Volume 19, Issue 9, September 2019, Page 64-66.

Since children are considered incapable ofgiving informed consent to participate inresearch, regulations require that bothparental permission and the assent of thepotential child subject be obtained. Assent andpermission are uniquely bound together, eachserving a different purpose. Parentalpermission protects the child from assumingunreasonable risks. Assent demonstrates respectfor the child and his developing autonomy. Inorder to give meaningful assent, the child mustunderstand that procedures will be performed,voluntarily choose to undergo the procedures,and communicate this choice. Understanding theelements of informed consent has been theparadigm for (...) assessing capacity to give assent.This method leaves the youngest, leastcognitively mature children vulnerable towaiver of assent and forced researchparticipation. Voluntariness can also becompromised by the influence of authorityfigures who can exert undue influence andcoerce children to participate in research. This paper discusses factors that may influencethe decision to give assent/permission,potential parent-child conflict in theassent/permission process and how it isresolved, and potential parental undueinfluence on research participation. Theseissues are illustrated with quotations drawnfrom a larger qualitative study of parentalpermission and child assent (data notpresented). We suggest a developmentalapproach, viewing assent as a continuum rangingfrom mere affirmation in the youngest childrento the equivalent of the informed consentprocess in the mature adolescent. (shrink)

This lively volume explores the theme of friendship in the lives and works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

This essay outlines an empirically grounded account of normative political legitimacy. The main idea is to give a normative edge to empirical measures of sociological legitimacy through a nonmoralized form of ideology critique. A power structure’s responsiveness to the values of those subjected to its authority can be measured empirically and may be explanatory or predictive insofar as it tracks belief in legitimacy, but by itself it lacks normative purchase. It merely describes a preference alignment, and so tells us nothing (...) about whether the ruled have reason to support the rulers. I argue that we can close this gap by filtering the preferences of the ruled through a form of nonmoralized epistemic ideology critique, itself grounded in an empirical account of how belief in legitimacy is formed. (shrink)

Could the notion of compromise help us overcoming – or at least negotiating – the frequent tension, in normative political theory, between the realistic desideratum of peaceful coexistence and the idealistic desideratum of justice? That is to say, an analysis of compromise may help us moving beyond the contrast between two widespread contrasting attitudes in contemporary political philosophy: ‘fiat iustitia, pereat mundus’ on the one side, ‘salus populi suprema lex’ on the other side. More specifically, compromise may provide the backbone (...) of a conception of legitimacy that mediates between idealistic (or moralistic) and realistic (or pragmatic) desiderata of political theory, i.e. between the aspiration to peace and the aspiration to justice. In other words, this paper considers whether an account of compromise could feature in a viable realistic conception of political legitimacy, in much the same way in which consensus features in more idealistic conceptions of legitimacy (a move that may be attributed to some realist theorists, especially Bernard Williams). My conclusions, however, are largely sceptical: I argue that grounding legitimacy in any kind of normatively salient agreement does require the trappings of idealistic political philosophy, for better or – in my view – worse. (shrink)

This paper provides a critical overview of the realist current in contemporary political philosophy. We define political realism on the basis of its attempt to give varying degrees of autonomy to politics as a sphere of human activity, in large part through its exploration of the sources of normativity appropriate for the political and so distinguish sharply between political realism and non-ideal theory. We then identify and discuss four key arguments advanced by political realists: from ideology, from the relationship of (...) ethics to politics, from the priority of legitimacy over justice and from the nature of political judgement. Next, we ask to what extent realism is a methodological approach as opposed to a substantive political position and so discuss the relationship between realism and a few such positions. We close by pointing out the links between contemporary realism and the realist strand that runs through much of the history of Western political thought. (shrink)

This paper outlines an account of political realism as a form of ideology critique. Our focus is a defence of the normative edge of this critical-theoretic project against the common charge that there is a problematic trade-off between a theory’s groundedness in facts about the political status quo and its ability to consistently envisage radical departures from the status quo. To overcome that problem we combine insights from three distant corners of the philosophical landscape: theories of legitimacy by Bernard Williams (...) and other realists, Frankfurt School-inspired Critical Theory, and recent analytic epistemological and metaphysical theories of cognitive bias, ideology, and social construction. The upshot is a novel account of realism as empirically-informed diagnosis- critique of social and political phenomena. This view rejects a sharp divide between descriptive and normative theory, and so is an alternative to the anti- empiricism of some approaches to Critical Theory as well as to the complacency towards existing power structures found within liberal realism, let alone mainstream normative political philosophy, liberal or otherwise. (shrink)

