Philosophy should and can contribute to bioethics Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9476-2 Authors Vicki Langendyk, School of Medicine, University of Western Sydney, Locked Bag 1797, Penrith South DC, NSW 1797, Australia Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.

Argument that full grounds modally entail what they ground.

Using traditional meta-analytic techniques, we compile relevant research to enhance conceptual appreciation of ethical climate theory (ECT) as it has been studied in the descriptive and applied ethics literature. We explore the various treatments of ethical climate to understand how the theoretical framework has developed. Furthermore, we provide a comprehensive picture of how the theory has been extended by describing the individual-level work climate outcomes commonly studied in this theoretical context. Meta-analysis allows us to resolve inconsistencies in previous findings as (...) well as confirm the central tenets of the overall ethical climate framework. In addition, we consider the ethical climate relationships in the larger context of the␣theoretical framework, using path analysis to test the structural relationships. Overall, our results provide evidence of the relationships between ethical climate perceptions and individual-level work outcomes. Based on our analyses, we offer future research directions important for further development of ECT. (shrink)

Characterization of a form of explanation involving grounding on the model of mechanistic causal explanation.

Discussion of partial grounds that aren't parts of full grounds; definition of full grounding in terms of partial grounding.

Discussion of the challenge that acquaintance with the nature of experience poses to physicalism.

Discussion of a metaphysical sense of 'inheritance' and cognate notions relevant to fundamentality.

Argument that priority monism is best understood as being a contingent thesis.

Introduction: The role of animals in philosophies of man -- Part I: What's wrong with animal rights? -- The right to remain silent -- Part II: Animal pedagogy -- You are what you eat : Rousseau's cat -- Say the human responded : Herder's sheep -- Part III: Difference worthy of its name -- Hair of the dog : Derrida's and Rousseau's good taste -- Sexual difference, animal difference : Derrida's sexy silkworm -- Part IV: It's our fault -- The (...) beaver's struggle with species-being : De Beauvoir and the praying mantis -- Answering the call of nature : Lacan walking the dog -- Part V: Estranged kinship -- The abyss between humans and animals : Heidegger puts the bee in being -- Strange kinship : Merleau-Ponty's sensuous stickleback -- Stopping the anthropological machine : Agamben's tick-tocking tick -- Psychoanalysis and the science of kinship -- Psychoanalysis as animal by-product : Freud's zoophilia -- Animal abjects, maternal abjects : Kristeva's strays -- Conclusion: Sustainable ethics. (shrink)

Amendment of the Witmer, Butchard, and Trogdon (2005) account of intrinsic properties with the aim of neutrality between competing theories of what is fundamental.

General discussion of grounding, including its formal features, relations to other notions, and applications.

Safe Safety arguments are key components in a safety case. Too often, safety arguments are constructed without proper reasoning. To address this, we argue that informal logic argument schemes have important roles to play in safety argument construction and reviewing process. Ten commonly used reasoning schemes in computer system safety domain are proposed. The role of informal logic dialogue games in computer system safety arguments reviewing is also discussed and the intended work in this area is proposed. It is anticipated (...) that this work will contribute toward the development of computer system safety arguments, and help to move forward the interplay between research in informal logic and research in computer system safety engineering. (shrink)

Defense of a psychological account of what it is for an artwork to be complete.

For at least the last twenty years, philosophers have attempted various strategies for reviving the Hegelian notion of recognition and redeploying it in discourses centered around social justice, including multiculturalism, feminism, race theory, and queer theory. Hegel’s master-slave dialectic may seem like an obvious place to start to analyze the oppression of one group by another. Given that Hegel is not literally talking about slaves, however, but a stage of consciousness, indeed the onset of self-consciousness, we might wonder why his (...) notion of recognition has become so important to these contemporary discourses on oppression. One reason is that the Hegelian model of recognition proposes that.. (shrink)

