All Christians read the Bible differently, pray differently, value their traditions differently, and give different weight to individual and corporate judgment. These differences are the basis of conflict. The question Christian ethics must answer, then, is, "What does the good life look like in the context of conflict?" In this new introductory text, Ellen Ott Marshall uses the inevitable reality of difference to center and organize her exploration of the system of Christian morality. What can we learn from (...) Jesus' creative use of conflict in situations that were especially attuned to questions of power? What does the image of God look like when we are trying to recognize the divine image within those with whom we are in conflict? How can we better explore and understand the complicated work of reconciliation and justice? This innovative approach to Christian ethics will benefit a new generation of students who wish to engage the perennial questions of what constitutes a faithful Christian life and a just society. (shrink)

This article retrieves Sara Ruddick’s Maternal Thinking as a resource for analyzing contemporary activism by mothers advocating for gun control and police reform. Concerns about ethnocentrism and gender essentialism have discouraged engagement with maternal thinking. However, self-identified “moms” continue an historical pattern of protecting their children through public advocacy on social issues. Given the role that maternal identity plays in political activism, feminist ethics must continue to develop robust theoretical resources for analysis and critique. Sara Ruddick’s Maternal Thinking should remain (...) part of that repertoire. (shrink)

Playtime in urban cities has become an indoor activity for children due to limited access to natural outdoor environments. This product of urbanization makes the case for the introduction of biophilic design. However, playrooms are often neglected as a possibility in designing a natural space indoors. Interior designers and other specialists lack a reliable tool to identify and incorporate biophilic features into the design of these indoor environments in urban settings. The Biophilic Interior Design Matrix (BID-M) developed by McGee and (...) Marshall-Baker quantifies 52 of Kellert’s biophilic design attributes to assess their presence and absence within interior spaces. We expanded its use by testing the matrix in a new type of space, urban playrooms, and coded images of 45 children’s playrooms within Manhattan residential buildings in New York City, including assessing a larger sample and reliability rate compared to McGee and Marshall-Baker’s research. Inter-rater reliability of the overall design matrix and individual matrix items was measured with percent agreement and free-marginal multirater kappa. Reliability testing showed overall good reliability of the overall design matrix. Several matrix items had low reliability between raters. Our findings show that the BID-M needs to be modified to better assess urban interior spaces for children. (shrink)

This article examines the role and reputation of Ellen Terry, the most eminent British Shakespearean actress of the late-Victorian period, and the extent to which she interrogated her function on the eminently spectacular stage of London’s Lyceum theatre. The article contends that in her writing – her autobiography, annotations of playscripts and lectures – Terry self-consciously and deliberately repositions herself as a Shakespeare commentator, and hence as one no longer subject to the temporal and visual limitations of the spectacular (...) stage. (shrink)

The intersection of ethics, religion, theology, and peace studies is intensifying through increasingly multi‐disciplinary, contextual, explicitly normative scholarship. This book discussion demonstrates this claim through its profiles of an introduction to Christian ethics by Ellen Ott Marshall, a case study of the School of the Americas Watch by Kyle B. T. Lambelet, a case study of the American Jewish Palestine solidarity movement by Atalia Omer, and a global, historical study of Christian ethics by Cecilia Lynch. Though their methods (...) and subjects vary, these authors are collectively renewing a history of mutual enrichment between religious ethics and peace studies, employing theories of lived, ambivalent religion. To begin, this essay provides introductory remarks about the field of peace studies, highlighting the evolving involvement of religious actors. To conclude, it makes a plea for greater use of conflict theory and peace practice in religious ethics. (shrink)

This article seeks to show the interaction between cultural and anatomic evolution in the birth and differentiation of cultures and languages. The diversity which characterizes our world does not preclude logical regularities due to the coherence of the human mind, which evolved slowly through the paleontological phases of its emergence over millions of years. The anatomical retroaction of the hominids is analyzed to show that, in the long run, anatomy reflected ‘cultural selection’. With the anatomic evolution of man, culture became (...) a crucial component for all human beings and their anatomy simply adapted progressively to this fact. (shrink)

