While various definitions of moral distress have been proposed, some agreement exists that it results from illegitimate constraints in clinical practice affecting healthcare professionals’ moral agency. If we are to reduce moral distress, instruments measuring it should provide relevant information about such illegitimate constraints. Unfortunately, existing instruments fail to do so. We discuss here several shortcomings of major instruments in use: their inability to determine whether reports of moral distress involve an accurate assessment of the requisite clinical and logistical facts (...) in play, whether the distress in question is aptly characterized as moral, and whether the moral distress reported is an appropriate target of elimination. Such failures seriously limit the ability of empirical work on moral distress to foster appropriate change. (shrink)

Over the last five decades, philosophers of language have looked into the mechanisms for doing things with words. The same attention has not been devoted to how to undo those things, once they have been done. This paper identifies and examines three strategies to make one’s speech acts undone—namely, Annulment, Retraction, and Amendment. In annulling an act, a speaker brings to light its fatal flaws. Annulment amounts to recognizing an act as null, whereas retraction and amendment amount to making it (...) null. Speakers employ retraction to cancel the deontic updates engendered by a given act. They instead use amendment to adjust its degree of strength. I will argue that annulling, retracting, and amending are second-order speech acts, whose felicity conditions vary with the type of illocution they operate on. Undoing is therefore conceived of as a form of doing. Furthermore, I claim that, in calling off our acts, we undo the conventional or illocutionary effects of our words while leaving intact their past causal or perlocutionary outcomes. (shrink)

IRBs in action -- Everyone's an expert? Warrants for expertise -- Local precedents -- Documents and deliberations: an anticipatory perspective -- Setting IRBs in motion in Cold War America -- An ethics of place -- The many forms of consent -- Deflecting responsibility -- Conclusion: the making of ethical research.

"This book focuses on arguments from suffering against the existence of God and on a variety of issues concerning agency and value that they bring out. The central aim is to show the extent and power of arguments from evil. The book provides a close investigation of an under-defended claim at the heart of the major free-will-based responses to such arguments, namely that free will is sufficiently valuable to serve as the good, or prominently among the goods, that provides a (...) God-justifying reason for permitting evil in our world. Offering a fresh examination of traditional theodicies, it also develops an alternative line the author calls a divine intimacy theodicy. It makes an extended case for rejection of the position of skeptical theism. The book expands upon an argument from evil concerning a traditional doctrine of hell, which reveals a number of interesting issues concerning fault, agency, and blameworthiness. In response to recent work contending that the problem of evil is defanged since God's baseline attitude toward human beings is indifference, the book defends the essential perfect moral goodness of God. Finally it takes up the question of whether or not it makes sense to live a religious life as an agnostic or as an atheist"--. (shrink)

This article focuses on debates on philosophical knowledge, mathematics, and the empirical sciences by analyzing the positions on cosmological and astronomical knowledge, around 1800, of three German authors: Herder, Schelling, and Hegel. I show the mutual interdependence of Schelling’s and Hegel’s Naturphilosophie and Herder’s Ideen, and I then demonstrate that the latter’s position during the last years of his life was a reaction to Schelling’s and Hegel’s speculative philosophy. While Herder seems to ignore the works of the Naturphilosophen in his (...) journal Adrastea, in fact he participated in a very lively debate that included Schelling’s Weltseele and Hegel’s Dissertatio de Orbitis Planetarum. (shrink)

A new assessment of baron d’Holbach (1723-1789), his works, his circle and his legacy, gathering together generations of d’Holbach scholars to analyse multiple aspects of his diverse intellectual commitment from fresh perspectives.

