Radical forms of geoengineering, such as stratospheric sulfate injection (SSI), raise serious concerns about justice and the plight of the most vulnerable. However, these are sometimes dismissed on the basis of a challenge: “What if, in the face of catastrophic impacts, the most vulnerable countries initiate geoengineering themselves, or beg the richer, more technically sophisticated countries to do it? Wouldn’t geoengineering then be ethically permissible? Who could refuse them?” As a US tech billionaire put it, “Frankly, the Maldives could say, (...) ‘F--- you all—we want to stay alive’. Would you blame them? Wouldn’t any reasonable country do the same?” Such questions are intended to be rhetorical: it is assumed simply to be obvious that the appeals of the desperate would justify radical geoengineering. Moreover, the framing suggests that other nations would have strong moral reasons either to respect intervention by the desperate, or even to aid them by deploying themselves. Sometimes such arguments are also used to justify accelerating research on geoengineering now. If the desperate might attempt geoengineering, it is said, we should work out how best to do it, so as to assist them through advice. In general, the overriding thought is that the threat of catastrophe coupled with the plight of vulnerable populations provides most of the justification needed for the wider pursuit of a geoengineering agenda. Desperation becomes a trump card in the policy discourse. In this article, I argue that the desperation argument misses much of what is at stake, ethically speaking, in geoengineering policy. I focus on two further questions. The more obvious—the justificatory question—asks “under what conditions would geoengineering become justified?”, where the conditions to be considered would include, for example, the threat to be confronted, the governance mechanisms, the individual protections to be provided, the compensation provisions to be made, and so on. The less obvious question is the contextual question: “What is the ethical context within which geoengineering is likely to occur, and what difference does this make to our analysis of it?” (Gardiner 2013). In light of this distinction, I argue for two claims. First, on neither of the two most obvious interpretations of it does the desperation argument clearly justify the pursuit of geoengineering. Indeed, it may even count against such pursuit. Second, in any case, the context in which SSI is actually being pursued reveals more about the live threats and ethical import of geoengineering. For example, to push the most vulnerable to the point where they feel forced to accept pronounced subjugation to those who have made them desperate is a morally horrifying prospect which we have strong ethical reason to avoid. Such possibilities should not be concealed behind the superficial bravado of “f--- you all” and “what any reasonable country would do.” None of this implies that ethical geoengineering is impossible. However, it does suggest that geoengineering is morally complex in ways unappreciated by simple appeals to desperation. (shrink)

Randomised controlled trials (RCTs) sometimes recruit participants who are desperate to receive the experimental treatment. This paper defends the practice against three arguements that suggest it is unethical first, desperate volunteers are not in equipoise. Second clinicians, entering patients onto trials are disavowing their therapeutic obligation to deliver the best treatment; they are following trial protocols rather than delivering individualised care. Research is not treatment; its ethical justification is different. Consent is crucial. Third, desperate volunteers do not (...) give proper consent: effectively, they are coerced. This paper responds by advocating a notion of equipoise based on expert knowledge and widely shared values. Where such collective, expert equipoise exists there is a prima facie case for an RCT. Next the paper argues that trial entry does not involve clinicians disavowing their therapeutic obligation; individualised care based on insufficient evidence is not in patients best interest. Finally, it argues that where equipoise exists it is acceptable to limit access to experimental agents; desperate volunteers are not coerced because their desperation does not translate into a right to receive what they desire. (shrink)

The randomization ingredient in double-blind controlled experiments may be objectionable to patients who, in their desperation, come to such trials seeking a last chance of cure. Minogue et al., who view such a situation as inherently exploitive and undermining of patient autonomy, propose that such “desperate volunteers” instead be enrolled in the active arm, while other patients, less desperate and more committed to medical progress, continue to be randomized. Their view is critiqued as destructive of medical progress, inappropriate (...) in its lack of clinical response to such patients, and fatally flawed by unrealistic notions of autonomy and voluntariness. (shrink)

