The importance of graduating ethical health professionals is indisputable. Yet evaluating the quality of ethics education programs remains problematic for educators. A divide between learning and integrating ethics in everyday professional practice lies at the heart of this issue. The Ethics in Professional Practice (EPP) project addresses health professions' students’ self-efficacy for ethical practice. Students are cast as central characters in authentic vignettes and complete guided learning activities to facilitate their ethical reasoning skills. A design-based research approach was utilised to (...) create EPP resources and this study focuses on the analysis phase of the design process. The aim was to investigate EPP learning outcomes by developing innovative measures based upon Kirkpatrick’s ( 2006 ) evaluation model: namely, reaction, learning, behaviour and effects. Health professions students from Exercise and Sports Science, Rehabilitation Counselling and Speech Pathology (n = 58) participated in the EPP. Qualitative content analysis of reflective statements demonstrated their ethical sensitivity in four categories: Expectations and Empathy in Quality Care; Managing Overwhelming Demands; Informed, Engaged and Empowered; Access to Flexible Models of Service Delivery. Findings from the Rehabilitation Counselling cohort (n = 16) were explored in-depth using Semantic Differential Scales and demonstrated positive ethical reasoning outcomes. Participants also developed individual, ethical practice goals for professional practica. Qualitative content analysis of these goals demonstrated clear ethical reasoning learning effects. Participants integrated concepts of becoming an ethical professional with effective communication, collaboration, empowerment and quality care. Study outcome measures are critiqued and findings may inform redesign of future ethics education resources. (shrink)

Open access. This open-access book discusses vulnerability and the protection-inclusion dilemma of including those who suffer from serious poverty, severe stigma, and structural violence in research. Co-written with representatives from indigenous peoples in South Africa and sex workers in Nairobi, the authors come down firmly on the side of inclusion. In the spirit of leaving no one behind in research, the team experimented with data collection methods that prioritize research participant needs over researcher needs. This involved foregoing the collection of (...) personal data and community researchers being involved in all stages of the research. In the process, the term ‘vulnerability’ was illuminated across significant language barriers as it was defined by indigenous peoples and sex workers themselves. The book describes a potential alternative to exclusion from research that moves away from traditional research methods. By ensuring that the research is led by vulnerable groups for vulnerable groups, it offers an approach that fosters trust and collaboration with benefits for the community researchers, the wider community as well as research academics. Those living in low-income settings, in dire situations that are summarized with the term ‘vulnerability’ know best what their problems are and which priorities they have. To exclude them from research for their own protection is a patronizing approach which insinuates that researchers and research ethics committees know best. The team from this book have shown that minimally risky and minimally burdensome research tailored towards the needs of highly marginalized and stigmatized communities can be scientifically valuable as well as inclusive and equitable. I congratulate them. Prof. Klaus Leisinger, President Global Values Alliance, Former personal advisor to Kofi Annan on corporate responsibility. (shrink)

Does the morality of abortion depend on the moral status of the human fetus? Must the law of abortion presume an answer to the question of when personhood begins? Can a law which permits late abortion but not infanticide be morally justified? These are just some of the questions this book sets out to address. With an extended analysis of the moral and legal status of abortion, Kate Greasley offers an alternative account to the reputable arguments of Ronald Dworkin (...) and Judith Jarvis Thomson and instead brings the philosophical notion of 'personhood' to the foreground of this debate. Structured in three parts, the book will consider the relevance of prenatal personhood for the moral and legal evaluation of abortion; trace the key features of the conventional debate about when personhood begins and explore the most prominent issues in abortion ethics literature: the human equality problem and the difference between abortion and infanticide; and examine abortion law and regulation as well as the differing attitudes to selective abortion. The book concludes with a snapshot into the current controversy surrounding the scope of the right to conscientiously object to participation in abortion provision. (shrink)

