What is honor? Is it the same as reputation? Or is it rather a sentiment? Is it a character trait, like integrity? Or is it simply a concept too vague or incoherent to be fully analyzed? In the first sustained comparative analysis of this elusive notion, Frank Stewart writes that none of these ideas is correct. Drawing on information about Western ideas of honor from sources as diverse as medieval Arthurian romances, Spanish dramas of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, (...) and the writings of German jurists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and comparing the European ideas with the ideas of a non-Western society—the Bedouin—Stewart argues that honor must be understood as a right, basically a right to respect. He shows that by understanding honor this way, we can resolve some of the paradoxes that have long troubled scholars, and can make sense of certain institutions that have not hitherto been properly understood. Offering a powerful new way to understand this complex notion, _Honor_ has important implications not only for the social sciences but also for the whole history of European sensibility. (shrink)

DBS Think Tank IX was held on August 25–27, 2021 in Orlando FL with US based participants largely in person and overseas participants joining by video conferencing technology. The DBS Think Tank was founded in 2012 and provides an open platform where clinicians, engineers and researchers can freely discuss current and emerging deep brain stimulation technologies as well as the logistical and ethical issues facing the field. The consensus among the DBS Think Tank IX speakers was that DBS expanded in (...) its scope and has been applied to multiple brain disorders in an effort to modulate neural circuitry. After collectively sharing our experiences, it was estimated that globally more than 230,000 DBS devices have been implanted for neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders. As such, this year’s meeting was focused on advances in the following areas: neuromodulation in Europe, Asia and Australia; cutting-edge technologies, neuroethics, interventional psychiatry, adaptive DBS, neuromodulation for pain, network neuromodulation for epilepsy and neuromodulation for traumatic brain injury. (shrink)

Sharrad, Scott; Bartholomeusz, David; Henderson, Stewart.

Recent impossibility theorems for fair risk assessment extend to the domain of epistemic justice. We translate the relevant model, demonstrating that the problems of fair risk assessment and just credibility assessment are structurally the same. We motivate the fairness criteria involved in the theorems as also being appropriate in the setting of testimonial justice. Any account of testimonial justice that implies the fairness/justice criteria must be abandoned, on pain of triviality.

ABSTRACT This is a guest editorial introducing a special issue on ‘Exemplars and Emulation in Moral Education’ which contains contributions from 10 multidisciplinary authors. Representing the state of the art in the discourse, this editorial elucidates several new themes pertaining to it, before outlining each contribution in relation to said themes. In light of David Carr’s recent objections to role modelling, it is then argued that these contributions provide a possible collective response.

This paper generalizes rationalizability of a choice function by a single acyclic binary relation to rationalizability by a set of such relations. Rather than selecting those options in a menu that are maximal with respect to a single binary relation, a weakly pseudo-rationalizable choice function selects those options that are maximal with respect to at least one binary relation in a given set. I characterize the class of weakly pseudo-rationalizable choice functions in terms of simple functional properties. This result also (...) generalizes Aizerman and Malishevski's characterization of pseudo-rationalizable choice functions, that is, choice functions rationalizable by a set of total orders. (shrink)

Recent writing on the idea of a form of life has tended to be critical of the use made of this notion by writers such as Peter Winch, D. Z. Phillips and Norman Malcolm. Rightly or wrongly these writers have been regarded as meaning by ‘a form of life’, something like ‘a way or style of life’, and recent explicatory work on the notion has largely tended to discount this as a plausible interpretation of what Wittgenstein meant in his use (...) of the expression. The intention of this paper is not that of direct intervention in this particular dispute, though the conclusions drawn, if correct, would have some bearing on it. The intention is rather to develop, in order to make use of it, the idea of a form of life within the context of a number of philosophical difficulties. I should certainly claim to be drawing upon the remarks made by Wittgenstein in his own use of the expression: but I should not claim to be expounding Wittgenstein. Hence I do not wish to enter into the disputes referred to above about what precisely Wittgenstein meant by the expression, though again, what I say, if not wholly misguided, should have some bearing on these disputes. (shrink)

In the Politics of Black Joy, Lindsey Stewart develops Hurston's contributions to political theory and philosophy of race by introducing the politics of joy as a refusal of neoabolitionism, a political tradition that reduces southern Black life to tragedy or social death.

