: Ulysses contracts have faced paternalism objections since they first were proposed. Since the contracts are designed to override a present request from a legally competent patient in favor of a past request made by that patient, enforcement of these contracts was argued to be unjustifiable strong paternalism. Recent legal developments and new theories of practical reasoning suggest that the discussion of Ulysses contracts should be revived. This paper argues that with a proper understanding of the future-directed planning embodied in (...) Ulysses contracts, the charge of strong paternalism can be answered, and the enforcement of some Ulysses contracts may be justified under the rubric of weak paternalism. (shrink)

What is love? In this paper I argue that love is a psychological syndrome, or an enormously complex cluster of psychological attitudes and dispositions that’s accompanied by a corresponding set of symptoms that flow from it. More specifically, I argue that love is an affectionate loyalty that takes different shapes across cases and that manifests itself in some set of behavioral and emotional expressions, where this set of expressions also varies across cases. After laying down three theoretical constraints that viable (...) theories of love must satisfy, I sketch my syndrome theory of love in detail and then defend it. First, I argue that it has a strong yet defeasible claim to satisfying the three theoretical constraints. Then I defend my theory against two objections that target its extensional adequacy. I conclude that we have good grounds for being optimistic about the theory even though it calls for further development and scrutiny. (shrink)

In response to the catastrophes of the twentieth century, contemporary writers were often led to revolutionize inherited forms of philosophical presentation. And now, in an age of Anthropocene extinction, such experiments have become necessary once again. To comprehend this most recent of disasters, the present essay develops a practice of the philosophical fragment which, by returning to contemporaneous accounts of Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and Chernobyl, seeks to demonstrate what was both anticipated by and wholly unforeseen from within the perspective of earlier (...) attempts at contending with natural and societal disasters. By tracking the changing status of the skies in such writers as Robert Antelme, Marguerite Duras, Günther Anders, Svetlana Alexievich, and Greta Thunberg, the present essay distinguishes this longer twentieth-century history of destruction from the work of extermination now underway. (shrink)

Ludwig Feuerbach's work is often too easily dovetailed with the works of Hegel and Marx and therefore read teleologically as an intermediary step between the two “major” figures. By re-interpreting Feuerbach more as a system critic than as a system builder, this article attempts to elucidate his relationships to the other two. It will also point up the gendered articulation of his critiques of religion and philosophy. The article will show how Feuerbach's use of gender, though remaining fixed within a (...) predictably hierarchical binary, is more than simply symptomatic of its context and offers significant resources for critical re-readings of nineteenth-century German philosophy. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence ethics requires a united approach from policymakers, AI companies, and individuals, in the development, deployment, and use of these technologies. However, sometimes discussions can become fragmented because of the different levels of governance or because of different values, stakeholders, and actors involved. Recently, these conflicts became very visible, with such examples as the dismissal of AI ethics researcher Dr. Timnit Gebru from Google and the resignation of whistle-blower Frances Haugen from Facebook. Underpinning each debacle was a conflict between (...) the organisation’s economic and business interests and the morals of their employees. This paper will examine tensions between the ethics of AI organisations and the values of their employees, by providing an exploration of the AI ethics literature in this area, and a qualitative analysis of three workshops with AI developers and practitioners. Common ethical and social tensions will be discussed, along with proposals on how to avoid or reduce these conflicts in practice. Altogether, we suggest the following steps to help reduce ethical issues within AI organisations: improved and diverse ethics education and training within businesses; internal and external ethics auditing; the establishment of AI ethics ombudsmen, AI ethics review committees and an AI ethics watchdog; as well as access to trustworthy AI ethics whistle-blower organisations. (shrink)

