BackgroundAlthough patient advocates have developed templates for standard consent forms, evaluating patient preferences for first in human (FIH) and window of opportunity (Window) trial consent forms is critical due to their unique risks. FIH trials are the initial use of a novel compound in study participants. In contrast, Window trials give an investigational agent over a fixed duration to treatment naïve patients in the time between diagnosis and standard of care (SOC) surgery. Our goal was to determine the patient-preferred presentation (...) of important information in consent forms for these trials.MethodsThe study consisted of two phases: (1) analyses of oncology FIH and Window consents; (2) interviews of trial participants. FIH consent forms were analyzed for the location(s) of information stating that the study drug has not been tested in humans (FIH information); Window consents were analyzed for the location(s) of information stating the trial may delay SOC surgery (delay information). Participants were asked about their preferred placement of the information in their own trial’s consent form. The location of information in the consent forms was compared to the participants’ suggestions for placement. Results34 [17 FIH; 17 Window] of 42(81%) cancer patients approached participated. 25 consents [20 FIH; 5 Window] were analyzed. 19/20 FIH consent forms included FIH information, and 4/5 Window consent forms included delay information. 19/20(95%) FIH consent forms contained FIH information in the risks section 12/17(71%) patients preferred the same. Fourteen (82%) patients wanted FIH information in the purpose, but only 5(25%) consents mentioned it there. 9/17(53%) Window patients preferred delay information to be located early in the consent, before the “Risks” section. 3/5(60%) consents did this.ConclusionsDesigning consents that reflect patient preferences more accurately is essential for ethical informed consent; however, a one-size fits all approach will not accurately capture patient preferences. We found that preferences differed for FIH and Window trial consents, though for both, patients preferred key risk information early in the consent. Next steps include determining if FIH and Window consent templates improve understanding. (shrink)

Even appropriate, ethically sound recommendations can generate angst. In this case, the principal investigator is concerned about the ethics consult recommendation to not inform the participan...

This article examines how women members of contemporary U.S. racist groups reconcile the male-oriented agendas of organized racism with understandings of themselves and their gendered self-interests. Using life history narratives and in-depth interviews, the author examines how women racial activists construct self-understandings that fit agendas of the racist movement and how they reshape understandings of movement goals to fit their own beliefs and life experiences. This analysis situates the political actions of women racists in rational, if deplorable, understandings of self (...) and society. (shrink)

New technologies from artificial intelligence to drones, and biomedical enhancement make the future of the human family increasingly hard to predict and protect. This book explores how the philosophical tradition of virtue ethics can help us to cultivate the moral wisdom we need to live wisely and well with emerging technologies.

"I found this a fascinating book: wide-ranging, readable." —Alison Jaggar Bell shows how the flesh-and-blood female body engaged in sexual interaction for payment has no inherent meaning and is signified differently in different cultures ...

The 2017 codetection of electromagnetic radiation and gravitational waves was the first of its kind and marked the beginning of multimessenger astronomy. But this event has been treated within recent literature as something of an end as well. The 2017 detection is often regarded as an instance of falsification for all theories of modified gravity which postulate gravitational waves propagate along separate geodesics from electromagnetic radiation, perhaps most notably Jacob Bekenstein’s Tensor-Vector-Scalar gravity. I critically examine this explicit endorsement of falsification (...) by astronomers and astrophysicists. While the current state of multimetric modified gravity theories is dim, recent developments in multimessenger observation do not offer a deductive falsification. Rather such evidence should be regarded as a corroboration of the null hypothesis, following Deborah Mayo's error-statistical account. (shrink)

This paper explores the ambiguous impact of new information and communications technologies on the cultivation of moral skills in human beings. Just as twentieth century advances in machine automation resulted in the economic devaluation of practical knowledge and skillsets historically cultivated by machinists, artisans, and other highly trained workers , while also driving the cultivation of new skills in a variety of engineering and white collar occupations, ICTs are also recognized as potential causes of a complex pattern of economic deskilling, (...) reskilling, and upskilling. In this paper, I adapt the conceptual apparatus of sociological debates over economic deskilling to illuminate a different potential for technological deskilling/upskilling, namely the ability of ICTs to contribute to the moral deskilling of human users, a potential that exists alongside rich but currently underrealized possibilities for moral reskilling and/or upskilling. I flesh out this general hypothesis by means of examples involving automated weapons technology, new media practices, and social robotics. I conclude that since moral skills are essential prerequisites for the effective development of practical wisdom and virtuous character, and since market and cultural forces are not presently aligned to bring about the more salutary of the ambiguous potentials presented here, the future shape of these developments warrants our close attention—and perhaps active intervention. (shrink)

In most testimonial transactions between adults, the hearer’s obligation is to accord the speaker a level of credibility that matches the evidence that what she is saying is true. When the speaker...

