An attempt to reduce disability discrimination can do more harm than the ostensible discrimination itself. Such is the case with Shavelson et al.’s (2023) argument for equal access to medical aid i...

Disability rights advocates have traditionally denigrated charity as politically counterproductive and inherently demeaning. This article argues that this perspective mischaracterizes charity of a religious kind. Religious charity, I argue, must be understood immanently, through an exploration of the virtues cultivated in particular religious organizations. I consider two Catholic charities: L’Arche, a community for intellectually disabled people, and the end-of-life care facility Our Lady of Perpetual Help Home. At each organization, individual acts of charity are emblematic of an underlying virtue that (...) I call caritas or charity-love. This transforms them into gestures that advance goals that are consonant with those of the disability rights movement. In the case of Our Lady, this is even true of pity, perhaps the most despised emotion of the disability rights tradition. But while disability rights advocates have characterized pity as essentially devaluing disabled people, at Our Lady, it is an emotion that freely circulates, undoing hierarchical distinctions between ability and disability, and even human and divine. This redefined notion of pity—which I term misericordia—can, I conclude provide a new foundation for disability politics, one that radicalizes the goals of the disability rights movement, while also positing objectives that go beyond legal compliance. (shrink)

Providing a model for the transformative work that is required going forward, The Crisis of US Hospice Care illustrates the potential of hospice for facilitating a new way of living our last days and for having the best death possible.

Dominant Western discourses of motherhood have depicted disabled women as incapable of being mothers. In contrast to these representations, recent literature in disability studies has argued that disabled women can provide maternal care and should therefore retain custody over their children. This literature is commendable, but its emphasis on custodial rights excludes from the category of “mother” those disabled women who cannot maintain child custody. In this article, I challenge this exclusion via an account of my experience with my two (...) mothers: my biological mother, who relinquished custody over me because of her inability to provide care, and my maternal grandmother, who raised me as her child. Theorizing this account, I argue that disability studies must adopt a conception of motherhood that recognizes both alternative kinship structures and mothers whose disabilities preclude them from fulfilling normative conceptions of maternal care. I develop such a conception by synthesizing Judith Butler's theorization of queer kinship with Donald Winnicott's rethinking of the maternal subject. I conclude by drawing on this flexible conception of motherhood to argue that my disabled mother's relinquishing of custody over me to her own mother was the very gesture in which she accepted and adopted a maternal role. (shrink)

What issues should bioethics be looking at in the next forty years? Rather than take on new issues, I believe bioethicists should rethink our approach to bioethical topics more generally. Doing so will require refashioning the field itself, but such a reinvention is the only way we can help bioethics live up to its initial ideals and be relevant to our society.Thinking about the future of bioethics should begin with a fundamental question: Is bioethics even necessary? Most bioethicists would certainly (...) think so, and they might find confirmation in histories of the field like David Rothman's Strangers at the Bedside, in which bioethics was a response to the collapse of doctor-patient relations in the midtwentieth .. (shrink)

This article is an analysis of the relationship between US hospice structure and the feeling of being a burden to others (FBO). A goal of US hospice care is to reduce the FBO. But in America, hospice is limited in its ability to do so because of the high caregiver burden it places on family members of dying people. Through a historical study, I show that this burden was excessive when the hospice system was created and has worsened over time. (...) Through three ethnographic vignettes, I demonstrate how this burden inculcates in dying people the FBO. I then examine the bioethical implications of this finding for the existing US debate about physician-assisted suicide (PAS). The presence of FBO due to insufficient hospice care supports arguments made by PAS opponents about the social pressure placed on dying people. This finding is not itself sufficient to resolve the “right to die” debate. But it provides the ground for a compromise, across the debate, to reduce the FBO by changing US hospice structure. The resulting consensus will further the goals of both PAS proponents and opponents. (shrink)

