Political debate in an election season is artificially constrained by the media's focus on electability as the primary determinant of news coverage. What gets lost under this criterion is the wealth of ideas that lesser known candidates can bring to the debate. This article argues that political coverage by the mainstream media should be more responsible in its efforts to cultivate public discourse by redefining the standards for who gets covered and challenging the prevailing notions of electability. It also argues (...) for a view of campaign news that is less driven by events and that gives voters more information about candidates' ideas on key issues of the day. (shrink)

This article examines three divergent constructions about the salience of legal gender in lay people’s everyday lives and readiness to decertify gender. In our interviews (and survey data), generally participants minimised the importance of legal gender. The central argument in this article is that feminist socio-legal scholars applying legal consciousness studies to legal reform topics should find scrutinizing the construction of interview talk useful. We illustrate this argument by adapting and applying Ewick and Silbey’s (1998) ‘The Common Place of Law: (...) Stories from Everyday Life', ‘before’, ‘with’ and ‘against’ typology to interview talk about legal gender, and critique their cognitivist approach by offering a constructionist alternative. In our analysis, we offer a detailed discursive explication of three key legal consciousness themes. These themes offer a balanced representation of a dataset problematically ‘skewed’ towards sex-based rights feminist perspectives, namely that ‘before’ legal gender is an anti-decertification account, decertification would be risky for natal females; a ‘with’ legal gender construction is neither for nor against decertification per se, though the impact of decertification is produced in accounts as limited and unimportant; and ‘against’ legal gender is a pro-decertification classification, as not abolished legal gender is constructed as harmful to already marginalised groups. In concluding, we explore the reasoning for the lack of readiness for decertification currently, and return to the value of examining the construction of lay discourse about legal matters as talk is a form of social action. We suggest that applying discursive analysis to themes in legal consciousness studies enables a refocusing on the how rather than purely the what of divergent legal consciousnesses, and that this approach is a fruitful addition to feminist socio-legal studies. (shrink)

The current rise of neurodevelopmental disorders poses a critical need to detect risk early in order to rapidly intervene. One of the tools pediatricians use to track development is the standard growth chart. The growth charts are somewhat limited in predicting possible neurodevelopmental issues. They rely on linear models and assumptions of normality for physical growth data – obscuring key statistical information about possible neurodevelopmental risk in growth data that actually has accelerated, non-linear rates-of-change and variability encompassing skewed distributions. Here, (...) we use new analytics to profile growth data from 36 newborn babies that were tracked longitudinally for 5 months. By switching to incremental (velocity-based) growth charts and combining these dynamic changes with underlying fluctuations in motor performance – as the transition from spontaneous random noise to a systematic signal – we demonstrate a method to detect very early stunting in the development of voluntary neuromotor control and to flag risk of neurodevelopmental derail. (shrink)

PurposePrevious studies examining the relationship between health-related quality of life and speech perception ability in cochlear implant users have yielded variable results, due to a range of factors, such as a variety of different HRQoL questionnaires and CI speech testing materials in addition to CI configuration. In order to decrease inherent variability and better understand the relationship between these measures in CI users, we administered a commonly used clinical CI speech testing battery as well as two popular HRQoL questionnaires in (...) bimodal and bilateral CI users.MethodsThe Glasgow Benefit Inventory, a modified five-factor version of the GBI, and the Nijmegen Cochlear Implant Questionnaire were administered to 25 CI users. Speech perception abilities were measured with the AzBio sentence test in several conditions.ResultsHigher performance scores on the GBI general subscore were related to greater binaural speech perception ability in noise. There were no other relationships between the GBI or NCIQ and speech perception ability under any condition. Scores on many of the GBI-5F factors were substantially skewed and asymmetrical; therefore, correlational analyses could not be applied. Across all participants, binaural speech perception scores were greater than first-ear CI only scores.ConclusionThe GBI general subscore was related to binaural speech perception, which is considered the everyday listening condition of bimodal and bilateral CI users, in noise; while the more CI-specific NCIQ did not relate to speech perception ability in any listening condition. Future research exploring the relationships between the GBI, GBI-5F, and NCIQ considering bimodal and bilateral CI configurations separately is warranted. (shrink)

If the world itself is metaphysically indeterminate in a specified respect, what follows? In this paper, we develop a theory of metaphysical indeterminacy answering this question.