Benefit sharing in health research has been the focus of international debates for many years, particularly in developing countries. Whilst increasing attention is being given to frameworks that can guide researchers to determine levels of benefits to participants, there is little empirical research from developing countries on the practical application of these frameworks, including in situations of extreme poverty and vulnerability. In addition, the voices of those who often negotiate and face issues related to benefits in practice - frontline researchers (...) and fieldworkers - are rarely included in these debates. Against this background, this paper reports on experiences of negotiating research participation and benefits as described by fieldworkers, research participants and researchers in two community based studies. (shrink)

Julian Savulescu has given clear expression to a principle—that of “procreative beneficence”—which underlies the thought of many contemporary writers on bioethics. The principle of procreative beneficence holds that parents or single reproducers are at least prima facie obliged to select the child, out of a range of possible children they might have, who will be likely to lead the best life. My aim in this paper is to argue that prospective parents, just by dint of their being prospective parents, are (...) in fact not obliged to act on PPB. That is, there is something about their filling the role of prospective parents that exempts them from selecting the child with the best life. I urge that it is more realistic to view prospective parents as bound by a principle of acceptable outlook, which holds that they ought not to select children whose lives will contain an unacceptable amount of suffering. (shrink)

Defense of incompletable grounding and discussion of implications for ontological economy.

In The Foundations of Arithmetic, Gottlob Frege contended that the difference between concepts and objects was absolute. He meant that no object could be a concept and no concept an object. Benno Kerry disagreed; he contended that a concept could be an object, and that therefore the difference between concepts and objects was only relative. In this book, Jolley aims to understand the debate between Frege and Kerry. But Jolley's purpose is not so much to champion either side; rather, it (...) is to utilize an understanding of the debate to shed light on the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein-and vice versa. Jolley not only sifts through the debate between Frege and Kerry, but also through subsequent versions of the debate in J. J. Valberg and Wilfred Sellars. Jolley's goal is to show that the central notion of Philosophical Investigations, that of a 'conceptual investigation', is a legacy of the Frege/Kerry debate and also a contribution to it. Jolley concludes that the difference between concepts and objects is as absolute in its way in Philosophical Investigations as it was in The Foundations of Arithmetic and that recognizing the absoluteness of the difference in Philosophical Investigations provides a beginning for a 'resolute' reading of Wittgenstein's book. (shrink)

Revisionism about moral responsibility is the view that we would do well to distinguish between what we think about moral responsibility and what we ought to think about it, that the former is in some important sense implausible and conflicts with the latter, and so we should revise our concept accordingly. In this paper, I assess two related problems for revisionism and claim that focus on the first of these problems has thus far allowed the second to go largely unnoticed. (...) Here I develop this new objection to revisionism and argue that, while revisionists can successfully respond to the reference-anchoring problem, the normativity-anchoring problem poses a serious objection to the view. In particular, the methodological commitments used to motivate revisionism make it uniquely difficult for revisionists to justify our continued participation in the practice of moral praising and blaming. I conclude by briefly addressing a potential objection based on a common charge against revisionism: that there is no real difference between the view and its conventional competitors and thus the normativity-anchoring problem is of little interest in the broader dialectic. I argue that both of these claims are false. (shrink)

Discussion of atomistic and monistic theses about abstract reality.

Discussion of grounding-theoretic accounts of truthmaking in terms of the theoretical role of “catching cheaters”.

This important new book explores the contemporary refugee crisis and the untold realities and experiences of refugees themselves. A team of top scholars offer a critical and necessary diagnosis of the challenges, complexities, and contradictions impacting our philosophical approaches to the contemporary figure of the refugee.

Response to Skiles (2009) on Trogdon (2009) on intrinsic properties and fundamentality.

In this monograph on Luce Irigay, Kelly Ives explores the French thinker's ideas on the politics of sexual difference.