This article is an analysis of the relationship between US hospice structure and the feeling of being a burden to others. A goal of US hospice care is to reduce the FBO. But in America, hospice is limited in its ability to do so because of the high caregiver burden it places on family members of dying people. Through a historical study, I show that this burden was excessive when the hospice system was created and has worsened over time. Through (...) three ethnographic vignettes, I demonstrate how this burden inculcates in dying people the FBO. I then examine the bioethical implications of this finding for the existing US debate about physician-assisted suicide. The presence of FBO due to insufficient hospice care supports arguments made by PAS opponents about the social pressure placed on dying people. This finding is not itself sufficient to resolve the “right to die” debate. But it provides the ground for a compromise, across the debate, to reduce the FBO by changing US hospice structure. The resulting consensus will further the goals of both PAS proponents and opponents. (shrink)

This article is an analysis of the relationship between US hospice structure and the feeling of being a burden to others. A goal of US hospice care is to reduce the FBO. But in America, hospice is limited in its ability to do so because of the high caregiver burden it places on family members of dying people. Through a historical study, I show that this burden was excessive when the hospice system was created and has worsened over time. Through (...) three ethnographic vignettes, I demonstrate how this burden inculcates in dying people the FBO. I then examine the bioethical implications of this finding for the existing US debate about physician-assisted suicide. The presence of FBO due to insufficient hospice care supports arguments made by PAS opponents about the social pressure placed on dying people. This finding is not itself sufficient to resolve the “right to die” debate. But it provides the ground for a compromise, across the debate, to reduce the FBO by changing US hospice structure. The resulting consensus will further the goals of both PAS proponents and opponents. (shrink)

This article is an analysis of the relationship between US hospice structure and the feeling of being a burden to others. A goal of US hospice care is to reduce the FBO. But in America, hospice is limited in its ability to do so because of the high caregiver burden it places on family members of dying people. Through a historical study, I show that this burden was excessive when the hospice system was created and has worsened over time. Through (...) three ethnographic vignettes, I demonstrate how this burden inculcates in dying people the FBO. I then examine the bioethical implications of this finding for the existing US debate about physician-assisted suicide. The presence of FBO due to insufficient hospice care supports arguments made by PAS opponents about the social pressure placed on dying people. This finding is not itself sufficient to resolve the “right to die” debate. But it provides the ground for a compromise, across the debate, to reduce the FBO by changing US hospice structure. The resulting consensus will further the goals of both PAS proponents and opponents. (shrink)

In this article, I propose a new model for understanding the function of representation in bioethics. Bioethicists have traditionally judged representations according to a mimetic paradigm, in which representations of bioethical dilemmas are assessed based on their correspondence to the “reality” of bioethics itself. In this article, I argue that this mimetic paradigm obscures the interaction between representation and reality and diverts bioethicists from analyzing the tensions in the representational object itself. I propose an anti-mimetic model of representation that is (...) attuned to how representations can both maintain and potentially subvert dominant conceptions of bioethics. I illustrate this model through a case study of Clint Eastwood’s film Million Dollar Baby. By focusing attention on the film’s lack of adherence bioethical procedures and medical science, critics missed how an analysis of its representational logic provides a means of reimagining both bioethics and medical practice. In my conclusion, I build off this case study to assess how an incorporation of representational studies can deepen—and be deepened by—recent calls for interdisciplinarity in bioethics. (shrink)

The article presents and analyzes different approaches of U.S. bioethicists in comprehending the Nazi medical crimes after 1945. The account is divided into two sections: one dealing with discussions on research ethics and the Nuremberg Code up until the 1970s and the other ranging from the 1970s to the present and highlighting bioethics' engagement with Nazi analogies. The portrayal of different bioethical scholars, institutions, and documents—most notably Henry K. Beecher, Jay Katz, the Belmont Report, the Hastings Center, Arthur L. Caplan, (...) and Robert M. Veatch—provides a nuanced interpretation of the motives that bioethicists held and the strategies that they applied to establish an understanding of the Nazi medical crimes and their relation to contemporary bioethical issues. In this, the different approaches shared a common goal: To integrate the Nazi medical crimes into an ethical framework by means of selective acknowledgments and representation of their history. (shrink)