Dan Marshall and Josh Parsons note, correctly. that the property of being either a cube or accompanied by a cube is incorrectly classified as intrinsic under the definition we have given unless it turns out to be disjunctive. Whether it is disjunctive, under the definition we gave, turns on certain judgements of the relative naturalness of properties. They doubt the judgements of relative naturalness that would classify their property as disjunctive. We disagree. They also suggest that the whole idea (...) of judging relative naturalness is a dubious business. We reply that, like them or not, such judgements cannot easily be avoided. (shrink)

In 1985, Swiss legal philosopher Walter Ott visited Herbert Hart in Oxford and made this record of their meeting, which casts novel light on some of Hart’s ideas. Ott engaged Hart in a fresh encounter with the legal philosophy of Gustav Radbruch, particularly Hart’s and Radbruch’s reasons for a minimum content of justice in law. They also discussed the grudge informer, state responsibility under laws of an earlier régime, and questions of the definition and falsifiability of legal theories. Hart surprisingly (...) reported Hans Kelsen as stating, when they had met at Berkeley in 1961, that Hume (and not Kant, and certainly not Wittgenstein) was the greatest philosopher who had ever lived. The translation is accompanied with annotations explaining references, assumptions and contexts. (shrink)

Christian Ethics for a Digital Society looks at how we live in an increasingly digital world. From sexting to hashtag activism like the #metoo movement, technology has entered both our private and public lives in a deep way. Far from hand-wringing about the dangers of technology, Christian Ethics for a Digital Society offers pragmatic wisdom on how to live thoughtfully today. Instead of just worrying about the next technological gadget or app, it's time we consider what Christianity has to offer (...) a world increasingly reimagined in a digital landscape. This book provides a new perspective on how to assess digital technology use, development, and expansion through a lens of Christian values. The purpose of this book is to begin a conversation about the massive ecosystem change that digital technologies push in our lives through a focus on the ethics of everyday practices. (shrink)

Biosemiotics and the analysis of biopower have not yet been explicitly brought together. This article attempts to find their connecting points from the perspective of biosemiotics. It uses the biosemiotic understanding of the different types of semiosis in order to approach the practices of biopower and biopolitics. The central concept of the paper is that of the ‘semiotic threshold’. We can speak of (1) the lower semiotic threshold, signifying the dividing line between non-semiosis and semiosis; and (2) the secondary semiotic (...) thresholds, signifying the borders between different types (iconic, indexical, symbolic) of semiosis. Speaking in terms of types of semiosis means speaking in terms of different capabilities for normativity, which is why the article uses the approaches of Michel Foucault on normalization in biopower and of Georges Canguilhem on organismic normativity. As an example on which biopolitics and biosemiotics could connect, the discourse of regenerative and anti-aging medicine is used. (shrink)

Although affective facial pictures are widely used in emotion research, standardised affective stimuli sets are rather scarce, and the existing sets have several limitations. We therefore conducted a validation study of 490 pictures of human facial expressions from the Karolinska Directed Emotional Faces database (KDEF). Pictures were evaluated on emotional content and were rated on an intensity and arousal scale. Results indicate that the database contains a valid set of affective facial pictures. Hit rates, intensity, and arousal of the 20 (...) best KDEF pictures for each basic emotion are provided in an appendix. (shrink)

In this paper, I submit that it is the controlled part of skilled action, that is, that part of an action that accounts for the exact, nuanced ways in which a skilled performer modifies, adjusts and guides her performance for which an adequate, philosophical theory of skill must account. I will argue that neither Jason Stanley nor Hubert Dreyfus have an adequate account of control. Further, and perhaps surprisingly, I will argue that both Stanley and Dreyfus relinquish an account of (...) control for precisely the same reason: each reduce control to a passive, mechanistic, automatic process, which then prevents them from producing a substantive account of how controlled processes can be characterized by seemingly intelligent features and integrated with personal-level states. I will end by introducing three different kinds of control, which are constitutive of skilled action: strategic control, selective, top–down, automatic attention, and motor control. It will become clear that Dreyfus cannot account for any of these three kinds of control while Stanley has difficulty tackling the two latter kinds. (shrink)