What factors in the organizational culture of an ethically exemplary corporation are responsible for encouraging ethical decision making? This question was analyzed through an exploratory case study of a top pharmaceutical company that is a global leader in ethics. The participating organization is renowned in public opinion polls of ethics, credibility, and trust. This research explored organizational culture, communication in issues management and public relations, management theory, and deontological or utilitarian moral philosophy as factors that might encourage ethical analysis. Our (...) understanding of organiza tional ethics is enhanced by elucidating factors the case revealed as encouraging ethical analysisan organizational culture that emphasizes the importance of ethics, Theory Y management, a symmetrical worldview valuing innovation and dialogue, a counseling role for issues management or public relations in the dominant coalition, rewarding ethical behavior, ethical analysis using moral philosophy, consistency between individual values and organizational philosophy, and ethics training. These factors, and perhaps others as yet unidentified, worked together to create an environment that encouraged ethical decision making at the exemplar organization. (shrink)

I defend the view that a significant ethical distinction can be made between justified killing in self-defense and police use of lethal force. I start by opposing the belief that police use of lethal force is morally justified on the basis of self-defense. Then I demonstrate that the state’s monopoly on the use of force within a given jurisdiction invests police officers with responsibilities that go beyond what morality requires of the average person. I argue that the police should primarily (...) be concerned with preserving public safety. As a consequence, police have additional moral permissions to use lethal force. But this also means that the principle of restraint is inherent to the policing function and therefore police are obliged to go to greater lengths to avoid killing. I concede that the just use of police force can be made difficult in extreme situations such as a mass riot. In such cases, police should take proportionate actions necessary to protect the lives of inhabitants by restoring order, which might include calling on military support. I conclude with a cautionary note opposing militarization of the policing role. (shrink)

Through systematic case analyses of much-discussed social media cases, both negative aspects and best practices of social media use are revealed. Ethical theory is applied to these cases as a means of analysis to reveal the moral principles associated with each case. Four cases are analyzed, ranging from bad to arguably innovative. Based upon comparing the moral principles upheld or violated, descriptive ethics are used to infer normative ethical guidelines to govern the use of social media. Fifteen ethical guidelines derived (...) from the cases and normative moral theory are offered as a way to begin a discussion that leads to a deeper understanding of ethics in the burgeoning realm of digital engagement. (shrink)

While training design choices seem amoral, they interact to determine training (in)effectiveness, potentially harming/benefiting trainees and organizations. These moral implications intensify when training is administered at scale (e.g., e-training) and focuses on social issues like sexual harassment (hereafter, SH). In fact, research on SH training shows it can elicit trainees’ gender-based biases against content messengers. We suggest that one such bias, resulting from messenger gender-occupation incongruence and influencing training effectiveness, is lowered perceptions of the messenger’s integrity. We also investigate whether (...) rich media will increase or decrease this perceived integrity penalty. Using an excerpt from real SH e-training and a sample [_N_ = _210_] consistent with the targeted training audience, we conducted a 2 × 2 × 2 relative comparison experiment (messenger gender x messenger occupation x media richness) and tested a moderated mediation model of the interactive effects of messenger gender-occupation incongruence and media richness on trainees’ perceptions of messenger integrity and training outcomes. Results suggest that trainees’ perceptions of messenger integrity decrease when the messenger’s gender is incongruent with their occupation, leading to worse outcomes in text-based training. These effects, however, are mitigated by increased media richness, providing support for media richness theory. Implications for researchers and practitioners are discussed. (shrink)

