There has been a growing concern over establishing norms that ensure the ethically acceptable and scientifically sound conduct of clinical trials. Among the leading norms internationally are the World Medical Association's Declaration of Helsinki, guidelines by the Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences, the International Conference on Harmonization's standards for industry, and the CONSORT group's reporting norms, in addition to the influential U.S. Federal Common Rule, Food and Drug Administration's body of regulations, and information sheets by the Department of (...) Health and Human Services. There are also many norms published at more local levels by official agencies and professional groups.Any account of international standards should cover both scientific and ethical norms at once – the two are conceptually intertwined. Recent sources recognize that “[s]cientifically unsound research on human subjects is unethical in that it exposes research subjects to risks without possible benefit.”. (shrink)

Jon Elster and Daniel Little have criticized social scientists for appealing to a mechanism of social selection in functional explanations of social practices. Both believe that there is no such mechanism operative in the social world. I develop and defend an account of functional explanation in which a mechanism of social selection figures centrally. In addition to developing an account of social selection, I clarify what functional hypotheses purport to claim, and re-examine the role of agents’ intentions in functional (...) explanations in an effort to show why a mechanism of social selection is indispensable to adequate functional explanations. (shrink)

This essay seeks to provide a justification for the ‘egalitarian authority claim’, according to which citizens of democratic states have a moral duty to obey (at least some) democratically made laws because they are the outcome of an egalitarian procedure. It begins by considering two prominent arguments that link democratic authority to a concern for equality. Both are ultimately unsuccessful; but their failures are instructive, and help identify the conditions that a plausible defense of the egalitarian authority claim must meet. (...) The first argument (discussed in Section II, after Section I clarifies what authority and democracy are taken to consist in) appeals to the simple idea that fairness disallows granting ourselves special privileges that we deny to others; and it suggests that fairness thus requires obeying democratic decisions rather than acting on our own judgment of the right policy. I show that this argument fails; and its failure indicates that we must invoke a less formal, more substantive understanding of equality to justify democratic authority. The second argument, recently suggested by Thomas Christiano, does just that. Democratic authority is, on this account, not justified by the formal demand for equal treatment but by the distinctive value of showing public equal respect to our fellow citizens. Such public equal respect requires treating as authoritative the democratic decisions in which citizens had an equal say. This argument does not, however, succeed in its goal either. While it plausibly establishes the value of democratic institutions, it does not provide grounds for a duty to obey democratic decisions (Section III). This essay thus develops an alternative argument, according to which egalitarian procedures have authority because, by obeying them, we can avoid acting on certain considerations that must be excluded from our intrinsically valuable egalitarian relationships. The authority of democratic decisions rests on the egalitarian fact that none of us has more of a say than any other, not on the further fact (crucial to the previous argument) that each of us has a positive say (Sections IV and V). The argument in turn helps us understand the limits of democratic authority: it is constrained not only by a demand for equality, and by considerations of justice, but also by a requirement of mutual concern without which our egalitarian relationships lack their distinctive value (Section VI). (shrink)

Premodern Buddhists are sometimes characterized as veritable "mind scientists" whose insights anticipate modern research on the brain and mind. Aiming to complicate this story, Dan Arnold confronts a significant obstacle to popular attempts at harmonizing classical Buddhist and modern scientific thought: since most Indian Buddhists held that the mental continuum is uninterrupted by death, they would have no truck with the idea that everything about the mental can be explained in terms of brain events. Nevertheless, a predominant stream of Indian (...) Buddhist thought, associated with the seventh-century thinker Dharmakirti, turns out to be vulnerable to arguments modern philosophers have leveled against physicalism. By characterizing the philosophical problems commonly faced by Dharmakirti and contemporary philosophers such as Jerry Fodor and Daniel Dennett, Arnold seeks to advance an understanding of both first-millennium Indian arguments and contemporary debates on the philosophy of mind. The issues center on what modern philosophers have called _intentionality_--the fact that the mind can be about other things. Tracing an account of intentionality through Kant, Wilfrid Sellars, and John McDowell, Arnold argues that intentionality cannot, in principle, be explained in causal terms. Elaborating some of Dharmakirti's central commitments, Arnold shows that despite his concern to refute physicalism, Dharmakirti's causal explanations of the mental mean that modern arguments from intentionality cut as much against his project as they do against physicalist philosophies of mind. This is evident in the arguments of some of Dharmakirti's contemporaneous Indian critics, whose critiques exemplify the same logic as modern arguments from intentionality. Elaborating these various strands of thought, Arnold shows that seemingly arcane arguments among first-millennium Indian thinkers can illuminate matters still very much at the heart of contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