A 1999–2000 national study of U.S. hospitals raised concerns about ethics consultation (EC) practices and catalyzed improvement efforts. To assess how practices have changed since 2000, we administered a 105-item survey to “best informants” in a stratified random sample of 600 U.S. general hospitals. This primary article details the methods for the entire study, then focuses on the 16 items from the prior study. Compared with 2000, the estimated number of case consultations performed annually rose by 94% to 68,000. The (...) median number of consults per hospital was unchanged at 3, but more than doubled for hospitals with 400+ beds. The level of education of EC practitioners was unchanged, while the percentage of hospitals formally evaluating their ECS decreased from 28.0% to 19.1%. The gap between large, teaching hospitals and small, nonteaching hospitals widened since the prior study. We suggest targeting future improvement efforts to hospitals where needs are not being met by current approaches to EC. (shrink)

When reflecting on the nature of skilled action, it is easy to fall into familiar dichotomies such that one construes the flexibility and intelligence of skill at the level of intentional states while characterizing the automatic motor processes that constitute motor skill execution as learned but fixed, invariant, bottom-up, brute-causal responses. In this essay, I will argue that this picture of skilled, automatic, motor processes is overly simplistic. Specifically, I will argue that an adequate account of the learned motor routines (...) that constitute embodied skills cannot be given in a purely bottom-up, brute-causal fashion. Rather, motor control is intelligent all the way down. To establish this, I will first review two recent accounts of skill, Stanley and Krakauer and Papineau, which characterize the automatic motor control responsible for the fine-grained movements constitutive of motor skill as brute, low-level phenomena. I will then isolate five key features that should apply to skilled motor control, if these accounts are correct. Together, the accounts posit that motor control is: ballistic, invariant, independent of general action trajectories, Insensitive to semantic content, and independent of personal-level intentions. In the final section of this paper, I will appeal to optimal control theory for empirical evidence to challenge the commitment to skilled action as qualified by the above features. (shrink)

Context: Although ethics consultation is commonplace in United States (U.S.) hospitals, descriptive data about this health service are lacking. Objective: To describe the prevalence, practitioners, and processes of ethics consultation in U.S. hospitals. Design: A 56-item phone or questionnaire survey of the "best informant" within each hospital. Participants: Random sample of 600 U.S. general hospitals, stratified by bed size. Results: The response rate was 87.4%. Ethics consultation services (ECSs) were found in 81% of all general hospitals in the U.S., and (...) in 100% of hospitals with more than 400 beds. The median number of consults performed by ECSs in the year prior to survey was 3. Most individuals performing ethics consultation were physicians (34%), nurses (31%), social workers (11%), or chaplains (10%). Only 41% had formal supervised training in ethics consultation. Consultation practices varied widely both within and between ECSs. For example, 65% of ECSs always made recommendations, whereas 6% never did. These findings highlight a need to clarify standards for ethics consultation practices. (shrink)

