A Reformed understanding of sickness requires that connections be drawn between the structural effects of sin and the ways that sickness is experienced in people's lives. Such an understanding can be an important resource for the bioethicist, both the bioethicist who speaks from the Reformed tradition and the bioethicist who speaks to patients and caregivers who may assume that sin and sickness are connected, but may understand that linkage in overly simplistic ways.

Connected Lives examines the account of human nature that is implicit in an ethics of care, a picture of human lives that emphasizes interdependency, embodiment, and social connectedness. The book makes important connections to the picture of human life found in theorists of love such as St. Augustine and Emmanuel Levinas, and shows that when care theory is articulated clearly, it provides resources for thinking through some of the difficult moral issues we face in the contemporary world, issues such as (...) assisted reproduction and the new genetic technologies. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Care theory has the resources to offer an insightful and original theoretical perspective on issues in medical ethics. The paper begins with a discussion of the sort of theory Care is, and argues that it closely resembles virtue theory. After a discussion of cammon features of Care theories, I respond to a few of the criticisme that have been levied against the theory. The final section of the paper is a discussion of the question (...) of neutrality in public moral discourse. Care theory is not a neutral theory with regard to questions of the nature of the good life for humans, but I argue that this should not preclude Care from playing a part in the public debate over policy decisions. (shrink)

Traditionally, healthcare workers have had the right to refuse to participate in abortions or physician-assisted suicide, but more recently there has been a movement in white Evangelical circles to expand these rights to include the refusal of any treatment at all to same-sex couples or their children, transgender individuals, or others who offend the provider’s moral sensibilities. Religious freedom of conscience exists in an uneasy tension with laws protecting equal rights in a liberal polity, and it is a particularly fraught (...) question in the context of medicine, where providers’ consciences must be balanced against patients’ rights to access appropriate care. This article examines the refusal of care to classes of people, usually classes defined by various sexual issues with which the caregivers disagree. This expands conscientious refusals from the traditional concept of responses to actions and instead directs it at specific types of people. The article draws on Reformed thought to argue that such refusals are not justified and are, in fact, both a profound misreading of Christian morality and a new and dangerously expansive account of the right to conscientious refusal in medicine. (shrink)

"The stories are powerful, sometimes heart-rending, sometimes lyrical, but always deeply personal. And there is some very good philosophizing as part of the bargain." —Merold Westphal How can the seemingly separate lives of philosopher, feminist, and follower of a religious tradition come together in one person’s life? How does religious commitment affect philosophy or feminism? How does feminism play out in religious or philosophical commitment? Wrestling with answers to these questions, women who balance philosophy, feminism, and faith write about their (...) lives. The voices gathered here from several different traditions—Catholic, Protestant, Quaker, Jewish, and Muslim—represent diverse ethnicities, races, and ages. The challenging and poignant reflections in Philosophy, Feminism, and Faith show how critical thought can successfully mesh with religious faith and social responsibility. (shrink)

The global migration of physicians and nurses produces serious shortages in the developing world, exemplifying one of the ways that global capitalism sets up dynamics of surplus extraction from periphery to global wealth centers. This paper focuses specifically on the Ghanaian situation, and argues that an ethics of care framework offers a way of approaching the problem productively. Recognizing the various commitments and relationships that tie us together allows for a response that protects individual freedom while responding to the need (...) to maintain adequate numbers of trained health-care workers. (shrink)

Christians, health care, and basic moral reasoning -- When life ends -- Chronic illness, suffering, and Christian responses -- Organ donation and heroic medicine -- Scarce resources and Christian compassion -- Abortion -- Assisted reproduction and embryo selection -- Embryo research and cloning -- What happened to the neighbors? global health care -- The global challenge of HIV/AIDS -- Concluding thoughts.

