Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) diseases are a group of neuromuscular diseases that often cause suffering and premature death. New mitochondrial replacement techniques (MRTs) may offer women with mtDNA diseases the opportunity to have healthy offspring to whom they are genetically related. MRTs will likely be ready to license for clinical use in the near future and a discussion of the ethics of the clinical introduction ofMRTs is needed. This paper begins by evaluating three concerns about the safety of MRTs for clinical (...) use on humans: (1) Is it ethical to use MRTs if safe alternatives exist? (2) Would persons with three genetic contributors be at risk of suffering? and (3) Can society trust that MRTs will be made available for humans only once adequate safety testing has taken place, and that MRTs will only be licensed for clinical use in a way that minimises risks? It is then argued that the ethics debate about MRTs should be reoriented towards recommendingways to reduce the possible risks of MRT use on humans. Two recommendations are made: (1) licensed clinical access to MRTs should only be granted to prospective parents if they intend to tell their children about their MRT conception by adulthood; and (2) sex selection should be used in conjunction with the clinical use ofMRTs, in order to reduce transgenerational health risks. (shrink)

Mitochondrial replacement techniques have the potential to allow prospective parents who are at risk of passing on debilitating or even life-threatening mitochondrial disorders to have healthy children to whom they are genetically related. Ethical concerns have however been raised about these techniques. This article focuses on one aspect of the ethical debate, the question of whether there is any moral difference between the two types of MRT proposed: Pronuclear Transfer and Maternal Spindle Transfer. It examines how questions of identity impact (...) on the ethical evaluation of each technique and argues that there is an important difference between the two. PNT, it is argued, is a form of therapy based on embryo modification while MST is, instead, an instance of selective reproduction. The article's main ethical conclusion is that, in some circumstances, there is a stronger obligation to use PNT than MST. (shrink)

Currently in the United Kingdom, anyone donating gametes has the status of an open-identity donor. This means that, at the age of 18, persons conceived with gametes donated since April 1, 2005 have a right to access certain pieces of identifying information about their donor. However, in early 2015, the UK Parliament approved new regulations that make mitochondrial donors anonymous. Both mitochondrial donation and gamete donation are similar in the basic sense that they involve the contribution of gamete materials to (...) create future persons. Given this similarity, this paper presumes that both types of donor should be treated the same and made open-identity under the law, unless there is a convincing argument for treating them differently. I argue that none of the existing arguments that have been made so far in favor of mitochondrial donor anonymity are convincing and mitochondrial donors should therefore be treated as open-identity donors under UK law. (shrink)

Although best known as a scientific instrument maker, John Rowley extended his sphere of activity very considerably as Master of Mechanics to George I and as a hydraulic engineer at the Offices of Ordnance and Works. Re-examined and untapped sources provide fresh evidence of these aspects of his work and highlight his predilection for the arts and the virtuosity of his artefacts. The findings also have implications for studies of the instrument-making trade in the early eighteenth century.

This paper is the report of a meetingthat gathered many of the UK's most senioranimal scientists with representatives of thefarming industry, consumer groups, animalwelfare groups, and environmentalists. Therewas strong consensus that the current economicstructure of agriculture cannot adequatelyaddress major issues of concern to society:farm incomes, food security and safety, theneeds of developing countries, animal welfare,and the environment. This economic structure isbased primarily on competition betweenproducers and between retailers, driving foodprices down, combined with externalization ofmany costs. These issues must be addressed (...) by acombination of legislation, restructuring ofthe market, and use of public funds. Themeeting included workshops that made otherrecommendations for research and education. Themost urgent requirement is recognition thatchange is needed and development of a visionfor what that change must achieve. (shrink)

Well-known in his day, but overlooked since, Erasmus King lectured in natural and experimental philosophy from the 1730s until 1756 at his Westminster home and twenty other venues, publicizing his frequent courses exclusively in the Daily Advertiser. In 1739 he escorted Desaguliers's youngest son to Russia, hoping to demonstrate experimental philosophy to the Russian empress. En route, he conducted trials with a sea-guage in the Baltic which were reported by Stephen Hales in his Statical Essays. Various sources testify to King's (...) subsequent experimental research for Hales in the fields of anatomy, respiration and electricity. There is recorded evidence for the exceptional range and quality of King's scientific apparatus and models. (shrink)

Keith Ansell Pearson and Diane Morgan , Nihilism Now! Monsters of Energy ISBN - 9780333732922Gary Banham and Charlie Blake , Evil Spirits: Nihilism and the Fate of Modernity ISBN - 9780719056420.