This article expands on what Bernard Stiegler describes as “The Ordeal of Truth”. Through an evolutionary account of cognition and its exteriorization in human technology, I highlight a recurring tension in philosophy between the “as-if” nature of our models and representations, and the doubt that infects even our most stable understanding of the world. Truth is here associated to the process of metastabilization that characterizes the biological organism. The famous case of Clive Wearing’s severe amnesia, as well as the fictional (...) treatment of amnesia in Christopher Nolan’s Memento, are recalled to highlight the connection between truth and memory, and more importantly the contingent character of the formation of thoughts, and the desperate nature of the construction of truths, through the evolutionarily conditioned “subjective necessity” to link the before and the after, the cause and the effect. I show that this same ordeal is reflected in the philosophy of science in what is known as “pessimistic meta induction”, which I put into dialogue with the growing pessimism about knowledge in contemporary technological culture known as “post truth”. Finally, a possible way out of this pessimism is briefly sketched: a compromise such that, without recourse to objective truth, and in full acceptance of an always already biased relation to the world, future technologies might be designed to incrementally reduce our biases, through an intrinsic mapping of the relative falsity of our models, rather than through some idealized extrinsic relation to an unattainable noumenal real. (shrink)

Critics from a variety of camps have argued that bioethics has suffered an indifference to Cases have been described as thin and the selves inhabiting them hollow. This criticism has been driven at least in part by a reworked conception of the self. The rational and autonomous self that once dominated bioethics discourse has been replaced with a more self, a self embedded in stories, relationships, families, communities, cultures, and other particularitythese differences—matter. They matter because they figure importantly into our (...) ethical analyses of cases, affecting, for example, how we interact with and treat patients. And with this shift has come increasing attention to the processes of moral inquiry that enable inquirers to gather all of this moral information and find their way from complex cases to context-sensitive responses. (shrink)

In a recent essay, Deery and Nahmias :1255–1276, 2017) utilize interventionism about causation to develop an account of causal sourcehood in order to defend compatibilism about free will and moral responsibility from manipulation arguments. In this paper, we criticize Deery and Nahmias’s analysis of sourcehood by drawing a distinction between two forms of causal invariance that can come into conflict on their account. We conclude that any attempt to resolve this conflict will either result in counterintuitive attributions of moral responsibility (...) or will undermine their response to manipulation arguments. (shrink)

This essay sets out to search for an equivalent Chinese word to the English word ‘justice’ in classical Chinese language, through ancient Chinese philosophical texts, imperial codes and idioms. The study found that there does not seem to be a linguistic sign for ‘justice’ in classical Chinese, and further, yi resembles ‘justice’ in some ways and has been used sometimes to translate ‘justice’, but yi is a complex concept in traditional Chinese philosophy with multiple meanings and it is dissimilar to (...) ‘justice’ in their semantic and pragmatic meanings in Chinese and English legal culture. While ‘justice’ is a keyword and fundamental to Western law, yi is not a legal word or concept in classical Chinese in traditional China. Given its complexity, yi does not have a one-to-one equivalent in English. It sometimes carries a sense of ‘righteousness’ and occasionally ‘justice’, but yi and ‘justice’ are not equivalent. In view of these, it becomes understandable that the translations of yi in contemporary Chinese usage vary ranging from ‘friendship and justice’ to ‘greater good’, among others. The meaning of yi is still uncertain and context sensitive as it was two thousand years ago. (shrink)

This article is both a personal response to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and an examination of the concept within literature of making the strange familiar and making the familiar strange. It discusses the educative force and potential of Beckett’s strangers in a strange world by examining my own personal experiences with the play. At the same time the limitations of Beckett’s theatre are explored through the contrast with the work of Berthold Brecht, who sought to make the familiar strange (...) as a method of political enquiry to facilitate the transformation of the capitalist state. Parallels are drawn between the possibilities of both theatre and education as tools for social transformation and change. (shrink)

It has been notoriously difficult to link Ludwig Wittgenstein’s work to the agendas of academic political theory. While this is in part due to his style of writing and the absence of an explicit discussion of politics, his commitment to the irreducibility of conventions is difficult to reconcile with the search of many political theorists for both criteria of political essentiality and a basis of cognitive privilege that would underwrite a vision of critical and normative inquiry. Although political theory is (...) characteristically drawn toward the literature of philosophy in search of identity and images of epistemic authority, Wittgenstein’s work subverts the search for the universality of both politics and political inquiry. It is, however, possible to perceive in his work a positive valence for both a vision of political inquiry and criteria of democracy. (shrink)

Cheating is prevalent in workplaces and has a significant detrimental impact, and thus considerable scholarly research has been dedicated to investigating its antecedents. While various influential factors (e.g., performance pressure, perceived threats of COVID-19, leadership, and employee characteristics) have been identified, the effects of employment conditions remain relatively underexplored. We extend the research by applying impression management theory to examine how perceived job insecurity contributes to workplace cheating behavior. Through a field survey and an experimental study, we found that impression (...) management motives mediate the positive link between job insecurity and workplace cheating behavior. In addition, job immobility exacerbates the direct effect of job insecurity on impression management motives, which in turn increases workplace cheating behavior. The findings enrich the literature by identifying job insecurity as a critical employment-related antecedent of workplace cheating behavior and by developing a comprehensive impression management framework to elucidate whether, how, and when job insecurity may result in such behavior. (shrink)