This chapter offers a plea for the media to reframe its coverage of campus controversies from free expression to academic freedom. These freedoms are entwined, but distinct. Freedom of expression is extended to all persons with no expectation of quality control, apart from legal prohibitions against defamation, threats, etc. By contrast, academic freedom is a cluster of freedoms afforded to scholarly personnel for a particular purpose – namely, the pursuit of universities’ academic mission to seek truth and advance understanding in (...) the service of society. An academic freedom framing better reflects the distinctive social purpose around which universities are organized, as well as universities’ duty of care to employees and students. While universities have a legal and moral duty of care to all employees and students, the unjust, exclusionary past and present of higher education arguably makes that duty particularly acute in the case of equity-deserving (e.g., racialized, Indigenous, disabled or 2SLGBTQ+) people. Finally, academic freedom framing for campus media stories is less monolithic than free expression framing, allowing for a more nuanced understanding of campus controversies while keeping universities accountable to the public they serve. In this chapter, I survey three very different campus controversies at a single Canadian university, and the media response each received. I show how an academic freedom frame for those stories would have produced better reportage while reducing opportunities for bad actors to manipulate both universities and the media. At the end of the day, the real crisis at universities isn’t the cancellation of ill-judged events that were never a part of the academic mission; it is the ongoing erosion of academic freedom. (shrink)

This chapter argues that a Peircean philosophy of sex offers a non-reductionist approach to sex as a biological category. The chapter surveys traditional biological accounts of sex categories and several social constructivist accounts of sex. It then provides an overview of Peirce’s scholastic realism and his ethics of inquiry. While Peirce regarded the distinction between the sexes as a rare “polar distinction”, the chapter works to recover the nuanced view of sex that Peirce ought to have adopted had he extended (...) his scholastic realism to reproductive biology. Ultimately, the Peircean account offered treats sex differences as norms expressed as bimodal distributions. The chapter concludes by illustrating some applications of this Peircean philosophy of sex, and gesturing to those that we can yet barely imagine. (shrink)

In the early twenty-first century, we stand on the threshold of welcoming robots into domains of human activity that will expand their presence in our lives dramatically. One provocative new frontier in robotics, motivated by a convergence of demographic, economic, cultural, and institutional pressures, is the development of “carebots”—robots intended to assist or replace human caregivers in the practice of caring for vulnerable persons such as the elderly, young, sick, or disabled. I argue here that existing philosophical reflections on the (...) ethical implications of carebots neglect a critical dimension of the issue: namely, the potential moral value of caregiving practices for caregivers. This value, I argue, gives rise to considerations that must be weighed alongside consideration of the likely impact of carebots on care recipients. Focusing on the goods internal to caring practices, I then examine the potential impact of carebots on caregivers by means of three complementary ethical approaches: virtue ethics, care ethics, and the capabilities approach. Each of these, I argue, sheds new light on the contexts in which carebots might deprive potential caregivers of important moral goods central to caring practices, as well as those contexts in which carebots might help caregivers sustain or even enrich those practices, and their attendant goods. (shrink)

This paper argues in favor of more widespread and systematic applications of a virtue-based normative framework to questions about the ethical impact of information technologies, and social networking technologies in particular. The first stage of the argument identifies several distinctive features of virtue ethics that make it uniquely suited to the domain of IT ethics, while remaining complementary to other normative approaches. I also note its potential to reconcile a number of significant methodological conflicts and debates in the existing literature, (...) including tensions between phenomenological and constructivist perspectives. Finally, I claim that a virtue-based perspective is needed to correct for a strong utilitarian bias in the research methodologies of existing empirical studies on the social and ethical impact of IT. The second part of the paper offers an abbreviated demonstration of the merits of virtue ethics by showing how it might usefully illuminate the moral dimension of emerging social networking technologies. I focus here on the potential impact of such technologies on three virtues typically honed in communicative practices: patience, honesty and empathy. (shrink)