Eugene W. Holland, Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus:Introduction to Schizoanalysis ISBN - 9780415113182Patrick Hayden, Multiplicity and Becoming: The Pluralist Empiricismof Gilles Deleuze, Studies in European Thought XV ISBN - 9780820438566.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated inequalities, including among the healthcare workforce. Based on recent literature and drawing on our experiences of working in operating theatres and critical care in the UK’s National Health Service during the pandemic, we review the role of personal protective equipment and consider the ethical implications of its design, availability and provision at a time of unprecedented demand. Several important inequalities have emerged, driven by factors such as individuals purchasing their own personal protective equipment, inconsistencies between (...) guidelines issued by different agencies and organisations, and the standardised design and procurement of equipment required to protect a diverse healthcare workforce. These, we suggest, have resulted largely because of a lack of appropriate pandemic planning and coordination, as well as insufficient appreciation of the significance of equipment design for the healthcare setting. As with many aspects of the pandemic, personal protective equipment has created and revealed inequalities driven by economics, gender, ethnicity and professional influence, creating a division between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ of personal protective equipment. As the healthcare workforce continues to cope with ongoing waves of COVID-19, and with the prospect of more pandemics in the future, it is vital that these inequalities are urgently addressed, both through academic analysis and practical action. All data relevant to the study are included in the article. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Peacebuilding: Catholic Theology, Ethics, and Praxis ed. by Robert J. Schreiter, R. Scott Appleby, Gerard F. PowersJames W. McCarty IIIPeacebuilding: Catholic Theology, Ethics, and Praxis Edited by Robert J. Schreiter, R. Scott Appleby, and Gerard F. Powers Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2010. 480pp. $27.00Peacebuilding results from a four-year research project sponsored by the Catholic Peacebuilding Network. A wide-ranging and interdisciplinary set of fifteen essays, Peacebuilding not (...) only brings to the fore the unique ways that Roman Catholic theology and practice has contributed to the global work of peacebuilding, but it also makes the case that the Catholic Church needs to develop a more robust theology of peacebuilding to complement and strengthen traditional Catholic approaches to the ethics of war and peace. The two most bold proposals along these lines are Daniel Philpott’s call for a papal encyclical on peacebuilding (92, 120) and Maryann Cusimano Love’s proposal of “just peace” criteria for guiding peacebuilding work in a fashion similar to the way “just war” criteria have guided the conduct of war (82, 425–27).Peacebuilding is organized into two main sections. The first documents and theorizes the work of Catholic actors and organizations in peacebuilding work. In one of the most helpful essays in this section, John Paul Lederach describes how the “ubiquitous presence” of the Catholic Church in a society is, in fact, one of the most unique contributions the Church has to make to global peacebuilding. Lederach uses the phrase “ubiquitous presence” to describe the unique role Catholic “actors” play within the “pyramid approach” to peacebuilding that he develops elsewhere (see Lederach, The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Peacebuilding [New York: Oxford University Press, 2005], 79). Because of its hierarchical structure, the Catholic Church—especially in Catholic-majority countries—has the potential to cultivate peacebuilding allies among different sectors of a society: the elite, “midlevel” actors, and at the grassroots level. Many other peacebuilding actors—politicians, civil society activists, and the historic peace churches, for instance—do not have such a ubiquitous presence. While Lederach has previously emphasized the importance of midlevel actors in peacebuilding, in this essay he argues that the “ubiquitous presence” of the Catholic Church [End Page 213] in a society provides a basis for making connections for peacebuilding work among a range of sectors within a society. Several of the other contributors to this book draw on this observation and demonstrate its usefulness to a variety of settings. In my estimation, this is the most important contribution of the volume.The second section consists of six essays that both expand upon existing Catholic moral theology and make the case that Catholic theology needs to develop a more robust theology of peacebuilding. Here we find a range of arguments—from Robert Schreiter’s proposal for a practical theology of reconciliation and Peter Phan’s outline of a fourfold Catholic understanding of interreligious dialogue to Kenneth Himes’s discussion of the ways peacebuilding theory challenges and complements contemporary Catholic social teaching. Himes, in particular, claims that the current acceptance of a Catholic “presumption against war” requires a more robust Catholic approach to conflict transformation; in making his case, he draws on resonances between contemporary peacebuilding theory and recent reflections on jus post bellum (justice after war) as a new category of just war thinking.As in nearly every edited collection, the quality of the essays in Peacebuilding varies. I found the essays in the first section to be the most stimulating. Not only do they highlight the peacebuilding work the Catholic Church is currently doing around the world, they also ground their proposals for how we should understand and do peacebuilding from a Catholic perspective in relevant historical examples.Indeed, the varied nature of the essays in Peacebuilding is precisely what makes it a valuable resource for both researchers and teachers of peacebuilding. On the one hand, it includes essays that break new ground and move forward our understanding of the unique nature of Catholic peacebuilding. On the other, it includes essays that introduce the topic of peacebuilding to students of religion and ethics. This book, then, serves as an excellent resource for a range... (shrink)