Simone de Beauvoir's account of biology in The Second Sex offers a nuanced and well‐developed phenomenological account of the lived experience of sexual difference. It is an account of biology that recognizes the importance of embodiment for the experience of freedom, and also recognizes the ways that particular bodies shape those experiences. She provides clarity about why biology matters, and why the fact that it matters does not mean that it determines our sense of self or identity. Beauvoir's thought offers (...) important resources for contemporary scientific discussions of sex and sexuality, as can be seen by its close parallels to the view of sexual identity developed by Anne Fausto‐Sterling. It also offers an important vantage point for critiquing the simplistic, deterministic accounts of sex differences found in contemporary evolutionary psychology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Being in Time: Selves and Narrators in Philosophy and LiteratureRuth GroenhoutBeing in Time: Selves and Narrators in Philosophy and Literature, by Genevieve Lloyd; 192 pp. New York: Routledge, 1993, $49.95 cloth, $19.95 paper.Philosophers have long been telling stories about temporal consciousness. Augustine explained it as an imperfect reflection of the eternal God in whose image persons are made; Kant explained it as the transcendental unity of apperception, assumed (...) in any act of understanding while always just out of range; Nietzsche explained it as eternal recurrence. These issues also appear in literary treatments of the self, particularly those by Proust and Woolf. In this book, Genevieve Lloyd compares a broad range of philosophical discussions to these two writers. [End Page 404]Being in Time argues for several fascinating conclusions, among them a rejection of the claim that modern and premodern philosophy implicitly assumed the existence of a unified subject. Although Proust and Woolf are often held up as paradigmatic of the fragmented self, which also plays a prominent role in Derrida, this is not a postmodern discovery, Lloyd claims; the unified subject has been problematic throughout the Western philosophical tradition. She concludes, nonetheless, that postmodern thought does represent a new departure, at least to the extent that it treats the fragmentation of self not as a problem to be solved, but as a fundamental feature of what it is to be human.Meanwhile, Being in Time also pursues a second theme: the relationship between philosophy and fictional narrative. Drawing on Ricoeur and Aristotle, Lloyd argues that the best way to understand philosophy is to approach it as a story that illuminates and explains the human self by means of metaphor. Literature and philosophy both involve the telling of stories that allow us to make sense of our world and our place in it.Does it follow that literature and philosophy are indistinguishable? They belong to the same family; each offers insight into the human condition, and does so through the medium of myth, story, narrative, or fiction. They are not identical twins, however, since philosophy uses stories and metaphors to draw connections among universals while literature tells its stories about universals by means of particulars. (Compare Hobbes’s State of Nature to Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.) For Lloyd, though, it is a mistake to discard the narrative and literary aspects of a philosophical work in an effort to get at what might be considered its real point (namely, deductive arguments). The illuminating power of philosophy lies not in truncated arguments, but rather in the richer narratives, metaphors, and stories that are used to develop and explain them.Her claim for the unique nature of postmodern philosophy may not stand up to scrutiny—from Heraclitus through the skeptics and into the nominalist tradition of the Middle Ages, there has been a strand of Western thought that emphasizes the fragmentary, contingent nature of the self—but Lloyd’s claims for the family resemblance between literature and philosophy should be of interest to students of both subjects, particularly those concerned with the ways in which style, choice of metaphor, and narrative voice are relevant to philosophical study. The book makes an eloquent plea for reading philosophy instead of stripping its arguments of the narrative flesh with which they were originally endowed.Ruth GroenhoutSouthwest Missouri State UniversityCopyright © 1995 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic and its conflict with science denialism raises the question of how philosophers teaching bioethics should respond to debates concerning truth, scientific evidence, and medical treatment raised by their students. We suggest that philosophical responses to the spread of serious disinformation in the health care context can be effectively explored in bioethics courses through discussions of informed consent, patient autonomy, the nature of scientific evidence, and moral responsibly for one’s views in ways that are especially important in the (...) current pandemic era. Addressing these issues offers important epistemological grounding for students who will soon be making biomedical judgments and policies, as well as students who, like the rest of us, will be on the receiving end of those decisions. We argue that helping all of our students to understand the epistemological structures, and the moral consequences, of biomedicine and its detractors is a vital part of the professor’s responsibility. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic and its conflict with science denialism raises the question of how philosophers teaching bioethics should respond to debates concerning truth, scientific evidence, and medical treatment raised by their students. We suggest that philosophical responses to the spread of serious disinformation in the health care context can be effectively explored in bioethics courses through discussions of informed consent, patient autonomy, the nature of scientific evidence, and moral responsibly for one’s views in ways that are especially important in the (...) current pandemic era. Addressing these issues offers important epistemological grounding for students who will soon be making biomedical judgments and policies, as well as students who, like the rest of us, will be on the receiving end of those decisions. We argue that helping all of our students to understand the epistemological structures, and the moral consequences, of biomedicine and its detractors is a vital part of the professor’s responsibility. (shrink)