The doctrine is familiar. In a sentence, a priori truths are those that are knowable on the basis of reflection alone (independent of experience) by anyone who has acquired the relevant concepts. This expresses the classical conception of the a priori. Of course, there are those who despair of finding any truths that fully meet these demands. Some of the doubters are convinced, however, that the demands, are somewhat inflated by an epistemological tradition that was nevertheless on to something of (...) importance. These thinkers would then seek to reconceive the a priori somewhat--accommodating some of the classical demands within a "retentive analysis." Ultimately, we will urge a place for both the classical conception and a complementary revisionary but retentive conception as well. (shrink)

The three important target articles make a strong case for regarding racism as a public health crisis. Each calls for advocacy by the bi...

We here propose an account of what it is for an agent to be objectively justified in holding some belief. We present in outline this approach, which we call transglobal reliabilism, and we discuss how it is motivated by various thought experiments. While transglobal reliabilism is an externalist epistemology, we think that it accommodates traditional internalist concerns and objections in a uniquely natural and respectful way.

Animal and plant species exhibit an astonishing diversity of sexual systems, including environmental and genetic determinants of sex, with the latter including genetic material in the mitochondrial genome. In several hermaphroditic plants for example, sex is determined by an interaction between mitochondrial cytoplasmic male sterility (CMS) genes and nuclear restorer genes. Specifically, CMS involves aberrant mitochondrial genes that prevent pollen development and specific nuclear genes that restore it, leading to a mixture of female (male‐sterile) and hermaphroditic individuals in the population (...) (gynodioecy). Such a mitochondrial‐nuclear sex determination system is thought to be rare outside plants. Here, we present one possible case of CMS in animals. We hypothesize that the only exception to the strict maternal mtDNA inheritance in animals, the doubly uniparental inheritance (DUI) system in bivalves, might have originated as a mitochondrial‐nuclear sex‐determination system. We document and explore similarities that exist between DUI and CMS, and we propose various ways to test our hypothesis. (shrink)

In approximately the last 20 years, the self-protection capacity of many American Indian tribes has significantly increased to include the review of research requests by a tribally based IRB. While these tribal IRBs are trained using a curriculum derived from the Belmont Report, there is need to recognize the cultural specificity of the Belmont Report and its potential for conflict or inappropriateness when applied to populations with deep differences in cultural constructs compared to the majority population. However, recognition of the (...) sometimes paradigmatically different culture of American Indian tribes compared to the U.S. culture at large seldom occurs. Moreover, significant and subtle factors of researchers' professional, organizational, and personal cultures that relate to the research enterprise are essentially never addressed by themselves or the tribal IRB. Nonetheless, tribal IRBs continue and serve as a procedural guide for investigators intending to conduct respectful research with American Indian populations. (shrink)

Australia, along with other countries, has introduced New Public Management (NPM) into public sector hospitals in an effort to contain healthcare costs. NPM is associated with outsourcing of service provision, the meeting of government performance indicators, workforce flexibility and rationing of resources. This study explores the impact of rationing of staffing and other resources upon delivery of care outside of business hours. Data was collected through semistructured interviews conducted with 21 nurses working in 2 large Australian metropolitan hospitals. Participants identified (...) four strategies associated with NPM which add to workload after‐hours and impacted on the capacity to deliver nursing care. These were functional flexibility, vertical substitution of staff, meeting externally established performance indicators and outsourcing. We conclude that cost containment alongside of the meeting of performance indicators has extended work traditionally performed during business hours beyond those hours when less staffing and material resources are available. This adds to nursing workload and potentially contributes to incomplete nursing care. (shrink)