What does the aesthetic ask of us? What claims do the aesthetic features of the objects and events in our environment make on us? My answer in this paper is: that depends. Aesthetic reasons can only justify feelings – they cannot demand them. A corollary of this is that there are no aesthetic obligations to feel, only permissions. However, I argue, aesthetic reasons can demand actions – they do not merely justify them. A corollary of this is that there are (...) aesthetic obligations to act, not only permissions. So, I conclude, the aesthetic asks little of us as patients and much of as agents. (shrink)

In his new book, eminent psychologist - Daniel Stern, explores the hitherto neglected topic of 'vitality'. Truly a tour de force from a brilliant clinician and scientist, Forms of Vitality is a profound and absorbing book - one that will be essential reading for psychologists, psychotherapists, and those in the creative arts.

Barristers in England are obliged to follow the ‘cab rank rule’, according to which they must take any case offered to them, as long as they have time in their.

Presents a version of dynamic semantics for a language with presuppositions that predicts basic facts about presupposition projection in a non-stipulative way.

This paper explores how accountability might make otherwise obscure and inaccessible algorithms available for governance. The potential import and difficulty of accountability is made clear in the compelling narrative reproduced across recent popular and academic reports. Through this narrative we are told that algorithms trap us and control our lives, undermine our privacy, have power and an independent agential impact, at the same time as being inaccessible, reducing our opportunities for critical engagement. The paper suggests that STS sensibilities can provide (...) a basis for scrutinizing the terms of the compelling narrative, disturbing the notion that algorithms have a single, essential characteristic and a predictable power or agency. In place of taking for granted the terms of the compelling narrative, ethnomethodological work on sense-making accounts is drawn together with more conventional approaches to accountability focused on openness and transparency. The paper uses empirical material from a study of the development of an “ethical,” “smart” algorithmic videosurveillance system. The paper introduces the “ethical” algorithmic surveillance system, the approach to accountability developed, and some of the challenges of attempting algorithmic accountability in action. The paper concludes with reflections on future questions of algorithms and accountability. (shrink)

Freedom of Conscience and Freedom of Religion should be taken to protect two distinct sets of moral considerations. The former protects the ability of the agent to reflect critically upon the moral and political issues that arise in her society generally, and in her professional life more specifically. The latter protects the individual's ability to achieve secure membership in a set of practices and rituals that have as a moral function to inscribe her life in a temporally extended narrative. Once (...) these grounds are distinguished, it becomes more difficult to grant healthcare professionals' claims to religious exemptions on the basis of the latter than it is on the basis of the former. While both sets of considerations generate ‘internal reasons’ for rights to accommodation, the relevant ‘external’ reasons present in the case of claims of moral conscience do not possess analogues in the case of claims of religious conscience. However, the argument applies only to ‘irreducibly religious’ claims, that is to claims that cannot be translated into moral vocabulary. What's more, there may be reasons to grant the claims of religious persons to exemptions that have to do not with the nature of the claims, but with the beneficial effects that the presence of religious persons may have in the context of the healthcare institutions of multi-faith societies. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe notion of immunity to error through misidentification has played a central role in discussions of first-person thought. It seems like a way of making precise the idea of thinking about oneself ‘as subject’. Asking whether bodily first-person judgments can be IEM is a way of asking whether one can think about oneself simultaneously as a subject and as a bodily thing. The majority view is that one cannot. I rebut that view, arguing that on all the notions of IEM (...) that have so far been successfully defined, bodily first-person judgments can be IEM. (shrink)