An amazing value for digital photography beginners–Digital Cameras & Photography For Dummies, a full-color book, plus a 60-minute DVD! This value-priced bundle is the perfect how-to package for novice digital photographers who want to start taking great pictures right away. It features a 256-page, full-color guide that shows how to take great photos, edit them, and show them off–including special "makeover" chapters that explain how to turn bad photos into good ones. The 60-minute DVD demonstrates how to work with light, (...) focus, and exposure to get great photos when shooting sports action, in low light, or a panorama. It also offers tutorials on editing with Photoshop Elements and sharing photos using online services. (shrink)

Bringing together Luce Irigaray's early psychoanalytically orientated writings with her more recent and more explicitly political writings, Irigaray and Politics weaves together the ontological, political and ethical dimensions of Irigaray's philosophy of sexuate difference in imaginative ways.

This paper investigates the relationship between structural explanation and the New Mechanistic account of explanation. The aim of this paper is twofold: firstly, to argue that some phenomena in the domain of fundamental physics, although mechanically brute, are structurally explained; and secondly, by elaborating on the contrast between SE and mechanistic explanation to better clarify some features of SE. Finally, this paper will argue that, notwithstanding their apparently antithetical character, SE and ME can be reconciled within a unified account of (...) general scientific explanation. (shrink)

This article examines three cases of mid-20th-century oil media—oil-related imagery, iconographies, and media—in visual culture: a series of popular science books entitled The Story of Oil published in the US, an oil-themed set of Kuwaiti postage stamps (1959), and an art exhibition in Zurich (1956) titled Welt des Erdöls: Junge Maler sehen eine Industrie (World of Petroleum: Young Artists See an Industry). While depicting crude oil in its natural habitat was a common photographic theme in the early 20th-century United States, (...) the material discussed shows that, by the mid-20th century, crude oil no longer had the same visual presence. The iconography of oil in the three case studies came to rely increasingly on images of oil infrastructure and on context-specific depictions of living within petro-modernity or petro-culture, meaning lifestyles fueled by cheap fossil energy. However, it is not just the changes in visual representations of petroleum that matter; any debate about the visibility and invisibility of petroleum has to take into account the very media through which petroleum has become visually communicated—that is, the precise forms of oil's mediatization. The aesthetic negotiation of petroleum through media-based visual representations has been crucial for the dematerialization of fossil matter in its conversion to fossil energy, as well as the decoupling of sites of extraction from sites of production and consumption in the public imagination. As petro-culture has morphed into national or even global culture (rather than representing just one possible energy source among many), oil media has paved the way for our intimate relationship with fossil energy-dependent lifestyles, which is one of the biggest drivers of climate change. (shrink)

Moral disengagement is the process by which individuals mitigate the consequences of their own violations of moral standards. Although MD is understood to be co-determined by culture norms, no study has yet explored the extent to which MD applied to safety at work fosters safety violations, nor the role of organizational culture as a predictor of JS-MD. The current study seeks to address this gap in the literature by examining individual- and organizational-level factors that explain why employees fail to report (...) workplace accidents. We tested a latent variable structural model positing organizational culture typologies as predictors of JS-MD, which in turn is expected to mediate the relationship with accident underreporting. Using data from 1033 employees in 28 Italian organizations, findings suggest that bureaucratic safety culture was related to lower levels of JS-MD, whereas technocratic safety culture was related to greater JS-MD. In turn, JS-MD positively predicted employee accident underreporting and fully mediated the relationship between culture and underreporting. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed in light of the increasing focus on underreporting as well as the adverse individual and organizational consequences of failing to report workplace accidents. (shrink)

The 2006 outbreak of E. coli O157:H7, traced to bagged spinach from California, illustrates a number of contradictions. The solutions sought by many politicians and popular food analysts have been to create a centralized federal agency and a uniform set of production standards modeled after those of the animal industry. Such an approach would disproportionately harm smaller-scale producers, whose operations were not responsible for the epidemic, as well as reduce the agroecological diversity that is essential for maintaining healthy human beings (...) and ecosystems. Why should responses that only reinforce the problem be proffered? We use the framework of accumulation and legitimation to suggest corporate and government motives for concealing underlying problems and reinforcing powerful ideologies of individualism, scientism, and centralizing authority. Food safety (or the illusion of safety) is being positioned to secure capital rather than public welfare. We propose implementing the principle of subsidiarity as a more democratic and decentralized alternative. Because full implementation of this principle will be resisted by powerful interests, some promising intermediate steps include peer production or mass collaboration as currently applied to disease prevention and surveillance, as well as studying nascent movements resisting current food safety regulations. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