Written by one of today's most creative and innovative philosophers, Ruth Garrett Millikan, this book examines basic empirical concepts; how they are acquired, how they function, and how they have been misrepresented in the traditional philosophical literature. Millikan places cognitive psychology in an evolutionary context where human cognition is assumed to be an outgrowth of primitive forms of mentality, and assumed to have 'functions' in the biological sense. Of particular interest are her discussions of the nature of abilities as (...) different from dispositions, her detailed analysis of the psychological act of reidentifying substances, and her critique of the language of thought for mental representation. In a radical departure from current philosophical and psychological theories of concepts, this book provides the first in-depth discussion on the psychological act of reidentification. (shrink)

The fourth edition of this bestselling title is designed to help you think critically and thoughtfully about ethical decisions you'll face in practice-in any health care discipline. Utilizing a unique 6-step decision making process designed by the author, this multi-disciplinary text provides an expert framework for making effective choices that lead to a professional and caring response to patients and clients.

Hannah Arendt claims the concept of brotherhood presents false notions of political community that elide historic hatreds of others and threaten modern political life. This paper explores Arendt’s critical assessment of the concept of brotherhood in order to reflect on one specific example: the politics of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the wake of the Arab Spring of 2011. While some observers reject Arendt’s assessment of brotherhood as too narrow, her criticisms raise useful questions about democracy and plurality, which (...) confront any community that exhorts its members to act as ‘brethren’ rather than as ‘citizens.’ The Muslim concept of brotherhood suggests many different possibilities for belonging: a classic universalism of the Abrahamic natural law tradition; a progressive counter-public sphere; and as well the authoritarian private community of believers as represented in the early writings of the Muslim Brotherhood leadership. Therefore, the politically controversial Muslim Brotherhood has no monopoly over the understanding of the Muslim concept of brotherhood. However, it is the most powerful, most well-organized brotherhood movement. The paper opens and ends with reflections on the Arab Spring of 2011, its one-year anniversary in January 2012, and considers other possibilities for the concept of brotherhood against the backdrop of Arendt’s analysis. (shrink)

This article considers two arguments that purport to show that inductive reasoning is unjustified: the argument adduced by Sextus Empiricus and the (better known and more formidable) argument given by Hume in the Treatise. While Sextus’ argument can quite easily be rebutted, a close examination of the premises of Hume’s argument shows that they are seemingly cogent. Because the sceptical claim is very unintuitive, the sceptical argument constitutes a paradox. And since attributions of justification are theoretical, and the claim that (...) they are never (or seldom) true isn’t preposterous, the correct response to the paradox may well be to admit that the sceptic has exposed our error in making them. (shrink)

Research on visual attention has uncovered significant anomalies, and some traditional methods may have inadvertently probed peripheral vision rather than attention. Vision science needs to rethink visual attention from the ground up. To facilitate this, for a year I banned the word “attention” in my lab. This constraint promoted a more precise discussion of attention-related phenomena, capacity limits, and mechanisms. The insights gained lead me to challenge attributing to “attention” those phenomena that can be better explained by perceptual processes, are (...) predictable by an ideal observer model, or that otherwise may not require an additional mechanism. I enumerate a set of critical phenomena in need of explanation. Finally, I propose a unifying theory in which all perception results from performing a task, and tasks face a limit on complexity. (shrink)

They examine the currents of thought behind some of the most significant works in Western philosophy, including those by John Locke and David Hume.

Ruth Garrett Millikan presents a strikingly original account of how we get to grips with the world in thought. Her question is Kant's 'How is knowledge possible?', answered from a contemporary naturalist standpoint. We begin with an understanding of what the world is like prior to cognition, then develop a theory of cognition within that world.

In liberal political theory, meaningful work is conceptualised as a preference in the market. Although this strategy avoids transgressing liberal neutrality, the subsequent constraint upon state intervention aimed at promoting the social and economic conditions for widespread meaningful work is normatively unsatisfactory. Instead, meaningful work can be understood to be a fundamental human need, which all persons require in order to satisfy their inescapable interests in freedom, autonomy, and dignity. To overcome the inadequate treatment of meaningful work by liberal political (...) theory, I situate the good of meaningful work within a liberal perfectionist framework, from which standpoint I develop a normative justification for making meaningful work the object of political action. To understand the content of meaningful work, I make use of Susan Wolf’s distinct value of meaningfulness, in which she brings together the dimensions of objectivity and subjectivity into the ‘bipartite value’ of meaningfulness (BVM) (Wolf, Meaning in life and why it matters, 2010). However, in order to be able to incorporate the BVM into our lives, we must become valuers, that is, co-creators of values and meanings. This demands that we acquire the relevant capabilities and status as co-authorities in the realm of value. I conclude that meaningful work is of first importance because it is a fundamental human need, and that society ought to be arranged to allow as many people as possible to experience their work as meaningful through the development of the relevant capabilities. (shrink)