In our everyday social interactions, we try to make sense of what people are thinking, why they act as they do, and what they are likely to do next. This process is called mindreading. Mindreading, Shannon Spaulding argues in this book, is central to our ability to understand and interact with others. Philosophers and cognitive scientists have converged on the idea that mindreading involves theorizing about and simulating others’ mental states. She argues that this view of mindreading is limiting (...) and outdated. Most contemporary views of mindreading vastly underrepresent the diversity and complexity of mindreading. She articulates a new theory of mindreading that takes into account cutting edge philosophical and empirical research on in-group/out-group dynamics, social biases, and how our goals and the situational context influence how we interpret others’ behavior. -/- Spaulding's resulting theory of mindreading provides a more accurate, comprehensive, and perhaps pessimistic view of our abilities to understand others, with important epistemological and ethical implications. Deciding who is trustworthy, knowledgeable, and competent are epistemically and ethically fraught judgments: her new theory of mindreading sheds light on how these judgments are made and the conditions under which they are unreliable. -/- This book will be of great interest to students of philosophy of psychology, philosophy of mind, applied epistemology, cognitive science and moral psychology, as well as those interested in conceptual issues in psychology. (shrink)

The widespread and growing use of new social media, especially social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, invites sustained ethical reflection on emerging forms of online friendship. Social scientists and psychologists are gathering a wealth of empirical data on these trends, yet philosophical analysis of their ethical implications remains comparatively impoverished. In particular, there have been few attempts to explore how traditional ethical theories might be brought to bear upon these developments, or what insights they might offer, if any. (...) In attempting to address this lacuna in applied ethical research, this paper investigates the ethical significance of online friendship by means of an Aristotelian theory of the good life, which holds that human flourishing is chiefly realized through ‘complete’ friendships of virtue. Here, four key dimensions of ‘virtue friendship’ are examined in relation to online social media : reciprocity, empathy, self-knowledge and the shared life. Online social media support and strengthen friendship in ways that mirror these four dimensions, particularly when used to supplement rather than substitute for face-to-face interactions. However, deeper reflection on the meaning of the shared life for Aristotle raises important and troubling questions about the capacity of online social media to support complete friendships of virtue in the contemporary world, along with significant concerns about the enduring relevance of this Aristotelian ideal for the good life in the 21st century. (shrink)

Habits and habitudes are peculiar in that they are both a condition of human agency, as well as one of its most significant hurdles. They open up the world by providing us with ways of being within it (e.g., how we perceive, move about, and generally orient ourselves in space). However, they also confine our worldly behavior given their repetitive and often predictable nature. This tension between spontaneity and repetition arises out of the two-fold temporal structure of habits – i.e., (...) the habitual body simultaneously directs us toward the future and the past. An understanding of this tension is generally important for thinking about how individuals can do things differently. More urgently, this work has applications in the treatment of addictions and other compulsive behaviors where the difficulties of disrupting habitual repetition are much more pronounced. (shrink)

Habits and habitudes are peculiar in that they are both a condition of human agency, as well as one of its most significant hurdles. They open up the world by providing us with ways of being within it (e.g., how we perceive, move about, and generally orient ourselves in space). However, they also confine our worldly behavior given their repetitive and often predictable nature. This tension between spontaneity and repetition arises out of the two-fold temporal structure of habits—i.e., the habitual (...) body simultaneously directs us toward the future and the past. An understanding of this tension is generally important for thinking about how individuals can do things differently. More urgently, this work has applications in the treatment of addictions and other compulsive behaviors where the difficulties of disrupting habitual repetition are much more pronounced. (shrink)

Direct Social Perception (DSP) is the idea that we can non-inferentially perceive others’ mental states. In this paper, I argue that the standard way of framing DSP leaves the debate at an impasse. I suggest two alternative interpretations of the idea that we see others’ mental states: others’ mental states are represented in the content of our perception, and we have basic perceptual beliefs about others’ mental states. I argue that the latter interpretation of DSP is more promising and examine (...) the kinds of mental states that plausibly could satisfy this version of DSP. (shrink)

Preface -- Part I : Mastering the basics. The importance of public relations : Case: UPS faces losses in Teamster's union strike ; What is public relations? ; Models and approaches to public relations ; Public relations as a management function -- Part II : Organizations and processes. Organizational factors contributing to excellent public relations ; How public relations contributes to organizational effectiveness ; Identifying and prioritizing stakeholders and publics ; Public relations research: the key to strategy ; The public (...) relations process: RACE -- Part III : The practice and best practices. The practice of public relations ; Ethics, leadership and counseling roles, and moral analyses ; Best practices for excellence in public relations -- Notes -- References -- Index. (shrink)

