The increased usage of questionable environmental marketing claims has become an issue of concern for academics, policy makers and consumers. Much of the research to date, has focused on the accuracy of environmental claims in advertisements, with the information on product packaging being largely ignored. This study uses a content analysis to examine the environmental information on packaging. More specifically it examines the packaging of the population of dishwashing liquid bottles available in grocery stores in a large city in Australia. (...) Evaluation criteria are developed to classify the various types of information and the degree to which the information is "misleading". Seven different informational categories and four accuracy categories are developed. These criteria are developed based on the existing environmental advertising literature and environmental marketing regulations in the U.S. and Australia. It was found that a majority of the packaging information can be classified as being not accurate. (shrink)

Two ideas shape the epistemology of testimony. One is that testimony provides a unique kind of knowledge. The other is that testimonial knowledge is a social achievement. In traditional terms, those who affirm these ideas are anti-reductionists, and those who deny them are reductionists. There is increasing interest, however, in the possibility of affirming these ideas without embracing anti-reductionism. Thus, Sanford Goldberg uses the idea of epistemic buck-passing to argue that even reductionists can accept the uniqueness of testimonial knowledge, and (...) Jennifer Lackey gives both speaker and hearer an essential role in testimonial justification, rejecting both reductionism and anti-reductionism in favor of what she calls dualism. After distinguishing a weaker and a stronger notion of buck-passing, we show how anti-reductionists can use the stronger notion to motivate their position, and to answer Goldberg’s and Lackey’s challenges. (shrink)

7. The rights of immigrants: Joseph H. Carens.

This paper challenges the assumption that reasons are intrinsic to rational action. A great many actions are not best understood as ones in which the agent acted for reasons--and yet they can be understood as rational, and as open to rational criticism. The relative paucity of explicit reason-giving, practical arguments in daily life presents a general philosophical problem. It reflects the existence of a class of ways in which reason can regulate action, which goes far beyond producing reasons or applying (...) principles. Much practical reasoning takes the form of what H. P. Grice called 'thought-transitions'. These are neither in the form of standard practical arguments, nor can they be so reconstructed without distorting the ways in which an agent thinks. Some actions to which one is led by a thought transition are rational, namely when what Grice called a 'propension' towards a given class of actions--a standing inclination to act in certain ways--would itself stand up to rational evaluation. The paper examines two bases for such endorsement, one local and limited, and one much more speculative, due to Grice himself. (shrink)

In this book Richard Foley formulates the problem of the authority of others’ testimony, and of the rationality of one’s own beliefs, in terms of trust. Part 1 discusses the appropriateness of trust in one’s own cognitive faculties and beliefs, while part 2 argues that those assessments provide a basis for trust in others’ beliefs as well as those of one’s earlier and later selves. He does not offer us an analysis of trust or what it is to speak of (...) trust as rational or reasonable. He simply uses the notion to discuss what is surely one form of the problem of the rationality of belief. Rationality, in this book as in his earlier works, The Theory of Epistemic Rationality and Working Without a Net, is understood from a strict internalist and first-person perspective. Assessments of the rationality of opinions, like assessments of decisions, are claims, from a particular perspective, about how effectively the belief or decision promotes a goal or set of goals. With respect to belief and rational belief, the goal is what Foley calls the traditional “epistemic goal” of accurate and comprehensive beliefs. On his view, the perspective from which the assessment is made is the individual’s, taken on reflection. From the start, Foley’s understanding of rationality involves the first-person perspective. Rational belief is belief that will stand up to an individual’s own self-criticism. (shrink)

A community's abilities to promote health and maximize its response to public health threats require fulfillment of one of the four elements of public health legal preparedness, the capacity to effectively coordinate law-based efforts across different governmental jurisdictions, as well as across multiple sectors and disciplines. Government jurisdictions can be viewed “vertically” in that response efforts may entail coordination in the application of laws across multiple levels, including local, state, tribal, and federal governments, and even with international organizations. Coordination of (...) legal responses to public health emergencies also may involve a horizontal dimension comprising numerous and diverse sectors, such as public health, public and private health care, emergency management, education, law enforcement, the judiciary, and the military.Although responses to many acute health threats can implicate multiple jurisdictions and sectors, the jurisdictional and sectoral dimensions of legal preparedness are complex and may vary substantially by the nature of a threat, its geographic and geopolitical extent, and the operational response demanded. (shrink)

