Of the many far-reaching implications of Fincher & Thornhill's (F&T's) theory, we focus on the consequences of parasite stress for mating strategies, marriage, and the differing roles and restrictions for men and women. In particular, we explain how examination of cultures of honor can provide a theoretical bridge between effects of parasite stress and disproportionate emphasis on female purity.

NED HETTINGER | : This essay explores the tension between concern for the suffering of wild animals and concern about massive human influence on nature. It examines Clare Palmer’s animal ethics and its attempt to balance a commitment to the laissez-faire policy of nonintervention in nature with our obligations to animals. The paper contrasts her approach with an alternative defence of this laissez-faire intuition based on a significant and increasingly important environmental value: Respect for an Independent Nature. The paper (...) articulates and defends naturalness value and explores its implications for the laissez-faire intuition and for concern about wild-animal suffering. | : Le présent essai examine la tension entre la préoccupation pour la souffrance des animaux sauvages et celle concernant l’influence massive des humains sur la nature. Il examine l’éthique animale de Clare Palmer, notamment sa tentative d’atteindre un équilibre entre la politique de non-intervention dans la nature dite du « laissez-faire » et nos engagements envers les animaux. L’article propose une approche alternative à celle de Palmer qui, tout en défendant cette intuition du « laissez-faire », se fonde cette fois sur une valeur environnementale significative de plus en plus importante : le Respect pour une Nature Indépendante. Le texte articule et défend la valeur de naturalité et examine les implications de celle-ci pour l’intuition du « laissez-faire » ainsi que pour le souci envers la souffrance des animaux sauvages. (shrink)

Moral distress has been well reviewed in the literature with established deleterious side effects for all healthcare professionals, including nurses, physicians, and others. Yet, little is known about the quality and effectiveness of interventions directed to address moral distress. The aim of this integrative review is to analyze published intervention studies to determine their efficacy and applicability across hospital settings. Of the initial 1373 articles discovered in October 2020, 18 were appraised as relevant, with 1 study added by hand search (...) and 2 after a repeated search was completed in January and then in May of 2021, for a total of 22 reviewed articles. This review revealed data mostly from nurses, with some studies making efforts to include other healthcare professions who have experienced moral distress. Education-based interventions showed the most success, though many reported limited power and few revealed statistically lowered moral distress post intervention. This may point to the difficulty in adequately addressing moral distress in real time without adequate support systems. Ultimately, these studies suggest potential frameworks which, when bolstered by organization-wide support, may aid in moral distress interventions making a measurable impact. (shrink)

A questão da esfera pública se relaciona com dois aspectos fundamentais. Em primeiro lugar, o debate a respeito da modernidade como tal; e, em segundo, a efervescência do ponto de vista moral delineado desde uma perspectiva laica, isto é, alheio a qualquer religião institucionalizada. Desde o início, a preocupação central de Habermas foi, e continua sendo, o papel do sujeito coautor participativo no âmbito da esfera pública. O foco da teoria do agir comunicativo é o sujeito coautor emancipado capaz de (...) assumir, através do agir comunicativo, a responsabilidade frente aos desafios de uma sociedade com profundos sinais de transformação. O significado de esfera pública não se isola do agir comunicativo. Por isso, não há como rechaçar o fenômeno humano ligado às crenças ou à fé, nem propalar uma moral delineada desde a dogmática religiosa. Então, como entender a razão laica diante dos conteúdos semânticos que a realidade cotidiana apresenta? O que significa justiça no contexto secular e, ao mesmo tempo, plural e multi- étnica e religiosa? Quais os reflexos que esse ponto de vista moral acarreta para a educação? (shrink)

Este artigo objetiva realizar uma revisão narrativa sobre a temática da branquitude, de modo a verificar suas definições presentes na literatura, assim como as maneiras como ela se expressa no cotidiano. As produções foram organizadas em um quadro segundo autor e data, discutindo os diferentes aspectos da raça, na realidade brasileira, em diferentes regiões e também da realidade de outros países. Os dados obtidos indicam que a branquitude, em suas diversas representações, configura-se um agente central na manutenção do racismo. Confirmaram-se (...) os problemas da não racialização e os prejuízos centenários dessa relação de poder. É um panorama diverso e complexo, que compreende pessoas com ou sem consciência de si, com variados níveis de privilégios, expressos territorialmente de maneira diferente. (shrink)