The US-Australia strategic relationship has evolved from more or less an adversarial position in the 19th century to an Australia largely dependent on the US during the Cold War to the interdependent partnership we see today. Strategic interdependence means that the US-Australia relationship is not merely a one-sided affair; that Australia has something of substance to offer the strategic relationship. Part of the reason that the relationship is strong is because of a shared language, similar social values, and compatible political-legal (...) systems. Moreover, the relationship has been thoroughly institutionalised via intelligence cooperation, defence science collaboration, and extensive personal relationships. But what the US really seems to value is Australia’s reliability as an ally. I argue that Australia best demonstrates its reliability as an ally, however, when it follows US strategic decision-making for the right reasons. This sense of reliability is more akin to trustworthiness than it is to loyalty. History demonstrates that Australia has not always agreed with the US. But agreeing doesn’t matter so much when Australia has established a track record of consistently applying sound reasoning to its strategic decisions and it has made substantive contributions to jointly sought after strategic outcomes. (shrink)

The problem of global climate changes has raised fundamental questions of justice in world politics centered around the vast discrepancies between the causes and the effects of global warming and the uneven levels of consumption/enjoyment of fossil fuels. The overwhelming majority of approaches in environmental ethics have focused on either distributive justice or rights-based frameworks. Climate change justice, however, can be explored through an alternative framework, an approach based on the recognition theory of Axel Honneth that has not been systematically (...) engaged with in this field. A critique of John Rawls’ The Law of Peoples as an exemplar of distributive approaches reveals a number of limitations inherent in Rawlsian models of climate-change justice. Honneth’s theory of recognition is an advance on distributive models toward a notion of climate justice in which the conditions necessary for the “functioning and flourishment” of human freedom includes climatic stability as a basic social condition. The ideal of mutual recognition provides a basis for environmental protections, including but not limited to the global atmosphere as a necessary condition for the realization of self-autonomy for all human kind. (shrink)

In response to the ubiquitous graphs and maps of COVID-19, artists, designers, data scientists, and public health officials are teaming up to create counter-plots and subaltern maps of the pandemic. In this intervention, we describe the various functions served by these projects. First, they offer tutorials and tools for both dataviz practitioners and their publics to encourage critical thinking about how COVID-19 data is sourced and modeled—and to consider which subjects are not interpellated in those data sets, and why not. (...) Second, they demonstrate how the pandemic’s spatial logics inscribe themselves in our immediate material landscapes. And third, they remind us of our capacity to personalize and participate in the creation of meaningful COVID visualizations—many of which represent other scales and dimensions of the pandemic, especially the quarantine quotidian. Together, the official maps and counter-plots acknowledge that the pandemic plays out differently across different scales: COVID-19 is about global supply chains and infection counts and TV ratings for presidential press conferences, but it is also about local dynamics and neighborhood mutual aid networks and personal geographies of mitigation and care. (shrink)

In this chapter, I explore the importance of ethics education for senior military officers with responsibilities at the strategic level of government. One problem, as I see it, is that senior commanders might demand “ethics” from their soldiers but then they are themselves primarily informed by a “morally skeptical viewpoint” (in the form of political realism). I argue that ethics are more than a matter of personal behavior alone: the ethical position of an armed service is a matter of the (...) collective responsibility of the people who constitute it, and senior military officers, having authority to give the orders, have a particularly important role. First, I discuss the continued prominence of a neorealist mindset in strategic thinking. Neorealist theory assumes that ethics is a largely irrelevant concern for strategic decision-makers. In contrast, I argue that consideration of moral values should be at the center of strategic theory and practice. Then, in the second section, I explore the “professional ethics” of senior military officers in order to develop an appreciation of the shared values and expectations regarding required conduct within any professional military service. I argue that senior military leaders should be concerned with what it means to be “good” and that this concept of the good can, and should, be applied across cultures and national boundaries. In the final section, I examine armed conflict and briefly discuss the moral reasoning involved to justify deliberate killing and destruction. I conclude that senior military officers require an understanding of sound moral reasoning to implement effective strategy. (shrink)

Recently, philosophers and psychologists defending the embodied cognition research program have offered arguments against mindreading as a general model of our social understanding. The embodied cognition arguments are of two kinds: those that challenge the developmental picture of mindreading and those that challenge the alleged ubiquity of mindreading. Together, these two kinds of arguments, if successful, would present a serious challenge to the standard account of human social understanding. In this paper, I examine the strongest of these embodied cognition arguments (...) and argue that mindreading approaches can withstand the best of these arguments from embodied cognition. (shrink)

