We conducted a survey of residents of Kingston, Ontario, Canada, (n = 107) to understand their attitudes to and experiences of waste management and governance. Currently, the municipality is emphasising waste diversion and exploring new waste processing systems (WPS; e.g., incineration) to reduce costs. Using Foucault's governmentality theory, our data suggest Kingston's reliance on an attitude-behaviour-context model of behaviour change successfully fosters an environmental citizenship identity based on waste diversion (e.g., recycling). However, we argue that the neoliberal governmentality upon which (...) the attitude-behaviour-context model is predicated elides the need for, and inhibits consideration of, broader societal change concerning urgent environmental issues involving consumption and waste. (shrink)

Introduction: Healthcare practitioners have a legal, ethical and professional obligation to obtain patient consent for all healthcare treatments. There is increasing evidence which suggests dissonance and variation in practice in assessment of decision-making capacity and consent processes. Aims: This study explores healthcare practitioners’ knowledge and practices of assessing decision-making capacity and obtaining patient consent to treatment in the acute generalist setting. Methods: An exploratory descriptive cross-sectional survey design, using an online questionnaire, method was employed with all professional groups invited via (...) email to participate. Data were collected over 3 months from July to September 2015. Survey content and format was reviewed by the liaison psychiatry team and subsequently contained five sections (demographics, general knowledge and practice, delirium context, legal aspects and education/training). Descriptive, univariate and bivariate analysis of quantitative data and qualitative content analysis of qualitative data were undertaken. Ethical considerations: The study was approved by the institutional Human Research and Ethics Committee and informed consent was taken to be provided by participants upon completion and submission of the de-identified survey. Results: In total, 86 participants engaged the survey with n = 24, exiting at the first consent question. Almost two-thirds of respondents indicated that all treatments required patient consent. Knowledge of consent and decision-making capacity as legal constructs was deficient. Decision-making capacity was primarily assessed using professional judgement and perceived predominantly as the responsibility of medical and psychology staff. A range of patient psychological and behavioural symptoms were identified as indicators requiring assessment of decision-making capacity. Despite this, many patients with delirium have their decision-making capacity assessed and documented only sometimes. Uncertain knowledge and inconsistent application of legislative frameworks are evident. Many participants were unsure of the legal mechanisms for obtaining substitute consent in patients with impaired decision-making capacity and refusing treatment. Conclusion: The legal context of decision-making capacity and consent to treatment appears complex for healthcare practitioners. Professional, ethical and legal standards of care in this context can benefit from structured education programmes and supportive governance processes. An understanding of why ‘duty of care’ is being used as a framework within the context of impaired decision-making capacity is warranted, alongside a review of the context of Duty of Care within health policy, guidance and faculty teaching. (shrink)

BackgroundDelirium is highly prevalent in the general hospital patient population, characterized by acute onset, fluctuating levels of consciousness, and global impairment of cognitive functioning. Mental capacity, its assessment and subsequent consent are therefore prominent within this cohort, yet under-explored.AimThis study of patients with delirium sought to determine the processes by which consent to medical treatment was attempted, how capacity was assessed, and any subsequent actions thereafter.MethodA retrospective documentation review of patients identified as having a delirium for the twelve months February (...) 2013 to January 2014 was undertaken. Inclusion and exclusion criteria were used; demographic and descriptive data collected. A total of n=1153 patients were identified with n=310 meeting inclusion criteria.ResultA random sample of one hundred patients were subsequently reviewed. One third of patients had documentation relating to consent, while four patients had documentation relating to capacity. Median delirium duration was three days, with treatment refusal occurring in twenty-two patients and “duty of care” being used as an apparent beneficent related treatment framework in twelve patients.ConclusionsWhile impaired decision-making was indicated, the review was unable to indicate what patient characteristics flag the need for capacity assessment. Documentation relating to consent processes appeared deficient for this cohort. (shrink)

Australian prisons are overpopulated with people suffering from numerous health problems. COVID-19 presents a significant threat to prisoner health. This article examines the current regulatory responses from Australian state and territory governments to COVID-19 and a recent case which tested the human rights of prisoners during a pandemic.