Our hospital’s policy and procedures for “Patients Without Surrogates” provides for gradated safeguards for managing patients’ treatment and care when they lack decision–making capacity, have no advance directives, and no surrogate decision makers are available. The safeguards increase as clinical decisions become more significant and have greater consequences for the patient. The policy also directs social workers to engage in “rigorous efforts” to search for surrogates who can potentially provide substituted judgments for such patients. We describe and illustrate the policy, (...) procedures, and kinds of expected rigorous efforts through our narration of an actual but disguised case for which we provided clinical ethics guidance and social work expertise. Our experience with and reflection on this case resulted in four recommendations we make for health care facilities and organizations that aim to provide quality care for their own patients without surrogates. (shrink)

People often think there are moral duties that hold irrespective of the consequences, until those consequences exceed some threshold level – that we shouldn’t kill innocent people in order to produce the best consequences, for example, except when those consequences involve saving millions of lives. This view is known as “threshold deontology.” While clearly controversial, threshold deontology has significant appeal. But it has proven quite difficult to provide a non-ad hoc justification for it. This chapter develops a new justification, showing (...) that acting like a threshold deontologist is a good strategy for being moral, given our uncertainty and imperfect moral knowledge. And failing to use good strategies for being moral is, itself, morally bad. (shrink)

Most medical consultations are for self‐limiting conditions. While technical expertise remains necessary, creating therapeutic knowledge in this context is the joint responsibility of physician and patient, and depends upon recognition that the observer, the observation, and the observed form a temporary union.

Contemporary scenes of democracy and education exemplify a real scepticism about the point of political participation, and by implication about one's place in society in relation to others. What is called for is a recovery of desire per se ? of people's desire to say what they want to say and their desire to participate in the creation of the public. In response, this article examines Stanley Cavell's ordinary language philosophy. The way he reconstructs philosophy from the perspective of ordinary (...) language provides us with an alternative route to citizenship. Cavell's philosophy is turned towards our existential need to recover political passion, the mainspring of a desire to think that affirms humanity as necessarily political. And in the end this existential need dovetails with the need of the polis: that people speak in their own voice. That, I shall conclude, must be the basis of education for citizenship and political literacy. (shrink)

The horror described in the Book of Lamentations engenders terror-fraught cries from those entrapped by them. The laments that comprise the book plumb the depths of human tragedy and desperation without rushing prematurely into consolation and relief.

This essay explores the mutual reinforcements between socioeconomic precarity and right-wing populism, and then envisions a politics that contests Trumpism through workers’ organizations that create alternatives to predominant patterns of subject formation through work. I first revisit my recent critique of precarity, which initiates a new method of critical theory informed by Paulo Freire’s political pedagogy of popular education. Reading migrant day laborers’ commentaries on their work experiences alongside critical accounts of today’s general work culture, this “critical-popular” procedure yields a (...) conception of precarity with two defining characteristics. First, precarity is socially bivalent: it singles out specific groups for especially harsh treatment even as it pervades society. Second, precarity constitutes subjects through contradictory experiences of time in everyday work-life, exacerbated by insoluble dilemmas of moral responsibility. Antonio Vásquez-Arroyo’s conception of “political literacy” and Bridget Anderson’s notion of “migrantizing the citizen,” in turn, help us understand how precaritization blocks workers from developing the critical dispositions toward time needed for democratic citizenship. This analysis then makes it possible to elucidate, in dialogue with Daniel Martinez-HoSang and Joseph Lowndes, how precaritized worker-citizenship facilitates the cross-class and multiracial appeal of Trumpism’s white supremacist discourse of national economic decline and resurgence, while normalizing the temporal affects of shock and violence characteristic of Trumpism, as theorized by Lia Haro and Romand Coles. Day laborers’ worker centers, I argue, refunction precaritized time, regenerate political literacy, and migrantize the citizen. A large-scale alternative to right-wing populism thus could emerge if the worker center network were expanded throughout the economy. (shrink)