Paul Churchland's book (hereafter ER)is an entertaining and instructive advertisement for a "neurocomputational" vision of how the brain (and mind) works. While we agree with its general thrust, and commend its lucid pedagogy on a host of difficult topics, we note that such pedagogy often exploits artificially heightened contrast, and sometimes the result is a misleading caricature instead of a helpful simplification. In particular, Churchland is eager to contrast the explanation of consciousness that can be accomplished by his "aspiring new (...) structural and dynamic cognitive prototype: recurrent PDP networks" (p.266) with what strikes him as the retrograde introduction by Dennett of a virtual von Neumannesque machine--a "failed prototype"--as the key element in an explanation of human consciousness (in Consciousness Explained, 1991, hereafter, CE). We will try to show that by oversimplifying Dennett's alternative, he has taken a potential supplement to his own view--a much needed supplement--and transformed it in his imagination into a subversive threat. In part 1, we will expose and correct the mistaken contrasts. In part 2, we will compare the performance of the two views on Churchland's list of seven features of consciousness any theory must account for, showing that Dennett's account provides more than Churchland has recognized, and indeed offers answers to key questions that Churchland's account is powerless to address. At that point, Churchland's project and Dennett's could be seen to collaborate in a useful division of labor instead of being in mortal combat, were it not for what appears to be a fairly major disagreement about consciousness in non-human animals. Part 3 briefly examines this issue. It may be due to a misunderstanding, which when cleared up might restore the happy prospect of unification. (shrink)

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Technology gives readers a view into this increasingly vital and urgently needed domain of philosophical understanding, offering an in-depth collection of leading and emerging voices in the philosophy of technology. The thirty-two contributions in this volume cut across and connect diverse philosophical traditions, methodologies, and subfields, providing the reader with provocative and original insights on the history, concepts, problems and challenges that mark humanity's attempts to attain deeper and more lasting wisdom about our complex (...) and evolving relationship to technology. (shrink)

Full text available at the external link below.

"Radically reorienting, challenging, provocative, this book moves progressive philosophy, feminist and queer theory, critical discussions of race and racism forward. Prophetically, it calls for an interrogation of all our oppositional theory and politics, offering new and alternative visions." —bell hooks In Queering Freedom, Shannon Winnubst examines contemporary categories of difference—sexuality, race, gender, class, and nationality—and how they operate within the politics of domination. Drawing on the work of Georges Bataille, Michel Foucault, and others, Winnubst engages feminist theory, race theory, (...) and queer theory as she sheds light on blind spots that have characterized thinking about freedom. Winnubst turns away from the language of rights, identity politics, and liberation toward bodies and experiences to calibrate normative ideas of time and space. Her views operate at the very limits of freedom, which contain individuals within strict boundaries that they are forbidden to cross. Winnubst develops strategies of "queering freedom" to undo the more subtle spatial and temporal norms and shatter structures of domination. This thoughtful and provocative work challenges the cornerstones of contemporary philosophies about the body and its politics. (shrink)

Leading scholars explore how different forms of ignorance are produced and sustained, and the role they play in knowledge practices.

Adverse childhood experiences are known to have deleterious effects on individuals across the life span, but less is known about how they affect grit, a strong predictor of achievements and well-being. This study seeks to investigate the effect of ACEs on grit in a sample of Chinese college students during the COVID-19 pandemic. Data were collected from 1,871 students across 12 universities in China. Findings indicated a significant effect of ACEs on grit, particularly abuse and neglect dimensions of ACE. Since (...) grit is particularly important for professional success, those who have experienced abuse and neglect victimization may struggle throughout their education, and subsequently, in their careers. This calls for interventions to buffer the effects of ACEs on grit. (shrink)

Research Ethics, Volume 18, Issue 2, Page 93-113, April 2022. Twitter is an increasingly common source of rich, personalized qualitative data, as millions of people daily share their thoughts on myriad topics. However, questions remain unclear concerning if and how to quote publicly available social media data ethically. In this study, focusing on 136 education manuscripts quoting 2667 Tweets, we look to investigate the ways in which Tweets are quoted, the ethical discussions forwarded and actions taken, and the extent to (...) which quoted Tweets are “discoverable.” A concerning result is that in almost all manuscripts, and for around half of all quoted Tweets, the original author could be identified. Drawing on our findings we share some ethical dilemmas, including those that arise from an apparent lack of understanding of the technical aspects of the platform, and offer suggestions for promoting ethically-informed practice. (shrink)