Nietzsche coins the enigmatic term homo natura to capture his understanding of the human being as a creature of nature and tasks philosophy with the renaturalisation of humanity. Following Foucault's critique of the human sciences, Vanessa Lemm discusses the reception of Nietzsche's naturalism in philosophical anthropology, psychoanalysis and gender studies. She offers an original reading of homo natura that brings back the ancient Greek idea of nature and sexuality as creative chaos and of the philosophical life as outspoken and (...) embodied truth, perhaps best exemplified by the Cynics' embrace of social and cultural transformation. (shrink)

Holobionts are symbiotic assemblages composed by a macrobe host plus its symbiotic microbiota. In recent years, the ontological status of holobionts has created a great amount of controversy among philosophers and biologists: are holobionts biological individuals or are they rather ecological communities of independent individuals that interact together? Chiu and Eberl have recently developed an eco-immunity account of the holobiont wherein holobionts are neither biological individuals nor ecological communities, but hybrids between a host and its microbiota. According to their account, (...) the microbiota is not a proper part of the holobiont. Yet, it should be regarded as a set of scaffolds that support the individuality of the host. In this paper, we approach Chiu and Eberl’s account from a metaphysical perspective and argue that, contrary to what the authors claim, the eco-immunity account entails that the microorganisms that compose the host’s microbiota are proper parts of the holobiont. Second, we argue that by claiming that holobionts are hybrids, and therefore, not biological individuals, the authors seem to be assuming a controversial position about the ontology of hybrids, which are conventionally characterized as a type of biological individual. In doing so, our paper aligns with the contemporary tendency to incorporate metaphysical resources to shed light on current biological debates and builds on that to provide additional support to the consideration of holobionts as biological individuals from an eco-immunity perspective. (shrink)

Many of today’s most disruptive challenges are the result of rare yet highly impactful events. Their characteristics are largely at odds with prevailing management research paradigms, thus stymieing efforts toward societally relevant guidance. New approaches are needed to ensure sustainable businesses and societies.

This chapter contains sections titled: The possibility and need for justification Civil, militant, and revolutionary disobedience Worries about violence and letting the individual decide Justifications for militant environmental activism The critique of humans‐only democracy Implications for militant disobedience Conclusion.

Animal beauty provides a significant aesthetic reason for protecting nature. Worries about aesthetic discrimination and the ugliness of predation might make one think otherwise. Although it has been argued that aesthetic merit is a trivial and morally objectionable basis for action, beauty is an important value and a legitimate basis for differential treatment, especially in the case of animals. While the suffering and death of animals due to predation are important disvalues that must be recognized, predation’s tragic beauty has positive (...) aesthetic value that can be appropriately aesthetically appreciated. (shrink)

Contrary to frequent characterisations, exotic species should not be identified as damaging species, species introduced by humans, or species originating from some other geographical location. Exotics are best characterised ecologically as species that are foreign to an ecological assemblage in the sense that they have not significantly adapted with the biota constituting that assemblage or to the local abiotic conditions. Exotic species become natives when they have ecologically naturalised and when human influence over their presence in an assemblage (if any) (...) has washed away. Although the damaging nature and anthropogenic origin of many exotic species provide good reasons for a negative evaluation of such exotics, even naturally-dispersing, nondamaging exotics warrant opposition. Biological nativists' antagonism toward exotics need not be xenophobic and can be justified as a way of preserving the diversity of ecological assemblages from the homogenising forces of globalisation. Implications for Yellowstone National Park policy are explored. (shrink)

If the traditional problem of demandingness is that a theory demands too much of all agents, for example by asking them to maximize utility in every decision, then we should ask whether there is a related problem of “differential demandingness”, when a theory places vastly different demands on different agents. I argue that even according to common-sense morality, the demands faced by particular agents depend on a variety of contingent factors. These include the general circumstances, the compliance of others, the (...) available resources, the agent’s relevant relationships, the agent’s psychological constitution, and the agent’s knowledge. Some agents, for instance, find themselves in a “sacrifice hazard”: a situation where morality calls for a huge unforeseen sacrifice. I argue that if moral demands are differential, it is harder than one might think to assess a theory’s general level of demandingness in the abstract. (shrink)