Radical moral encroachment is the view that belief itself is morally evaluable, and that some moral properties of belief itself make a difference to epistemic rationality. To date, almost all proponents of radical moral encroachment hold to an asymmetry thesis: the moral encroaches on rational belief, but not on rational credence. In this paper, we argue against the asymmetry thesis; we show that, insofar as one accepts the most prominent arguments for radical moral encroachment on belief, one should likewise accept (...) radical moral encroachment on credence. We outline and reject potential attempts to establish a basis for asymmetry between the attitude types. Then, we explore the merits and demerits of the two available responses to our symmetry claim: (i) embracing moral encroachment on credence and (ii) denying moral encroachment on belief. (shrink)

Focuses on the encounters of feminist and queer theories, on the ways in which basic terms such as - sex, gender, and sexuality change meaning as they move from one body of theory to another. This book includes essays by Judith Butler, Evelynn Hammonds, Biddy Martin, Kim Michasiw, Carole-Anne Tyler, and Elizabeth Weed.

Introduction: human rights in healthcare -- A right to treatment? the allocation of resouces in the National Health Service -- Ensuring quality healthcare: an issue of rights or duties? -- Autonomy and consent in medical treatment -- Treating incompetent patients: beneficence, welfare and rights -- Medical confidentiality and the right to privacy -- Property right in the body -- Medically assisted conception and a right to reproduce? -- Termination of pregnancy: a conflict of rights -- Pregnancy and freedom of choice (...) -- The right to life at the end of life -- The law and ethics of assisted dying: is there a right to die? (shrink)

It has recently been reported that some hospitals in the UK have placed a blanket restriction on the provision of maternal request caesarean sections as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Pregnancy and birthing services are obviously facing challenges during the current emergency, but we argue that a blanket ban on MRCS is both inappropriate and disproportionate. In this paper, we highlight the importance of MRCS for pregnant people’s health and autonomy in childbirth and argue that this remains crucial during (...) the current emergency. We consider some potential arguments—based on pregnant people’s health and resource allocation—that might be considered justification for the limitation of such services. We demonstrate, however, that these arguments are not as persuasive as they might appear because there is limited evidence to indicate either that provision of MRCS is always dangerous for pregnant people in the circumstances or would be a substantial burden on a hospital’s ability to respond to the pandemic. Furthermore, we argue that even if MRCS was not a service that hospitals are equipped to offer to all pregnant persons who seek it, the current circumstances cannot justify a blanket ban on an important service and due attention must be paid to individual circumstances. (shrink)

On a rainy day in May 1988, a lowland gorilla named Willie B. stepped outdoors for the first time in twenty-seven years, into a new landscape immersion exhibit. Born in Africa, Willie B. had been captured by an animal collector and sold to a zoo. During the decades he spent in a cage, zoos stopped collecting animals from the wild and Americans changed the ways they wished to view animals in the zoo. Zoos developed new displays to simulate landscapes like (...) the Amazon River basin and African forests. Exhibits similar to animals' natural habitats began to replace old-fashioned animal houses. But such displays are only the most recent effort of zoos to present their audiences with an authentic experience of nature. Since the first zoological park opened in the United States in Philadelphia in 1874, zoos have promised their visitors a journey into the natural world. And for more than a century they have been popular places for education and recreation: every year more than 130 million Americans go to zoos to look at the animals and enjoy a day outdoors. The first book-length history of American zoos, Animal Attractions examines the meaning of nature in the city by looking at the ways zoos have assembled and displayed their animal collections. Situated literally and culturally in the American middle landscape, zoos are concrete expressions of longstanding tensions between wildness and civilization, science and popular culture, education and entertainment. In their efforts to promote nature appreciation, they reveal much about how our culture envisions the natural world and the human place in it and how these ideas have changed. (shrink)

The Aristotle-Kant tradition requires that autonomous activity must originate within the self and points toward a new type of causation (different from natural efficient causation) associated with teleology. Notoriously, it has so far proven impossible to uncover a workable model of causation satisfying these requirements without an increasingly unsatisfying appeal to extra-physical elements tailor-made for the purpose. In this paper we first provide the essential reason why the standard linear model of efficient causation cannot support the required model of agency: (...) its causal thread model of efficient causation cannot support the core requirement that an action is determined by, and thus an expression of, the agent’s nature. We then provide a model that corrects these deficiencies, constructed naturalistically from within contemporary biology, and argue that it provides an appropriate foundation for all the features of genuine agency. Further, we provide general characterisations of freedom and reason suitable to this bio-context (but that also capture the core classical conceptions) and show how this model reconciles them. (shrink)