It is not rare in philosophy and psychology to see theorists fall into dichotomous thinking about mental phenomena. On one side of the dichotomy there are processes that I will label “unintelligent.” These processes are thought to be unconscious, implicit, automatic, unintentional, involuntary, procedural, and non-cognitive. On the other side, there are “intelligent” processes that are conscious, explicit, controlled, intentional, voluntary, declarative, and cognitive. Often, if a process or behavior is characterized by one of the features from either of the (...) above lists, the process or behavior is classified as falling under the category to which the feature belongs. For example, if a process is implicit this is usually considered sufficient for classifying it as “unintelligent” and for assuming that the remaining features that fall under the “unintelligent” grouping will apply to it as well. Accordingly, if a process or behavior is automatic, philosophers often consider it to be unintelligent. It is my goal in this paper to challenge the conceptual slip from “automatic” to “unintelligent”. I will argue that there are a whole range of properties highlighted by the existing psychological literature that make automaticity a much more complex phenomenon than is usually appreciated. I will then go on to discuss two further important relationships between automatic processes and controlled processes that arise when we think about automatic processes in the context of skilled behavior. These interactions should add to our resistance to classifying automaticity as unintelligent or mindless. In Sect. 1, I present a few representative cases of philosophers classifying automatic processes and behaviors as mindless or unintelligent. In Sect. 2, I review trends in the psychology of automaticity in order highlight a complex set of features that are characteristic, though not definitive, of automatic processes and behaviors. In Sect. 3, I argue that at least some automatic processes are likely cognitively penetrable. In Sect. 4, I argue that the structure of skilled automatic processes is shaped diachronically by practice, training and learning. Taken together, these considerations should dislodge the temptation to equate “automatic” with “unintelligent”. (shrink)

I describe a realist, ontologically objective interpretation of probability, "far-flung frequency (FFF) mechanistic probability". FFF mechanistic probability is defined in terms of facts about the causal structure of devices and certain sets of frequencies in the actual world. Though defined partly in terms of frequencies, FFF mechanistic probability avoids many drawbacks of well-known frequency theories and helps causally explain stable frequencies, which will usually be close to the values of mechanistic probabilities. I also argue that it's a virtue rather than (...) a failing of FFF mechanistic probability that it does not define single-case chances, and compare some aspects of my interpretation to a recent interpretation proposed by Strevens. (shrink)

When reflecting on the nature of skilled action, it is easy to fall into familiar dichotomies such that one construes the flexibility and intelligence of skill at the level of intentional states while characterizing the automatic motor processes that constitute motor skill execution as learned but fixed, invariant, bottom-up, brute-causal responses. In this essay, I will argue that this picture of skilled, automatic, motor processes is overly simplistic. Specifically, I will argue that an adequate account of the learned motor routines (...) that constitute embodied skills cannot be given in a purely bottom-up, brute-causal fashion. Rather, motor control is intelligent all the way down. To establish this, I will first review two recent accounts of skill, Stanley and Krakauer (Front Hum Neurosci, 2013. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2013.0050) and Papineau (R Inst Philos Suppl 73:175–196, 2013), which characterize the automatic motor control responsible for the fine-grained movements constitutive of motor skill as brute, low-level phenomena. I will then isolate five key features that should apply to skilled motor control, if these accounts are correct. Together, the accounts posit that motor control is: (1) ballistic, (2) invariant, (3) independent of general action trajectories, (4) Insensitive to semantic content, and (5) independent of personal-level intentions. In the final section of this paper, I will appeal to optimal control theory for empirical evidence to challenge the commitment to skilled action as qualified by the above features. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2014 Heft: 202 Seiten: 301-320.

Organisms' environments are thought to play a fundamental role in determining their fitness and hence in natural selection. Existing intuitive conceptions of environment are sufficient for biological practice. I argue, however, that attempts to produce a general characterization of fitness and natural selection are incomplete without the help of general conceptions of what conditions are included in the environment. Thus there is a "problem of the reference environment"—more particularly, problems of specifying principles which pick out those environmental conditions which determine (...) fitness. I distinguish various reference environment problems and propose solutions to some of them. While there has been a limited amount of work on problems concerning what I call "subenvironments", there appears to be no earlier work on problems of what I call the "whole environment". The first solution I propose for a whole environment problem specifies the overall environment for natural selection on a set of biological types present in a population over a specified period of time. The second specifies an environment relevant to extinction of types in a population; this kind of environment is especially relevant to certain kinds of long-term evolution. (shrink)