Philosophers have turned their attention to gaslighting only recently, and have made considerable progress in analysing its characteristic aims and harms. I am less convinced, however, that we have fully understood its nature. I will argue in this paper that philosophers and others interested in the phenomenon have largely overlooked a phenomenon I call moral gaslighting, in which someone is made to feel morally defective—for example, cruelly unforgiving or overly suspicious—for harbouring some mental state to which she is entitled. If (...) I am right about this possibility, and that it deserves to be called gaslighting, then gaslighting is a far more prevalent and everyday phenomenon than has previously been credited. And it can also be a purely structural phenomenon, as well as an interpersonal one, which remains a controversial possibility in the current literature. (shrink)

Centralised, compliance-focused approaches to research ethics have been normalised in practice. In this paper, we argue that the dominance of such systems has been driven by neoliberal approaches to governance, where the focus on controlling and individualising risk has led to an overemphasis of decontextualised ethical principles and the conflation of ethical requirements with the documentation of ‘informed consent’. Using a UK-based case study, involving a point-of-care-genetic test as an illustration, we argue that rather than ensuring ethical practice such compliance-focused (...) approaches may obstruct valuable research. We call for an approach that encourages researchers and research communities—including regulators, ethics committees, funders and publishers of academic research—to acquire skills to make morally appropriate decisions, and not base decision-making solely on compliance with prescriptive regulations. We call this ‘ethical preparedness’ and outline how a research ethics system might make space for this approach. (shrink)

A high heritability estimate usually corresponds to a situation in which trait variation is largely caused by genetic variation. However, in some cases of gene-environment covariance, causal intuitions about the sources of trait difference can vary, leading experts to disagree as to how the heritability estimate should be interpreted. We argue that the source of contention for these cases is an inconsistency in the interpretation of the concepts ‘genotype’, ‘phenotype’, and ‘environment’. We propose an interpretation of these terms under which (...) trait variance initially caused by genetic variance is subsumed into a heritability for all cases of gene-environment covariance. (shrink)

This paper considers the moral psychology of interpersonal conduct that is cruel, brutal, humiliating, or degrading. On the view I call “humanism,” such behavior often stems from the perpetrators’ dehumanizing view of their targets. The former may instead see the latter as subhuman creatures, nonhuman animals, supernatural beings, or even mindless objects. If people recognized their common humanity, they would have a hard time mistreating other human beings. This paper criticizes humanism so understood, arguing that its explanatory power is often (...) overstated, and that there are alternative, “socially situated” explanations that are better in many cases. (shrink)

Kant makes and elaborates upon a distinction between active citizenship and passive citizenship. Active citizens enjoy the right to vote and rights of political participation generally. Passive citizens do not, though they still enjoy the protection of the law as citizens. Kant’s examples have left commentators puzzling over how these distinctions follow from his stated rationale or justification for active citizenship, namely, that active citizens possess a kind of political and economic self-sufficiency. This essay focuses on one subset passive citizenry (...) – that of traveling blacksmiths, barbers, and day laborers in order to examine Kant’s distinctions. I argue that these examples show that Kant’s concerns regarding dependence are, at least in some cases, pragmatic rather than political. (shrink)

What makes certain mental states subject to evaluation with respect to norms of rationality and justification, and others arational? In this paper, I develop and defend an account that explains why belief is governed by, and so appropriately subject to, evaluation with respect to norms of rationality and justification, one that does justice to the complexity of our evaluative practice in this domain. Then, I sketch out a way of extending the account to explain when and why other kinds of (...) mental states are rationally evaluable. I argue that the cognitive or psychological mechanisms that give rise to and sustain our mental states help to render our mental states appropriate targets for evaluation with respect to norms of rationality and justification when the operation of these mechanisms is responsive, in a specific way, to our judgments about which kinds of considerations constitute rationalizing and justifying reasons for being in states of the relevant sort. (shrink)