Raymond Aron is widely regarded as the most important figure in the history of twentieth-century French liberalism. Yet his status within the history of liberal thought has been more often proclaimed than explained. Though he is frequently lauded as the inheritor of France's liberal tradition, Aron's formative influences were mostly non-French and often radically anti-liberal thinkers. This book explains how, why, and with what consequences he belatedly defined and aligned himself with a French liberal tradition. It also situates Aron within (...) the larger histories of Cold War liberalism and decolonization, re-evaluating his contribution to debates over totalitarianism, the end of ideology, and the Algerian War. By exposing the enduring importance of Aron's student political engagements for the development of his thought, Iain Stewart challenges the prevailing view of Aron's early intellectual trajectory as a journey from naïve socialist idealism to mature liberal realism, offering a new critical perspective on one of the twentieth century's most influential intellectuals. (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.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Précis of Microaggressions in MedicineLauren Freeman (bio) and Heather Stewart (bio)Microaggressions in Medicine demonstrates that the harms of microaggressions are anything but micro. Guided by diverse patient testimonies and case studies, the book focuses on harms experienced by patients who are marginalized on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, body size, and disability. It amplifies their voices, stories, and experiences, which have too often been excluded from (...) mainstream bioethical, medical, and popular discussions. The novel account advanced in Microaggressions in Medicine illustrates that microaggressions in medicine are not rare, but frequent in the healthcare experiences of marginalized patients. Our hope is that the book helps patients better understand and make sense of their experiences. We also hope that it helps current and future healthcare professionals recognize the serious and enduring consequences that microaggressions can have on their patients. Finally, it introduces actionable strategies for healthcare professionals to reduce microaggressions in their practices and institutions.Microaggressions in Medicine argues that healthcare professionals have a moral obligation to prevent microaggressions as much as possible. It aims to make a positive difference in the lives of marginalized patients as they interact with medical practitioners and institutions. It also aims to support healthcare professionals in modifying their practices to ensure that they are always providing high-quality, patient-centered care to all patients. Its ultimate goal is to help increase health equity.More specifically, the book has two broad goals: one theoretical, one practical. The theoretical goal is to reconceptualize how microaggressions have been understood in the literature and to develop this new account within medical contexts. The practical goal is to provide healthcare professionals with a greater understanding of the serious and enduring consequences that microaggressions can have on members of marginalized patient groups and to introduce strategies and tools to help healthcare professionals reduce microaggressions experienced [End Page 142] by patients, thereby diminishing harm caused to patients. To set the context for the critical responses to follow, we briefly summarize each chapter of the book, highlighting the main arguments and novel contributions.Microaggressions can be defined as actions, gestures, or even material environments that subtly and often unintentionally harm members of marginalized groups. They are prevalent in medicine yet often go unnoticed by those who commit them. The introduction outlines the main problem with which the book engages: that there are subtle things that healthcare professionals commonly say and do to patients that do not register as serious to them yet that often cause major harms to patients in the short and long term. To set the stage to unpack this problem, we define what microaggressions are, provide examples of microaggressions in medical contexts, outline the aims and goals of the book, and explain key concepts (e.g., intersectionality, harm, structural oppression) that are necessary for understanding and engaging with the book's arguments. The introduction makes clear how and why a discussion of microaggressions in medicine is valuable to marginalized patients who want to better understand their own experiences interacting with healthcare professionals and institutions. It also underscores the book's value for healthcare professionals who want to improve their clinical interactions with marginalized patients and strategize about how to make their practices more inclusive, welcoming, and just.Chapter 1, "Microaggressions: A Brief History," provides a history of microaggressions. The term was coined in 1970 by a Black Harvard psychologist, Chester Pierce, to describe the "subtle blows" experienced by Black people that are not major or explicit yet that cause real harm. Although little was written about microaggressions for almost four decades, microaggressions gained traction in 2007 through the work of psychologist Derald Sue and his colleagues. We discuss Sue et al.'s work on microaggressions, tracing key revisions and developments the concept has undergone in the last fifteen years. The chapter also summarizes some of the main criticisms that have been launched against microaggressions and considers responses that have been offered. This chapter provides the groundwork for chapter 2, which lays out our novel critique of the dominant understanding of microaggressions. It also motivates our reconceptualization of microaggressions that unfolds over the remainder of the book.Chapter 2, "Microaggressions Reconsidered: A Critique of the Act-Based... (shrink)

About 6,000 individuals participate in the U.S. transplant system as a living organ donor each year. Organ donation by living individuals is a unique procedure, where healthy patients undergo a major surgical operation without any direct functional benefit to themselves. In this article, the authors explore how the ideal of informed consent guides education and evaluation for living organ donation. The authors posit that informed consent for living organ donation is a process. Though the steps in this process are partially (...) standardized through national health policy, they can be improved through institutional structures at the local, transplant center-level. Effective structures and practices aimed at supporting and promoting comprehensive informed consent provide more opportunities for candidates to ask questions about the risks and benefits of living donation and to opt out voluntarily Additionally, these practices could enable new ways of measuring knowledge and improving the consent process. (shrink)