Research in face recognition has largely been divided between those projects concerned with front‐end image processing and those projects concerned with memory for familiar people. These perceptual and cognitive programmes of research have proceeded in parallel, with only limited mutual influence. In this paper we present a model of human face recognition which combines both a perceptual and a cognitive component. The perceptual front‐end is based on principal components analysis of face images, and the cognitive back‐end is based on a (...) simple interactive activation and competition architecture. We demonstrate that this model has a much wider predictive range than either perceptual or cognitive models alone, and we show that this type of combination is necessary in order to analyse some important effects in human face recognition. In sum, the model takes varying images of “known” faces and delivers information about these people. (shrink)

Editor's introduction -- Author's introduction -- Interrelational subjects and social sublimation -- The gestation of the other in phenomenology -- The look of love and ecological subjectivity -- Social melancholy, shame and sublimation -- Responsible subjects and witnessing -- Witnessing subjectivity and testimony -- Witnessing, recognition, and response ethics -- Between ethics and politics -- Response ethics and the nonhumans -- Animal ethics: toward an ethics of responsiveness -- Service dogs: between animal studies and disability studies -- Earth ethics and (...) creaturely cohabitation -- Witnessing in the age of spectacle -- Death as a penalty and instant death -- Rape as spectator sport and creepshot entertainment -- The spectacle of war -- Bibliography -- Index. (shrink)

The American Journal of Bioethics, Volume 11, Issue 8, Page 31-33, August 2011.

In this essay, I respond to A. W. Moore’s instructive chapter on Frege. I respond by asking various questions, and I question particularly Moore’s claim that Frege, in reacting to Benno Kerry, falls into Hegelian excess. I toy with responding to my question by regarding Frege as anticipating a Wittgensteinian-Heideggerian exaction. It remains unclear whether this constitutes (much) progress.

Response to Gover (2015) on Trogdon and Livingston (2015) on artwork completion.

In accordance with standards published by the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH), ethics consultants are expected to provide recommendations that align with scholarly literature, professional society statements, law, and policy. However, there are no studies to date that characterize the specific references that ethics consultants and educators use to inform their work. To address this gap, a convenience sample of clinical ethics consultants and educators was surveyed online through two major listservs for clinical ethics, the ASBH Clinical Ethics (...) Consultation Affinity Group (CECAG) and the Association of Bioethics Program Directors (ABPD). Ninety-five ethics consultants and/or educators with diverse educational background, credentials, and experience provided responses. In total, 451 references, 315 of which were unique, were reported. These references were broken into 6 categories after analysis: bioethics literature (divided into articles and books), professional society documents (divided into professional society statements and codes of ethics), federal/state/uniform/case law, hospital/health system policies, official religious teachings, and other. We found extensive variation and minimal overlap in the references respondents used for ethics consultation and education, even when referring to the same topics. Future research directions should include conducting more systematic efforts to characterize the references used by ethics consultants across the US; determining whether demographic characteristics of consultants influence the references used; and ascertaining whether the variation in references used reflects genuine disagreements in consultants’ and educators’ bioethical analysis or recommendations. (shrink)

What follows is talky—I skitter across a number of difficult topics much too quickly and with little attempt to defend what I say. I may be able to add some defense later in discussion, but I don't promise anything much and certainly nothing fancy. I am still very much in the process of thinking about these topics, and I aim to do no more than to perhaps nudge you to think about them too.By "poetry" in what follows, I typically mean (...) "lyric poetry." There are poems and poems and poems, and the dactyls make a difference, as do many other features internal to poetry. I will also say upfront that I have no working definition of "lyric poetry." I also have no working definition of "philosophy," although I will be... (shrink)