Princess Diana’s death was a tragedy that provoked mourning across the globe; the death of a homeless person, more often than not, is met with apathy. How can we account for this uneven distribution of emotion? Can it simply be explained by the prevailing scientific understanding? Uncovering a rich tradition beginning with Aristotle, _The Secret History of Emotion_ offers a counterpoint to the way we generally understand emotions today. Through a radical rereading of Aristotle, Seneca, Thomas Hobbes, Sarah Fielding, and (...) Judith Butler, among others, Daniel M. Gross reveals a persistent intellectual current that considers emotions as psychosocial phenomena. In Gross’s historical analysis of emotion, Aristotle and Hobbes’s rhetoric show that our passions do not stem from some inherent, universal nature of men and women, but rather are conditioned by power relations and social hierarchies. He follows up with consideration of how political passions are distributed to some people but not to others using the Roman Stoics as a guide. Hume and contemporary theorists like Judith Butler, meanwhile, explain to us how psyches are shaped by power. To supplement his argument, Gross also provides a history and critique of the dominant modern view of emotions, expressed in Darwinism and neurobiology, in which they are considered organic, personal feelings independent of social circumstances. The result is a convincing work that rescues the study of the passions from science and returns it to the humanities and the art of rhetoric. (shrink)

This paper describes a plausible view of the nature of physical objects, their mereological connections to each other, and their relation to spacetime. As well as being parsimonious, the view provides a plausible context for denying all of the following: (1) A theory that objects endure through time (and do not have temporal parts, as normally conceived) cannot claim that material objects are identical to space-time regions they occupy. (2) At least one of the family of mereological connections (part-whole, overlap (...) etc.) is to be taken as primitive. (3) Claims entirely in the language of quantifiers and identity and mereology are not semantically vague. It is thus an example showing that the there are more options for the metaphysics of objects, spacetime and mereology than many metaphysicians ordinarily assume. (shrink)

Call “epistocracy” a political regime in which the experts, those who know best, rule; and call “the epistocratic claim” the assertion that the experts’ superior knowledge or reliability is “a warrant for their having political authority over others.” Most of us oppose epistocracy and think the epistocratic claim is false. But why is it mistaken? Contemporary discussions of this question focus on two answers. According to the first, expertise could, in principle, be a warrant for authority. What bars the successful (...) justification of epistocracy is that the relevant kind of expertise does not exist in politics (either because there are no procedure-independent standards of right or wrong in politics, or because, though such standards exist, no one knows better than anyone else what they require). This skeptical position comes, however, at a significant cost: Without the assumption that some political decisions are better than others, and that some people know better than others what these decisions are, it is difficult to make sense of much of our political practice, including how we criticize politicians and choose among candidates for office. The second answer accepts that there is expertise of the relevant sort in politics. It argues, however, that such expertise does not justify political authority because political justifications are subject to special “acceptability requirements.” Since claims to expertise are normally not acceptable to all qualified (reasonable etc.) points of view, they cannot function as premises in the justification of political authority, and the epistocratic claim fails. Yet as a number of critics have pointed out, this (broadly Rawlsian) strategy faces significant problems: it is at least unclear whether the strategy in fact bars all epistocratic conclusions whether there is any principled way to draw the distinction between qualified and non-qualified points of views on which it depends; and whether principled defenses for it are available and internally consistent. This article outlines a third and previously largely overlooked answer, which resists the epistocratic claim without either denying the existence of expertise in politics or invoking special acceptability requirements for political justifications. The only plausible argument for the epistocratic claim, this article argues, focuses on the compensatory role that the expert’s authority plays in correcting the subject’s relative unreliability or other agential shortcomings. The expert’s authority is thus justified only if the subject, by adopting a policy of obeying the expert’s directives, does not face problems that are very similar to the ones that the expert’s authority was meant to solve in the first place. If, for instance, the subject finds it no easier to reliably identify what the expert’s directives require of him than to reliably assess and act on the reasons with which the expert is meant to help him, then the expert’s directives lack the compensatory value that would justify her authority. But if some widely accepted empirical conjectures about politics in a pluralistic political community are correct, then citizens normally either have no reason to adopt a policy of obeying experts, or the experts with regard to whom they have reason to adopt such a policy differ, so that no expert has the kind of general authority over the polity that we associate with political rule. (We may call this the “non-compensation argument” against epistocracy.) The argument is important both because it helps shed light on the proper relation between authority and expertise in general, and because it shows that we can normally reject the epistocratic claim without adopting either the skeptical or the Rawlsian strategy, thus undercutting whatever support these views derive from the mistaken perception that they are necessary for resisting the threat of epistocracy. Finally, because the anti-epistocratic constraints it introduces apply only to justifications of the subjects’ duty to obey, but not to the existence or activities of political institutions as such, the compensation argument can accommodate our anti-epistocratic intuitions without excluding epistemic considerations from the design of political institutions more generally. (shrink)