A normal state on a von Neumann algebra defines a countably additive probability measure over its projection lattice. The von Neumann algebras familiar from ordinary QM are algebras of all the bounded operators on a Hilbert space H, aka Type I factor von Neumann algebras. Their normal states are density operator states, and can be pure or mixed. In QFT and the thermodynamic limit of QSM, von Neumann algebras of more exotic types abound. Type III von Neumann algebras, for instance, (...) have no pure normal states; the pure states they do have fail to be countably additive. I will catalog a number of temptations to accord physical significance to non-normal states, and then give some reasons to resist these temptations: pure though they may be, non-normal states on non-Type I factor von Neumann algebras can't do the interpretive work we've come to expect from pure states on Type I factors; our best accounts of state preparation don't work for the preparation of non-normal states; there is a sense in which non-normal states fail to instantiate the laws of quantum mechanics. (shrink)

Background Intensivists must provide enough analgesia and sedation to ensure dying patients receive good palliative care. However, if it is perceived that too much is given, they risk prosecution for committing euthanasia. The goal of this study is to develop consensus guidelines on analgesia and sedation in dying intensive care unit patients that help distinguish palliative care from euthanasia. Methods Using the Delphi technique, panelists rated levels of agreement with statements describing how analgesics and sedatives should be given to dying (...) ICU patients and how palliative care should be distinguished from euthanasia. Participants were drawn from 3 panels: 1) Canadian Academic Adult Intensive Care Fellowship program directors and Intensive Care division chiefs (N = 9); 2) Deputy chief provincial coroners (N = 5); 3) Validation panel of Intensivists attending the Canadian Critical Care Trials Group meeting (N = 12). Results After three Delphi rounds, consensus was achieved on 16 statements encompassing the role of palliative care in the intensive care unit, the management of pain and suffering, current areas of controversy, and ways of improving palliative care in the ICU. Conclusion Consensus guidelines were developed to guide the administration of analgesics and sedatives to dying ICU patients and to help distinguish palliative care from euthanasia. (shrink)

Philosophical accounts of quantum theory commonly suppose that the observables of a quantum system form a Type-I factor von Neumann algebra. Such algebras always have atoms, which are minimal projection operators in the case of quantum mechanics. However, relativistic quantum field theory and the thermodynamic limit of quantum statistical mechanics make extensive use of von Neumann algebras of more general types. This chapter addresses the question whether interpretations of quantum probability devised in the usual manner continue to apply in the (...) more general setting. Features of non-type I factor von Neumann algebras are cataloged. It is shown that these novel features do not cause the familiar formalism of quantum probability to falter, since Gleason's Theorem and the Lüders Rule can be generalized. However, the features render the problem of the interpretation of quantum probability more intricate. (shrink)

In this paper we address a frontier topic in the humanities, namely how the cultural and natural construction that we call landscape affects well-being and health. Following an updated review of evidence-based literature in the fields of medicine, psychology, and architecture, we propose a new theoretical framework called “processual landscape,” which is able to explain both the health-landscape and the medical agency-structure binomial pairs. We provide a twofold analysis of landscape, from both the cultural and naturalist points of view: in (...) order to take into account its relationship with health, the definition of landscape as a cultural product needs to be broadened through naturalization, grounding it in the scientific domain. Landscape cannot be distinguished from the ecological environment. For this reason, we naturalize the idea of landscape through the notion of affordance and Gibson’s ecological psychology. In doing so, we stress the role of agency in the theory of perception and the health-landscape relationship. Since it is the result of continuous and co-creational interaction between the cultural agent, the biological agent and the affordances offered to the landscape perceiver, the processual landscape is, in our opinion, the most comprehensive framework for explaining the health-landscape relationship. The consequences of our framework are not only theoretical, but ethical also: insofar as health is greatly affected by landscape, this construction represents something more than just part of our heritage or a place to be preserved for the aesthetic pleasure it provides. Rather, we can talk about the right to landscape as something intrinsically linked to the well-being of present and future generations. (shrink)