Some health care organizations allow physicians to withhold cardiopulmonary resuscitation from a patient, despite patient or surrogate requests that it be provided, when they believe it will be more harmful than beneficial. Such cases usually involve patients with terminal diagnoses whose medical teams argue that aggressive treatments are medically inappropriate or likely to be harmful. Although there is state-to-state variability and a considerable judicial gray area about the conditions and mechanisms for refusals to perform CPR, medical teams typically follow a (...) set of clearly defined procedures for these decisions. The procedures are based on the principle of nonmaleficence and typically include consultation with hospital ethics committees, reflecting the guidelines of relevant professional associations. Ethical debates about when CPR can and should be limited tend to rely more on discussions of theory, principles, and case studies than systematic empirical study of the situations in which such limitations are applied. Sociologists of bioethics call for empirical study, arguing that what ethicists and health professionals believe they are doing when they draft policies or invoke principles does not always mirror what is happening on the ground. In this article, we begin the task of modeling the empirical analyses sociologists call for, focusing on a cohort at Massachusetts General Hospital. We inductively analyzed ethics committee notes and medical records of nineteen patients whose surrogates did not accept the decision to withhold CPR. (shrink)

To design effective strategies to improve ethics consultation (EC) practices, it is important to understand the views of ethics practitioners. Previous U.S. studies of ethics practitioners have overrepresented the views of academic bioethicists. To help inform EC improvement efforts, we surveyed a random stratified sample of U.S. hospitals, examining ethics practitioners’ opinions on EC in general, on their own EC service, on strategies to improve EC, and on ASBH practice standards. Respondents across all categories of hospitals had very positive perceptions (...) of their own ethics consultation service (ECS) and few concerns about quality. Our findings suggest that the ethics-related needs of small, rural, non-teaching hospitals may be very different from those of academic medical centers, and therefore, different approaches to addressing ethical issues might be warranted. (shrink)

BackgroundWhile previous research has examined various aspects of ethics consultation (EC) in U.S. hospitals, certain EC practices have never been systematically studied.MethodsTo address this gap, we surveyed a random stratified sample of 600 hospitals about aspects of EC that had not been previously explored.ResultsNew findings include: in 26.0% of hospitals, the EC service performs EC for more than one hospital; 72.4% of hospitals performed at least one non-case consultation; in 56% of hospitals, ECs are never requested by patients or families; (...) 59.0% of case consultations involve conflict; the usual practice is to visit the patient in all formal EC cases in 32.5% of hospitals; 56.6% of hospitals do not include a formal meeting in most EC cases; 61.1% of hospitals do not routinely assess ethics consultants’ competencies; and 31.6% of hospitals belong to a bioethics network. We estimate the total number of non-case consultations performed in U.S. hospitals to be approximately one half the number of case consultations; we estimate the total number of ECs performed in U.S. hospitals, including both case and non-case consultations, to be just over 100,000 per year.ConclusionsThese findings expand our current understanding of EC in U.S. hospitals, and raise several concerns that suggest a need for further research. (shrink)

Although the last decade has seen a proliferation of ontological approaches to arguments, many of them employ ad hoc solutions to representing arguments, lack interoperability with other ontologies, or cover arguments only as part of a broader approach to evidence. To provide a better ontological representation of arguments, we present the Arguments Ontology (ArgO), a small ontology for arguments that is designed to be imported and easily extended by researchers who work in different upper-level ontology frameworks, different logics, and different (...) approaches to argument evaluation. Unlike most ontological approaches to arguments, ArgO utilizes Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) as an upper-level ontology, and may be used alongside other commonly used ontologies in the BFO framework, including boththe Information Artifact Ontology (IAO), and the Information Entity Ontology (INFO). Critically, our proposal is principled, based on rigorous definitions and formal axioms out of which characterizations of arguments naturally fall. It is our hope that ArgO may assist researchers in many projects, including: integrating heterogeneous sources of evidence, structuring the content of semantic wikis, and enhancing semantic reasoning. (shrink)