The question of what, if anything, Christian theology as theology might contribute to ethical debates about appropriate uses of medical genetics has often been ignored. The answer is complex, and the author argues it is best characterized by an explanation of the analogous aspirations of the two: both have as their goal the perfection of the human being, both assert that the present disposition of the human body is on a fundamental level more often than not other than it ought (...) to be, and both aspire to transform the present state of the body toward a future state in which present imperfections no longer exist. Given these analogous concerns, it would seem that one of the primary moral contributions that Christianity can make to debates about medical genetics is to ask whether and to what extent the Christian vision of embodied human perfection is compatible with the vision of perfection offered by the sciences pertaining to medical genetics. The author pursues a discussion of this analogy and its implications in this essay. (shrink)

This is not just another media ethics book. Engaging and non-conventional it breaks away from the usual text practice of presenting the ethical theories of well-known philosophers in watered-down form.

Persons with borderline personality disorder are often described as affected by extreme emotional fluctuations and by the sudden emergence of uncontrollable and disproportionate emotional reactions. Borderline persons frequently experience their own self as dim and fuzzy, are deprived of a stable sense of identity and unable to be steadily involved in a given life project. We will interpret these typical features as fluctuations between a clearly normative emotion such as anger and the more diffuse and confusing background of bad moods (...) like dysphoria. Our main focus will be on dysphoria. The intentional structure that characterizes much of human emotional experience, we shall argue, is absent in dysphoria. If we imagine emotions as fluxes of intentionality that innervate the body and connect it to the world, dysphoria is empty intentionality, so to speak, devoid of the moderating power of language and representation. Dysphoria exerts a centrifugal force which fragments the borderline person's representations of herself and of others, inducing a painful experience of incoherence and inner emptiness, a feeling of uncertainty and inauthenticity in interpersonal relationships, and an excruciating sense of futility and inanity of life. But it also entails a sense of vitality, although a disorganized, aimless, and explosive one -- a desperate vitality. (shrink)

Victoria Davion confuses seeking approval with the desire for recognition of and respect for one's difference. Ironically, when she asserts that the desire to please others provides an incentive to do well (and thus constitutes a positive aspect of competition) Davion undermines her argument that competition enhances one's sense of self. Rather than enhancing one's sense of self, striving to win approval from others sabotages one's ability to rely on her own judgment and take moral responsibility for herself.

The isolated mention of the existence of a powerful Jewish polity in the Horn of Africa by Jewish traveller Benjamin of Tudela in the twelfth century AD has generally been given such credence by the twentieth-century orientalistes that it is often considered the first mention of the people later to be known as Falasha. This short passage has indeed engendered a large amount of scholarly literature, which has partially obscured the wider historical and geographical context to which it refers and (...) in which it was produced. Beyond his formulation of the hypothesis of this Jewish polity, which, it will be argued, probably never existed, this article suggests that Benjamin's Jewish viewpoint has much more to tell us about the regional scene than has been recognized. First, analyzed as an itinerary, Benjamin's text sheds new light on the trading routes of the time. Second, the comparison of this text with other sources from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries provides new perspectives on the religious, political, and economic intricacies of the time, a context in which, it is suggested, Benjamin's confusion about the identity of the polity he describes makes sense. Finally, while it probably does not constitute a reflection on a political entity that existed in actual fact, Benjamin's narrative, with all its ambiguities, may be considered a rather faithful mirror of the social complexity of the communities near the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa, which are at the crossroads of several worlds. (shrink)

This essay explores some concerns about the quality of informed consent in patients whose autonomy is diminished by fatal illness. It argues that patients with diminished autonomy cannot give free and voluntary consent, and that recruitment of such patients as subjects in human experimentation exploits their vulnerability in a morally objectionable way. Two options are given to overcome this objection: (i) recruit only those patients who desire to contribute to medical knowledge, rather than gain access to experimental treatment, or (ii) (...) provide prospective subjects the choice to participate in standard doubleblind study or receive the experimental treatment. Either option would guarantee that patients in desperate conditions are given a more meaningful choice and a richer freedom, and thus a higher quality of informed consent, than under standard randomized trials. (shrink)

_Environmental Philosophy in Desperate Times_ examines environmental philosophy in the context of climate denial, inaction, and thoughtlessness. It introduces readers to the varied theories and movements of environmental philosophy. But more than that, it seeks to unsettle our received understanding of the world and our role in it, especially through consideration of Indigenous, feminist, and radical voices.