This paper applies Plato's cave allegory to Enron's success and downfall. Plato's famous tale of cave dwellers illustrates the different levels of truth and understanding. These levels include images, the sources of images, and the ultimate reality behind both. The paper first describes these levels of perception as they apply to Plato's cave dwellers and then provides a brief history of the rise of Enron. Then we apply Plato's levels of understanding to Enron, showing how the company created its image (...) and presented information to support that image, and how the public eventually emerged from the cave to realize the truth about Enron's actual accounting practices and financial state, which led to the corporation's downfall. We find Plato's allegory both useful in analyzing the relationship between Enron and the public and instructive about the power and moral responsibility of Enron's executives. (shrink)

This chapter considers Ralph Cudworth as a philosophical critic of Hobbes. Cudworth saw Hobbes as a representative of the three views he was attacking: atheism, determinism, and the denial that morality is eternal and immutable. Moreover, he did not just criticize Hobbes by assuming that a general critique of those views applied to Hobbes’s particular case. Rather, he singled out Hobbes, often by quoting him, and argued against the distinctively Hobbesian positions he had identified. In this chapter I look at (...) Cudworth as a critic of Hobbes in two of the three central areas, atheism and ethics, focusing on passages where we see him explicitly picking out Hobbes. (shrink)

La réflexion sur la guerre de Montesquieu est amorcée dans l’ouvrage qu’il consacre à l’histoire de Rome : les Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence. C’est pour le baron de la Brède un moyen de prendre position contre les arguments machiavélistes qui soutiennent les entreprises de conquêtes de son époque. Il s’agit alors de retracer la généalogie de cette prise de position depuis les thèses de Machiavel, dont Montesquieu hérite, jusqu’aux usages politiques qu’il (...) dénonce. (shrink)

In our work we have drawn attention to an aspect of conscious experience that we have labeled chromatic illumination, which consists of conscious appreciation of a large body of background information, and of the holistic relevance of this information to a cognitive task that is being consciously undertaken, without that information being represented by any conscious, occurrent, intentional mental state. We have also characterized the prototypical causal role of chromatic-illumination features of conscious intentional states, and we have detailed the specific (...) kind of physical-to-mental supervenience situation that would need to obtain in order for a chromatically illuminated conscious intentional state to figure as a supervenient mental cause of one’s subsequent cognition and behavior. In this paper we answer two residual questions. The first is a “How possible?” question, asking whether such a supervenience scenario is really a coherent conceptual possibility, given that it posits a putative conscious feature of conscious experience that allegedly plays a conscious causal role that supposedly constitutes conscious appreciation of information not being consciously represented. The second is a “How plausible?” question, asking whether the details of such a physical-to-mental supervenience scenario can be spelled out in a way that makes actually plausible the claim that chromatic illumination actually gets physically implemented this way in the human brain. We argue that the supervenient causal efficacy of chromatically illuminated conscious experience is not only a genuine conceptual possibility, but also very plausibly can really occur in humans. (shrink)

SummaryIn his Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, Wittgenstein holds that in studying or interpreting a language and associated activities we should not attempt to explain what goes on, just describe, for description is able to give us everything we could ask for. He seems to presents two arguments for this descriptivist approach. I criticize both. Generally, I argue that Wittgenstein's position seems to presuppose a radical distinction between description and explanation that cannot be supported.Specifically, I show that Wittgenstein's first objection (...) to explanatory concerns in interpretive contexts is an overly quick generalization from limitations in Frazer's early attempts at explanation. The inadequacy of one attempt at explaining some phenomena hardly implies that it is wrong to attempt an explanation of that phenomena. Nor does the fact that a false explanation may support a false description of some phenomena show that a correct explanation would not support a correct description. Wittgenstein's second, and most important, objection turns on the crucial claim that correct description is at least as satisfying as explanation. There is one significant respect in which I agree this claim, and another in which I disagree. I show that, on Wittgenstein's view, a description is a perspicuous story about an effect and its antecedents. It answers a “why”‐question. This is to say, a good description is something of a condensed explanation. Now, when description is so understood, it would be foolish to deny that description is as satisfying as explanation, for here, description is not just theory‐laden, it is also explanation‐laden. However, I argue that in contexts where reliability worries become pressing, the more familiar, explicit, forms of explanation have important advantages. (shrink)

Eliminative materialism, as William Lycan (this volume) tells us, is materialism plus the claim that no creature has ever had a belief, desire, intention, hope, wish, or other “folk-psychological” state. Some contemporary philosophers claim that eliminative materialism is very likely true. They sketch certain potential scenarios, for the way theory might develop in cognitive science and neuroscience, that they claim are fairly likely; and they maintain that if such.