Deleuze’s philosophy of immanence, because it vigorously rejects every appeal to the beyond, is often presumed to be indifferent to the concerns of religion. This book argues against such a presumption. It does so, first of all, by emphasising how both Deleuze’s thought and the notion of religion are motivated by a demand to create new modes of existence, or to imagine and enact a future that would substantively break with the present configuration of being. If Deleuze’s thought and the (...) notion of religion intersect in this regard, then their divergence must be located elsewhere, namely in the distinction between immanence and transcendence. The book thus argues that the enemy of Deleuze’s thought is not religion in general but instead the specific operation of transcendence. Furthermore, it argues that since Deleuze’s thought is not simply anti-religious, it cannot be identified with secularism. Along these lines, the book shows how Deleuzian immanence is able both to oppose religious transcendence and to enter an allliance with immanent accounts of the name of God. The effect of this is to suspend the paralysing debate between religion and the secular in order to attend to the ways in which immanence – whether “religious” or “secular” – is able to break with the present and to create the future. (shrink)

How can one person’s having political power over another be justified? This essay explores the idea that such justifications must be in an important sense derivative, and that this ‘Derivative Justification Constraint’ bars certain justifications widely endorsed in political and philosophical debates. After critically discussing the most prominent extant articulations of the Constraint (associated with a view often called ‘political instrumentalism’), the essay offers a novel account of what precisely the Constraint bars (in short: justification by appeal to non-derivative goods (...) that include among their elements one person’s ruling over another), what motivates it (in a nutshell: a deeply non-instrumental concern for each person’s moral independence), and what it entails for how we may justify democratic political arrangements in particular. (shrink)

Inductive generalization, where people go beyond the data provided, is a basic cognitive capability, and it underpins theoretical accounts of learning, categorization, and decision making. To complete the inductive leap needed for generalization, people must make a key ‘‘sampling’’ assumption about how the available data were generated. Previous models have considered two extreme possibilities, known as strong and weak sampling. In strong sampling, data are assumed to have been deliberately generated as positive examples of a concept, whereas in weak sampling, (...) data are assumed to have been generated without any restrictions. We develop a more general account of sampling that allows for an intermediate mixture of these two extremes, and we test its usefulness. In two experiments, we show that most people complete simple one-dimensional generalization tasks in a way that is consistent with their believing in some mixture of strong and weak sampling, but that there are large individual differences in the relative emphasis different people give to each type of sampling. We also show experimentally that the relative emphasis of the mixture is influenced by the structure of the available information. We discuss the psychological meaning of mixing strong and weak sampling, and possible extensions of our modeling approach to richer problems of inductive generalization. (shrink)

Korcz argues that deontological considerations support this view. According to him, our practice of praising and blaming people for the epistemic appropriateness of their beliefs provides us with good reason to think that meta-beliefs can establish basing relations independently of any causal relation. Korcz writes.

In this paper I draw the distinction between intuitive and theory-relative accounts of the time reversal symmetry and identify problems with each. I then propose an alternative to these two types of accounts that steers a middle course between them and minimizes each account’s problems. This new account of time reversal requires that, when dealing with sets of physical theories that satisfy certain constraints, we determine all of the discrete symmetries of the physical laws we are interested in and look (...) for involutions that leave spatial coordinates unaffected and that act consistently across our physical laws. This new account of time reversal has the interesting feature that it makes the nature of the time reversal symmetry an empirical feature of the world without requiring us to assume that any particular physical theory is time reversal invariant from the start. Finally, I provide an analysis of several toy cases that reveals differences between my new account of time reversal and its competitors. (shrink)

Daniel Callahan's life time work in bioethics has again and again returned to the root problems of health, progress, technology, and death. How we think about each of them individually and in relation to each other will shape the way we approach and deal with the most common dilemmas of modern medicine. They are at the roots of the field.