Abstract It would be puzzling if the morally best agents were not so good after all. Yet one prominent account of the morally best agents ascribes to them the exact motivational defect that has famously been called a “fetish.” The supposed defect is a desire to do the right thing, where this is read de dicto . If the morally best agents really are driven by this de dicto desire, and if this de dicto desire is really a fetish, then (...) the morally best agents are moral fetishists. This is puzzling. I resolve the puzzle by showing that on a proper understanding of the interaction between de dicto and de re moral motivation, it is not only not fetishistic, but quite possibly desirable, to be motivated by a de dicto desire to do the right thing. My argument relies partly on an appeal to a non-buck-passing account of moral rightness, according to which rightness is itself an additional reason-giving property over and above the right-making properties of an action. If this account of moral rightness is correct, then we would expect the morally best agents to exhibit de dicto moral motivation. However, since their de dicto desire acts in concert with de re desires, there is no reason to consider it a fetish. Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-19 DOI 10.1007/s11098-011-9825-z Authors Vanessa Carbonell, Philosophy Department, University of Cincinnati, P.O. Box 210374, Cincinnati, OH 45221-0374, USA Journal Philosophical Studies Online ISSN 1573-0883 Print ISSN 0031-8116. (shrink)

We emerge from certain activities with an altered sense of self. Whether returning from a warzone or from an experience as common as caring for an aging parent, one might remark, “I’m not the same person I was.” I argue that such transformations are relevant to debates about what morality requires of us. To undergo an alteration in one’s self is to make a special kind of sacrifice, a sacrifice of self. Since projects can be more or less morally obligatory (...) to the extent that they require more or less sacrifice, we must incorporate these unique sacrifices into any accounting of the contours and limits of moral obligation. But sacrifices of self pose a special difficulty for any such accounting, precisely because of their transformative nature. Unlike most other sacrifices, they cannot be analyzed entirely in terms of wellbeing. Using real-world case studies and examples, I argue for the existence of two types of sacrifice of self, involving changes in identity and moral agency. I argue that sacrifices of self require particular attention because they may be extra difficult to compare with other costs and with moral gains. (shrink)

For in all natural things there is something marvelous.1 None of nature’s landscapes are ugly so long as they are wild.2 Positive aesthetics is the idea that all of nature is beautiful.3 The more qualified version supported here claims that nature—to the extent it is not influenced by humans—is specially and predominantly beautiful. Some of the most prominent figures in environmental aesthetics and ethics have defended PA. Holmes Rolston III was an early proponent: The Matterhorn leaves us in awe, but (...) so does the fall foliage on any New England hillside, or the rhododendron on Roan Mountain. Those who linger with nature find this integrity where it is not at first suspected, in... (shrink)

O artigo pretende pensar o aspecto afirmativo do pensamento de Nietzsche ao propor uma “transmutação” do niilismo. Transmutação está em destaque, pois para Nietzsche o niilismo faz parte da vontade de potência, ou seja, para superar o niilismo decadente da cultura europeia e ocidental é necessário saber direcionar o aspecto negativo, ou melhor, da crítica aos valores tradicionais, para afirmar a vida, o ‘sujeito criador’ e a finitude. Ao pensar no poder do aspecto niilista presente na transmutação da cultura, poder (...) esse que destrói os valores da cultura ocidental e faz nascer uma possibilidade de superação do niilismo, pensa-se também em Edmund Husserl como um representante da filosofia nietzschiana ao fazer implodir a noção de cultura ocidental através da crítica às ciências sejam elas positivas, do espírito (história, psicologia e sociologia), ou a própria filosofia através da crítica à metafísica e sua dicotomia realismo versus idealismo como causa e fundamento da crise cultural. Para aproximar Nietzsche e Husserl deve-se entender que Husserl efetivou o principal chamado de Nietzsche, o chamado pela afirmação da vida, afirmação do mundo fenomênico e afirmação da ‘subjetividade’ criadora, o que propiciou novos rumos ao pensar contemporâneo. Husserl faz da fenomenologia uma filosofia pensante da aproximação com o mundo e com as coisas mesmas, num ato de liberdade e criação de um campo relacional de sentido, aproximando-se ao si criador, ao além-do-homem nietzschiano. (shrink)