A growing number of multi-stakeholder initiatives seek to improve labor and environmental standards through third-party certification. Fairtrade, one of the most popular third-party certifications in the agro-food sector, is currently expanding its operations from its traditional base in commodities like coffee produced by peasant cooperatives to products like flowers produced by hired labor enterprises. My analysis reveals how Fairtrade’s engagement in the hired labor sector is shaped by the tensions between traditional market and industrial conventions, rooted in price competition, bureaucratic (...) efficiency, product standardization and certification and alternative domestic and civic conventions, rooted in trust, personal ties, and concerns for societal wide benefits. At the global level, these tensions shape Fairtrade’s global standard setting as reflected in Fairtrade’s recently revised labor standards. At the local level, these tensions shape the varied impacts of certification on the ground as revealed through a case study of certified flower production in Ecuador. (shrink)

Philosophers have understood propositional contents in many different ways, some of them imposing stricter demands on cognition than others. In this paper, I want to characterize a specific sub-type of propositional content that shares many core features with full-blown propositional contents while lacking others. I will call them modest propositional contents, and I will be especially interested in examining which behavioral patterns would justify their attribution to non-human animals. To accomplish these tasks, I will begin by contrasting modest propositional contents (...) with primitive feature-placing contents: a kind of content that, according to some philosophers, can explain the behavior of non-human animals. I will examine which cognitive abilities are involved in having mental states with each of these contents and which sorts of behavioral patterns would provide evidence that an animal has one of them or another. Finally, I will present some empirical evidence which strongly suggests that some non-human animals have mental states with modest propositional contents. (shrink)

Two generalizations can be made regarding Kant’s account of imperatives of skill and prudence. First, Groundwork 4:412-420 remains the locus classicus for reconstructions of Kant’s view. Second, it is widely agreed that Kant’s treatment of these imperatives is confusing, incomplete, and lacking the requisite argumentation. I agree that Groundwork 4:412-420 lacks a clear and defensible account of imperatives of skill and prudence. But while many think this spells trouble for Kant’s theory of non-moral practical imperatives more generally, and that Kant (...) never really clarified his position, on this point I differ. Groundwork II is problematic, yet it’s not Kant’s final word on the non-moral imperatives of practical reason. In fact, there is substantial and broadly overlooked evidence that Kant later rejected much of the account he laid out in this text. This evidence is found primarily in the third Critique, and I explore this evidence and the virtues of Kant’s revised account. (shrink)

it is common in reid scholarship to use the notion of intentionality both to explicate his notion of conception and to explain his talk of acts such as perception having objects distinct from themselves. With regard to conception, Reid states that every act of conception “must have an object; for he that conceives, must conceive something.”1 Using the notion of intentionality, commentators interpret this to mean that, through conception, the mind is directed on an object, and that acts of conception (...) are always of an object or about something.2 Commentators further explicate the purported intentionality of conception in terms of it being an act of representing something or having representational content, where... (shrink)

The present narrative review addresses issues concerning the defining criteria and conceptual underpinnings of pain catastrophizing. To date, the concept of pain catastrophizing has been extensively used in many clinical and experimental contexts and it is considered as one of the most important psychological correlate of pain chronicity and disability. Although its extensive use, we are still facing important problems related to its defining criteria and conceptual understanding. At present, there is no general theoretical agreement of what catastrophizing really is. (...) The lack of a consensus on its definition and conceptual issues has important consequences on the choice of the pain management approaches, defining and identifying problems, and promoting novel research. Clinical and research work in absence of a common theoretical ground is often trivial. It is very surprising that clinical and experimental work has grown extensively in the past years, without a common ground in the form of a clear definition of pain catastrophizing and overview of its conceptual basis. Improving the efficacy and efficiency of pan catastrophizing related treatments requires an understanding of the theoretical construct. So far, most interventions have only demonstrated modest effects in reducing pain catastrophizing. Therefore, clarifying the construct may be an important precursor for developing more targeted and effective interventions, thereby easing some of the burden related to this aspect of pain. In our review, we have extracted and de-constructed common elements that emerge from different theoretical models with the aim to understand the concept of catastrophizing, which components can be modulated by psychological interventions, and the general role in pain processing. The analysis of the literature has indicated essential key elements to explain pain catastrophizing: emotional regulation, catastrophic worry, rumination, behavioral inhibition and behavioral activation systems, and interoceptive sensitivity. The present paper attempts to integrate these key elements with the aim to re-compose and unify the concept within a modern biopsychosocial interpretation of catastrophizing. (shrink)