Integrative explanations of why obesity is more prevalent in some sectors of the human population than others are lacking. Here, we outline and evaluate one candidate explanation, the insurance hypothesis. The IH is rooted in adaptive evolutionary thinking: The function of storing fat is to provide a buffer against shortfall in the food supply. Thus, individuals should store more fat when they receive cues that access to food is uncertain. Applied to humans, this implies that an important proximate driver of (...) obesity should be food insecurity rather than food abundance per se. We integrate several distinct lines of theory and evidence that bear on this hypothesis. We present a theoretical model that shows it is optimal to store more fat when food access is uncertain, and we review the experimental literature from non-human animals showing that fat reserves increase when access to food is restricted. We provide a meta-analysis of 125 epidemiological studies of the association between perceived food insecurity and high body weight in humans. There is a robust positive association, but it is restricted to adult women in high-income countries. We explore why this could be in light of the IH and our theoretical model. We conclude that although the IH alone cannot explain the distribution of obesity in the human population, it may represent a very important component of a pluralistic explanation. We also discuss insights it may offer into the developmental origins of obesity, dieting-induced weight gain, and anorexia nervosa. (shrink)

In recent decades, issues that reside at the center of philosophical and psychological inquiry have been absorbed into a scientific framework variously identified as "brain science," "cognitive science," and "cognitive neuroscience." Scholars have heralded this development as revolutionary, but a revolution implies an existing method has been overturned in favor of something new. What long-held theories have been abandoned or significantly modified in light of cognitive neuroscience? _Consciousness and Mental Life_ questions our present approach to the study of consciousness and (...) the way modern discoveries either mirror or contradict understandings reached in the centuries leading up to our own. Daniel N. Robinson does not wage an attack on the emerging discipline of cognitive science. Rather, he provides the necessary historical context to properly evaluate the relationship between issues of consciousness and neuroscience and their evolution over time. Robinson begins with Aristotle and the ancient Greeks and continues through to René Descartes, David Hume, William James, Daniel Dennett, John Searle, Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, and Derek Parfit. Approaching the issue from both a philosophical and a psychological perspective, Robinson identifies what makes the study of consciousness so problematic and asks whether cognitive neuroscience can truly reveal the origins of mental events, emotions, and preference, or if these occurrences are better understood by studying the whole person, not just the brain. Well-reasoned and thoroughly argued, _Consciousness and Mental Life_ corrects many claims made about the success of brain science and provides a valuable historical context for the study of human consciousness. (shrink)

This short paper acts as a comment on Totaro and Ninno's ‘The Concept of Algorithm as an Interpretative Key of Modern Rationality’ and also introduces some new avenues for exploring the organization of algorithms. In recent discussion of algorithms, concerns have been expressed regarding the apparent power, agential capacity and control that algorithms command of our lives ( Beer, 2009 ; Lash, 2007 ; Slavin, 2011 ; Spring, 2011 ; Stalder and Mayer, 2009 ). The logic of order, if there (...) is one within these discussions, appears somewhat distinct from the metaphor of recursion suggested by Totaro and Ninno. Using this distinction as a starting point, the paper explores alternative metaphors from which to begin an engagement with political questions of algorithmic ordering. The paper argues for engaging with associative metaphors of: algorithmic account, fluidity, absent-presence and sociality. The paper explores these associative metaphors through an important set of emerging questions regarding organizing algorithms: who and what is included or excluded, on what terms and to what ends? (shrink)

In a paper in this journal, I defend the view that truth is the fundamental norm for assertion and, in doing so, reject the view that knowledge is the fundamental norm for assertion. In a recent response, Littlejohn raises a number of objections against my arguments. In this reply, I argue that Littlejohn’s objections are unsuccessful.