Prior research suggests that most people perceive themselves to be more altruistic than the average population, an observation known as the better-than-average (BTA) effect. Understanding the BTA effect carries significant public health implications, as self-perceived altruism is closely related to altruistic behaviors, which plays a significant role in individual and societal well-being. However, little is known about whether subpopulations with specific sociodemographic profiles are more likely to hold BTA altruistic self-perceptions, making it difficult to design targeted programs based on multiple (...) sociodemographic characteristics to promote altruistic behaviors. This study addresses this gap by identifying the sociodemographic profiles of populations who are more likely to exhibit BTA effects on trait altruism. Data were derived from a representative sample of Hong Kong citizens (n= 1,185) in the 2017 Hong Kong Altruism Survey. A latent class analysis was performed using four domains of sociodemographic characteristics: sex, age, religion, and socioeconomic status. Multivariate multinomial logistic regressions were conducted to examine associations between class membership, BTA effect, and altruistic behaviors. The results yielded four classes of sociodemographic profiles. Middle-aged, Christian/Catholic, highly educated, and high-income individuals (Class 4, 17.8%) were most likely to exhibit BTA effects and behave altruistically; Class 3 (14.0%) were older, male, no/other religious belief, low education, and least likely to exhibit BTA effects and behave altruistically. Findings improve the understanding of the sociodemographic profiles of people showing BTA effects and facilitate targeted policy development to effectively promote altruism. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: “Power dressing,” itself a women’s dress reform movement, as it came to be called in the 1970s, used to distinguish typical feminine dress styles and was seen as a necessary strategy for a more subdued image on par with the masculine, serious, and formal professional dress, namely the ubiquitous suit and tie. This new ‘career’ woman became visible by her appearance and choice of dress codes that reinforced her position as a businesswoman who was seriously committed to her work. (...) But from the perspective of the first decades of the new millennium, power dressing and power and fashion have far wider meanings and ramifications. For Michel Foucault, power is a regulatory principle that is used to control social interactions and to impose structures that inform the ways in which we act and appear. In line with Foucault’s analysis, to dress is already to respond to tacit frameworks of power, and because it involves already accepted codes of visualisation and behaviour, to “power dress” is not simply to wield or enact power voluntarily but to succumb to it as well. Further, as this paper will reveal, power dressing can also be understood according to Foucault’s “technologies of self”, which sees the historical subject as both subject and object of a network of discursive forces that are considered normative as opposed to constructed. Power dressing still exists today but according to a more nuanced and multivalent configuration. It can also be thought of as a particular form of renunciation that facilitates an embodiment of power much as religious asceticism and privation is (purportedly) constitutive of a more authentic self. (shrink)

Grounding-theoretic reformulation of Fodor's theory of content that addresses recalcitrant Quinean concerns.