Ms. X is a person with cerebral palsy and schizophrenia. She has intractable bedsores that are a result of her immobility and to poor wound care related to her delusional thinking. Despite intensive community support, the wounds have worsened to the point that she has needed multiple hospitalizations to prevent systemic sepsis, a life‐threatening condition. She is capable of placement decisions and wishes for independence at home but is incapable of making wound care decisions and does not appreciate that immediately (...) returning home from the hospital, instead of going into a special care facility, would likely result in sepsis. The resulting dilemma about discharge planning highlights the complexity involved in weighing concerns around mental illness and capacity for treatment and placement of care. The extent of the care that is required and available in a community or health care system and the slow but relatively certain progression of the symptoms also make the decision challenging. Two commentaries take very different approaches in exploring the question whether Ms. X should be supported to go home or to a special care facility. (shrink)

When the whole is greater than the sum of the parts--indeed, so great that the sum far transcends the parts and represents something utterly new and different--we call that phenomenon emergence. When the chemicals diffusing in the primordial waters came together to form the first living cell, that was emergence. When the activities of the neurons in the brain result in mind, that too is emergence. In The Emergence of Everything, one of the leading scientists involved in the study of (...) complexity, Harold J. Morowitz, takes us on a sweeping tour of the universe, a tour with 28 stops, each one highlighting a particularly important moment of emergence. For instance, Morowitz illuminates the emergence of the stars, the birth of the elements and of the periodic table, and the appearance of solar systems and planets. We look at the emergence of living cells, animals, vertebrates, reptiles, and mammals, leading to the great apes and the appearance of humanity. He also examines tool making, the evolution of language, the invention of agriculture and technology, and the birth of cities. And as he offers these insights into the evolutionary unfolding of our universe, our solar system, and life itself, Morowitz also seeks out the nature of God in the emergent universe, the God posited by Spinoza, Bruno, and Einstein, a God Morowitz argues we can know through a study of the laws of nature. Written by one of our wisest scientists, The Emergence of Everything offers a fascinating new way to look at the universe and the natural world, and it makes an important contribution to the dialogue between science and religion. (shrink)

Revolutionizing received opinion of Taoism's origins in light of historic new discoveries, Harold D. Roth has uncovered China's oldest mystical text--the original expression of Taoist philosophy--and presents it here with a complete translation and commentary. Over the past twenty-five years, documents recovered from the tombs of China's ancient elite have sparked a revolution in scholarship about early Chinese thought, in particular the origins of Taoist philosophy and religion. In _Original Tao,_ Harold D. Roth exhumes the seminal text of (...) Taoism--_Inward Training (Nei-yeh)_--not from a tomb but from the pages of the _Kuan Tzu,_ a voluminous text on politics and economics in which this mystical tract had been "buried" for centuries. _Inward Training_ is composed of short poetic verses devoted to the practice of breath meditation, and to the insights about the nature of human beings and the form of the cosmos derived from this practice. In its poetic form and tone, the work closely resembles the _Tao-te Ching_; moreover, it clearly evokes Taoism's affinities to other mystical traditions, notably aspects of Hinduism and Buddhism. Roth argues that _Inward Training_ is the foundational text of early Taoism and traces the book to the mid-fourth century B.C. (the late Warring States period in China). These verses contain the oldest surviving expressions of a method for mystical "inner cultivation," which Roth identifies as the basis for all early Taoist texts, including the _Chuang Tzu_ and the world-renowned _Tao-te Ching._ With these historic discoveries, he reveals the possibility of a much deeper continuity between early "philosophical" Taoism and the later Taoist religion than scholars had previously suspected. _Original Tao_ contains an elegant and luminous complete translation of the original text. Roth's comprehensive analysis explains what _Inward Training_ meant to the people who wrote it, how this work came to be "entombed" within the _Kuan Tzu,_ and why the text was largely overlooked after the early Han period. (shrink)