Indigenous peoples possess enormously rich and articulated knowledge of the natural world. A major goal of research in anthropology and ethnobiology as well as ecology, conservation biology, and development studies is to find ways of integrating this knowledge with that produced by academic and other institutionalized scientific communities. Here I present a challenge to this integration project. I argue, by reference to ethnographic and cross-cultural psychological studies, that the models of the world developed within specialized academic disciplines do not map (...) onto anything existing within traditional beliefs and practices for coping with nature. Traditional ecological knowledge is distributed across a heterogeneous array of overlapping practices within Indigenous cultures, including spiritual and ritual practices that invoke categories, properties, and causal-explanatory models that do not in general converge with those of the academic sciences. In light of this divergence I argue that we should abandon the integration project, and conclude by sketching a notion of knowledge coordination as a possible successor framework. (shrink)

Finding myself writing this introduction on the same day that Greta Thunberg is addressing the United Nations, it seems impossible not to understand her parrhesia concerning the biospheric crisis a...

Theodor Adorno’s 1960–1961 lecture course Ontology and Dialectics, recently translated into English, provides the most systematic articulation of his critique of Martin Heidegger. When Adorno delivered three of the lectures at the Collège de France, Maurice Merleau-Ponty was reportedly scandalised as he was at that time developing his own ontology, informed by Heidegger. However, this article problematises the assumption that Adorno’s negative dialectic and Merleau-Ponty’s late ontology are incompatible. First, Adorno’s criticism of Heidegger’s ontology is delineated, with particular focus on (...) how Adorno argues that Heidegger’s subordination of the human being to being is homologous with the logic of capitalism. Then, we turn to Merleau-Ponty’s own engagement with Heidegger, with particular focus on how Merleau-Ponty cannot be accused of denigrating ontic beings. Finally, it is argued that Merleau-Ponty’s indirect ontology has the same implications as those which allow Adorno to position his dialectical method as politically opposed to Heidegger’s ontology. (shrink)

The invention of Bitcoin in 2008 as a new type of electronic cash has arguably been one of the most radical financial innovations in the last decade. Recently, developer communities of blockchain technologies have started to turn their attention towards the issue of governance. The features of blockchain governance raise questions as to tensions that might arise between a strictly “on-chain” governance system and possible applications of “off-chain” governance. In this paper, we approach these questions by reflecting on a long-running (...) debate in legal philosophy regarding the construction of a positivist legal order. First, we argue that on-chain governance shows striking similarities with Kelsen’s notion of a positivist legal order, characterised by Schmitt as the machine that runs itself. Second, we illustrate some of the problems that emerged from the application of on-chain governance, with particular reference to a calamity in a blockchain-based system called the DAO. Third, we reflect on Schmitt’s argument that the coalescence of private interests is a vulnerability of positivist legal systems, and accordingly posit this as an inherent vulnerability of on-chain governance of existing blockchain-based systems. (shrink)

Disagreements about the morality of markets, and about self-interested behavior within markets, run deep. They arise from perspectives within economics and political philosophy that appear to have nothing in common. In this book, Daniel Finn provides a framework for understanding these conflicting points of view. Recounting the arguments for and against markets and self-interest, he argues that every economy must address four fundamental problems: allocation, distribution, scale, and the quality of relations. In addition, every perspective on the morality of (...) markets addresses explicitly or implicitly the economic, political, and cultural contexts of markets, or what Finn terms 'the moral ecology of markets'. His book enables a dialogue among the various participants in the debate over justice in markets. In this process, Finn engages with major figures in political philosophy, including John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and Michael Walzer, as well as in economics, notably Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and James Buchannan. (shrink)

Two recent studies have shown a relationship between male height and number of offspring in contemporary developed-world populations. One of them argues as a result that directional selection for male tallness is both positive and unconstrained. This paper uses data from a large and socially representative national cohort of men who were born in Britain in March 1958. Taller men were less likely to be childless than shorter ones. They did not have a greater mean number of children. If anything, (...) the pattern was the reverse, since men from higher socioeconomic groups tended to be taller and also to have smaller families. However, clear evidence was found that men who were taller than average were more likely to find a long-term partner, and also more likely to have several different long-term partners. This confirms the finding that tall men are considered more attractive and suggests that, in a noncontracepting environment, they would have more children. There is also evidence of stabilizing selection, since extremely tall men had an excess of health problems and an increased likelihood of childlessness. The conclusion is that male tallness has been selected for in recent human evolution but has been constrained by developmental factors and stabilizing selection on the extremely tall. (shrink)