RESUMO O objetivo do artigo é proceder a uma análise da personagem Alison, esposa de Bath, na obra Os contos de Canterbury, de Geofrey Chaucer. Para isso, com base em Bakhtin (2010, 2018), em particular a partir da perspectiva da carnavalização, somada à teoria da performatividade de gênero de Butler (1988, 2017), pretendemos mostrar como a referida personagem subverte, carnavalizadamente, certos textos bíblicos referentes ao papel da mulher no matrimônio. Dessa forma, nesse estudo, para efeito de análise, tomamos da obra (...) chaucereana o prólogo da esposa de Bath visto que nele a personagem elabora, de modo mais evidente, sua relação tensa e, ao mesmo tempo cômica, com a Bíblia. Da análise feita, concluímos, assim, que a esposa de Bath, de maneira carnavalizada, performatiza o gênero feminino em pleno período medieval, mostrando-se subversiva aos estereótipos da época ao profanar certas orientações bíblicas, tanto do Velho como do Novo Testamento, relativamente ao que é ser mulher e esposa. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to analyze the character Alison, the wife of Bath, in Geofrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. To do this, based on Bakhtin (1984a, 1984b), especially from the perspective of carnivalization, together with Butler’s theory of gender performativity (1988, 1999), we intend to show how this character carnivalistically subverts certain biblical texts relating to the role of women in marriage. Thus, for the purposes of this study, we have taken the Wife of Bath’s prologue from (...) Chaucer’s work, because in it she constructs her polemical more explicitly and the comic relationship with the Bible at the same time. From this analysis, we conclude that Bath’s wife, in a carnivalized way, performs the feminine gender in the middle of the medieval period, showing herself to be subversive of the stereotypes of the time by profaning certain biblical guidelines, from both the Old and New Testaments, regarding what it means to be a woman and a wife. (shrink)

Grandiose narcissistic traits refer to exploitative and arrogant attitudes, while vulnerable narcissistic traits entail hypersensitivity to judgment and low self-esteem. Little is known about how individuals with narcissistic traits can improve their attitudes toward themselves and others. The current research puts self- and other compassion forward as possible targets to alleviate some of destructive patterns of narcissism. Generally, self-compassion has previously been associated with beneficial effects on psychological wellbeing, while other compassion is advantageous for interpersonal relationships. This study explored the (...) relationship between narcissistic traits and the efficacy of experimental compassion inductions. Student and community participants completed grandiose and vulnerable narcissistic trait, SC and OC state questionnaires, and either an SC or OC induction. It was expected that individuals with higher narcissistic traits would benefit from the inductions and show higher SC after but would have greater difficulty showing meaningful increases in OC. The results indicated that individual differences in grandiose and vulnerable narcissistic traits are related to the magnitude of improvements following the inductions: the theorized lack of SC in individuals with vulnerable oversensitivity to judgment traits seems possible to be counteracted through different types of compassion exercises. Moreover, higher grandiose exploitativeness–entitlement and global vulnerable narcissistic traits related to less increases than others. However, directly inducing OC in individuals with these traits was linked to greater OC improvements than improvements after inducing SC. Overall, the present findings suggest that self-compassionate behavior can be improved in individuals with high oversensitivity and that other compassionate behavior could potentially be increased if, specifically, other compassion exercises are utilized when higher levels of certain narcissistic traits are present. (shrink)

One facet of Vigil's socio-relational framework of expressive behaviors (SRFB) suggests that females are more sensitive to facial expressions than are males, and should detect facial expressions more quickly. A re-examination of recent research with children demonstrates that girls do detect various facial expressions more quickly than do boys. Although this provides support for SRFB, further examination of SRFB in children would lend important support this evolutionary-based theory.

Após uma breve retomada da tese bergsoniana da inadequabilidade da linguagem para exprimir o real, a qual está presente ao longo de toda sua obra, este trabalho procura mostrar de que modo Matéria e Memória contempla uma reflexão mais profunda sobre esta temática ao apresentar a noção de “aparelho motor”, que permite vislumbrar o fundamento corporal dos hábitos da prática e aponta para o problema de transpô-los sem crítica ao âmbito do pensamento especulativo. Em linhas gerais, procuramos entender de que (...) modo a concepção de linguagem de Bergson – com base na definição da palavra como entidade de ordem motora ou mais explicitamente como aparelho motor – anuncia um acesso extralingüístico ao real. (shrink)