I There are a great many ways in which a thing can be good. What counts as a way of being good? I leave it to intuition. Let us allow that being a good dancer is being good in a way, and that so also is being a good carpenter. We might group these and similar ways of being good under the name activity goodness, since a good dancer is good at dancing and a good carpenter is good at carpentry. (...) Everything good at doing something D is good in a way, and for each activity D, being good at D-ing falls into the class of ways of being good which I call activity goodness. Again, let us allow that being a good hammer is being good in a way, and that so also is being a good butter knife. We might group these ways of being good under the name equipment goodness, since a good hammer is good for use in hammering nails and a good butter knife is good for use in buttering bread. Everything good for use in achieving a purpose P is good in a way, and for each purpose P, being good for use in achieving P falls into the class of ways of being good which I call equipment goodness. Again, let us allow that tasting good is being good in a way, and so also are looking good, sounding good, and so on. The class here is aesthetic goodness. Is all goodness goodness-in-a-way? Intuitively, the answer is yes: it seems right to think that everything is good only insofar as it is good in one or more ways. (shrink)

This chapter explores the possibility of identifying core moral claims with the states of mind which are called bodily imperatives—e.g. the ‘make it stop’ state of mind which is plausibly an aspect of, if not identical with, severe pain states and states such as severe thirst, hunger, sleeplessness, humiliation, terror, and torment. The chapter combines this idea with another, that the desire-like, conative, or ‘world-guiding’ states of mind which make normative claims on agents need not belong to the agent on (...) whom the claim is made, on a broadly Humean or desire-based view in metaethics. On the view defended, any subject’s bodily imperatives can make moral claims on any moral agent. The case is made that bodily imperatives are a good candidate for constituting the core moral claims or basic imperatives of morality, which all others are either built from, or at least constrained by. (shrink)

Art theory has consistently emphasised the importance of situational, cultural, institutional and historical factors in viewers’ experience of fine art. However, the link between this heavily context-dependent interpretation and the workings of the mind is often left unexamined. Drawing on relevance theory—a prominent, cogent and productive body of work in cognitive pragmatics—we here argue that fine art achieves its effects by prompting the use of cognitive processes that are more commonly employed in the interpretation of words and other stimuli presented (...) in a communicative context. We describe in particular how institutional factors effectively co-opt these processes for new ends, allowing viewers to achieve cognitive effects that they otherwise would not, and so provide cognitivist backing for an Institutional Theory of Art, such as that put forward by Arthur Danto. More generally, we situate and describe the Western fine art tradition as a phenomenon that is a consequence of both the cognitive processes involved in communication, and of cultural norms, practices and institutions. (shrink)

This essay details the resurgence of wellness program as employed by large corporations with the aim of reducing healthcare costs. The essay narrows in on a discussion of how Big Data collection practices are being utilized in wellness programs and the potential negative impact on the worker in regards to privacy and employment discrimination. The essay offers an ethical framework to be adopted by wellness program vendors in order to conduct wellness programs that would achieve cost-saving goals without undue burdens (...) on the worker. The essay also offers some innovative approaches to wellness that may well better serve the goals of healthcare cost reduction. (shrink)

Global democratization cannot be achieved by simply replicating familiar democratic institutions on a global scale. We must explore alternative institutional means for establishing democratic institutions at the global level within the present pluralist structure of global power.

Ordinary moral practice suggests that our beliefs, themselves, can wrong. But when one moral subject wrongs another, it must be something that the first subject, herself, does or brings about which constitutes the wronging: wronging involves exercising moral agency. So, if we can wrong others simply by believing, then believing involves an exercise or expression of moral agency. Unfortunately, it is not at all obvious how our beliefs could manifest our moral agency. After all, we are not capable of believing (...) at will, and belief generally seems to be nonvoluntary. Indeed, believing is often nondeliberative, automatic, and reflexive. Belief is a kind of spontaneous and unchosen cognitive response to one’s circumstances; it is the doxastic output of cognitive processing that is often wholly unreflective and subconscious. This paper develops and defends a two-part explanation of how beliefs that are nonvoluntary, automatic, and reflexive can nevertheless manifest our moral agency in a way that can help vindicate the intuitively attractive idea that our beliefs, themselves, can wrong. (shrink)

The Element provides an overview of Immanuel Kant's arguments regarding the content of the moral law, as well as an exposition of his arguments for the bindingness of the moral law for rational agents. The Element also considers common objections to Kant's ethics.