Disability is primarily a social phenomenon -- a way of being a minority, a way of facing social oppression, but not a way of being inherently or intrinsically worse off. This is how disability is understood in the Disability Rights and Disability Pride movements; but there is a massive disconnect with the way disability is typically viewed within analytic philosophy. The idea that disability is not inherently bad or sub-optimal is one that many philosophers treat with open skepticism, and sometimes (...) even with scorn. The goal of this book is to articulate and defend a version of the view of disability that is common in the Disability Rights movement. To be physically disabled is not to have a defective body, but simply to have a minority body. (shrink)

Philosophical theories of gender are typically understood as theories of what it is to be a woman, a man, a nonbinary person, and so on. In this paper, I argue that this is a mistake. There’s good reason to suppose that our best philosophical theory of gender might not directly match up to or give the extensions of ordinary gender categories like ‘woman’.

Metaphysical orthodoxy maintains that the relation of ontological dependence is irreflexive, asymmetric, and transitive. The goal of this paper is to challenge that orthodoxy by arguing that ontological dependence should be understood as non- symmetric, rather than asymmetric. If we give up the asymmetry of dependence, interesting things follow for what we can say about metaphysical explanation— particularly for the prospects of explanatory holism.

As current events around the world have illustrated, epistemological issues are at the center of our political lives. It has become increasingly difficult to discern legitimate sources of evidence, misinformation spreads faster than ever, and the role of truth in politics has allegedly decayed in recent years. It is therefore no coincidence that political discourse is currently saturated with epistemic notions like ‘post-truth,’ ‘fake news,’ ‘truth decay,’ ‘echo chambers,’ and ‘alternative facts.’ This book brings together leading philosophers to explore ways (...) in which the analytic and conceptual tools of epistemology bear on political philosophy, and vice versa. It is organized around three broad themes: truth and knowledge in politics; epistemic problems for democracy; and disagreement and polarization. The authors provide new and rich insights on topics such as: propaganda, fake news, weaponized skepticism, belief polarization, political disagreement, the epistemic value of democracy, voter ignorance, irrationality in politics, political bullshit, and identity politics. (shrink)

This article examines the barriers to quality health care for transgender, nonbinary, and gender-expansive people (TGE) who become pregnant and give birth, identifying three central themes that emerge from the literature. These insights suggest that significant reform will be necessary to ensure access to safe, appropriate, gender-affirming care for childbearing TGE people. After illustrating the need for systemic changes that untether rigid gender norms from the provision of perinatal care, the article proposes that the Midwives Model of Care offers a (...) set of values and clinical practices that are well-suited to meet the needs of many TGE patients during pregnancy and childbirth and which should be incorporated into the healthcare system more broadly. (shrink)

What gender are you? And in virtue of what? These are questions of gender categorization. Such questions are increasingly at the core of many contemporary debat.

: The underdetermination argument establishes that scientists may use political values to guide inquiry, without providing criteria for distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate guidance. This paper supplies such criteria. Analysis of the confused arguments against value-laden science reveals the fundamental criterion of illegitimate guidance: when value judgments operate to drive inquiry to a predetermined conclusion. A case study of feminist research on divorce reveals numerous legitimate ways that values can guide science without violating this standard.

Climate Change and the Moral Agent examines the moral foundations of climate change and makes a case for collective action on climate change by appealing to moralized collective self-interest, collective ability to aid, and an expanded understanding of collective responsibility for harm.

I. Causal Thesis: Dispositions have a causal basis. II. Distinctness Thesis: Dispositions are distinct from their causal basis. III. Impotence Thesis: Dispositions are not causally active.

Heil's vision of the relationship between the manifest and scientific images is compelling. Central to his vision are the convictions that ordinary truths do not impose substantive constraints on the natures of their underlying truthmakers and, relatedly, that one and the same subject can be represented truly and aptly in different ways. But what exactly are the grounds or arguments for these convictions?

