to circumscribe normative commitments on the basis of existing political and cultural boundaries. It differs from cosmopolitanism, though, by virtue of its rejection of the individualism and universalism of cosmopolitan thought. Where cosmopolitan approaches tend to articulate abstract principles developed from (...) within a particular Western tradition, decolonial approaches reject abstract global designs in favour of inter-cultural dialogue amongst multiple people, including peoples who deem collective and non-human entities to be of fundamental moral importance. In addition, decolonial global ethics rejects universality in favour of ‘pluriversality’. (shrink)

Through an analysis of two highly routinized interactive service jobs, fast food service and insurance sales, this article explores the interrelationship of work, gender, and identity. While notions of proper gender behavior are quite flexible, gender-segregated service jobs reinforce the conception of gender differences as natural. The illusion that gender-typed interaction is an expression of workers' inherent natures is sustained, even in situations in which workers' appearances, attitudes, and demeanors are closely controlled by their employers. Gender-typed work has different meanings (...) for women and men, however, because of differences in the cultural valuation of behavior considered appropriate to each gender. (shrink)

The use of contingent valuation methods for estimating the economic value of environmental improvements and damages has increased significantly. However, doubts exist regarding the validity of the usual willingness to pay CV methods. In this article, we examine the CV approach in light of recent findings from behavioral decision research regarding the constructive nature of human preferences. We argue that a principal source of problems with conventional CV methods is that they impose unrealistic cognitive demands upon respondents. We propose a (...) new CV approach, based on the value-structuring capabilities of multiattribute utility theory and decision analysis, and discuss its advantages and disadvantages. (shrink)

D‐amino acids are being recognized as functionally important molecules in mammals. We recently identified endogenous D‐cysteine in mammalian brain. D‐cysteine is present in neonatal brain in substantial amounts (mM) and decreases with postnatal development. D‐cysteine binds to MARCKS and a host of proteins implicated in cell division and neurodevelopmental disorders. D‐cysteine decreases phosphorylation of MARCKS in neural progenitor cells (NPCs) affecting its translocation. D‐cysteine controls NPC proliferation by inhibiting AKT signaling. Exogenous D‐cysteine inhibits AKT phosphorylation at Thr 308 and Ser (...) 473 in NPCs. D‐cysteine treatment of NPCs led to 50% reduction in phosphorylation of Foxo1 at Ser 256 and Foxo3a at Ser 253. We hypothesize that in the developing brain endogenous D‐cysteine is as a physiologic regulator of NPC proliferation by inhibiting AKT signaling mediated by Foxo1 and Foxo3a. Endogenous D‐cysteine may regulate mammalian neurodevelopment with roles in schizophrenia and Alzheimer's disease (AD). (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the ways that phenomenological concepts like intercorporeality and mutual incorporation offer new tools in trying to make sense of human experiences via mediating systems. In particular, I think about how the COVID-19 pandemic hastened a large population into mediated interactions, and what is lost, perhaps contingently or perhaps intrinsically, when human experiences are mediated in this way. I look to research in presence, skillful interaction, and enactive social cognition to argue that there remains something ineffable (...) or at least extremely hard to pin down about intercorporeality, and embodied togetherness has not yet been replicated in the mediating systems we currently embrace. (shrink)

Despite the striking similarities between Pyrrhonian skepticism and Madhyamaka Buddhism, few lessons have been drawn from the parallels between the two traditions. Here, it is argued that Madhyamaka Buddhism verifies the livability of Pyrrhonian skepticism. After establishing that Pyrrhonism and Madhyamaka can be understood as undertaking the same project, it is shown that Madhyamaka philosophy is able to refute objections to the viability of Pyrrhonism. Finally, it is demonstrated that Madhyamaka is still a lived practice in Tibetan Buddhism, and it (...) is argued that this constitutes empirical support for the livability of Pyrrhonian skepticism. (shrink)

A book for nurses, doctors and all who provide end of life care, this essential volume guides readers through the ethical complexities of such care, including current policy initiatives, and encourages debate and discussion on their controversial aspects. dived into two parts, it introduces and explains clinical decision making-processes about which there is broad consensus, in line with guidance documents issued by WHO, BMA, GMC, and similar bodies. The changing political and social context where 'patient choice' has become a central (...) idea, and the broadened scope of potients' best interests, have added to the complexity of decision-making in end of life care. The authors discuss issues widely encountered by GPs, nurses, and hospital clinicians. These include patient choice, consent, life-prolonging treatment, and symptom relief including sedation. Part rwo explores the more controversial current end of life care initiatives, such as advance care planning preferred place of care and death, euthanais and assited suicide, extended ideas of 'best interests', and the view that there are therapeutic duties to the relatives of Throughout their discussion the authors draw attention to loose ends and contradictions in some of the proposals. Examining the current policy of comsumerist choice, they reject its place in the health service, proposing a a realistic, fair, humane and widely adoptable system of end of life care. As knowledge of ethical theories is required in training courses, and the vocabulary of ethical theory is widespread in current discussions a substantial appendix on ethical theories and terms is available online. Written by the same authors as The Philosophy of Palliative Care: Critique and Reconstruction, which won the Medical Journalists' Association Specialits Book Award 2007, this new book for non-specialists is essential reading for all health care professionals involved in providing end of life care. (shrink)