Revolutionizing received opinion of Taoism's origins in light of historic new discoveries, Harold D. Roth has uncovered China's oldest mystical text -- the original expression of Taoist philosophy -- and presents it here with a complete translation and commentary. Over the past twenty-five years, documents recovered from the tombs of China's ancient elite have sparked a revolution in scholarship about early Chinese thought, in particular the origins of Taoist philosophy and religion. In _Original Tao,_ Harold D. Roth exhumes (...) the seminal text of Taoism -- _Inward Training _ -- not from a tomb but from the pages of the _Kuan Tzu,_ a voluminous text on politics and economics in which this mystical tract had been "buried" for centuries. _Inward Training_ is composed of short poetic verses devoted to the practice of breath meditation, and to the insights about the nature of human beings and the form of the cosmos derived from this practice. In its poetic form and tone, the work closely resembles the _Tao-te Ching_; moreover, it clearly evokes Taoism's affinities to other mystical traditions, notably aspects of Hinduism and Buddhism. Roth argues that _Inward Training_ is the foundational text of early Taoism and traces the book to the mid-fourth century B.C.. These verses contain the oldest surviving expressions of a method for mystical "inner cultivation," which Roth identifies as the basis for all early Taoist texts, including the _Chuang Tzu_ and the world-renowned _Tao-te Ching._ With these historic discoveries, he reveals the possibility of a much deeper continuity between early "philosophical" Taoism and the later Taoist religion than scholars had previously suspected. _Original Tao_ contains an elegant and luminous complete translation of the original text. Roth's comprehensive analysis explains what _Inward Training_ meant to the people who wrote it, how this work came to be "entombed" within the _Kuan Tzu,_ and why the text was largely overlooked after the early Han period. (shrink)

A largely qualitative body of literature has contributed to understanding the contradictory dimensions of community gardening as a social justice tool. Building on this literature through a city-wide, quantitative intervention, this paper focuses on community gardening as a facilitator of ecological gentrification in St. Louis, Missouri. Combining the analytical lenses of spatial justice, urban political ecology, and the rent gap theory of gentrification, I deploy spatial regression analysis to show that community gardening was positively associated with gentrification in St. Louis (...) between the years 2000 and 2010, as measured by the growth of high socioeconomic status residents in each neighborhood. This result suggests that a sociospatial dialectic exists in which the implementation of a community garden, a change in the use of urban space, leads to unintended social outcomes. Contextualizing this finding within the broader literature, I conclude that the potential of community gardening as an instrument for spatial justice is contingent on institutional support against larger-scale processes, like gentrification, that lead to spatially unjust outcomes. (shrink)

Analyzes the development of art during the past decade paying special attention to the works of Mondrian, Arp, Newman, and Dubuffet.

Much of the debate about identity in recent decades has been about personal identity, and specifically about personal identity over time, but identity generally, and the identity of things of other kinds, have also attracted attention. Various interrelated problems have been at the centre of discussion, but it is fair to say that recent work has focussed particularly on the following areas: the notion of a criterion of identity; the correct analysis of identity over time, and, in particular, the disagreement (...) between advocates of perdurance and advocates of endurance as analyses of identity over time; the notion of identity across possible worlds and the question of its relevance to the correct analysis of de re modal discourse; the notion of contingent identity; the question of whether the identity relation is, or is similar to, the composition relation; and the notion of vague identity. A radical position, advocated by Peter Geach, is that these debates, as usually conducted, are void for lack of a subject matter: the notion of absolute identity they presuppose has no application; there is only relative identity. Another increasingly popular view is the one advocated by Lewis: although the debates make sense they cannot genuinely be debates about identity, since there are no philosophical problems about identity. Identity is an utterly unproblematic notion. What there are, are genuine problems which can be stated using the language of identity. But since these can be restated without the language of identity they are not problems about identity. (For example, it is a puzzle, an aspect of the so-called “problem of personal identity”, whether the same person can have different bodies at different times. But this is just the puzzle whether a person can have different bodies at different times. So since it can be stated without the language of personal “identity”, it is not a problem about identity, but about personhood.) This article provides an overview of the topics indicated above, some assessment of the debates and suggestions for further reading. (shrink)