Van Fraassen's 1991 modal interpretation of Quantum Mechanics offers accounts of measurement and state preparation. I argue that both accounts overlook a class of interactions I call General Unitary Measurements, or GUMs. Ironically, GUMs are significant for van Fraassen's account of measurement because they challenge it, and significant for his account of preparation because they simplify it. Van Fraassen's oversight prompts a question about modal interpretations: developed to account for ideal measurement outcomes, can they consistently account as well for the (...) whole horizon of laboratory practices by which we investigate QM? (shrink)

Feminist criticism of health care and ofbioethics has become increasingly rich andsophisticated in the last years of thetwentieth century. Nonetheless, this body ofwork remains quite marginalized. I believe thatthere are (at least) two reasons for this.First, many people are still confused aboutfeminism. Second, many people are unconvincedthat significant sexism still exists and aretherefore unreceptive to arguments that itshould be remedied if there is no largerbenefit. In this essay I argue for a thin,``core'' conception of feminism that is easy tounderstand and (...) difficult to reject. Corefeminism would render debate within feminismmore fruitful, clear the way for appropriaterecognition of differences among women andtheir circumstances, provide intellectuallycompelling reasons for current non-feminists toadopt a feminist outlook, and facilitatemutually beneficial cooperation betweenfeminism and other progressive socialmovements. This conception of feminism alsomakes it clear that feminism is part of alarger egalitarian moral and political agenda,and adopting it would help bioethics focus onthe most urgent moral priorities. In addition,integrating core feminism into bioethics wouldopen a gateway to the more speculative parts offeminist work where a wealth of creativethinking is occurring. Engaging with thisfeminist work would challenge and strengthenmainstream approaches; it should also motivatemainstream bioethicists to explore othercurrently marginalized parts of bioethics. (shrink)

It had to happen. After two full decades of intense energy, business ethicists and business practitioners may actually have succeeded in suppressing the feeblest joke of the profession: “Business Ethics. Isn’t that an oxymoron?” Har har har.In the early days of business ethics, the oxymoron had actual embodiments. “Business” was represented by hard-nosed, thicks-kinnedmanagers with no inclination to adopt academia’s language and critiques. “Ethics” was embodied by ivory-towered theoreticians with an undisguised contempt for profit makers. What a joke to think (...) of these two groups as conceptually productive partners. (shrink)

An “intrinsically mixed” state is a mixed state of a system that is ‘orthogonal’ to every pure state of that system. Although the presence of such states in the quantum theories of infinite systems is well known to those who work with such theories, intrinsically mixed states are virtually unheralded in the philosophical literature. Rob Clifton was thoroughly familiar with intrinsically mixed states. I aim here to introduce them to a wider audience—and to encourage that audience to cultivate their acquaintance (...) by suggesting that intrinsically mixed states undermine assumptions framing standard discussions of the quantum measurement problem. (shrink)

Background: Psychiatric interventions are a contested area in medicine, not only because of their history of abuses, but also because their therapeutic goal is to affect emotions, thoughts, beliefs...