Few discussions of the ethics of mitochondrial ‘replacement’ techniques have drawn significant ethical distinctions between the two approaches now legal in the U.K. However, Anthony Wrigley, Stephen Wilkinson and John Appleby have together argued that under some circumstances pronuclear transfer (PNT) may be in better ethical standing than maternal spindle transfer (MST). They base their conclusion on what they allege to be different implications of the techniques with respect to non‐identity considerations, which they ground on a version of (...) origin essentialism. I raise a series of problems for their argument, which have cautionary implications for invocations of origin essentialism that go beyond specialized debates regarding MST and PNT. I argue that (i) origin essentialism is a fragile foundation for non‐identity considerations; (ii) gametic essentialism, which Wrigley et al. believe licenses their claims, is more questionable than origin essentialism; (iii) gametic essentialism does not straightforwardly justify their conclusion; and (iv) their conclusion in fact relies on an especially dubious position that we can call chromosomal origin essentialism. No good reasons have yet been supplied to distinguish PNT from MST on ethical grounds, and one should be wary of basing claims with practical impact on fragile foundations relating to origin essentialism. (shrink)

The Institute of Medicine has recently endorsed arguments put forward by John Appleby calling for mandatory sex selection against female offspring in the initial trials of mitochondrial replacement techniques. In this paper I argue that, despite this endorsement, the reasons offered by Appleby for mandatory sex selection are inadequate. I further argue that plausible revisions to Appleby's arguments still fail to convincingly defend such an intrusive policy. While I remain neutral about whether intending parents making use (...) of mitochondrial replacement techniques ought to have access to sex selection, I conclude that to date the case for mandatory sex selection has not been satisfactorily made. (shrink)

In general we think of reasoning as a way of moving from some body of evidence to a belief that is drawn as a conclusion from it. But is it possible for reasoning to conclude in action, i.e., in a person’s intentionally doing one thing or another? In PRACTICAL SHAPE Jonathan Dancy answers 'Yes', on the grounds that "when an agent deliberates well and then acts accordingly, the action done is of the sort most favoured by the considerations rehearsed, taken (...) as a whole—just as when an agent reasons well and then believes accordingly, the belief formed ... is of the sort most favoured by the considerations rehearsed, again taken as a whole" (Dancy 2018, p. 29). I critique this supposed parallelism between reasoning to action and reasoning to belief, arguing in two ways that in practical reasoning the action that is one’s conclusion need not be meant to be, or to be of a sort, that is most favored by the considerations that one reasons from. I then go on to explain why this should be: that in practical reasoning the correct conclusion to draw is not supposed to have been determined in advance, because this is a form of reasoning by which we create truth through acting rather than reflecting a truth that is independently so. (shrink)

This book sets out for the first time in English and in the terms of modern logic the semantics of the Port Royal Logic of Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, perhaps the most influential logic book in the 17th and 18th centuries. Its goal is to explain how the Logic reworks the foundation of pre-Cartesian logic so as to make it compatible with Descartes' metaphysics. The Logic's authors forged a new theory of reference based on the medieval notion of objective (...) being, which is essentially the modern notion of intentional content. Indeed, the book's central aim is to detail how the Logic reoriented semantics so that it centered on the notion of intentional content. This content, which the Logic calls comprehension, consists of an idea's defining modes. Mechanisms are defined in terms of comprehension that rework earlier explanations of central notions like conceptual inclusion, signification, abstraction, idea restriction, sensation, and most importantly within the Logic's metatheory, the concept of idea-extension, which is a new technical concept coined by the Logic. Although Descartes is famous for rejecting "Aristotelianism," he says virtually nothing about technical concepts in logic. His followers fill the gap. By putting to use the doctrine of objective being, which had been a relatively minor part of medieval logic, they preserve more central semantic doctrines, especially a correspondence theory of truth. A recurring theme of the book is the degree to which the Logic hews to medieval theory. This interpretation is at odds with what has become a standard reading among French scholars according to which this 16th-century work should be understood as rejecting earlier logic along with Aristotelian metaphysics, and as putting in its place structures more like those of 19th-century class theory. (shrink)