A community's abilities to promote health and maximize its response to public health threats require fulfillment of one of the four elements of public health legal preparedness, the capacity to effectively coordinate law-based efforts across different governmental jurisdictions, as well as across multiple sectors and disciplines. Government jurisdictions can be viewed “vertically” in that response efforts may entail coordination in the application of laws across multiple levels, including local, state, tribal, and federal governments, and even with international organizations. Coordination of (...) legal responses to public health emergencies also may involve a horizontal dimension comprising numerous and diverse sectors, such as public health, public and private health care, emergency management, education, law enforcement, the judiciary, and the military.Although responses to many acute health threats can implicate multiple jurisdictions and sectors, the jurisdictional and sectoral dimensions of legal preparedness are complex and may vary substantially by the nature of a threat, its geographic and geopolitical extent, and the operational response demanded. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:preface Within the current context in the United States, we tend to think of “choice” as the leading slogan of the liberal movement to expand women’s reproductive rights, particularly the right to elective abortion. But choice depends on context: on what is available, what is mandated, what is prohibited or discouraged, and what has not yet been imagined. This issue of Feminist Studies expands our thinking about available and (...) potential choices, both individual and social. The issue opens with Stephanie Yingyi Wang’s ethnographic study of companionate marriage in China, in which she describes cooperative marriage partnerships that look heterosexual and appear to fulfill traditional familial expectations, but that facilitate same-sex liaisons and so create new family structures. Other essays in this issue describe the kinds of choices available to those who seek nontraditional or less conventional family and erotic bonds. Leila J. Rupp discusses the “queer dilemmas of desire” that perplex undergraduate queer women in US colleges, and Sonny Nordmarken opens possibilities for new trans epistemologies that disrupt and produce new gender practices, claiming that queer instability provides “infinite possibilities” for individual and social change. More traditional choices and families take differing shapes in other historical and cultural contexts. Carla Pascoe Leahy compares the levels of maternal satisfaction felt by three historical cohorts of Australian women: those of the immediate post-World War II generation, the later generation of the Women’s Liberation Movement, and the current generation. Miriam Kienle examines how two designers, Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec, decided to explore alternatives to big data by sending each other weekly postcards that quantified their lives according to “small/slow data” points. Other essays and poems emphasize constraint rather than choice about the kinds of identities that take shape within current social structures. Bettina Judd ponders the effects on herself and others of her own rage at racial injustice and of the stereotype of raging black women perpetuated by a society that has chosen not to 8Preface deal with its endemic racism. Similarly, Vivyan Adair’s memoir on the stigmata of growing up in poverty exposes the limitations of individual choice in the context of violence, a theme echoed in the poems by Elisabeth Blair, which dramatize her experiences in an abusive institution for troubled teens. Trysh Travis reviews four books published in 2017 that together, but differently, tackle the difficult situations of the “drug-using woman” and her recovery. Marilyn Strathern and Jade S. Sasser review Adele Clarke and Donna Haraway’s edited volume Making Kin, Not Population : Reconceiving Generations, with responses from multiple authors featured in the book. Finally, a short story by Mary Anna Evans and poetry by Hannah Baker Saltmarsh and Abigail G. H. Manzella voice other individual dilemmas related to choice. We end the issue with a News and Views piece by Sonja Thomas that offers more context on the recent Women’s Wall protest in Kerala, India. In “When Tongzhi Marry: Experiments of Cooperative Marriage between Lalas and Gay Men in Urban China,” Stephanie Yingyi Wang frames cooperative marriage in mainland China between gay men and lalas (same-sex loving women), or tonghzi marriage, as an experiment in queer kinship. Such marriages appear to fulfill traditional roles on the surface, providing women and men who desire same-sex relationships a sanctioned institution—marriage—within which to fulfill these desires. According to Wang, these relational strategies are shaped simultaneously by China’s heteronormative policies and by the global circulation of gay rights narratives, “transforming the heteronormative family institution from within.” In this ethnography, Wang describes relationships as varied as those in which married partners are mutually supportive close friends who confide in one another about their same-sex relationships, to others in which subjects suffered from differing expectations between the partners, sometimes with gay husbands expecting deferential behavior from their lala wives, or between the couples and their parents and in-laws. Wang suggests applying a “decolonizing feminist methodology” to go beyond dichotomies of public/private, local/global, and success/failure and thus to better understand tongzhi marriage and critical queer subjectivities at this global juncture. Wang’s article is a co-winner of the 2018 Feminist Studies Award for the... (shrink)