Between the fall of the Soviet Union and the fall of Lehman Brothers, if the Anglophone academy could be said to have arrived at any consensus about the value of Marxist theory, it would be that Marxism was a quaint historical curio at best and a world-historically hubristic folly at worst. Today, however, well on our way through the first quarter of the twenty-first century, we live in a moment of greatly renewed interest in Marxist ideas. This curiosity is stoked (...) by, among other factors, the worldwide economic shocks of 2008 and, in more recent times, by impending climate catastrophe, incipient fascisticization, and the still-ongoing global COVID-19 pandemic. Any of these on its own would stand out as a rebuke to the neoliberal triumphalism of the 1990s, famously crystallized in Francis Fukayama's assertion that humanity had arrived at "the end of history," there to find permanently expanding capitalist prosperity. Taken together, they present at least strong prima facie evidence for what Karl Marx identified as the inherently and ineluctably crisis-ridden nature of capital and, therefore, good reason to encounter his writings anew. (shrink)

Evaluation of the contribution that Allen Carlson’s environmental aesthetics can make to environmental protection shows that Carlson’s positive aesthetics, his focus on the functionality of human environments for their proper aesthetic appreciation, and his integration of ethical concern with aesthetic appreciation all provide fruitful, though not unproblematic, avenues for an aesthetic defense of theenvironment.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 7.1 (2002) 109-123 [Access article in PDF] The Problem of Finding a Positive Role for Humans in the Natural World Ned Hettinger As necessary as it obviously is, the effort of "wilderness preservation" has too often implied that it is enough to save a series of islands of pristine and uninhabited wilderness in an otherwise exploited, damaged, and polluted land. And, further, that the (...) pristine wilderness is the only alternative to exploitation and abuse. So far, the moral landscape of the conservation movement has tended to be a landscape of extremes.... On the one hand we have the unspoiled wilderness, and on the other hand we have scenes of utter devastation—strip mines, clear-cuts, industrially polluted wastelands, and so on. We wish, say the conservationists, to have more of the one, and less of the other. To which, of course, one must say amen. But it must be a qualified amen, for the conservationist's program has been embarrassingly incomplete. Its picture of the world as either deserted landscape or desertified landscape has misrepresented both the world and humanity. If we are to have an accurate picture of the world, even in its present diseased condition, we must interpose between the unused landscape and the misused landscape a landscape that humans have used well. Wendell Berry (1995, 64) [End Page 109] Introduction If one wants to identify what has gone wrong with humans' relationship to the natural world, there is probably no better place to look than in Eric Katz's (1997) fine collection of essays, Nature as Subject: Human Obligation and Natural Community. 1 Many key insights for understanding our disastrous attitudes toward nature can be found in this compilation of twenty years of merciless criticism of anthropocentrism. Katz's articulation of the source of our moral obligations to nature is deeply on target: Nature is a subject owed moral concern fundamentally because of its independence from humanity and its autonomy from human domination and control.What cannot be found in Nature as Subject is a vision of a positive role for humanity in the natural world. My worry is that Katz's views about the value of nature and our obligations to it leave no room for such an account. I fear that Katz's conceptualization of how humans have wronged nature may entail that all human activity toward nature wrongs nature. This would undermine the possibility of envisioning an environmentally just future in which humans live in the natural world in a morally appropriate way. This is a serious problem, because environmental philosophy needs an ethic for the use of nature, as well as for its nonuse. We need a vision of a constructive human relationship with nature, in addition to a characterization of our past failures of relationship. The question I pose is whether Katz's ideas allow for an account of how humans can be flourishing members who contribute to natural community.This is a problem not just for Eric Katz, but for all of us who accept a broadly preservationist environmental philosophy. If one believes that natural value is fundamentally a function of nature's autonomy from humanity and that a major goal of environmentalism should be to preserve nature relatively uninfluenced by humans, one will have to work hard to explain what positive role humans might have in nature. The alternatives of either minimizing human influence on nature, or sacrificing natural value for human goods, fail to provide for such a positive role. Katz's conceptualization of these matters brings out this problem poignantly. After a brief characterization of the wealth of ideas in Nature as Subject, I will explore this difficulty in some detail. In explaining why this is a problem for Katz and in exploring ways he can avoid it, I hope to set a path that preservationist environmental philosophers can follow if they are to develop a positive vision of humans' place in nature. [End Page 110] A Sketch of Katz's Position Katz defends a nonanthropocentric, holist, and communal environmental philosophy that treats... (shrink)