The paper analyzes Christmas Eve, a short dialogue by the protestant romantic Friedrich Schleiermacher published in 1806, as an attempt to translate the traditional language of Christmas into the idiom of the modern, gendered family life. The central message of Christmas is rearticulated in the realm of private family life, the division of gender, the naïve happiness of the children etc. At the same time, the form of the dialogue among the family members and some close friends is used to (...) raise different interpretations of Christmas, including moments of suffering and national identity. The text thus both reflects and actively shapes a shifting interpretation of religious traditions in the modern word precisely by enacting the translation of Christian language into a modern vernacular (that of family, intimacy, nation) as an ongoing process among the different partners of the dialogue. (shrink)

Abstract: Debates about the possibility of global democracy and justice are plagued by a fallacious assumption made by all parties. That assumption is that there is a "naturalness" to relations among fellow nationals to which a global demos could never aspire. In fact, nation builders employed a great many tools that mobilized the psychological and moral susceptibilities of individuals in order to create a sense of solidarity out of initially heterogeneous elements. Two such tools are described and then applied to (...) the global sphere: first, appeals to prudence through the sometimes artificial engineering of Hobbesian situations, and second, uses of philosophically inferior but motivationally optimal moral argument. The applicability of these strategies to the global sphere suggests that cosmopolitans would be well advised to examine further the nation builder's toolbox for other devices through which a global demos might be motivated. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to defend, and in so doing clarify, the claim that the affective component of emotional experience plays an essential explanatory role in the acquisition of evaluative knowledge. In particular, it argues that the phenomenally conscious affective component of emotional experience provides the subject with the epistemic access to the semantic value of evaluative concepts. The core argument relies on a comparison with the role played by the phenomenal character of perceptual experience in the acquisition (...) of knowledge of colours. The upshot is that it is a disanalogy with perceptual experience that explains the essential role of affective experience in acquiring evaluative knowledge, namely its motivational component. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Charles Foster argued that the epistemic uncertainties surrounding prolonged disorders of consciousness make it impossible to prove that the withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment can be in a patient’s best interests and, therefore, the presumption in favour of the maintenance of life cannot be rebutted. In the present response, I argue that, from a legal perspective, Foster has reached the wrong conclusion because he is asking the wrong question. According to the reasoning in two leading cases —Bland (...) and James —the principle of respect for autonomy creates a persuasive presumption against treatment without consent. Therefore, it is the continuation of treatment that requires justification, rather than its withdrawal. This presumption also works as the tiebreaker determining that treatment should stop if there is no persuasive evidence that its continuation is in the best interests of the patient. The presumption in favour of the maintenance of life, on the other hand, should be understood as an evidential presumption on a factual issue that is assumed to be true if unchallenged. However, the uncertainties regarding PDOC actually give reasons for displacing this evidential presumption. Consequently, decision-makers will have to weigh up the pros and cons of treatment having the presumption against treatment without consent as the tiebreaker if the evidence is inconclusive. In conclusion, when the right question is asked, Foster’s argument can be turned on its head and uncertainties surrounding PDOC weigh in to justify the interruption of treatment in the absence of compelling contrary evidence. (shrink)

This chapter defends the moral right of national communities to self‐determination, but examines the problems involved in institutionalizing such a right, and the problem of perverse consequences in exercising the right.

Actor-network theory has contributed greatly to the development of science and technology studies. However, recent critiques appear to have left ANT in a gloomy theoretical black box. What is the likelihood of ANT exiting its current theoretical discontent? Is ANT worthy of salvation and on what grounds? Law argues that recent critiques stem from ANT’s development into a particular theoretical strategy. However, this article will argue that by focusing on strategy as messy and impure, ANT can be afforded the opportunity (...) to shift from a fixed approach to an ambiguous and contingent strategy, well placed to carry on. The article achieves such an argument by first highlighting how ANT has contributed to a recent study of strategy in action; second, by outlining the strategic aspects of ANT; and third, by using the study of strategy in action as a means of engaging with ANT’s current theoretical discontent. (shrink)