At the time when existentialism was a dominant intellectual and cultural force, a number of commentators observed that some of the language of existential philosophy, not least its interpretation of human existence in terms of nothingness, evoked the language of so-called mystical writers. This book takes on this observation and explores the evidence for the influence of mysticism on the philosophy of existentialism. It begins by delving into definitions of mysticism and existentialism and then traces the elements of mysticism present (...) in German and French thought during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book goes on to make original contributions to the study of figures including Kierkegaard, Buber, Heidegger, Beauvoir, Sartre, Marcel, Camus, Weil, Bataille, Berdyaev, and Tillich, linking their existentialist philosophy back to some of the key concerns of the mystical tradition. Providing a unique insight into how these two areas have overlapped and interacted, this study is vital reading for any academic with an interest in twentieth-century philosophy, theology, and religious studies. (shrink)

Intervening on causal systems can illuminate their underlying structures. Past work has shown that, relative to adults, young children often make intervention decisions that appear to confirm a single hypothesis rather than those that optimally discriminate alternative hypotheses. Here, we investigated how the ability to make informative causal interventions changes across development. Ninety participants between the ages of 7 and 25 completed 40 different puzzles in which they had to intervene on various causal systems to determine their underlying structures. Each (...) puzzle comprised a three‐ or four‐node computer chip with hidden wires. On each trial, participants viewed two possible arrangements of the chip's hidden wires and had to select a single node to activate. After observing the outcome of their intervention, participants selected a wire configuration and rated their confidence in their selection. We characterized participant choices with a Bayesian measurement model that indexed the extent to which participants selected nodes that would best disambiguate the two possible causal structures versus those that had high causal centrality in one of the two causal hypotheses but did not necessarily discriminate between them. Our model estimates revealed that the use of a discriminatory strategy increased through early adolescence. Further, developmental improvements in intervention strategy were related to changes in the ability to accurately judge the strength of evidence that interventions revealed, as indexed by participants' confidence in their selections. Our results suggest that improvements in causal information‐seeking extend into adolescence and may be driven by metacognitive sensitivity to the efficacy of previous interventions in discriminating competing ideas. (shrink)

The capacity to perceive internal bodily states is linked to emotional awareness and effective emotional regulation. We explore individual differences in emotional awareness in relation to the fading affect bias, which refers to the greater dwindling of unpleasant compared to pleasant emotions in autobiographical memory. We consider interoceptive awareness and alexithymia in relation to the FAB, and private event rehearsal as a mediating process. With increasing interoceptive awareness, there was an enhanced FAB, but with increasing alexithymia, there was a decreased (...) FAB. Further, the effects of interoceptive awareness were partially mediated by private rehearsal of pleasant events. We provide novel evidence that capacity for emotional awareness and thus effective processing is an important factor predictive of the FAB. Moreover, our results imply an important role for maintaining positive affect in the FAB. Our findings offer new insights into the effects of interoception and alexithymia on autobiographical memory, and support concepts of the FAB emerging as a result of adaptive emotional regulation processes. (shrink)

Doing research with young children can be challenging for many reasons, but this book provides clear guidance on how to engage in appropriate methods. Focusing on researching through play, careful consideration is given to: · the founding principles of playful research · understanding young children's perspectives · prioritising the rights of the child and the voice of the child · examples of innovative research methods Real life examples and research projects are presented, to enable common challenges to be anticipated and (...) to showcase successful creative approaches, and to inspire new paths in research. (shrink)

In his published texts and lectures on moral philosophy, Kant repeatedly singles out gratitude for discussion. Nevertheless, puzzles about the derivation, content, and nature of this duty remain. This paper seeks to solve some of these puzzles. Centrally, I argue that it is essential to attend to a distinction that Kant makes between well-wishing benevolence (Wohlwollen) and active beneficence (Wohlthun) on the part of a benefactor. On the Kantian account, I argue, a different type of gratitude is owed in response (...) to each. With this distinction in place, I argue further that we can construct what many have thought to be missing from Kant’s discussion of gratitude – an argument explicating the precise contradiction generated by a maxim of ingratitude. (shrink)