The doctrine of consent is built upon presumptions of mental capacity. Those presumptions must be tested according to legal rules that may be difficult to apply to COVID-19 patients during emergency presentations. We examine the principles of mental capacity and make recommendations on how to assess the capacity of COVID-19 patients to consent to emergency medical treatment. We term this the CARD approach.

Feminist standpoint epistemology suggests that women are cognitively privileged, since gender-specific forms of oppression produce insights systematically denied to men. Yet if many forms of oppression exist, what happens when they overlap? Some reject such theories as irredeemably essentialist, triumphalist, and relativist, but I argue that their original versions in Hegel and Lukács as supplemented by Sabina Lovibond generate both the strongest arguments for standpoint theories and a way through their deepest difficulties.

This collection of 30 essays covers living a moral and ethical life as a lawyer and Christian, following the example of J. Reuben Clark, Jr. The mission and history of the BYU Law School is also adressed.

The promotion of the self‐managing capacities of people has become a marker of contemporary mental health practice, yet self‐management remains a largely uncontested construct in mental health settings. This discourse analysis based upon the work of Foucault investigates self‐management practices for bipolar disorder and their action upon how a person with bipolar disorder comes to think of who they are and how they should live. Using Foucault's framework for exploring the ethical self and transcripts of interviews with people living with (...) bipolar disorder, this discourse analysis finds that the discursive practices of self‐management for bipolar disorder are prescribing a restricted regime for living based upon the quintessential neo‐liberal subject using practices that are focused upon managing an unreliable and problematic self. The article concludes with the proposition that the problem of bipolar disorder (for which self‐management is an answer) is less about the object itself and more about how we construct the nature of the self. A Māori indigenous ontology is used here as an example of an alternative discursive resource through which people make sense of the self and which allows ways of thinking about self‐management that engage with ambivalence and ambiguity rather than restriction and regulation. (shrink)

This article tries to grapple with the difficulty of hearing the call of the other and recognizing it as a call that obligates us to ethical response, especially when such a “call” is not issued by a human other but by other species or environmental precarity more broadly. I briefly review how ethical responsibility is articulated by Emmanuel Lévinas and then consider some of the ways in which his philosophy has been applied to environmental questions. I suggest that while some (...) calls might be obvious and obligate by the blatant need almost impossible to ignore, in many cases a hermeneutic context and predisposition is required in order to “hear” a call and understand it as ethically obligating. I conclude with one example of how it might be possible to inculcate such dispositions that would attune us to more careful hearing and might cause us to recognize ethical obligation. (shrink)

One of Scott Cameron’s most recent contributions to environmental hermeneutics (a field in which he was a founding scholar) was to defend the concept of nature against those who would argue that it should be abandoned in order to stave off the ecological destruction. Rather than jettison nature as an outdated and unhelpful construct, Cameron argued for its redemption based on Gadamer’s hermeneutical insights into language. In this article, I will look at Cameron’s arguments against Steven (...) Vogel as well as particular points made against nature as a concept recently articulated by Slavoj Žižek and Timothy Morton. I will follow these arguments through, demonstrating that while the arguments can be accepted and are, indeed, accurate, the conclusion that the concept of nature be abandoned need not and should not be conceded. Finally, I will return to Cameron’s hermeneutic defense of a concept of nature and expand further on his insights and arguments. With Cameron, I conclude that the concept of nature can be redeemed. Extending Cameron’s line of reasoning, I argue that this aim is accomplished by refiguring the concept of nature with the insights offered by philosophical hermeneutics. (shrink)