The anticipated social capabilities of robots may allow them to serve in authority roles as part of human-machine teams. To date, it is unclear if, and to what extent, human team members will comply with requests from their robotic teammates, and how such compliance compares to requests from human teammates. This research examined how the human-likeness and physical embodiment of a robot affect compliance to a robot's request to perseverate utilizing a novel task paradigm. Across a set of two studies, (...) participants performed a visual search task while receiving ambiguous performance feedback. Compliance was evaluated when the participant requested to stop the task and the coach urged the participant to keep practicing multiple times. In the first study, the coach was either physically co-located with the participant or located remotely via a live-video. Coach type varied in human-likeness and included either a real human, a Nao robot, or a modified Roomba robot. The second study expanded on the first by including a Baxter robot as a coach and replicated the findings in a different sample population with a strict chain of command culture. Results from both studies showed that participants comply with the requests of a robot for up to 11 min. Compliance is less than to a human and embodiment and human-likeness on had weak effects on compliance. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Fatherhood and the Promise of EthicsKelly Oliver (bio)Both Paul Ricoeur and Emmanuel Levinas reject the Freudian/Lacanian association of father with law and instead associate fatherhood with promise. For Ricoeur, fatherhood promises equality through contracts, while for Levinas, fatherhood promises singularity beyond the law. The tension between equality and singularity, between law and something beyond the law, is what is at stake in Derrida’s The Gift of Death. There, Derrida (...) describes ethics as a paradox between the universal and the individual, between equality and singularity. Kierkegaard’s reading of the story of Abraham and Isaac from Genesis is the centerpiece of Derrida’s analysis. If we read The Gift of Death, with its focus on this story of father and son, in relation to Ricoeur and Levinas on the question of fatherhood, it reads as the culmination of a dialectical tension between the two. And if we read the Abraham story as a legend about father-son relations rather than just a parable of faith, The Gift of Death appears to uncover not just the paradoxical logic of ethics but also the uncompromising logic of patriarchy and paternal authority.Paternity Begets FraternityIn “Fatherhood: from Phantasm to Symbol” Ricoeur describes fatherhood as a battle of wills struggling for recognition. He brings together what he calls the different perspectives of psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and religion in order to rearticulate the oedipal situation as a process of recognition (rather than a structure) which moves from the father as phantasm to the father as symbol and replaces images of real murder with symbolic sacrifice. Through his dialectical analysis, Ricoeur himself attempts to articulate a recognition of fatherhood that moves us away from the phantasm of the father as castrator to the symbol of the father as compassionate. Relying on Hegelian dialectics, Ricoeur outlines a movement from psychoanalysis’s fantastic image of an omnipotent father who must be killed so that the son might live, through Phenomenology of Spirit’s master-slave dialectic, to the Christian religious representation of the loving father sacrificing Himself through His son for the sake of all His children. In this higher stage of the dialectic of paternity, the murder of the father is replaced by his sacrifice. Oddly, however, Ricoeur’s dialectic remains at the level of the master-slave fight to the death, where—without the Hegelian resolution—the only options available to insure the recognition of the father by the son (or the son by the father) are murder or suicide. For Ricoeur, recognition requires death, symbolic if not imaginary, whereas Hegel insists that recognition comes only when the master and slave are willing to risk death but also realize the necessity of avoiding it; mutual recognition cannot be maintained if one of the parties is dead.For Ricoeur, recognition does not necessitate avoiding death but rather moving away from the realm of the family and the body to the level of the social and the law. In order for the father-son relationship to be one of mutual recognition, the father must sacrifice his absolute authority so that the son might also participate in it. The goal of recognition is equality, which can be achieved only through social contracts that abstract from the particulars of embodied familial relations. One such social operation is designation, [End Page 45] which is removed from the realm of the bodily drives that motivate the oedipal scenario. Designation requires the sublimation of bodily drives into abstract laws that can equalize bodies by turning them into symbols.The move from psychoanalysis to Christianity is a move from a domestic family to a social family: through God the Father’s sacrifice of His son, we all become members of the Christian family; we all become children of God. For Ricoeur, it is not that God is the Father because He gives the Law. Rather, the law, the covenant or contract, enables Him to be recognized as father [490]. Ricoeur implicitly rejects the Lacanian association of the Father with the Law or the Name. He claims that there is no Name of the Father. “Father” is not a name but a designation [Ricoeur 485]. And the father’s proper name is... (shrink)

In this article, I argue that the liberal framework-its autonomous individuals with equal rights-allows judges to justify enforcing surrogacy contracts. More importantly, even where judges do not enforce surrogacy contracts, the liberal framework conceals gender and class issues which insure that the surrogate will lose custody of her child. I suggest that Marx's analysis of estranged labor can reveal the class and gender issues which the liberal framework conceals.

In this open peer commentary, we categorize the possible “neuroscience in national security” definitions of misuse of science and identify which, if any, are uniquely presented by advances in neuroscience. To define misuse, we first define what we would consider appropriate use: the application of reasonably safe and effective technology, based on valid and reliable scientific research, to serve a legitimate end. This definition presents distinct opportunities for assessing misuse: misuse is the application of invalid or unreliable science, or is (...) the use of reliable scientific methods to serve illegitimate ends. Ultimately, we conclude that while national security is often a politicized issue, assessing the state of scientific progress should not be. (shrink)