Moral theorists often say such things as “But surely A ought to do such and such,” or “Plainly it is morally permissible for B to do so and so,” and do not even try to prove that those judgments are true. Moreover, they often rest weight on the supposition that those judgments are true. In particular, they often rest theories on them: they take them as data. Others object. They say that nobody is entitled to rest any weight at all (...) on judgments such as those. They say, not that the judgments are false, but that there is no reason to believe them true. They say, more generally, that there is no reason to think of any moral judgment that it is true. I will call this The No Reason Thesis. Is there reason to think The No Reason Thesis true? There are lots of arguments for it in the literature, but I want to focus on one of them in particular. I think that the one I will focus on lies behind all the others, but no matter if it does not: I suggest that if this argument fails, they all fail. (shrink)

An interview by Alex Thomson of UKColumn on Landgrebe and Smith's book: Why Machines Will Never Rule the World. The subtitle of the book is Artificial Intelligence Without Fear, and the interview begins with the question of the supposedly imminent takeover of one profession or the other by artificial intelligence. Is there truly reason to be afraid that you will lose your job? The interview itself is titled 'Where this is no will there is no way', drawing on one (...) thesis of the book to the effect that there will never be anything like the human will on the part of a machine. This is for mathematical reasons. AI is always and in every case a matter of algorithms; thus of applied mathematics. And algorithms are not the sorts of things that can want or desire or intend to do something. It is the human will of those who work at OpenAI or google or microsoft which have given rise to the new shiny objects of AI (ChatGPT and other Large Language Models). And it is the human will of the users of these shiny objects which gives them the resources and power to work their apparent miracles. (shrink)

This paper 1 explores the potential of ‘new nature writing’ – a literary genre currently popular in the UK – as a kind of arts activism, in particular in terms of how it might engage with the environmental crisis and lead to a kind of collective politics. We note the limitations of the genre, notably the reproduction of class, gender and ethnic hierarchies, the emphasis on nostalgia and loss, and the stress on individual responses rather than collective politics. But we (...) also take seriously the claims of art to enable us to imagine other futures, suggesting that new nature writing has the potential to play a role in collective forms of environmental justice and capabilities. (shrink)

The effects of head injury, even mild traumatic brain injury, are wide-ranging and profound. Persons with adult-onset head injury offer feminist philosophers important perspectives for philosophical methodology and philosophical research concerning personal identity, mind-body theories, and ethics. The needs of persons with head injury require the expansion of typical teaching strategies, and such adaptations appear beneficial to both disabled and non-disabled students.

This article examines the development of Heidegger's philosophical views on university education, situates these views within their broader historical and philosophical context, and shows them to be largely responsible for Heidegger's decision to become the first Nazi Rector of Freiburg University in 1933. Did Heidegger learn from this appalling political misadventure and so transform the underlying philosophical views that helped motivate it? It is argued, against the interpretations of Pöggeler and Derrida, that the later Heidegger continued to develop and refine (...) the core of these philosophical views rather than abandoning them after 1933. (shrink)

Sex is fundamental to many organisms. It is through sexual reproduction that humans, and many metazoans (multicellular eukaryotes in the animal kingdom), propagate our species. For more than 150 years, sexual reproduction within metazoans has been understood to rely on the existence of a discrete category of cells (germ cells) that are usually considered uniquely separate from all other cells in the body (somatic cells), and which form a cell lineage (germline) that is sequestered from all somatic cell lineages. The (...) consideration of germ cells and germline as the lone source of reproductive potential within metazoans has allowed many investigators to place the hereditary and evolutionary burdens of sexually reproducing lineages solely within these cells and cell lineages, making them central to many important topics within biology, such as units of selection, transmission and population genetics, Darwinian evolution, and individuality. Regarding these topics, there is a predominant and shared understanding of germ cells, somatic cells, and the ways in which these two relate to each other that is rarely critically evaluated. In this article, I lay out how germ cells and germline within metazoans are understood by a majority of scientists and philosophers, both now and historically, by sketching out what I call the predominant epistemic framework of germ. I show how this framework conflicts with empirical evidence, propose a series of revisions to realign it with this evidence, and indicate why such revisions are urgently needed by highlighting the case of somatic cell genome editing. (shrink)