Wie sollen sich autonome Fahrzeuge verhalten, wenn ein Unfall nicht mehr abwendbar ist? Die Komplexität spezifischer moralischer Dilemmata, die in diesem Kontext auftreten können, lässt bewährte ethische Denktraditionen an ihre Grenzen stoßen. Dieser Aufsatz versteht sich als Versuch, neue Lösungsperspektiven mithilfe einer risikoethischen Sichtweise auf die Problematik zu eröffnen und auf diese Weise deren Relevanz für die Programmierung von ethischen Unfallalgorithmen aufzuzeigen. Im Zentrum steht dabei die Frage, welche Implikationen sich aus einer Auffassung von Dilemma-Situationen als risikoethische Verteilungsprobleme im Hinblick (...) auf die Zulässigkeit von entsprechenden Risikoübertragungen ergeben. Dabei wird zunächst eine risikoethische Interpretation des zugrundeliegenden Entscheidungsproblems skizziert, welches durch seine dilemmatische Struktur eine besondere Risikokonstellation begründet. Ausgehend von den Positionen von Sven Ove Hansson und Julian Nida-Rümelin wird für einen deontologisch-risikoethischen Ansatz argumentiert, der auf Individualrechten einerseits und einer interpersonell gerechten Verteilung der entstehenden Schadensrisiken anderseits basiert. Diese beiden Kriterien werden für den Anwendungskontext des autonomen Fahrens konkretisiert. Zum einen wird in Bezug auf das erste Kriterium argumentiert, dass individuelle Rechte genau dann als angemessen gewahrt gelten können, wenn die resultierenden Risikoübertragungen auf die Einzelnen in ihrer absoluten Höhe jeweils zumutbar sind. Zum anderen werden Schwierigkeiten skizziert, die sich hinsichtlich der konkreten Umsetzung des zweiten Kriteriums der Verteilungsgerechtigkeit ergeben. In diesem Zusammenhang werden beispielsweise ethische Herausforderungen in Bezug auf einen möglichen Vorteilsausgleich, das Prinzip der Schadensminimierung sowie individuell unterschiedliche Ausgangsbedingungen der persönlichen Schadensreduktion kritisch in den Blick genommen. (shrink)

Veterinary oaths are public declarations sworn by veterinarians, usually when they enter the profession. As such, they may reflect professional and social concerns. Analysis of contemporary veterinary oaths may therefore reveal their ethical foundations. The objective of this article is to contextualize the ethical content of contemporary oaths, in terms of the origin and development of veterinary medicine and wider societal changes such as the intensification of farming and the rise of animal welfare. This informs a comparison of oaths from (...) the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Brazil. This analysis suggests some ways in which the oaths might be developed to better reflect contemporary societal values. (shrink)

Human freedom is often characterised as a unique power of self-determination. Accordingly, free human action is often thought to be determined by the agent in some distinctive manner. What is more, this determination is widely assumed to be a kind of efficient-causal determination. In reaction to this efficient-causal-deterministic conception of free human action, this paper argues that if one takes up the understanding of determination and causality that is offered by Anscombe in ‘Causality and Determination’, and moreover takes up an (...) understanding of free human action that is constrained by Anscombe’s account of intentional action in Intention, then an account of free human action as distinctively caused or determined by the agent is untenable. However, the notion of necessitation that Anscombe presents in ‘Causality and Determination’, which implies neither causality nor determination, offers an attractive alternative account. This alternative account pushes us to reconsider the sense in which human freedom is a power of self-determination, and to acknowledge the limits of our control in free action. (shrink)

In philosophy, the empirical success of a science is often explained by the fact that it has managed to discover some law(s) of nature. This line of thought has not been thoroughly explored with respect to chemistry. The aim of this paper is to fill this gap by showing how we could think about laws in chemistry. Specifically, it briefly presents how laws of nature are understood in philosophy of science. It then discusses two case studies from chemistry—the periodic table (...) and chemical reactions—and explains how general ideas about law-hood can be applied to these cases. Lastly, it presents research questions and philosophical problems that arise by considering chemistry from the perspective of laws. This analysis illustrates that there is value in thinking about laws in chemistry. (shrink)

There is a persisting debate about what chemical bonds are and whether they exist. I argue that chemical bonds are real patterns of interactions between subatomic particles. This proposal resolves the problems raised in the context of existing understandings of the chemical bond and provides a novel way to defend the reality of chemical bonds.