Grosz gives a critical overview of Lacan's work from a feminist perspective. Discussing previous attempts to give a feminist reading of his work, she argues for women's autonomy based on an indifference to the Lacanian phallus.

We citizens of the 21st century live in a world where division of epistemic labour rules. Most of what we know we learned from the spoken or written word of others, and we depend in endless practical ways on the technological fruits of the dispersed knowledge of others—of which we often know almost nothing—in virtually every moment of our lives. Interest has been growing in recent years amongst philosophers, in the issues in epistemology raised by this fact. One issue concerns (...) the depth and extent of our epistemic dependence on testimony, as we may label this broad epistemic source: Do we have any knowledge at all that is free of epistemic dependence on what we have learned from others? A related question is whether our entitlement to believe what we have learned from others can be explained without invoking any epistemic principles special to testimony. These questions concern, as it were, the macro-epistemology of testimony. In the present discussion I shall focus instead on the micro foundations. Testimony, in our broad sense, can occur through an extensive range of types of spoken and written means of purportedly factual communication, including telephone calls, e-mails and personal letters, lectures and radio broadcasts, newspapers, textbooks and encyclopaedias, personal diaries, and public records of all kinds. But the central paradigm—what started the whole communication thing off—is surely that of face-to-face spoken encounter, when one person tells something to another, thereby intending and hoping to share her knowledge with her audience. I begin by describing the speech act of telling, identifying what takes place in a felicitous act of telling. From the nature of the speech act of telling, we see precisely how it is that knowledge is, when all goes as it should, acquired from teller by trusting hearer, in such an act, and in acts of testimony more broadly. (shrink)

Many problems of inequality in developing countries resist treatment by formal egalitarian policies. To deal with these problems, we must shift from a distributive to a relational conception of equality, founded on opposition to social hierarchy. Yet the production of many goods requires the coordination of wills by means of commands. In these cases, egalitarians must seek to tame rather than abolish hierarchy. I argue that bureaucracy offers important constraints on command hierarchies that help promote the equality of workers in (...) bureaucratic organizations. Bureaucracy thus constitutes a vital if limited egalitarian tool applicable to developing and developed countries alike. (shrink)

The underdetermination argument establishes that scientists may use political values to guide inquiry, without providing criteria for distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate guidance. This paper supplies such criteria. Analysis of the confused arguments against value-laden science reveals the fundamental criterion of illegitimate guidance: when value judgments operate to drive inquiry to a predetermined conclusion. A case study of feminist research on divorce reveals numerous legitimate ways that values can guide science without violating this standard.

This book is devoted to applied ethics. We focus on six popular and controversial topics: abortion, the environment, animals, poverty, punishment, and disability. We cover three chapters per topic, and each chapter is devoted to a famous or influential argument on the topic. After we present an influential argument, we then consider objections to the argument, and replies to the objections. The book is impartial, and set up in order to equip the reader to make up her own mind about (...) the controversial topics covered. (shrink)

Conferralism is the view that social properties are neither intrinsic to the things that have them nor possessed simply by virtue of their causal or spatiotemporal relations to other things, but are somehow bestowed (intentionally or not, explicitly or not) upon them by persons who have both the capacity and the standing to bestow them. We argue that conferralism faces a dilemma: either it is viciously circular, or it is limited in scope in a way that undercuts its motivation.

It is analyzed the subject of the metabolization of the knowledge on the part of a rural community from its practical relation with a group of scientists, whose operational base constitutes a located laboratory of marine Biology in the locality of Mehuin in Chile. Product of this relation, and inadv..

La selección natural ayuda a resolver el misterio de la vida pero no es aplicable para explicar la diversidad cultural. La selección natural es vista, por una parte, como un componente de la imaginación de un mundo industrial cambiante, y, por la otra, como un medio de producir diferencias en el seno de procesos sociales que son claves en la distribución de los genes humanos. La genética es intencionalmente traducida en el mundo social: se subvierte la biología y se la (...) somete a la agencia humana. Tal es una ruptura esencial que enmarca el reservorio genético en el novedoso mundo humano. Los seres humanos deliberan acerca de su condición y, al hacerlo, cooptan la naturaleza. No obstante, esto no es un proceso evidente sino que en sí mismo está infiltrado por los procesos neurológicos, una poderosa razón para mantener una visión dialéctica de la relación entre los genes y los humanos. (shrink)

Este artículo pretende identificar las metáforas fundantes a partir de las cuales se reorganiza la cosmovisión local y en las que se basan las prácticas de resistencia de las comunidades frente a la intervención modernizante del Estado y del sector privado. El caso a considerar lo constituye la ..