En el presente trabajo me propongo rastrear algunos nexos existentes entre la obra de Donald Davidson (1917-2003) y dos de los mayores exponentes del movimiento pragmatista clásico: Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914) y William James (1842-1910). Con dicho objetivo, partiré de una caracterización básica del pragmatismo clásico; luego, examinaré ciertas concepciones propias del pragmatismo de Peirce y de James con el propósito de establecer afinidades con el pensamiento davidsoniano. Finalmente, y teniendo en cuenta la vinculación anterior, reflexionaré brevemente sobre la (...) vigencia –muchas veces poco reconocida– de las ideas pragmatistas clásicas en el contexto de las discusiones de la filosofía contemporánea. (shrink)

To what extent are questions of sovereign debt a matter for political rather than scientific or moral adjudication? We answer that question by defending three claims. We argue that (i) moral and technocratic takes on sovereign debt tend to be ideological in a pejorative sense of the term, and that therefore (ii) sovereign debt should be politicised all the way down. We then show that this sort of politicisation need not boil down to the crude Realpolitik of debtor-creditor power relations—a (...) conclusion that would leave no room for normative theory, among other problems. Rather, we argue that (iii) in a democratic context, a realist approach to politics centred on what Bernard Williams calls ‘The Basic Legitimation Demand’ affords a deliberative approach to the normative evaluation of public debt policy options. (shrink)

In this rejoinder to Erman and Möller’s reply to our “Political Norms and Moral Values” we clarify the sense in which there can be specifically political values, and expound the practice-dependent notion of legitimacy adopted by our preferred version of political realism.

This paper provides a realist analysis of the EU's legitimacy. We propose a modification of Bernard Williams' theory of legitimacy, which we term critical responsiveness. For Williams, 'Basic Legitimation Demand + Modernity = Liberalism'. Drawing on that model, we make three claims. (i) The right side of the equation is insufficiently sensitive to popular sovereignty; (ii) The left side of the equation is best thought of as a 'legitimation story': a non-moralised normative account of how to shore up belief in (...) legitimacy while steering clear of both raw domination and ideological distortions. (iii) The EU's current legitimation story draws on a tradition of popular sovereignty that sits badly with the supranational delegation and pooling of sovereign powers. We conclude by suggesting that the EU's legitimation deficit may be best addressed demoicratically, by recovering the value of popular sovereignty at the expense of a degree of state sovereignty. (shrink)

I stumbled into my interpretation of Wittgenstein as an advocate of what is now termed applied philosophy. In doing research for an essay on linguistic violence, [2] I decided to read more by and about Ferrucio Rossi Landi because I had already made use of his work on linguistic alienation. [3] One source, in particular, caught my attention because of its clever, though sexist, subtitle. In 1991, Ranjit Chatterjee published an essay titled "Rossi Landi's Wittgenstein: 'A philosopher's meaning (...) is his use in the.. (shrink)

Non-classical solutions to semantic paradox can be associated with conceptions of paradoxicality understood in terms of entailment facts. In a K3-based theory of truth, for example, it is prima facie natural to say that a sentence φ is paradoxical iff φ ∨ ¬φ entails an absurdity. In a recent paper, Julien Murzi and Lorenzo Rossi exploit this idea to introduce revenge paradoxes for a number of non-classical approaches, including K3. In this paper, I show that on no understanding of (...) ‘is paradoxical’ (for K3) should both rules needed for their paradox be expected to hold unrestrictedly. Just which rule fails, however, depends on various factors, including whether the derivability relation of a target system of reasoning is arithmetically definable. (shrink)

This article offers a realist interpretation of Tacitus’s analysis of political failure. Tacitus described the early Roman Empire as a balance between the conflicting and irreconcilable values and interests of the emperor, the army, and the senate. For him Stoic-republican morality in itself—without the intervention of a political standard demanding political agency in every circumstance—cannot provide an all-purpose guide to action. He provides a fine-grained analysis of types of political failure, such as failing to act, or to realize one’s limited (...) scope for maneuver, or the inevitability of failure given particular political circumstances. Tacitus also describes Thrasea, a moderate member of the senatorial opposition to Nero, as an exceptionally laudable figure. His preference for moderate politics places Tacitus on the side of contemporary status-quo oriented, liberal, realists (e.g., Bernard Williams), rather than on the side of radical realists (e.g., Raymond Geuss, Enzo Rossi), but the central lesson of his understanding of Roman politics is not so much that political order is fragile as that the cost of political failure can indeed be unbearably high. (shrink)