Sorry that he is no longer here to read it, I consider in this paper Scott Cameron’s discussion of my views questioning the value of the concept of “nature” for environmental philosophy. Scott had suggested, based on arguments from hermeneutics, that although we never have access to a nature independent of our interpretations of it, still the existence of such a nature is necessarily presupposed by all such interpretations. I claim in response that if we replace the (...) (idealist) notion of interpretation by the (materialist) one of practice, that presupposition is no longer necessary: the independence required is built into the notion of practice itself, and need not be seen as a characteristic of the world “outside” of us. (shrink)

It is more than a coincidence that in his two essays, “Wilderness and the City: Not such a Long Drive After All” and “Can Cities Be Both Natural and Successful? Reflections Grounding Two Apparently Oxymoronic Aspirations,” Scott Cameron looks to water as a basis for evaluating the city in relationship to the wild and in imagining new possibilities for urban nature. In an attempt to complement and enrich Cameron’s thinking, this essay focuses on emerging, decentralized and ecologically (...) responsive approaches to water and wastewater systems in architectural projects in dense urban environments. Such an emphasis on “blue architectures” allows for a reframing of the city/nature relationship in terms of degrees of concentration—of water, organisms, and pollutants—as a precursor to considerations of distances involved (“not such a long drive”). To concentrate on localized hydrologic conditions is to support the integrity of broader scale ecological systems and to reconnect urban dwellers to processes that bear directly on the wild. (shrink)

Essays that put noted political thinkers of the past—including Plato, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Wollstonecraft, Marx, and Confucius—in dialogue with current environmental political theory. Contemporary environmental political theory considers the implications of the environmental crisis for such political concepts as rights, citizenship, justice, democracy, the state, race, class, and gender. As the field has matured, scholars have begun to explore connections between Green Theory and such canonical political thinkers as Plato, Machiavelli, Locke, and Marx. The essays in this volume put important figures (...) from the political theory canon in dialogue with current environmental political theory. It is the first comprehensive volume to bring the insights of Green Theory to bear in reinterpreting these canonical theorists. Individual essays cover such classical figures in Western thought as Aristotle, Hume, Rousseau, Mill, and Burke, but they also depart from the traditional canon to consider Mary Wollstonecraft, W. E. B. Du Bois, Hannah Arendt, and Confucius. Engaging and accessible, the essays also offer original and innovative interpretations that often challenge standard readings of these thinkers. In examining and explicating how these great thinkers of the past viewed the natural world and our relationship with nature, the essays also illuminate our current environmental predicament. Essays on Plato • Aristotle • Niccolò Machiavelli • Thomas Hobbes • John Locke • David Hume • Jean-Jacques Rousseau • Edmund Burke • Mary Wollstonecraft • John Stuart Mill • Karl Marx • W. E. B. Du Bois • Martin Heidegger • Hannah Arendt • Confucius Contributors Sheryl D. Breen, W. Scott Cameron, Peter F. Cannavò, Joel Jay Kassiola, Joseph H. Lane Jr. Timothy W. Luke, John M. Meyer, Özgüç Orhan, Barbara K. Seeber, Francisco Seijo, Kimberly K. Smith, Piers H. G. Stephens, Zev Trachtenberg, Andrew Valls, Harlan Wilson. (shrink)

This ambitious, interdisciplinary book seeks to explain the origins of religion using our knowledge of the evolution of cognition. A cognitive anthropologist and psychologist, Scott Atran argues that religion is a by-product of human evolution just as the cognitive intervention, cultural selection, and historical survival of religion is an accommodation of certain existential and moral elements that have evolved in the human condition.

_Matters of Mind_ examines the mind-body problem. It offers a chapter by chapter analysis of debates surrounding the problem, including visual experience, consciousness and the problem of Zombies and Ghosts. It will prove invaluable for those interested in epistemology, philosophy of mind and cognitive science.

Plato and Aristotle used moral philosophy to influence the way people actually live. Focusing on the Republic and the Nicomachean Ethics, this book examines how far they thought it could succeed in this.