This paper substantiates a distinction, built out of Gricean resources, between two kinds of communicative act: showing and telling. Where telling that p proceeds by recruiting an addressee’s capacity to recognize trustworthy informants, showing does not. Instead, showing proceeds by presenting an addressee with a consideration that provides reason to believe that p (other than the reason provided by an informant’s credibility), and so recruits their capacity to respond to those reasons. With this account in place, the paper defends an (...) account of one way in which authors can show their readers that certain moral states of affairs obtain both inside, and outside of, their fictions. It is argued, moreover, that this kind of showing gives addressees access to more than just reasons for moral belief–it also gives them access to the sorts of reasons that enable agents to increase their moral understanding. In virtue of these latter capacities, the showing identified is a way of communicating about morality that is markedly different from the sort of moral testimony that many philosophers have been increasingly interested in of late. (shrink)

Imagination seems to play an epistemic role in philosophical and scientific thought experiments, mindreading, and ordinary practical deliberations insofar as it generates new knowledge of contingent facts about the world. However, it also seems that imagination is limited to creative generation of ideas. Sometimes we imagine fanciful ideas that depart freely from reality. The conjunction of these claims is what I call the puzzle of knowledge through imagination. This chapter aims to resolve this puzzle. I argue that imagination has an (...) epistemic role to play, but it is limited to the context of discovery. Imagination generates ideas, but other cognitive capacities must be employed to evaluate these ideas in order for them to count as knowledge. Consideration of the Simulation Theory's so-called "threat of collapse” provides further evidence that imagination does not, on its own, yield new knowledge of contingent facts, and it suggests a way to supplement imagination in order to get such knowledge. (shrink)

Mirror neurons are widely regarded as an important key to social cognition. Despite such wide agreement, there is very little consensus on how or why they are important. The goal of this paper is to clearly explicate the exact role mirror neurons play in social cognition. I aim to answer two questions about the relationship between mirroring and social cognition: What kind of social understanding is involved with mirroring? How is mirroring related to that understanding? I argue that philosophical and (...) empirical considerations lead us to accord a fairly minimal role for mirror neurons in social cognition. (shrink)

This paper develops a phenomenological defense of Ian Hacking's experimental realism about unobservable entities in physical science, employing historically undervalued resources from the phenomenological tradition in order to clarify the warrant for our ontological commitments in science. Building upon the work of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Heelan, the paper provides a phenomenological correction of the positivistic conception of perceptual evidence maintained by antirealists such as van Fraassen, the experimental relevance of which is illustrated through a phenomenological interpretation of the 1974 discovery (...) of the J/ ψ particle generally regarded as evidence for the charmed quark. The argument then turns to address known problems in Hacking's account, demonstrating that his own instrumentalist criterion of the real is inadequately rooted in the phenomenology of perception, and as a result, passes over the true ontological significance of experimental phenomena. The paper maintains that the proper criterion, only indirectly related to instrumentality, is the distinctive style of the real encountered in perception: empirical pregnancy. With this notion and Merleau-Ponty's associated reversibility thesis, I show that the phenomenological tradition provides insights into the warrant for our realist commitments that have yet to be adequately acknowledged by philosophers of science. (shrink)

"[A] lucid discussion of race that does not sell out the black experience." —Tommy Lott, author of The Invention of Race Revealing Whiteness explores how white privilege operates as an unseen, invisible, and unquestioned norm in society today. In this personal and selfsearching book, Shannon Sullivan interrogates her own whiteness and how being white has affected her. By looking closely at the subtleties of white domination, she issues a call for other white people to own up to their unspoken (...) privilege and confront environments that condone or perpetuate it. Sullivan’s theorizing about race and privilege draws on American pragmatism, psychology, race theory, and feminist thought. As it articulates a way to live beyond the barriers that white privilege has created, this book offers readers a clear and honest confrontation with a trenchant and vexing concern. (shrink)