The 'ethical commonwealth', the central social element in Kant's account of religion, provides the church, as 'the moral people of God', with a role in establishing a cosmopolitan order of peace. This role functions within an interpretive realignment of Kant's critical project that articulates its central concern as anthropological: critically disciplined reason enables humanity to enact peacemaking as its moral vocation in history. Within this context, politics and religion are not peripheral elements in the critical project. They are, instead, complementary (...) social modalities in which humanity enacts its moral vocation to bring lasting peace among all peoples. (shrink)

In the past two decades, reinforcement learning has become a popular framework for understanding brain function. A key component of RL models, prediction error, has been associated with neural signals throughout the brain, including subcortical nuclei, primary sensory cortices, and prefrontal cortex. Depending on the location in which activity is observed, the functional interpretation of prediction error may change: Prediction errors may reflect a discrepancy in the anticipated and actual value of reward, a signal indicating the salience or novelty of (...) a stimulus, and many other interpretations. Anterior cingulate cortex has long been recognized as a region involved in processing behavioral error, and recent computational models of the region have expanded this interpretation to include a more general role for the region in predicting likely events, broadly construed, and signaling deviations between expected and observed events. Ongoing modeling work investigating the interaction between ACC and additional regions involved in cognitive control suggests an even broader role for cingulate in computing a hierarchically structured surprise signal critical for learning models of the environment. The result is a predictive coding model of the frontal lobes, suggesting that predictive coding may be a unifying computational principle across the neocortex. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: Part I -- Doctors -- Dr. Joseph Messer -- Dr. Sharon Sandell -- ER -- Dr. John Barrett -- Marc and Noreen Levison, a paramedic and a nurse -- Lloyd (Pete) Haywood, a former gangbanger -- Claire Hellstern, a nurse -- Ed Reardon, a paramedic -- Law and Order -- Robert Soreghan, a homicide detective -- Delbert Lee Tibbs, a former death-row inmate -- War -- Dr. Frank Raila -- Haskell Wexler, a cinematographer -- Tammy Snider, (...) a Hiroshima survivor (hibakusha) -- Mothers and Sons -- V.I.M. (Victor Israel Marquez), a Vietnam vet -- Angelina Rossi, his mother -- Guadalupe Reyes, a mother -- God's Shepherds -- Rev. Willie T. Barrow -- Father Leonard Dubi -- Rabbi Robert Marx -- Pastor Tom Kok -- Rev. Ed Townley -- The Stranger -- Rick Rundle, a city sanitation worker -- Part II -- Seeing Things -- Randy Buescher, an associate architect -- Chaz Ebert, a lawyer -- Antoinette Korotko-Hatch, a church worker -- Karen Thompson, a student -- Dimitri Mihalas, an astronomer and physicist -- A View from the Bridge -- Hank Oettinger, a retired printer -- Ira Glass, a radio journalist -- Kid Pharaoh, a retired "collector" -- Quinn Brisben, a retired teacher -- Kurt Vonnegut, a writer -- The Boomer -- Bruce Bendinger, an advertising executive and writer -- Part III -- Fathers and Sons -- Doc Watson, a folksinger -- Vernon Jarrett, a journalist -- Country Women -- Peggy Terry, a retired mountain woman -- Bessie Jones, a Georgia Sea Island Singer (1972) -- Rosalie Sorrels, a traveling folksinger -- The Plague I -- Tico Valle, a young man -- Lori Cannon, "curator" of the Open Hand Society -- Brian Matthews, an ex-bartender, writer for a gay weekly -- Jewell Jenkins, a hospital aide -- Justin Hayford, a journalist, musician -- Matta Kelly, a case manager -- The Old Guy -- Jim Hapgood -- The Plague II -- Nancy Lanoue -- Out There -- Dr. Gary Slutkin -- Day of the Dead -- Carlos Cortez, a painter and poet -- Vine Deloria, a writer and teacher -- Helen Sclair, a cemetery familiar -- The Other Son -- Steve Young, a father -- Maurine Young, a mother -- The Job -- William Herdegen, an undertaker -- Rory Moina, a hospice nurse -- The End and the Beginning -- Mamie Mobley, a mother -- Dr. Marvin Jackson, a son -- Epilogue -- Kathy Fagan and Linda Gagnon, mothers. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 147 The Godly Image: Christ and Salvation in Catholic Thought from Anselm to Aquinas. By ROMANUS CESSARIO, O.P. Studies in historical theology. v. 6. Petersham, Mass.: St. Bede's Publications, 1990. Pp. xxiv + 214. $14.95 (paper). The Godly Image presents a retouched version of the author's dissertation, first published in 1982 as Christian Satisfaction in Aquinas: Towards a Personalist Understanding (Washington, DC: University Press of America). Seeking (...) a broader audience, the author has dropped the dissertation's numerous Latin footnotes, shortened and enlivened the chapter titles, and streamlined some of his arguments (e.g., pp. 9395 ). He has as well corrected (e.g., on Pannenberg, p. xxii; on Anselm, p. 157) or toned down (e.g., the description of monastic theology, p. 1) earlier statements. Reference to the possibility that Aquinas suffered a nervous breakdown disappears (p. 18). Still, the work remains substantially the same, reproducing even some typos (e.g., William of St. Armour [sic], p. 3) from the original. The new subtitle, Christ and Salvation in Catholic Thought from Anselm to Aquinas, is unfortunate. First, it leads one to expect a survey of the major soteriological positions articulated in the period between the two, hut such is not forthcoming. The work remains what the original title indicated, a study in the thought of Aquinas. Second, in that work Anselm plays hut a perfunctory role, serving as the foil from whose mercantile model (p. 73) or juridical mentality (p. 91) Thomas can advance to a more appropriately interpersonal grasp of the mode of our salvation. This reading of Anselm, however, leaves him in the hands of liberal Protestant historians of doctrine of the nineteenth century, and, as the bibliography indicates, it ignores more recent literature which rightly stresses the metaphysical and religious depth of Anselm's key concept of iustitia. For a precise rendering of the relation between Anselm and Aquinas, one may wish to place greater emphasis on ST III, q.14, a.I, ad 1. In that text Aquinas accomplishes two things. First, he integrates Anselm's concept of satis· faction with the traditional religious insight that, in some sense, Christ suffered what sinners deserve to suffer. At the same time he deepens the concept by rendering explicit the place of love and obedience as the formal element in satisfaction and thus rejoins Anselm in rejecting any strict notion of penal substitution. These reservations aside, the author's thorough, comprehensive, and competent investigation into Aquinas fills a lacuna in the history of soteriology, a lacuna, one regrets to say, still left open by the work of his immediate predecessor, B. Catao. At the same time the scope 148 BOOK REVIEWS of the author's work offers a further and important contribution. By researching Thomas's thought on satisfaction in the context of penance as well as soteriology, the author manages to suggest, and explicitly, that the generative matrix for Thomas's theoretic work in both areas lies in the cruciform dynamics of Christian conversion, the life of grace. With this insight he opens a door from historical theology to a contemporary systematics. Catholic University of America Washington, D.C. WILLIAM P. LOEWE Free Will and the Christian Faith. By W. S. ANGLIN. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. Pp. vii + 218. $55.00 (cloth). W. S. Anglin, a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Mathematics at McGill University, has produced a highly compact and compelling volume which attempts in just 218 pages to prove God's existence, to argue for personal immortality, to defend the coherence of theism against the problem of evil, to provide cogent analyses of both omnipotence and omniscience, and to examine criteria for distinguishing divine revelation from other forms of communication. The thread holding these rather motley swatches of cloth together is the author's concentration on libertarian freedom which weaves throughout the above issues in one way or another. It shows up in the expected places (e.g., in the so-called 'free will defense' of the problem of evil) but also in places hitherto unexpected (Anglin nicely argues that if humans are truly free in the libertarian sense, then it is appropriate and necessary that the Scriptures take the... (shrink)

In a previous article, we unpacked the so-called “ethics first premise”—the idea that ethics is “prior” to politics when theorizing political legitimacy— that is denied by political realists. We defended a “justificatory” reading of this premise, according to which political justification is irreducibly moral in the sense that moral values are among the values that ground political legitimacy. We called this the “necessity thesis.” In this paper we respond to two challenges that Robert Jubb and Enzo Rossi raise against (...) our proposal. Their first claim is that our argument for the necessity thesis is question begging, since we assume rather than show that freedom and equality are moral values. The second claim is that Bernard Williams’s Basic Legitimacy Demand demonstrates the possibility of giving political legitimacy a non-moral foundation, since it allows for a distinction to be made between politics and sheer domination. We refute both claims. (shrink)