Essays by 14 Levinas scholars provide a fresh acount of the argument and purpose of Emmanuel Levinas's major work, Totality and Infinity, drawing parallels between Levinas and other thinkers; considering Levinas's relationship to other disciplines such as nursing, psychotherapy, and law; and bringing this seminal text to bear on specific, concrete issues of present-day concern"--Provided by publisher.

I address the question of the origins and historical meaning of art. Analyzing suggestions from Marx, Derrida, Winnicott, and Todorov, I claim that art doesn’t simply represent conscious, historical events but is also the continuing presentation of the prehistorical break-up of our “original” human family. Indeed,perpetuating yet distancing this archaic scene of community and violence in tension, art performs this mediation not just in history but also as history, as a secretive historiography of splitting and meaning-making. To this end, I (...) analyze some tribal tattooing and scarring practices. Literally carving a world of metaphorical significance out of our disidentification with mother nature and with each other in turn, art speaks hieroglyphically of persistent primitive loss. (shrink)

A collection of 37 essays surveying the state of the art on metaphysical ground. -/- Essay authors are: Fatema Amijee, Ricki Bliss, Amanda Bryant, Margaret Cameron, Phil Corkum, Fabrice Correia, Louis deRosset, Scott Dixon, Tom Donaldson, Nina Emery, Kit Fine, Martin Glazier, Kathrin Koslicki, David Mark Kovacs, Stephan Krämer, Stephanie Leary, Stephan Leuenberger, Jon Litland, Marko Malink, Michaela McSweeney, Kevin Mulligan, Alyssa Ney, Asya Passinsky, Francesca Poggiolesi, Kevin Richardson, Stefan Roski, Noel Saenz, Benjamin Schnieder, Erica Shumener, Alexander Skiles, (...) Olla Solomyak, Tuomas Tahko, Naomi Thompson, Kelly Trogdon, Jennifer Wang, Tobias Wilsch, and Justin Zylstra. (shrink)

A widely accepted view in the philosophy of humour is that immoral jokes, like racist, sexist or homophobic jokes, can nevertheless be funny. What remains controversial is whether the moral flaws in these jokes can sometimes increase their humour. Moderate comic immoralism claims that it is possible, in at least some cases, for moral flaws to increase the humour of jokes. Critics of moderate comic immoralism deny that this ever occurs. They recognise that some jokes are both funny and immoral, (...) yet they claim that it is always something other than the moral flaws of jokes that contribute to their humour. In a series of recent papers, Aaron Smuts has pressed this objection to moderate comic immoralism. I argue that Smuts' attempt to narrow the range of cases in which humour can be attributed to immoral features is not sufficient to demonstrate that moderate comic immoralism is false. Specifically, I claim that Smuts cannot rule out a case for moderate comic immoralism grounded in the possibility that humour is normatively relative while the ethical status of jokes is not. (shrink)

People who report believing in God fear death. They also experience grief when someone they love dies. Philosophers and social scientists sometimes claim that this can only be plausibly explained by the hypothesis that people who claim to believe in God do not really believe in God. I show that this is mistaken. I identify three independently plausible explanations of why people who genuinely believe in God would have these behaviors and attitudes. First, there is an evolutionary explanation of why (...) the fear of death would be resilient even if one genuinely believes God has good things in store for us after death. Second, people often fear low probability outcomes. It may be that religious people are afraid of hell or the cessation of existence even if they judge those outcomes to have a low probability. Third, belief in God is typically combined with views according to which death is accompanied by the permanent loss and radical transformation of important relationships. (shrink)

Kin selection, reciprocity and group selection are widely regarded as evolutionary mechanisms capable of sustaining altruism among humans andother cooperative species. Our research indicates, however, that these mechanisms are only particular examples of a broader set of evolutionary possibilities.In this paper we present the results of a series of simple replicator simulations, run on variations of the 2–player prisoner's dilemma, designed to illustrate the wide range of scenarios under which altruism proves to be robust under evolutionary pressures. The set of (...) mechanisms we explore is divided into four categories :correlation, group selection, imitation, and punishment. We argue that correlation is the core phenomenon at work in all four categories. (shrink)