Considered ahead of its time since the first publication in 1981, Medical Choices, Medical Chances provides a telescope for viewing how developments in the fields of medical research, medical technology, and health care organization are likely to influence the doctor-patient relationship in the 21st Century. The book explores this intricate web of relationships among doctors, patients, and families and offers a new framework for mastering the emotional and intellectual challenges of uncertainty, while at the same time providing tools for all (...) concerned to regain control from managed care. It is a must-read for all those interested in medicine and where it is headed in the new millennium. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Contrary to economics or history, for example, there does not exist an organized field dedicated to the philosophy of political science. Given that the philosophical issues raised by political science research are just as pressing and vibrant as those raised in these more organized fields, fostering a field that labels itself Philosophy of Political Science (PoPS) is important. PoPS is advanced here as a fruitful meeting place where both philosophers and practicing political scientists contribute and discuss—with philosophical discussions that are (...) close to and informed by actual developments in political science, making philosophy of science continuous with the sciences in line with contemporary naturalist philosophy of science. The topics scrutinized in the different chapters of the Handbook will figure prominently in PoPS, as we lay out in this chapter. (shrink)

Interpretation, Constraint, and the Prospects of Scientific Realism I explore the interaction between theory-based interpretations of scientific evidence and constraints on theories provided by that evidence. Interpretation is often viewed as a source of error and a reason for scepticism about scientific results. But, I argue, while interpretation does generate epistemic risk, it also points to new sources of evidence that can constrain our theories. This is especially clear in the development of instrumentation that increases the range of our interactions (...) with nature. While the design of such instruments and the interpretation of their outputs are deeply dependent on theory-based interpretations, these outputs can still challenge those very theories. At the same time, theory-guided instrumentation provides us access to aspects of nature that we cannot study with our unaided senses. This access allows us to extend the range of evidence that we collect, and thus increases the constraints on our theories. As a result, theory-guided evidence collection has a positive impact on the prospects of scientific realism since these increasing constraints on our theories provide our only reason for thinking that we may be approaching the development of true theories. (shrink)

Laski, Harold J. The Foundations of Sovereignty and Other Essays.

This paper presents a model-theoretic semantics for discourse "about" natural numbers, one that captures what I call "the mathematical-object picture", but avoids what I can "the mathematical-object theory".

Art has not always had the same salience in philosophical discussions of ethics that many other elements of our lives have. There are well-defined areas of "applied ethics" corresponding to nature, business, health care, war, punishment, animals, and more, but there is no recognized research program in "applied ethics of the arts" or "art ethics." Art often seems to belong to its own sphere of value, separate from morality. The first questions we ask about art are usually not about its (...) moral rightness or virtue, but about its beauty or originality. However, it is impossible to do any serious thinking about the arts without engaging in ethical questions. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

The Iliad is rich in references to stories that have only incidental relevance to the main narrative. These digressions, as they are often called, have usually been assumed to reflect a wealth of pre-Homeric legend, some of which must a have been embodied in poetry. The older Analysts tended to explain the digressions in terms of interpolation. Whether regarded as genuinely Homeric or as interpolated these myths were considered as something existing in an external tradition. More recent scholars have been (...) prepared to admit that Homer may invent from time to time. For example, Sir Maurice Bowra observes that ‘the poet seems sometimes to invent a detail which looks as if it referred to some story outside his immediate subject but is in fact an invention brought to serve a passing need’. (shrink)

Another title in the reissued Oxford Classic Texts in the Physical Sciences series, Jeffrey's Theory of Probability, first published in 1939, was the first to develop a fundamental theory of scientific inference based on the ideas of Bayesian statistics. His ideas were way ahead of their time and it is only in the past ten years that the subject of Bayes' factors has been significantly developed and extended. Until recently the two schools of statistics were distinctly different and set apart. (...) Recent work has changed all that and today's graduate students and researchers all require an understanding of Bayesian ideas. This book is their starting point. (shrink)

Coincidence comes in two varieties – permanent and temporary. Moderate monism is the position that permanent coincidence, but not temporary coincidence, entails identity. Extreme monism is the position that even temporary coincidence entails identity. Pluralists are opponents of monism tout court. The intuitively obvious, commonsensical position is moderate monism. It is therefore important to see if it can be sustained.

The paper discusses the arguments for and against animalism and concludes that a pluralist position which rejects animalism and embraces a multiplicity of thinkers is the best option.