Henri Bergson's philosophy is centered on forming a concept of lived time or durée, which he saw as a process of continuous variation and flux. He believed that the study of time should be the foundation of philosophy. By studying time, we find an integration of concrete, infinite, qualitative multiplicity within consciousness that we should use to understand the essence of reality. I show that his insights into the reality of duration come directly from a metaphysical or phenomenological interpretation of (...) integral and differential calculus. Drawing on the recently published lectures from 1902–1905, I show how An Introduction to Metaphysics schematizes the methodology of Matter and Memory and Time and Free Will by means of this mathematical analogy. To Bergson, the concepts of calculus are not mere metaphors; they unleash certain metaphysical implications that problematize the mind's relation to movement, life, consciousness, time, and consequently, reality itself. (shrink)

John Kulvicki explores the many ways in which pictures can be meaningful, taking inspiration from the philosophy of language. Pictures are important parts of communicative acts. They express a variety of thoughts, and they are also representations. Kulvicki shows how the meanings of pictures let us put them to a wide range of communicative uses.

In this attempt to deal with the problem of free will Tallis identifies intentionality as a feature of our lives that cannot be explained by deterministic, natural, physical, causal laws. Our ability to think about the world, and not merely be objects subject to it, gives us room for manoeuvre for free thought and action. Science, far from being antagonistic to the possibility of free will as it is usually presented through its deterministic explanations, is a manifestation of our freedom (...) and could not exist without it. However, doubts arise for the argument owing to a lack of explanation as to how freedom is possible no matter how persuasively we are shown that it appears to be. That is, what kind of world would it have to be for freedom to exist and be explicable. I conclude with my own view, alluded to by Tallis, but not followed up, that the problem with the scientific worldview is that it is wedded to objectivity as the only stance deemed veridical as to the nature of reality, one which therefore cannot by necessity allow subjects or freedom. As freedom is a property of subjects, the scientific worldview cannot allow for freedom. Once the condition is dropped that only the objectively knowable can be real, freedom also may be real, defined as a knowable property of our subjectivity. There is no need to deny physicalism if the definition of it is released from the epistemic bonds of objectivity and we hold that some physical properties may be known subjectively, namely those that characterize our subjective life. (shrink)

The new evidence scholarship addresses three distinct approaches: legal probabilism, Bayesian decision theory and relative plausibility theory. Each has major insights to offer, but none seems satisfactory as it stands. This paper proposes that relative plausibility theory be modified in two substantial ways. The first is by defining its key concept of plausibility, hitherto treated as primitive, by generalising the standard axioms of probability. The second is by complementing the descriptive component of the theory with a normative decision theory adapted (...) to legal process. Because this version of decision theory is based on plausibilities rather than probabilities, it generates plausibilistic expectations as outputs. Because these outputs are comparable, they function as relative plausibilities. Hence the resulting framework is an extension of relative plausibility theory, but it retains deep ties to legal probabilism, through the proposed definition of plausibility, and to Bayesian decision theory, through the normative use of decision theory. (shrink)

Previously published in The mountain path, quarterly published from Sri Ramanansramam.

In this article, we examine the inter-relationship between moral theory and the unpredictable and complex world of primary health care, where the values of patient and doctor, or groups of patients and doctors, may often clash. We introduce complexity science and its relevance to primary care; going on to explore how it can assist in understanding ethical decision making, as well as considering implications for clinical practice. Throughout the article, we showcase aspects and key concepts using examples and a case (...) study developed from our day-to-day experience working as clinical practitioners in primary care. (shrink)