Recent scholarship in business ethics has revealed the importance of privacy expectations as they relate to implicit privacy norms and the business practices that may violate these expectations. Yet, it is unclear how and when businesses may violate these expectations, factors that form or influence privacy expectations, or whether or not expectations have in fact been violated by company actions. This article reports the findings of three studies exploring how and when the corporate dissemination of consumer data violates privacy expectations. (...) The results indicate that consumer sentiment is more negative following intentional releases of sensitive consumer data, but the effect of data dissemination is more complex than that of company intentionality and data sensitivity alone. Companies can effectively set, and re-affirm, privacy expectations via consent procedures preceding and succeeding data dissemination notifications. Although implied consent has become more widely used in practice, we show how explicit consent outperforms implied consent in these regards. Importantly, this research provides process evidence that identifies perceived violation of privacy expectations as the underlying mechanism to explain the deleterious effects, on consumer sentiment, when company actions are misaligned with consumers’ privacy expectations. Ethical implications for companies collecting and disseminating consumer information are offered. (shrink)

According to directionalism, non-symmetric relations are distinct from their converses. Kit Fine (2000) argues that the directionalist faces a dilemma; they must either (i) reject the principle Uniqueness, which states that no completion (fact, state of affairs, or proposition) is a completion of more than one relation, or (ii) reject the principle Identity, which states that each completion of a relation is identical to a completion of its converse (e.g., Dante’s loving Bice is identical to Bice’s being loved by Dante). (...) Fine’s argument has been regarded as a decisive blow to directionalism. But new strategies for replying to it can be developed with the tools of the postmodal metaphysician, who is comfortable individuating relations and their completions hyperintensionally, allowing for necessary connections between distinct entities, and making use of hyperintensional notions like essence and grounding. In what follows, I develop postmodal strategies for denying both horns of Fine’s dilemma, concluding that the postmodal directionalist need not be concerned with Fine’s argument. (shrink)

To what extent should parents be able to choose the kind of child they have? The unfortunate phrase 'designer baby' has become familiar in debates surrounding reproduction. As a reference to current possibilities the term is misleading, but the phrase may indicate a societal concern of some kind about control and choice in the course of reproduction. Typically, people can choose whether to have a child. They may also have an interest in choosing, to some extent, the conditions under which (...) they do so, such as whether they have a child with a serious disability or disease. The purpose of this book is to explore the difficult and controversial question of the appropriate ethical and legal extent of reproductive autonomy in this context. The book examines ethical, legal and public policy issues in prenatal screening, prenatal diagnosis (PND), selective abortion and preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). It explores the ethics of these selection practices and the ability of current ethical guidelines and legal mechanisms, including the law on selective abortion and wrongful birth, to deal with advances in genetic and other knowledge in these areas. Unlike in the United States, in England the relevant law is not inherently rights-based, but the impact of the Human Rights Act 1998 inevitably raises questions about the proper scope of reproductive autonomy in this context. The implications of the analysis are considered for the development of relevant law, public policy and ethical guidelines and will be of interest to academics in medical law and ethics, health professionals, lawyers, those working on public policy and students with an interest in these issues. (shrink)

The consideration of ‘mutual benefits’ and partner cooperation have long been the accepted standpoint from which to draw inference about the onset, maintenance and breakdown of the coral‐algae endosymbiosis. In this paper, I review recent research into the climate‐induced breakdown of this important symbiosis (namely ‘coral bleaching’) that challenges the validity of this long‐standing belief. Indeed, I introduce a more parsimonious explanation, in which the coral host exerts a ‘controlled parasitism’ over its algal symbionts that is akin to an enforced (...) domestication arrangement. Far from being pathogenic, a range of well‐established cellular processes are reviewed that support the role of the coral host as an active ‘farmer’ of the energy‐rich photoassimilates from its captive symbionts. Importantly, this new paradigm reposes the deleterious bleaching response in terms of an envelope of environmental conditions in which the exploitative and captive measures of the coral host are severely restricted. The ramification of this new paradigm for developing management strategies that may assist the evolution of bleaching resistance in corals is discussed. (shrink)