Moby-Dick has long served as an index of contemporary events and changing paradigms. Yet despite its long and varied history of interpretation, an analysis of the novel’s reception history demonstrates a striking unanimity of purpose. In nearly every instance, Ahab’s excesses and inhumanities are identified and prohibited in the name of ensuring that the novel can aid in the work of furthering the aesthetic education of man. In the process, the artwork’s integrity, achievement and essential irreducibility are subordinated to the (...) demand that artworks provide essential moral instruction. The present essay reconstructs this common task through a close reading of the novel’s reception history, tracking its development from the time of Melville’s contemporaries to more recent debates between Donald E. Pease and William V. Spanos. Through Theodor W. Adorno’s work on aesthetics and society, this critical reinterpretation of Moby-Dick tries to better understand the “wicked book” its author first recognized, and for whose infernal birth he felt, in his own words, “as spotless as the lamb.”. (shrink)

This paper is part of a project to rescue fashion from the social sciences and restore it to philosophy. In Kawamura's Fashion-ology, power is understood solely as legal or institutional power. The work's strictly sociological approach means that, though the two are rightly distinguished, clothing continues to haunt the logic of fashion, and there is little reflection as to why the system of clothing and not some other commodity lends its name to cultural neomania in general. What is lacking is (...) an analysis of the specific nature of fashion's empowerment and disempowerment of subjectivity. For this we need to enlist Foucault's genealogy of power, which also has the advantage of explaining strategic resistance to institutional power. However, Foucault's account is itself unsatisfying, because it avoids offering a theory of power while nevertheless assuming one. Foucault's critique of power quietly assumes Nietzsche's metaphysic of power, the incessant, embodied movement of self-empowering and self-overpowering. The corporeal subject of this self-production is nothing but surface, one that extends to the surrounds of its world, and the ceaseless rhythm of its embodied self-presentation is fashion. Barthes insightfully observes that, were its rhythm to be disrupted by cultural developments, the intense jostling that resulted would be the beginning of a new history of fashion. Yet there is incoherence to this claim, for if the rhythm of fashion were to turn into the chaos of arrhythmia, then we might instead conclude that fashion was at an end. Barthes' uncertain prospect of a new beginning points to what I call, following Heidegger, the powerlessness of fashion. This is not intended as criticism, since this powerlessness is nothing negative but rather that which exceeds the limits of fashion while giving rise to it. But on questions concerning the historicality of its beginning and the finality of its self-understanding, the sociology of fashion can have nothing to say. (shrink)

Scientific research is almost always conducted by communities of scientists of varying size and complexity. Such communities are effective, in part, because they divide their cognitive labor: not every scientist works on the same project. Philip Kitcher and Michael Strevens have pioneered efforts to understand this division of cognitive labor by proposing models of how scientists make decisions about which project to work on. For such models to be useful, they must be simple enough for us to understand their dynamics, (...) but faithful enough to reality that we can use them to analyze real scientific communities. To satisfy the first requirement, we must employ idealizations to simplify the model. The second requirement demands that these idealizations not be so extreme that we lose the ability to describe real-world phenomena. This paper investigates the status of the assumptions that Kitcher and Strevens make in their models, by first inquiring whether they are reasonable representations of reality, and then by checking the models' robustness against weakenings of these assumptions. To do this, we first argue against the reality of the assumptions, and then develop a series of agent-based simulations to systematically test their effects on model outcomes. We find that the models are not robust against weakenings of these idealizations. In fact we find that under certain conditions, this can lead to the model predicting outcomes that are qualitatively opposite of the original model outcomes. (shrink)

It is common in metaethics today to draw a distinction between “naturalist” and “non-naturalist” versions of moral realism, where the former view maintains that moral properties are natural properties, while the latter view maintains that they are non-natural properties instead. The nature of the disagreement here can be understood in different ways, but the most common way is to understand it as a metaphysical disagreement. In particular, the disagreement here is about the reducibility of moral properties, where the “naturalists” maintain (...) that moral properties are in some way reducible to the lower-level natural properties on which they supervene, while the “non-naturalists” maintain that moral properties are sui generis and robustly irreducible. In this paper I present a novel version of realist ethical naturalism—a view that I call Emergentist Ethical Naturalism—that reveals this common way of understanding the distinction between naturalism and non-naturalism to be flawed by combining a commitment to ethical naturalism with a commitment to the sui generis and robustly irreducible nature of moral properties that typically defines non-naturalism. Then, after presenting the theory and addressing a few worries that one might have about it, I show how it offers some novel, emergence-based responses to the various supervenience challenges that plague moral realism and thereby gives the ethical naturalist a robustly non-reductive option for dealing with these challenges. (shrink)

