In response to Miranda Fricker's advocacy of a virtue of ‘reflexive critical openness’, I emphasise the importance of other virtues, such as loyalty, in evaluating an agent's response to testimony, and I query Fricker's claim that in certain circumstances agents can lack a means to correct their faulty evaluations of another's testimony.

The idea that there are some things which we should not talk about is most commonly dealt with in the context of debates about rights to free speech, and other contexts in which the value of talking is typically understood in instrumental terms. This paper explores ways of grounding that idea which do not depend upon instrumental values, in particular in the context of self-revelatory and confessional talk.

Some have argued that a proper account of prostitution shows it to be a morally neutral, commercial service ‘like any other’. This paper explores further the implications of this ‘service’ model and argues that it depends upon a weak conception of the kind of sex involved in such a practice and involves the objectification of both prostitute and customer. I argue that there is a moral view of sex which is not merely ‘romantic’, from which it is still possible to (...) view prostitution as morally objectionable; but that, nevertheless, this perspective itself may provide for a development of the idea of a service which would justify a limited practice of prostitution. Such a practice would, however, be very different from that which supporters of the putatively morally neutral model of prostitution have in mind and would depend for its plausibility on a comparison with other forms of caring for which payment is given. (shrink)

Taking as its starting point Miri Gur-Arye’s critical discussion of a legal duty to report crime, this paper sketches an idealising conception of a democratic republic whose citizens could be expected to recognise a civic responsibility to report crime, in order to assist the enterprise of a criminal law that is their common law. After explaining why they should recognise such a responsibility, what its scope should be, and how it should be exercised, and noting that that civic responsibility must (...) include a responsibility to report one’s own crimes; it discusses whether that civic responsibility could ground at least a limited legal duty to report certain types of crime. It then turns to the question of whether a civic responsibility to assist the criminal law’s enterprise of bringing wrongdoers to account could include a responsibility to arrest suspected or known offenders if the police cannot or will not do so—a responsibility to make a citizen’s arrest, and the legal power to discharge that responsibility: how far should citizens feel entitled, or duty-bound, thus to ‘take the law into their own hands’? (shrink)

(No abstract is available for this citation).

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The idea that crimes can usefully be understood as ‘public wrongs’, and that this can generate a plausible principle of criminalisation, has found some support in recent years; it has also been subjected to some sharp criticism. This paper aims to sketch the most plausible version of that idea, and to show how, once properly explained, it is not vulnerable to those criticisms. After a brief defence of the negative principle, that we may not criminalise conduct that does not constitute (...) a public wrong, it explains the positive principle, that we have reason to criminalise conduct if it constitutes a public wrong, by drawing an analogy between criminal law and codes of professional ethics, and by appealing to the idea of civil order, as the normative structure of a polity—a structure that criminal law helps both to constitute and to sustain. Four objections are then met: that this account implies an unacceptable relativism; that it distorts the reasons that bear on criminalisation; that it cannot make room for those who do not identify themselves with the polity in which they live; and that it implies an unrealistically demanding conception of what is required for a polity to exist. (shrink)

The fourth volume in the Criminalization series, this volume explores some of the most general principles and theories of criminalization. It includes not only philosophical work, but also historical, legal, and sociological investigations into criminalization, clarifying the state of the discipline today.

The third book in the Criminalization series examines the constitutionalization of criminal law. It considers how the criminal law is constituted through the political processes of the state; how the agents of the criminal law can be answerable to it themselves; and finally how the criminal law can be constituted as part of the international order.

BackgroundAccurate reporting on sex and gender in health research is integral to ensuring that health interventions are safe and effective. In Canada and internationally, governments, research organizations, journal editors, and health agencies have called for more inclusive research, provision of sex-disaggregated data, and the integration of sex and gender analysis throughout the research process. Sex and gender analysis is generally defined as an approach for considering how and why different subpopulations (e.g., of diverse genders, ages, and social locations) may experience (...) health conditions and interventions in different or similar ways.The objective of this study was to assess the extent and nature of reporting about sex and/or gender, including whether sex and gender analysis (SGA) was carried out in a sample of Canadian randomized controlled trials (RCTs) with human participants.MethodsWe searched MEDLINE from 01 January 2013 to 23 July 2014 using a validated filter for identification of RCTs, combined with terms related to Canada. Two reviewers screened the search results to identify the first 100 RCTs that were either identified in the trial publication as funded by a Canadian organization or which had a first or last author based in Canada. Data were independently extracted by two people from 10% of the RCTs during an initial training period; once agreement was reached on this sample, the remainder of the data extraction was completed by one person and verified by a second.ResultsThe search yielded 1433 records. We screened 256 records to identify 100 RCTs which met our eligibility criteria. The median sample size of the RCTs was 107 participants (range 12–6085). While 98% of studies described the demographic composition of their participants by sex, only 6% conducted a subgroup analysis across sex and 4% reported sex-disaggregated data. No article defined “sex” and/or “gender.” No publication carried out a comprehensive sex and gender analysis.ConclusionsFindings highlight poor uptake of sex and gender considerations in the Canadian RCT context and underscore the need for better articulated guidance on sex and gender analysis to improve reporting of evidence, inform policy development, and guide future research. (shrink)

The shift from a welfarist to a retributivist perspective on crime, which is one of the themes of David Garland?s book, has brought with it a renewed emphasis on the victims of crime and their rights. This shift in emphasis, I suggest, raises questions about the way we think of the relationship between individual citizens and between citizens and the state. Different political theories will produce different accounts of this relationship and hence different ways of characterising the status and role (...) of victims in the criminal process. In this paper then I sketch a roughly communitarian view of the citizen relationship as a context for an account of the status of victims. Thus, I argue, we need to consider not just the expectations that victims rightly have that they have rights which should to be recognised in the criminal process but also their duties as participants. Duties which require them to bear witness in calling offenders to account. This gives victims an active role in the criminal process but one that may come at a price since it might require victims to be subjected to greater scrutiny in the process of a criminal trial than they might find bearable. (shrink)

ABSTRACT A patient whose case notes had been used, without her permission, during a disciplinary inquiry on the conduct of Wendy Savage (her obstetrician) complained that this was a breach of confidentiality. Her complaint cannot be understood as based on a concern about the possible adverse consequences of this use of the notes: rather, her concern was just with the fact that medical information about her had been made known to others. My concern is with the meaning and status of (...) the right to privacy, to which the Savage patient appealed. Such a right cannot be reduced to a property right, since this cannot capture what concerned the Savage patient. A proper understanding of what lies behind her complaint requires us to recognise the way in which facts about oneself—in this case facts about one's body—are intimately bound up with one's self, with one's identity, and thus with one's autonomy. What kinds of fact, and thus what conception of the self, are involved in such a conception of privacy need not everywhere be the same; the crucial point is that privacy and the self are concepts which, whatever their particular content, are internally related [1]. (shrink)

What value is this scholarly debate about the origins of Jaspers' phenomenology to psychiatric clinicians? For one thing, it might help kindle enough interest among scholars and clinicians in Jaspers' General Psychopathology to warrant its reprinting. This would expand the psychiatrist's appreciation of the relevance of philosophy to medical thinking and patient care. In the GP, Jaspers quotes Kant's opinion that "the psychiatrist's competence is really commensurate with how far his education and knowledge would qualify him to belong to the (...) philosophic faculty". (shrink)