Mathematics is a highly specialised arena of human endeavour, one in which complex notations are invented and are subjected to complex and involved manipulations in the course of everyday work. What part do these writing practices play in mathematical communication, and how can we understand their use in the mathematical world in relation to theories of communication and cognition? To answer this, I examine in detail an excerpt from a research meeting in which communicative board-writing practices can be observed, and (...) attempt to explain the observed exchanges with reference to relevance theory (a cognitivist theory of pragmatics), in combination with the situated cognition paradigm. Successful communication in the excerpt appears well described by the notion of metacognitive acquaintance, as described inSperber & Wilson (2015), especially when a situated view of cognition is adopted. Though this example is taken from a relatively informal face-to-face communicative situation, characteristics of such situations extend even into formal written mathematics, since even the technical terminology developed in the course of the meeting includes details that may provide readers with a kind of access to the mathematicians’ cognitive processes. (shrink)

This paper examines the French erudite scholar Théodore Godefroy's (1580-1649) service to Cardinal Richelieu as a commercial expert. Using manuscripts that reveal his reading, connections and intellectual methods, it shows how Godefroy used his connections in the Parisian lettered circles and a politicized group within the Republic of Letters to gather commercial information, and used the techniques of juridical scholarship to organize his collection. His papers suggest that historians must look beyond a narrow canon of "mercantilist" works to understand seventeenth (...) century debates about the governance of commerce, to a broader context of debates about law, history, and sovereignty. (shrink)

A division between functional belief, on the one hand, and judgmental belief, on the other, is central to Sosa’s two-tier virtue epistemology. For Sosa, mere functional belief is constituted by a first-order affirmation. In contrast, a judgmental belief is an intentional affirmation; a performance which is partially constituted by the believer’s endeavor to affirm truthfully, and reliably enough. If, qua performance, judgmental belief is like the hunter’s shot or the baseball player’s swing, mere functional belief is much more like a (...) heartbeat. This paper explores whether we should accept Sosa’s distinction between mere functional belief and judgmental belief, and, if we should, how recognizing this distinction ought to shape our epistemological theorizing. Accordingly, the first aim of this paper is expository. It is to further clarify Sosa’s contrasting categories of functional belief and judgmental belief and to attempt to characterize explicitly the role that the division between functional belief and judgmental belief plays in Sosa’s two-tier virtue epistemology. The second aim of this paper is more critical. It is to articulate and begin to evaluate a series of concerns regarding whether Sosa’s division between functional belief and judgmental belief is well-founded, and so to explore whether a virtue-theoretic performance epistemology ought to embrace the sort of two-tiered account of cognitive performance that Sosa favors. (shrink)

Papers presented at the Conference, Consuming the past held at University of York, 29 November - 1 December 1996.

Jeffery et al. accurately identify the importance of developing an understanding of spatial reference frames in a three-dimensional world. We examine human spatial cognition via a unique paradigm that investigates the role of saliency and adjusting reference frames. This includes work with adults, typically developing children, and children who develop non-typically (e.g., those with autism).

In 1661, Samuel pepys arranged for his portrait to be painted for the first time. In his diary pepys refers to the painter only as ‘Mr Savill’. Using a range of archival sources, this Note conclusively identifies him as Daniel Savile, a successful City of London artist whose career has not previously been recognised. Savile catered to those men and women who could not afford the services of a ‘great’ painter such as peter Lely or Samuel Cooper. Savile’s interactions with (...) pepys offer insights into the pleasures and challenges of portrait commissioning in the Restoration. The records of Savile’s business also reveal that that he was responsible for training a significant proportion of the young women apprenticed to the painter-Stainers’ Company—an area of female employment about which little is known. The evidence about Savile’s studio allows us to deduce the potential benefits of such apprenticeship arrangements for the young women, for their employers, and for sitters. Together pepys’s diary and the records of Savile’s life illuminate the ways that painters and sitters from the middling sort negotiated the artistic culture of seventeenth-century London. (shrink)