Engaging in environmental stewardship is critical for sustainability. Understanding individual differences and engagement is an important gap in present scholarship and addressing it is necessary to understand individual factors that relate to the types of activities engaged in, motivations and barriers to environmental stewardship. We surveyed 637 Canadian and American adults via Amazon Mechanical Turk, querying a range of demographic, psychological and environmental perceptions factors as well as motivations and barriers to stewardship activities. Respondents were ultimately grouped into Non-Stewards, Home-Oriented (...) Stewards and Community-Oriented Stewards. Few differences were found among these groups. However, Home-Oriented Stewards and Community-Oriented Stewards exhibited very different initial and ongoing motivations to engage in environmental stewardship. Accordingly, we identify stewardship motivations as a potential leverage point and as one of several promising avenues for future research related to enhancing engagement in environmental stewardship for the sustainability of the planet. (shrink)

Body integrity identity disorder (BIID), previously called apotemnophilia, is an extremely rare condition where sufferers desire the amputation of a healthy limb because of distress associated with its presence. This paper reviews the medical and philosophical literature on BIID. It proposes an evidenced based and ethically informed approach to its management. Amputation of a healthy limb is an ethically defensible treatment option in BIID and should be offered in some circumstances, but only after clarification of the diagnosis and consideration of (...) other treatment options. (shrink)

A starting point for thinking about war and preparations for war is that today the average citizen in Western countries has absolutely no interest in fighting in a war him or herself. The best study of this phenomenon rightly notes that what might be called the “great refusal” of ordinary people to involve themselves in actual war making reflects what might be called the “great disillusionment” with war itself. However, this has not meant the end of war, or of preparations (...) for war, but rather war's transformation from a “nationalized” to a “postnationalized” arrangement. For the United States, this has meant expansion into a new type of empire. As part of the symposium on Ned Dobos'sEthics, Security, and the War-Machine,this essay explores these developments and the challenges they pose. (shrink)

Recent advances in the cognitive psychology of inference have been of great interest to philosophers of science. The present paper reviews one such area, namely studies based upon Wason's 4-card selection task. It is argued that interpretation of the results of the experiments is complex, because a variety of inference strategies may be used by subjects to select evidence needed to confirm or disconfirm a hypothesis. Empirical evidence suggests that which strategy is used depends in part on the semantic, syntactic, (...) and pragmatic context of the inference problem at hand. Since the factors of importance are also present in real-world science, and similarly complicate its interpretation, the selection task, though it does not present a quick fix, represents a kind of microcosm of great utility for the understanding of science. Several studies which have examined selection strategies in more complex problem-solving environments are also reviewed, in an attempt to determine the limits of generalizability of the simpler selection tasks. Certain interpretational misuses of laboratory research are described, and a claim made that the issue of whether or not scientists are rational should be approached by philosophers and psychologists with appropriate respect for the complexities of the issue. (shrink)

_Forest Family_ highlights the importance of old-growth forests to Australian art, community, culture, history, and politics. The volume will be of interest to general readers of environmental history, as well as scholars in critical plant studies and the environmental humanities.