The longstanding species problem in biology has a history that suggests a solution, and that history is not the received history found in many texts written by biologists or philosophers. The notion of species as the division into subordinate groups of any generic predicate was the staple of logic from Aristotle through the middle ages until quite recently. However, the biological species concept during the same period was at first subtly and then overtly different. Unlike the logic sense, which relied (...) on definitions of the essence of both genus and species, biological species from the time of Epicurus were consistently considered to involve a reproductive element: in short, living species relied not on essential definitions, but on the generative cause, which might not be definable. I term this the generative conception of species: species were the generation by reproduction of form. This undercuts the claim that species before Darwin were essentialist, and divorces the notion of a type from that of essence. In fact, as late as the end of the nineteenth century, logicians explicitly treated biological “species” as a homonym only of logical essentialist species, and permitted considerable deviation from the type or form. At every point, species in logic were thought to be a subset, in effect, of some more general notion. I sketch a history of both philosophical and biological traditions of the species concept, before turning to the current conceptions. These are reconsidered in the light of this history, and in particular Mayr’s changing views are shown to be somewhat Whiggish, historiographically. Of the many touted biological species concepts, only one of which (Mayr’s) is called _the_ Biological Species Concept, none appears to capture all the relevant facts, intuitions, and operational requirements of biology. Cladistic conceptions, however, have much in common with the older philosophical literature, in that the natural group of cladism is the clade, or monophyletic group. After considering the Individuality Thesis, and the metaphysics of species, we see that species are the most particular terminal taxa in a clade, and that they are “defined” in terms of the particular synapomorphies, or evolved characters, that are causally responsible for keeping the lineages that organisms form distinct from one another. In this way, we can remain within the generative conception of species that has been in play for over two millennia, and yet avoid the pitfalls of prior attempts to find a universal conception of species. (shrink)

This is a personal account of one man’s experience of the months during which COVID-19 spread in Australia. Though personal, it aims to also be representative, so that readers will find in it reflections of their own experiences. Various social incidents are described, some in which social distancing is involved. The altering states of the author’s mind as time passes are carefully described in sequence, and the impact of continued anxiety and isolation on his mental well-being is presented as a (...) form of madness, in one dramatic incident. (shrink)

Recent investigations on how people derive meaning from language have focused on task‐dependent shifts between two cognitive systems. The symbolic (amodal) system represents meaning as the statistical relationships between words. The embodied (modal) system represents meaning through neurocognitive simulation of perceptual or sensorimotor systems associated with a word's referent. A primary finding of literature in this field is that the embodied system is only dominant when a task necessitates it, but in certain paradigms, this has only been demonstrated using nouns (...) and adjectives. The purpose of this paper is to study whether similar effects hold with verbs. Experiment 1 evaluated a novel task in which participants rated a selection of verbs on their implied vertical movement. Ratings correlated well with distributional semantic models, establishing convergent validity, though some variance was unexplained by language statistics alone. Experiment 2 replicated previous noun‐based location‐cue congruency experimental paradigms with verbs and showed that the ratings obtained in Experiment 1 predicted reaction times more strongly than language statistics. Experiment 3 modified the location‐cue paradigm by adding movement to create an animated, temporally decoupled, movement‐verb judgment task designed to examine the relative influence of symbolic and embodied processing for verbs. Results were generally consistent with linguistic shortcut hypotheses of symbolic‐embodied integrated language processing; location‐cue congruence elicited processing facilitation in some conditions, and perceptual information accounted for reaction times and accuracy better than language statistics alone. These studies demonstrate novel ways in which embodied and linguistic information can be examined while using verbs as stimuli. (shrink)

In Eco’s work between around 1960 and 1992, “openness” in a modern literary text can mean (a) “permitting more than one interpretation,” and (b) “requiring a good deal of decoding work from the reader,” which is close to my own position. These two aspects of openness are demonstrated using Baudelaire’s Les Chats, in regard to which Eco denies that the text may be cristallin in Lévi-Strauss’s sense, while still requiring constructive effort from the reader. It is apparent that this term (...) is equivalent to Riffaterreʼs textual “monumentality.” Eco does not go into detail about the reader’s work in assembling the text’s global propositional structure. It is left to Riffaterre and myself to detail the various stages of this work, involving comparison of images in order to discover their common underlying generative proposition. In contrast to Riffaterre, I have long suggested that the modern poetic text is built on two such propositions. It is at the stage of relations between text and sociolect that Eco contributes much to modern poetics. Openness (b) seems to be a prerequisite for perceptual change in the reader, produced by contrast between textual structure and its sociolectic context. Riffaterre prefers to remain within the text/intertext/interpretant triad, preventing him from describing the text-sociolect relation, where the propositional innovation of the modernist text takes effect. (shrink)