Christine Buci-Glucksmann’s__ _The Madness of Vision_ is one of the most influential studies in phenomenological aesthetics of the baroque. Integrating the work of Merleau-Ponty with Lacanian psychoanalysis, Renaissance studies in optics, and twentieth-century mathematics, the author asserts the materiality of the body and world in her aesthetic theory. All vision is embodied vision, with the body and the emotions continually at play on the visual field. Thus vision, once considered a clear, uniform, and totalizing way of understanding the material world, (...) actually dazzles and distorts the perception of reality. In each of the nine essays that form _The Madness of Vision_ Buci-Glucksmann develops her theoretical argument via a study of a major painting, sculpture, or influential visual image—Arabic script, Bettini’s “The Eye of Cardinal Colonna,” Bernini’s _Saint Teresa_ and his 1661 fireworks display to celebrate the birth of the French dauphin, Caravaggio’s _Judith Beheading Holofernes,_ the Paris arcades, and Arnulf Rainer’s selfportrait, among others—and deftly crosses historical, national, and artistic boundaries to address Gracián’s_ El Criticón_; Monteverdi’s opera _Orfeo; _the poetry of Hafiz, John Donne, and Baudelaire; as well as baroque architecture and Anselm Kiefer’s Holocaust paintings. In doing so, Buci-Glucksmann makes the case for the pervasive influence of the baroque throughout history and the continuing importance of the baroque in contemporary arts. (shrink)

Christine Buci-Glucksmann’s__ _The Madness of Vision_ is one of the most influential studies in phenomenological aesthetics of the baroque. Integrating the work of Merleau-Ponty with Lacanian psychoanalysis, Renaissance studies in optics, and twentieth-century mathematics, the author asserts the materiality of the body and world in her aesthetic theory. All vision is embodied vision, with the body and the emotions continually at play on the visual field. Thus vision, once considered a clear, uniform, and totalizing way of understanding the material world, (...) actually dazzles and distorts the perception of reality. In each of the nine essays that form _The Madness of Vision_ Buci-Glucksmann develops her theoretical argument via a study of a major painting, sculpture, or influential visual image—Arabic script, Bettini’s “The Eye of Cardinal Colonna,” Bernini’s _Saint Teresa_ and his 1661 fireworks display to celebrate the birth of the French dauphin, Caravaggio’s _Judith Beheading Holofernes,_ the Paris arcades, and Arnulf Rainer’s selfportrait, among others—and deftly crosses historical, national, and artistic boundaries to address Gracián’s_ El Criticón_; Monteverdi’s opera _Orfeo; _the poetry of Hafiz, John Donne, and Baudelaire; as well as baroque architecture and Anselm Kiefer’s Holocaust paintings. In doing so, Buci-Glucksmann makes the case for the pervasive influence of the baroque throughout history and the continuing importance of the baroque in contemporary arts. (shrink)

Many accept the following three theses in animal ethics. First, although animal welfare should not be—or at least, need not be—our top moral priority, it is not a trivial one either. Second, if an animal is sentient, then it is a moral patient. Third, the extinction of an animal species is a tragic outcome that we have moral reason to prevent. I argue that a traditional (i.e., pre-modern) Buddhist perspective pushes against the first thesis and that a naturalized Buddhist perspective (...) is inconsistent with the latter two. (shrink)

On scientific and moral revolutions -- Using the dead for the living: the benthamite moral revolution -- Immoralizing and criminalizing abortion: the doctors revolution -- Irredentism and counter-revolutions in geology and abortion -- The american bioethics revolution -- The structure of moral revolutions.

Maximize Expected Choiceworthiness (MEC) is a theory of decision-making under moral uncertainty. It says that we ought to handle moral uncertainty in the way that Expected Value Theory (EVT) handles descriptive uncertainty. MEC inherits from EVT the problem of fanaticism. Roughly, a decision theory is fanatical when it requires our decision-making to be dominated by low-probability, high-payoff options. Proponents of MEC have offered two main lines of response. The first is that MEC should simply import whatever are the best solutions (...) to fanaticism on offer in decision theory. The second is to propose statistical normalization as a novel solution on behalf of MEC. This paper argues that the first response is open to serious doubt and that the second response fails. As a result, MEC appears significantly less plausible when compared to competing accounts of decision-making under moral uncertainty, which are not fanatical. (shrink)

This paper discusses varieties of normative phenomena, ranging from morality, to epistemic justification, to the rules of chess. It canvases a number of distinctions among these different normative phenomena. The most significant distinction is between formal and authoritative normativity. The prior is the normativity exhibited by any standard one can meet or fail to meet. The latter is the sort of normativity associated with phenomena like the "all-things-considered" ought. The paper ends with a brief discussion of reasons for skepticism about (...) authoritative normativity. (shrink)

Revisiting Edward Said's late proposals for a one-state solution, Butler has come to a startling suggestion: Jewish ethics not only demand a critique of Zionism, but must transcend its exclusive Jewishness in order to realize the ethical ...