Mit diesem klaren und provokativen erkenntnistheoretischen Ansatz im Bereich der Religionsphilosophie argumentiert William P. Alston, dass die Wahrnehmung Gottes eines der wichtigsten Beitrage zu den Grunden des religiosen Glaubens liefert. Dabei spielt sein Begriff des direkten erfahrungsmassigen Bewusstsein eine entscheidende Rolle. Nach einem Uberblick uber verschiedene berichtete direkte Gotteserfahrungen zeigt Alston, dass eine Person auf der Grundlage der mystischen Erfahrung berechtigt ist, an Gott zu glauben. "Dieses grossartige Buch ist die Frucht von Jahrzehnten des Reifens und der durchdringenden Reflexion. (...) Wie zu erwarten war, nimmt es die Diskussion des umgebenden Themas der Gotteserfahrung auf und fuhrt es zu einer neuen Ebene der Einsicht und der Durchdringung." Alvin Plantinga, Universitat von Notre Dame, USA "Die Erkenntnistheorie des religiosen Glaubens war vor einiger Zeit das heisseste Thema der Religionsphilosophie. Alstons Arbeit ist der beste und interessanteste Beitrag zu diesem Gebiet. Alston ist nicht nur mit der Verteidigung des religiosen Glaubens beschaftigt, sondern er eroffnet einen plausiblen Vorschlag zum verbesserten Verstandnisses der Frage nach der Entstehung des religiosen Glaubens. Gott wahrnehmen ist sicher der wichtigste Beitrag zur Religionsphilosophie in diesem Jahr." Robert Merrihew Adams, Universitat von Califonien, Los Angeles". (shrink)

First published in 1977. Ethics is the most practical branch of philosophy: its immediate concern is with people's actions. Yet most philosophers do little to relate ethics intelligibly to the human situation. In this inquiry into the nature of ethics, William Ash draws on the relevant works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin to present the theory and practice of Marxist ethics. He offers an explanation of the moral aspect of Marx's dictum: 'The philosophers have only interpreted the world, (...) in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.' The book includes, perhaps for the first time in so considered a form, an assessment of Mao Tsetung's contribution to Marxist moral philosophy, together with the ethical implications of such developments in social practice as the Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The author deals with the question of value by analysing the concept of 'good'; with the question of claims on people and things by analysing the concept of 'right'; with the question of the limits and scope of freedom of choice and action by analysing the concept of 'ought'.' Clearly written in order to 'de-mystify' the subject, the book challenges readers to test the author's enlightened, Marxist approach in terms of the ethical ordering of their own society. (shrink)

The striking synthetic effort made by Bohr to unite radiation facts with atomic structure facts led to the formulation of his “quantum theory of atomic structure,” which with a large group of subsequent developments, is now usually referred to as the “classical quantum theory.” As a conceptual aid it takes over the idea of an “astronomical atom” consisting of a positive nucleus around which electrons revolve in definite orbits, more or less in the fashion of the solar system. More or (...) less. The similarities and differences as a bit of description are interesting and impressive, but when the theory is reduced to its postulates—and it is this which interests us here—it sounds very much like a re-statement of the Planckian decisions. (shrink)

William of Ockham was a medieval English philosopher and theologian (he was born about 1285, perhaps as late as 1288, and died in 1347 or 1348). In 1328 Ockham turned away from 'pure' philosophy and theology to polemic. From that year until the end of his life he worked to overthrow what he saw as the tyranny of Pope John XXII (1316-1334) and of his successors Popes Benedict XII (1334-1342) and Clement VI (1342-1352). This campaign led him into questions (...) of ecclesiology (the study of the nature and structure of the Christian Church, e.g. of the functions and powers of the pope) and political philosophy. The Dialogus purports to be a transcript made by a mature student of lengthy discussions between himself and a university master about the various opinions of the learned on the matters disputed between John XXII and the dissident Franciscans. The student is usually the initiator; he chooses the topics, asks most of the questions and decides when he has heard enough. The master is, so to speak, an expert witness whom the student examines. This volume provides the first critical edition of part 3.2 of the Dialogus and deals with the relation between the empire and the nation-states and engages in the theory of property rights, natural law, and political freedom. (shrink)