A balance needs to be struck between facilitating compassionate access to innovative treatments for those in desperate need, and the duty to protect such vulnerable individuals from the harms of untested/unlicensed treatments. We introduced a principle-based framework to evaluate such requests and describe its application in the context of recently evolved UK, US and European regulatory processes. 24 referrals were received by our quaternary children's hospital Clinical Ethics Committee over the 5-year period. The CEC-rapid response group evaluated individual cases (...) within 48-hours; the main referrers being haematology/oncology, immunology or transplant services. Most requests were for drug/vaccine/pre-trial access or biological/cellular therapies. The majority of individual requests were approved ; neutral or negative opinions were given in 5, including 3 group requests. Recently evolved regulatory processes share common criteria and conditions to our framework including: demonstration of clinical need; sound scientific basis with lack of viable alternative; risks-benefit/best interests evaluation; arrangements for fully informed consent; no compromise of arrangements to test treatment for licensing purposes; consideration of resource implications. There are differences between individual processes and with our framework, with respect to procedures, scope, application format, costs and obligation to make available all outcome data. Our experience has emphasized the need for an independent, principled, consistent, fair and transparent response to the increasing demand for innovative treatment on a compassionate basis. We believe that there is a need for harmonization of the recent proliferation of regulation and legislation in this area. (shrink)

Pese a la estricta contextualización de lomágico como demoníaco en el tejido dela narrativa de El asno dorado de Apuleyo,una corriente que se ha descuidado enla academia moderna explora su legadopagano –r et i ene el al cance par a unahi pót esi s fact i bl e en l a forma de unacoalición paradigmática entre su progeniei nevi tabl e, l as bruj as desesperadas aligual que una comunidad distinguida detaumaturgos, los teúrgos, cuya identidaden el discurso intelectual proporciona elejemplo (...) más fino de las formas politeistasde adivinación. En Sobre los misterios deJamblico, se clarifica la representación deotra tipología de magia, la natural, queavala un notable paralelo en una premisacompartida –los niveles de motivación.Deseo proponer, que en tanto arroja luzsobre una clasificación dual de la magiac omo demoní ac a y nat ur al , t ambi énrefleja de manera fascinante los grados deunidad entre las brujas desesperadas ylos teúrgos en cuestión –las operacionesde l os pri meros a menudo sust ent ans us pl a n t e a mi e n t o s pa r a o c ul t a r e lconocimiento y su potencial no es inferiora l as preocupaci ones el evadas de l ossegundos.Despite the strict contextualization ofmagic as demonic within the fabric ofnar r at i ve i n Aput ei us ’ Go l de n As s , aneglected current in modern academia itspagan legacy - retains scope for a feasiblehypothesis in the form of a paradigmaticcoalition between its inevitable progeny,desperate witches as well as a distinguishedc o mmu n i t y o f t h a u ma t a u r g o i , t h etheurgist, whose identity in intellectualdi scour se, chi ef l y t he f i nest possi bl ee x e mpl um of pol yt he i s t i c f or ms ofdi vi nat i on I ambl i chus’ De Myst eri es,clarify their representation of anothertypology of magic, natural, endorsinga striking parallel in a shared premise -levels of motivation. I wish to propose,that in as much as it throws light on twofold classification of magic as demonic andnatural it also fascinatingly reflects degreesof unity, though not without reserve insome areas, between the desperate witchesand theurgists in question - the formerwhose operations often underpin theirclaims to occult knowledge and whosepotential is no less inferior to the elevatedconcerns of the latter. (shrink)

If reports given on experimental awakenings validly represent mental activity that was underway before the awakening, REM sleep is neither necessary nor sufficient for dreaming. Another intuitively attractive hypothesis for its function – that REM consolidates or otherwise modifies memory traces acquired while awake – is not supported by the preponderant evidence. There is growing acceptance of the possibility that REM functions to support sleep rather than waking brain processes. [Hobson et al.; Nielsen; Solms; Vertes & Eastman].

In her film, Desperately Seeking Susan, Susan Seidelman continues her inquiry into the relations between the “center” and the “margin” in contemporary culture. The ideology of the film represents the center — the status quo — as the site for mature negotiations of communal values, whereas it constructs the margin — the locus of opposition — as an instance of self-indulgence, transgression, and extremity. This is the same theme in her first film, Smithereens. This fascination with the tension between the (...) center and the margin is interesting in that it enacts the “politics of reluctance” of fairly successful upper bourgeois who in their youth learned a political language and a set of attitudes now being tested in their middle years by new political “realities.”. (shrink)