The unlivable is the most extreme point of human suffering and injustice. But what is it exactly? How do we define the unlivable? And what can we do to prevent and repair it? These are the intriguing questions Judith Butler and Frédéric Worms discuss in a captivating dialogue situated at the crossroads of contemporary life and politics. Here, Judith Butler criticizes the norms that make life precarious and unlivable, while Frédéric Worms appeals to a "critical vitalism" as a (...) way of allowing the hardship of the unlivable to reveal what is vital for us. For both Butler and Worms, the difference between the livable and the unlivable forms the critical foundation for a contemporary practice of care. Care and support, in all their aspects, make human life livable, that is, "more than living." To understand it, we must draw on the concrete practices of humans who are confronted with the unlivable: the refugees of today and the witnesses and survivors of past violations and genocide. They teach us what is intolerable but also undeniable about the unlivable, and what we can do to resist it. Crafted with critical rigor, mutual respect, and lively humor, the compelling dialogue transcribed and translated in this book took place at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) on April 11, 2018, at a time when close to two thousand migrants were living in nearby makeshift camps in northern Paris. The Livable and the Unlivable showcases this 2018 dialogue in the context of Butler's and Worms's ongoing work and the evolution of their thought, as presented by Laure Barillas and Arto Charpentier in their equally engaging introduction. It concludes with a new afterword that addresses the crises unfolding in our world and the ways a philosophically rigorous account of life must confront them. While this book will be of keen interest to readers of philosophy and cultural criticism, and those interested in vitalism, new materialism, and critical theory, it is a far from merely academic text. In the conversation between Butler and Worms, we encounter questions we all grapple with in confronting the distress and precarity of our times, marked as it is by types of survival that are unlivable, from concentration camps to prisons to environmental toxicity, to forcible displacement, to the Covid pandemic. The Livable and the Unlivable at once considers longstanding philosophical questions around why and how we live, while working to retrieve a philosophy of life for today's Left. (shrink)

The Representational Theory of the Mind (RTM) has been forcefully and subtly developed by Jerry A. Fodor. According to the RTM, psychological states that explain behavior involve tokenings of mental representations. Since the RTM is distinguished from other approaches by its appeal to the meaning or "content" of mental representations, a question immediately arises: by virtue of what does a mental representation express or represent an environmental property like coto or shoe? This question asks for a general account of the (...) semantics of mental representation. Fodor places two conditions on the requisite theory: it must be physi calistic (that is, it must be couched in nonsemantic and nonintentional terms, free of expressions like "refers to" or "denotes" or "means that"), and it must be atomistic (that is, it must allow that the thinker can have a single intentional state without having any others). What is wanted, then, is a reductive theory that "naturalizes" content by specifying sufficient conditions, in physicalistic and atomistic terms, for a mental symbol to represent or express a certain property. (shrink)

No single theory so far proposed gives a wholly satisfactory account of the origin and maintenance of bird-song dialects. This failure is the consequence of a weak comparative literature that precludes careful comparisons among species or studies, and of the complexity of the issues involved. Complexity arises because dialects seem to bear upon a wide range of features in the life history of bird species. We give an account of the principal issues in bird-song dialects: evolution of vocal learning, experimental (...) findings on song ontogeny, dialect descriptions, female and male reactions to differences in dialect, and population genetics and dispersal.We present a synthetic theory of the origin and maintenance of song dialects, one that accommodates most of the different systems reported in the literature. The few data available suggest that large, regional dialect populations are genetically differentiated; this pattern is correlated with reduced dispersal between dialects, assortative mating by females, and male-male exclusion. At the same time, “subdialects” may be formed within regional dialects. Subdialect clusters are usually small and may represent vocal mimicry among a few adjacent territorial males. The relative importance of genetic and social adaptation may contribute to the emergence of subdialects; their distinctiveness may be correlated with the degree of polygyny, for example. Thus, subdialect formation is linked to one theory of the evolution of repertoire size, but data are too fragmentary to examine this idea critically. (shrink)