Ruth Millikan is well known for having developed a strikingly original way for philosophers to seek understanding of mind and language, which she sees as biological phenomena. She now draws together a series of groundbreaking essays which set out her approach to language. Guiding the work of most linguists and philosophers of language today is the assumption that language is governed by prescriptive normative rules. Millikan offers a fundamentally different way of viewing the partial regularities that language displays, comparing (...) them to biological norms that emerge from natural selection. This yields novel and quite radical consequences for our understanding of the nature of public linguistic meaning, the process of language understanding, how children learn language, and the semantics/pragmatics distinction. (shrink)

Based on Robert Baker's metaphorical view of damaging language, I argue that morally responsible individuals are obligated to refrain from using the word as a negative adjective directed towards that which the speaker dislikes. According to the metaphorical view, while a speaker may understand her use of the word as devoid of homosexual connotations, the hearer is likely to conclude that his puts him in the same hated category as all of those other objects, events, and persons who are negatively (...) called. (shrink)

A list of groceries, Professor Anscombe once suggested, might be used as a shopping list, telling what to buy, or it might be used as an inventory list, telling what has been bought (Anscombe 1957). If used as a shopping list, the world is supposed to conform to the representation: if the list does not match what is in the grocery bag, it is what is in the bag that is at fault. But if used as an inventory list, the (...) representation is supposed to conform to the world: if the list does not match what is in the bag, it is the list that is at fault. The first kind of representation, where the world is supposed to conform to the list, can be called "directive"; it represents or directs what is to be done. The second, where the list is supposed to conform to the world, can be called "descriptive"; it represents or describes what is the case. I wish to propose that there exist representations that face both these ways at once. With apologies to Dr. Doolittle, I call them pushmi-pullyu representations or PPRs. (shrink)

Die vorliegende Untersuchung setzt sich mit jenen Werken auseinander, die im frühen 18. Jahrhundert hermeneutische Problemgehalte ansprechen. Gleichsam als Vorbotin einer Kritik der Verstandeserkenntnis wird in der rationalistischen Aufklärung eine Bewegung spürbar, die geschichtshermeneutische, erkenntnis- und moralkritische Ansätze hervorbringt und in Opposition zu allgegenwärtigen nomologischen Vorstellungen die Frage nach dem ganzen Menschen neu formuliert. Diese ästhetisch-hermeneutische Kritik bezieht sich nicht nur auf die Gesetzeswissenschaften, sondern auch auf geschichtliche Problemstellungen, so daß die hier thematisierten Diskussionen über Gemeinsinn, empfindsame Moralkritik und ästhetische (...) Erkenntniskritik gleichsam Momente eines umfassenden Zusammenhangs verkörpern. (shrink)

We were shocked and deeply saddened to learn the news today. We had not heard from Martin for some time and were planning to write soon. Like so many others I considered Martin a loyal friend as well as a distinguished scholar. He set the highest standards for integrity and dedication to scholarship. No one was more generous in sharing his knowledlge with younger scholars.

Marcus argues that moral dilemmas are real, but that they are not the result of inconsistent moral principles. Moral principles are consistent just in case there is some world where all principles are 'obeyable.' They are inconsistent just in case there is no world where all are 'obeyable.' What this logical point is meant to show is that moral dilemmas do not make moral codes inconsistent. She also discusses guilt, and argues that guilt is still appropriate even in cases of (...) conflict, even when the agent thinks the right thing to do is clear. (shrink)

" Biosemantics " was the title of a paper on mental representation originally printed in The Journal of Philosophy in 1989. It contained a much abbreviated version of the work on mental representation in Language Thought and Other Biological Categories. There I had presented a naturalist theory of intentional signs generally, including linguistic representations, graphs, charts and diagrams, road sign symbols, animal communications, the "chemical signals" that regulate the function of glands, and so forth. But the term " biosemantics " (...) has usually been applied only to the theory of mental representation. Let me first characterize a more general class of theories called "teleological theories of mental content" of which biosemantics is an example. Then I will discuss the details that distinguish biosemantics from other naturalistic teleological theories. (shrink)

A leading scholar in the psychology of thinking and reasoning argues that the counterfactual imagination—the creation of "if only" alternatives to ...