Resumen: Las cambiantes relaciones entre seres humanos y árboles en los relatos de los habitantes cordilleranos del sur de Chile invitan a revisar los límites de la comunidad moral para incluir en ella a los seres con que se convive y de los que se depende. La presencia de prácticas mapuches cordilleranas de largo aliento junto con las transformaciones experimentadas por las poblaciones madereras y los relatos de las personas que explotaron los árboles nativos se encarnan en conversaciones que invitan (...) a reformular el vínculo con la naturaleza, tomando como referencia la pluralidad de experiencias locales. Estas voces cordilleranas convergen con aquellas orientaciones filosóficas que reconocen al ser humano como parte y no como centro de un entramado vital de mayores y más complejas dimensiones, a la vez que, en un sentido práctico, con la urgencia de generar respuestas que resguarden la naturaleza y que garanticen la inclusión social y la convivencia intercultural.: The changing relations between human and trees open opportunities in the narratives of the south Andean residents to expand the moral duties towards those beings upon whom humans depend and with whom they live. The existence of long lasting Mapuche cultural practices in the mountainous areas along with the transformations of timber towns and the narratives of people who exploited the native trees in those territories prompt a reshaping of the link with nature by means of the creation of moral duties based upon the diversity of local experiences. Such an alternative coincides with those philosophical orientations that recognize humans as part and not as the center of a vital patchwork. At the same time, it relates to the need of alternatives to preserve nature while guaranteeing social inclusion and intercultural coexistence. (shrink)

The practice of relational leadership is essential for dealing with the increasingly urgent and complex social, economic and environmental issues that characterize sustainability. Despite growing attention to both relational leadership and leadership for sustainability, an ethical understanding of both is limited. This is problematic as both sustainability and relational leadership are rife with moral implications. This paper conceptually explores how the moral theory of ‘ethics of care’ can help to illuminate the ethical dimensions of relational leadership for sustainability. In doing (...) so, the implications of ethics of care more broadly for the practice of relational leadership development are elaborated. From a caring perspective, a ‘relational stance’ or logic of effectiveness can be fostered through engaging in a reflective process of moral education through conversation. In starting this dialogue, we can begin to build capacity for relational leadership for sustainability and, thus, support the development of individual well-being and organizational and societal flourishing. (shrink)

This editorial to the special issue addresses the often overlooked question of the ethical nature of social enterprises. The emerging social entrepreneurship literature has previously been dominated by enthusiasts who fail to critique the social enterprise, focusing instead on its distinction from economic entrepreneurship and potential in solving social problems. In this respect, we have found through the work presented herein that the relation between social entrepreneurship and ethics needs to be problematized. Further, we find that a range of conceptual (...) lenses and methodological approaches is valuable as the social entrepreneurship field matures. (shrink)

A large body of literature considers the ethico-legal and regulatory issues surrounding assisted conception. Surrogacy, however, within this body of literature is an odd-fit. It involves a unique demand of another person—a form of reproductive labour—that many other aspects of assisted conception, such as gamete donation do not involve. Surrogacy is a form of assisted gestation. The potential alternatives for individuals who want a genetically related child but who do not have the capacity to gestate are ever increasing: with the (...) advent of uterus transplantation, and the anticipated development of artificial placentas.In this paper, I highlight the pertinent conceptual differences between technologies assisting conception and those assisting gestation to demonstrate that distinct issues arise when assisted gestative technologies are used. I argue that there is utility in considering AGTs as a genus of technologies. These technologies perform the same function from the perspective of putative parents and might exist on a spectrum of alternatives when they become more available. Moreover, since many of the same or very similar ethical, social and legal issues are raised by surrogacy, UTx and ectogestation, analysis of these issues will be better contextualised by considering these technologies together. Many of the matters currently being highlighted for reform in the context of surrogacy will inevitably impact on how other forms of assisted gestation are governed. The conversation should be broadened; we should consider how far other emerging technologies might be accommodated in revised regulatory schemes. (shrink)

First published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.