This book brings together a group of Judith Butler's philosophical essays written over two decades that elaborate her reflections on the roles of the passions in subject formation through an engagement with Hegel, Kierkegaard, Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche, Merleau-Ponty, Freud, Irigaray, and Fanon. Drawing on her early work on Hegelian desire and her subsequent reflections on the psychic life of power and the possibility of self-narration, this book considers how passions such as desire, rage, love, and grief are bound up (...) with becoming a subject within specific historical fields of power. Butler shows in different philosophical contexts how the self that seeks to make itself finds itself already affected and formed against its will by social and discursive powers. And yet, agency and action are not necessarily nullified by this primary impingement. Primary sense impressions register this dual situation of being acted on and acting, countering the idea that acting requires one to overcome the situation of being affected by others and the linguistic and social world. This dual structure of sense sheds light on the desire to live, the practice and peril of grieving, embodied resistance, love, and modes of enthrallment and dispossession. Working with theories of embodiment, desire, and relationality in conversation with philosophers as diverse as Hegel, Spinoza, Descartes, Merleau-Ponty, Freud, and Fanon, Butler reanimates and revises her basic propositions concerning the constitution and deconstitution of the subject within fields of power, taking up key issues of gender, sexuality, and race in several analyses. Taken together, these essays track the development of Butler's embodied account of ethical relations. (shrink)

I argue against pessimistic readings of the Buddhist tradition on which unawakened beings invariably have lives not worth living due to a preponderance of suffering (duḥkha) over well-being.

An innovative approach to rethinking sciences of mind at the turn of the twenty-first century via the texts of philosopher and psychologist William James.

The ethics of hospitality – the welcome of the foreigner – is implied in all moral debate in international relations ranging from questions of asylum to those of humanitarian intervention. Why then has there been so little reflection on hospitality in the study of international relations to date? Seeking to correct this striking omission, and making an important and original contribution to debates about ethics in international relations in the process, Baker outlines a theory of cosmopolitanism as hospitality which (...) goes beyond existing cosmopolitanisms. He argues that we must understand cosmopolitanism not as the pursuit of a world in which there are no more foreigners but as the welcome of the foreigner. However, though hospitality calls for a welcome, there is always a decision on the welcome to be made. Cosmopolitanism as hospitality is therefore always as much a politics as it is an ethics. Addressing issues of central concern for those who seek to understand our obligations to strangers, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations, security studies, ethics, and political and international theory. (shrink)

It is no exaggeration to say that there has been an explosion of activity in the field of philosophical enquiry that is known as natural theology. Having been smothered in the early part of the twentieth century due to the dominance of the anti-metaphysical doctrine of logical positivism, natural theology began to make a comeback in the late 1950s as logical positivism collapsed and analytic philosophers took a newfound interest in metaphysical topics such as possibility and necessity, causation, time, the (...) mind-body problem, and God. This chapter begins by considering how we might characterise natural theology as a field of enquiry. It then proceeds to survey the landscape of contemporary natural theology, which has spawned a large and at times highly technical body of literature. Finally, consideration is given to two epistemological issues confronting the theist who wishes to appeal to natural theology, which could be termed the problem of the gap(s) and the problem of accessibility. (shrink)

The papers in this volume question how perceptions of space influenced understandings of the body and its functions, illness and treatment, and the surrounding natural and built environments in relation to health in the classical and ...

When Ron Giere introduced perspectivism into philosophy of science, he provided a perspectivist analysis of both scientific instruments and scientific theorizing. Today, there is a burgeoning literature that extends Giere’s analysis of theorizing, with many philosophers examining the perspectivist approach to aspects of theorizing such as models, laws, explanations, and so on. However, relatively little attention has been paid to Giere’s analysis of instruments. In this article, I hope to fill this gap. I argue that the perspectivist analysis of instruments (...) should be rejected. First, I give a general account of the kind of instrumentation relevant to instrumental perspectivism, drawing on Cartwright’s notion of nomological machines, which forms the basis of my criticism of Giere’s argument for instrumental perspectivism. Next, I present the case against instrumental perspectivism. I argue that instrumental perspectivism is dependent on theoretical perspectivism in a way that robs it of philosophical significance, and that it introduces new puzzles while adding little to our understanding of instruments. (shrink)