“Busyness” like many concepts trades on contrast. The most obvious contrast is with “real work” and ‘really working.” “Busy work” is usually pretend work; we try to look as though we are achieving something but all we are doing is shuffling the paper on our desks, polishing the inlet manifold rather than diagnosing the fault about to destroy the engine, marching our soldiers up to the top of the hill and marching them down again rather than engaging the enemy. All (...) the same, being “busy” is often said to be a good thing: the Puritan hymn writer Isaac Watts celebrated “the little busy bee” for improving the shining hour. For creatures other than the bee, busy may be a good thing to be but not usually the best thing: a midfield soccer player who is “busy” is useful, but a player of equal skill who is “economical” is better. My theme is that our attitude to “real work” is deeply ambiguous; on the one side, work is a curse, the labour to which we are doomed as a result of the Fall; its side-effect of enforcing upon us a necessary discipline and self-discipline is small consolation. On the other side, work is the expression of distinctive human powers and aspirations; work brings imagination into the world as well as drudgery. We imagine a world that does not exist but might, and then we set about creating it. The Fall was a happy Fall, and the need to labour was the first step in teaching the human species how to make the most of its potentialities. (shrink)

Nevertheless, some of Stirling's students did contract virulent forms of Hegelian speculation. What attracted Stirling and others is indicated in his description of how he first came to know of Hegel.

THE THEME, "The Intelligibility of Nature," is exceedingly broad. It stretches like a vast domain in which one can only hope to leave a few footprints, some fragile impressions that are all but lost in the expanse. In attempting to understand the natural world, the enterprise that is most familiar to many of us is inherited from the Greeks and their Latin heirs, both classical and mediaeval, and this enterprise continues in our own day in the form of the modern (...) sciences of nature. Nowadays, we are more informed about the knowledge acquired by the Egyptians, Babylonians, and others prior to the Greeks. We are more conscious of the achievements of the Chinese in physics and the Indians in mathematics. And we are more aware of the medical and zoological lore present in oral traditions, such as those of Africa. Moreover, we are only now beginning to appreciate their contributions and their potential for new forms of enquiry, including other ways of approaching nature. The terms in which the topic is here designated, however, are conceived in Greek and expressed in Latin. Nevertheless, even within this cultural tradition of natural enquiry, the topic is quite broad enough. Like a grammarian of old parsing a sentence, I am forced to begin by distinguishing parts of the theme. (shrink)

In this paper, I leverage the pragmatist tradition in philosophy, the collective wisdom of scholarship in clinical ethics consultation, and earlier attempts to apply pragmatism in clinical ethics to develop a new vision of clinical ethics practice called New Clinical Pragmatism. It argues that clinical ethics methodology, from the New Clinical Pragmatist’s perspective, amounts to the recommendation that consultants should customize a methodological approach, drawing on the various available methods, depending on the demands of the specific case, and should avoid (...) attempts to identify a ‘true’ methodology but to the incoherence and inevitable failure of those attempts. I argue that pragmatism’s emphasis on practical wisdom and experimentation allow the New Clinical Pragmatist to do this while avoiding irrationality in choosing methods. I discuss how the New Clinical Pragmatist gives a unique, constructive perspective on key aspects of clinical ethics consultation such as the choice of common morality vs. internal morality of medicine approaches, process standards, bioethics mediation, and narrative ethics, and suggest how New Clinical Pragmatism’s relaxed approach to choice of methodology encourages consultants to balance attention to the particulars of the case with knowledge of what the many insightful scholars of clinical ethics methodology have found useful in the past. I also argue that New Clinical Pragmatism is consistent with efforts to professionalize clinical ethics consultation. (shrink)

This paper examines heterogeneous impacts of gendered household headship and control of resources on food security in rural Tanzania. Analysis with minimal attention to heterogeneity in gender considerations indicates no differences in household food security between male and female-headed households. But with a more differentiated household headship variable and accounting for gendered differences in resource ownership, the results differ markedly. Using more gender-disaggregated variables, our results show significant differences between female-headed and male-headed households. In these results we find support for (...) the claim that gender norms in the study villages often restrict women’s access to resources, resulting in more vulnerable female-headed households. Female-headed households with no male adults present are particularly vulnerable. The study also points to specific opportunities for enhanced food security with attention to female and joint ownership of livestock. These results represent a hopeful sign that efforts to enhance female livestock ownership could be a useful strategy to address lower levels of food consumption in these Tanzanian villages. (shrink)