This essay is devoted to the study of proper names. Although the view that sees proper names as referential singular terms is widely considered orthodoxy, there is a growing popularity to the view that proper names are predicates. This is partly because the orthodoxy faces two anomalies that Predicativism can solve: on the one hand, proper names can have multiple bearers. But multiple bearerhood is prima facie a problem to the idea that proper names have just one individual as referent. (...) On the other hand, proper names can have predicative uses. But the view that proper names are singular terms arguably does not have the resources to deal with these uses. In this dissertation I argue that the Predicate View of proper names is mistaken. In the first part of the thesis, I analyse this view in its main contentions and offer several arguments to reject it. This critical exercise provides useful insight into the life of proper names that I incorporate in my own view as follows: I argue that the behaviour of proper names should be understood in light of the wider phenomenon I call category change. Thus, I maintain, with orthodoxy, that proper names are fundamentally referential terms, but I also argue that they also have other uses, including the predicative uses highlighted by the predicativist. I also offer a semantic theory according to which proper names are polyreferential, that is, they are terms that can have more than one referent in a way that is distinct from both plural terms and general terms. This theory resolves the problem of multiple bearerhood and provides a base to account for all other uses of proper names that are not referential, i.e., common noun, adjectival and verbal uses, as semantically derived from the more fundamental referential meaning. (shrink)

According to Hutto and Satne, 521–536, 2015), an “essential tension” plagues contemporary neo-Pragmatist accounts of mental contents: their explanation of the emergence and constitution of intentional mental contents is circular. After identifying the problem, they also propose a solution: what neo-Pragmatists need to do, to overcome circularity, is to appeal to a primitive content-free variety of intentionality, different from the full-blown intentionality of propositional attitudes. In this paper, I will argue that, in addition to the problem of circularity, there is (...) another important problem that both neo-Pragmatist accounts, and Hutto and Satnes’s refinement of them, should also deal with: their difficulty to accommodate a host of recent empirical evidence and theoretical developments on the interdisciplinary field of animal cognition. I will call this difficulty the objection from animal minds, and I will present several arguments designed to show that, even though the notion of primitive intentionality, introduced by Hutto and Satne, may be useful to account for some of the most basic ways of dealing with the environment of nonhuman animals, it falls short of providing an adequate explanation of the full-range of cognitive capacities and behavioral dispositions that many animal species display. Thus, their proposal ends up being insufficient to help neo-Pragmatist approaches to overcome the problem of animal minds. Finally, I will suggest that overcoming this objection requires attributing to non-human animals some basic, yet content involving, kinds of intentional mental states. (shrink)

This article explores the relevance of ontological assumptions for justifications of agency and ethics. It critiques Kantian ethics for being based upon an ontological imaginary that starts from the substantialism of Newtonian physics. Substantialism shapes Western political philosophy’s view about who we are as subjects and how the world works. In this ontological imaginary, validation of ethics is based upon universality and abstractions. Furthermore, Kantian ethics underscores an anthropocentric and theocratic vision of how to govern societies. I argue Kantian criteria (...) are not only insufficient to make good choices but are also conducive to wrong ones, since they elicit self-appeasement in international intervention, and contribute to the conceptual repertoire of coloniality. I propose that an ontology of entanglements opens possibilities for overcoming the shortcomings of an ethos based upon abstractions and possibly for correcting some of its moral failures. In a quantum ontological imaginary, the validation of ethical choices relies instead upon the exploration of the apparatuses we deploy, as well as upon careful situational evaluation. Specific practices, rather than an abstract humanity, are the referents for devising such ethos. This position, I argue, resonates with the critical project of decoloniality and its acknowledgment of the political salience of ontological imaginaries. (shrink)

In current discussions on contemporary political philosophy some commonplaces around Rancière’s thought are restated with the effect of neutralizing the potential of his reflections. I refer in particular to the following assumptions: a dichotomic understanding of Rancière’s distinction between politics and the police, an ontological interpretation of this difference, an identification of Rancière’s political propositions as anti-institutionalist; a reading of the practices of emancipation as something ephemeral without a durable effect for the common world. In this article I question these (...) assumptions by emphasizing some usually neglected aspects of Rancière’s arguments. (shrink)