According to rational pedagogy models, learners take into account the way in which teachers generate evidence, and teachers take into account the way in which learners assimilate that evidence. The authors develop a framework for integrating rational pedagogy into models of active exploration, in which agents can take actions to influence the evidence they gather from the environment. The key idea is that a single agent can be both teacher and learner.

The development of nuclear weapons during the Manhattan Project is one of the most significant scientific events of the twentieth century. This revised and updated 3rd edition explores the challenges that faced the scientists and engineers of the Manhattan Project. It gives a clear introduction to fission weapons at the level of an upper-year undergraduate physics student by examining the details of nuclear reactions, their energy release, analytic and numerical models of the fission process, how critical masses can be estimated, (...) how fissile materials are produced, and what factors complicate bomb design. An extensive list of references and a number of exercises for self-study are included. Links are given to several freely-available spreadsheets which users can use to run many of the calculations for themselves. (shrink)

American football is played in a chaotic visual environment filled with relevant and distracting information. We investigated the hypothesis that collegiate football players show exceptional skill at shielding their response execution from the interfering effects of distraction ( interference control ). The performances of 280 football players from National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I football programs were compared to age-matched controls in a variant of the Eriksen flanker task ( Eriksen and Eriksen, 1974 ). This task quantifies the magnitude of (...) interference produced by visual distraction on split-second response execution. Overall, football athletes and age controls showed similar mean reaction times (RTs) and accuracy rates. However, football athletes were more proficient at shielding their response execution speed from the interfering effects of distraction (i.e., smaller flanker effect costs on RT). Offensive and defensive players showed smaller interference costs compared to controls, but defensive players showed the smallest costs. All defensive positions and one offensive position showed statistically smaller interference effects when compared directly to age controls. These data reveal a clear cognitive advantage among football athletes at executing motor responses in the face of distraction, the existence and magnitude of which vary by position. Individual differences in cognitive control may have important implications for both player selection and development to improve interference control capabilities during play. (shrink)

This essay intervenes in the on-going debate over the power-knowledge entanglements of classifying emic Indigenous resurgence accounts of the past as “therapeutic history”. We refer to how “therapeutic history” was defined by Ronald Niezen in his 2009 book, The Rediscovered Self. We argue that despite the important refinement of the concept made by Rafael Verbuyst in his application of the term in his work on Khoisan resurgence in South Africa, we believe it to be a problematic category, especially in Western (...) knowledge production about Indigenous people. Our reasons are that the term conflates the use of history with its recovery, unfairly maligns Indigenous knowledge keepers as self-serving and uninterested in the truth, and introduces an insidious binary which has unwelcome discursive effects, in that longer chains of equivalence ultimately place Indigenous storying and knowledge keeping on the other side of an epistemological divide from “proper” history-writing. (shrink)

The right to be forgotten enables individuals to remove certain links from search results that appear when their names are entered as search terms. Formulated as a distinct application of the general right to privacy, the right to be forgotten has proven highly controversial, for two reasons. First, it is difficult to see how the specific right to be forgotten can apply to the withdrawal of public information, since the general right to privacy typically covers the disclosure of private information. (...) Second, as a putative right to withdraw information from public reach, the right to be forgotten poses a threat to freedom of speech, which depends on the accessibility of information. By responding to these two objections, this paper develops a novel account of the right to be forgotten, understood as a claim of withdrawal grounded in both privacy and free speech interests. -/- . (shrink)