Twice in the 2020 term, in Bostock and Comcast, the Supreme Court doubled down on the reasoning of “but-for causation” to interpret antidiscrimination statutes. According to this reasoning, an outcome is discriminatory because of some status—say, sex or race—just in case the outcome would not have occurred “but-for” the plaintiff’s status. We think this reasoning embeds profound conceptual errors that render the decisions deeply confused. Furthermore, those conceptual errors tend to limit the reach of antidiscrimination law. In this essay, we (...) first unpack the ambiguity of this but-for causal reasoning. We then show that this reasoning arises from a misapplication of tort law principles within antidiscrimination law, and that, as a result, it is both conceptually and normatively indeterminate. (shrink)

The trajectory of Merleau-Ponty’s career is often seen as a progressive development: he begins by analyzing scientific consciousness in The Structure of Behavior, complements that account with a phenomenological analysis of behavior as lived in Phenomenology of Perception, and then overcomes the “philosophy of consciousness” to which the earlier texts are committed in the turn toward an ontology of flesh in The Visible and the Invisible. Through close readings of Merleau-Ponty’s engagements with Gestalt psychology in The Structure of Behavior, I (...) argue that the immanent critique of Gestalt theory in that text already anticipates the chiasmic logic of flesh. This challenges the idea of a turn in Merleau-Ponty’s thinking. I begin by outlining the elemental, carnal, and reversible status of flesh. With careful attention to his source materials, I then distinguish Merleau-Ponty’s appropriations of Gestalt theoretical insights from his critical adaptations, defending three claims: (1) The Structure of Behavior borrows insights from Gestalt theorists that are undermined by their own, realistic ontology; (2) it modifies those insights to explicitly acknowledge the elemental status of nature; and (3) those modifications enable Merleau-Ponty to re-interpret Gestalt psychologists’ empirical findings, outlining how consciousness must emerge from nature as both carnal and reversible. (shrink)

To address longstanding workforce shortages, increase efficiency and control the costs associated with the modern health-care provision, there has been a worldwide policy to promote increased flexibility within the health-care workforce. This is being done primarily by extending the ‘scope of practice’ of existing occupational roles into what is referred to as ‘advanced’ practice. The development of the advanced practice nurse (APN) has occurred within the context of a shortage of medical staff, and the need to control cost. However, the (...) means by which substantially repurposed occupational groups such as these, are incorporated into complex, hierarchical organisations such as the UK national health service (NHS) remains poorly understood. Using modern sociological theory, the development of the APN role has been examined in terms of power, control, professional identity and gender relations. Each of the theoretical approaches used adds to the quality of the discussion, although none provide a comprehensive picture. However, when synthesised, they do provide an enhanced insight into the evolution of the role. It is argued here that by critically examining the development of the APN role, this will enable both a better understanding of, and the means to influence, its future direction of travel. (shrink)

Unlike gender inequality, racial inequality primarily accumulates across generations. In this article, Dembroff and Payton argue that transracial identification undermines collective reckoning with that injustice.

This paper introduces a formal view of the semantics and pragmatics of corrective feedback in dialogues between adults and children. The goal of this research is to give a formal account of language coordination in dialogue, and semantic coordination in particular. Accounting for semantic coordination requires (1) a semantics, i.e. an architecture allowing for dynamic meanings and meaning updates as results of dialogue moves, and (2) a pragmatics, describing the dialogue moves involved in semantic coordination. We illustrate the general approach (...) by applying it to some examples from the literature on corrective feedback, and provide a fairly detailed discussion of one example using TTR (Type Theory with Records) to formalize concepts. TTR provides an analysis of linguistic content which is structured in order to allow modification and similarity metrics, and a framework for describing dialogue moves and resulting updates to linguistic resources. (shrink)

One of the moral questions concerning autonomous vehicles (henceforth AVs) is the choice between types that differ in their built-in algorithms for dealing with rare situations of unavoidable lethal collision. It does not appear to be possible to avoid questions about how these algorithms should be designed. We present the results of our study of moral preferences (N = 2769) with respect to three types of AVs: (1) selfish, which protects the lives of passenger(s) over any number of bystanders; (2) (...) altruistic, which minimizes the number of casualties, even if this leads to death of passenger(s); and (3) conservative, which abstains from interfering in such situations. We differentiate between scenarios in which participants are to make their decisions privately or publicly, and for themselves or for their offspring. We aim to answer two research questions: (1) whether the public visibility of the choice of an AV type choice make this choice more altruistic and (2) which type of situation makes it more difficult to choose altruistically: when choosing for society as a whole, when choosing only for oneself, or when choosing only for one’s offspring. Our results show that respondents exhibit a preference for an altruistic strategy for AVs and that it is reinforced when signaled to others. The altruistic preference is strongest when applies to everybody else, weaker when it reflects a solely personal choice, and weakest when choosing for one’s own child. We conclude that a public choice is considerably more likely to pressure consumers into accepting a more socially beneficial solution. (shrink)

Despised since ancient times, ugliness gains unprecedented appeal among early modern writers and painters. Subverting all norms, they value the beauty of deformity and, by extolling the paradoxical pleasure of mimesis, they helped create a new subjectivity.