In the first half of the twentieth century the attention of American and European researchers was drawn to the area of ‘extreme physiology’, partly because of expeditions to the north and south poles, and to high altitude, but also by global conflicts which were fought for the first time with aircraft, and involved conflict in non-temperate zones, deserts, and at the freezing Eastern front. In an attempt to help white Euro-Americans survive in extreme environments, physiologists, anthropologists, and explorers studied indigenous (...) people’s bodies, cultures, and technologies. This paper will sketch an outline of the science of white survival in three ‘extreme’ environments: the Antarctic and Arctic; high-altitude; and the Australian desert, with a particular focus on the ways in which indigenous populations were studied, or in some cases ignored, by Western biomedical scientists—despite their crucial and systematic contributions to the success of experiments and expeditions. Particularly focusing on altitude, and on blood in both its symbolic and literal sense, the article shows how assumptions about race, indigeneity, civilisation, and evolution shaped the ways White Westerners understood their own bodies as well as those of the people they encountered in cold, high and hot places on the earth. Despite new discoveries in physiology and evolutionary science, old racialised assumptions were maintained, especially those that figured the temperate body as civilised and the tropical body as primitive; and in at least one case it will be shown that these racialised assumptions significantly altered, if not retarded, the science of respiratory physiology. (shrink)

The moral community is a social community, and as such it is vulnerable to social problems and pathologies. In this essay I identify a particular way in which participation in the moral community can be constrained by social factors. I argue that features of the social world—including power imbalances, oppression, intergroup conflict, communication barriers, and stereotyping—can make it nearly impossible for some members of the moral community to hold others responsible for wrongdoing. Specifically, social circumstances prevent some marginalized people from (...) engaging in what Stephen Darwall calls “felicitous moral address” (Darwall 2006). We should think of some members of the moral community as having “second-class moral citizenship” in ways that parallel second-class political citizenship. The injustice of second-class moral citizenship can be understood by drawing an analogy with Miranda Fricker’s notion of “epistemic injustice” (Fricker 2007). Fricker’s account of how people can be undermined in their capacity as knowers can be extended to show how people can be undermined in their capacity as makers of moral claims, which can be called “claimant injustice”. (shrink)

There are many- not just one- periodic laws in chemistry. These laws correspond to non-accidental regularity relations about physical and chemical properties of (sets of) chemical elements. I support this by showing how these regularity relations can be understood from the perspective of a philosophical analysis of laws. Specifically, I show that these relations instantiate standard features associated with laws; they can be spelled out in terms of two standard accounts of laws; and, they can coherently figure in debates about (...) the reality of laws as plausible candidates of ceteris paribus laws. (shrink)

Liberalism is a critically important topic in the contemporary world as liberal values and institutions are in retreat in countries where they seemed relatively secure. Lucidly written and accessible, this book offers an important yet neglected Russian aspect to the history of political liberalism. Vanessa Rampton examines Russian engagement with liberal ideas during Russia's long nineteenth century, focusing on the high point of Russian liberalism from 1900 to 1914. It was then that a self-consciously liberal movement took shape, followed (...) by the founding of the country's first liberal (Constitutional-Democratic or Kadet) party in 1905. For a brief, revelatory period, some Russians - an eclectic group of academics, politicians and public figures - drew on liberal ideas of Western origin to articulate a distinctively Russian liberal philosophy, shape their country's political landscape, and were themselves partly responsible for the tragic experience of 1905. (shrink)

Is a painful experience less bad for you if you will not remember it? Do you have less reason to fear it? These questions bear on how we think about medical procedures and surgeries that use an anesthesia regimen that leaves patients conscious – and potentially in pain – but results in complete ‘drug-induced amnesia’ after the fact. I argue that drug-induced amnesia does not render a painful medical procedure a less fitting object of fear, and thus the prospect of (...) amnesia does not give patients a reason not to fear it. I expose three mistakes in reasoning that might explain our tendency to view pain or discomfort as less fearful in virtue of expected amnesia: a mistaken view of personal identity; a mistaken view of the target of anticipation; and a mistaken method of incorporating past evidence into calculations about future experiences. Ultimately my argument has implications for whether particular procedures are justified and how medical professionals should speak with anxious patients about the prospect of drug-induced amnesia. (shrink)