The lyric is a form or genre of poetry often intimately related to subjectivity. But is a lyricism divested of the subject possible? By examining the philosophical refl ections of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe upon lyricism, poetry, and their relation to subjectivity, this article explicates how an impersonal lyricism is not only possible, but perhaps necessary. If we wish to do justice to the phrasing or saying of poetic language, then we must endeavour to think the displacement of the subject in and (...) by the very language that the poem expresses. Following Lacoue-Labarthe, this article explores the paradoxical turn of lyricism—that it is bound to the subject, but not to its personal expression; rather, to its disappearance, its displacement, in the expression of language itself. By tracing a sketch of Lacoue-Labarthe’s poetics, relating this thought to the lyrical theories of Hamburger and Culler, and providing a brief explication of one of Lacoue-Labarthe’s “poetic” writings, lyricism is shown to be the testament to the disappearance of the subject, the remainder of a disappearance already passed insofar as the poem remains. What remains is that the lyrical subject would be no “subject” at all—only language itself, intimating its own diction. (shrink)

Rather than examining the possibilities of the relation between phenomenology and literature as they are conditioned by the imaginary image, this paper takes up the impossibility essential to this relation, bound to the question of its experience, to the experience of literature. The question of what “the experience of literature” is, what it signifies and directs itself towards, is explicated and unravelled in an analysis of the experience of the writer (and, at times, the reader), with the aid of Emmanuel (...) Levinas’ few engagements with art and literature, paired with the thought of Maurice Blanchot on the interruption of writing (in both the subjective and objective genitives). In tracing what passes through consciousness in this experience of literature, marking its impasses and its faltering approaches, the impossibility exposed in the experience of literature shall be shown to be necessary for opening and maintaining the distance binding phenomenology and literature in their separation and their traversal of the image. (shrink)

The question of communism as a real political possibility, if not the most necessary political possibility, seems entirely foreign or strange in our world today. Just as striking is the claim that communism is inextricably linked with literature. But both of these claims are made by the often-overlooked and as-yet untranslated French thinker and political activist Dionys Mascolo. By examining and explicating Mascolo’s strange (re)conception of communism, with the aid of the thought of his friend Maurice Blanchot concerning communication and (...) friendship, this article will explore another communism, between politics and literature—a communism of the future, a communism of thought, which approaches human need in a manner radically different from the common conception of communism. (shrink)

Dembroff’s “Escaping the natural attitude about gender” replies to my “Are women adult human females?”. This paper responds to Dembroff’s many criticisms of my arguments, as well as to the charge that “Are women...” “fundamentally is an unscholarly attempt to vindicate a political slogan that is currently being used to undermine civic rights and respect for trans persons”. I argue that Dembroff’s criticisms fail without exception, and explain why the claims about my motives are baseless.

The second premise of the Kalām cosmological argument, as defended by William Lane Craig, has two supporting arguments; the Hilbert’s Hotel argument and the suc.

In discussions of the emotions, it is commonplace to wheel out examples of people who know that rollercoasters aren’t dangerous but who fear them anyway. Such cases are well known to have been troubling for cognitivists who hold the emotions are judgments or beliefs. But more recently, it has been argued that the very theories that emerged from the failure of cognitivism face trouble as well. One gets the sense that the theory that can accomplish this will win a crucial (...) point over its competitors. In the present paper I offer a new approach to making sense of the normative tension to which recalcitrant emotions give rise. Interestingly, the approach is one that can be adopted by anyone willing to grant that emotions are themselves governed by norms. (shrink)

Much of our ordinary thought and talk about responsibility exhibits what I call the ‘pie fallacy’—the fallacy of thinking that there is a fixed amount of responsibility for every outcome, to be distributed among all those, if any, who are responsible for it. The pie fallacy is a fallacy, I argue, because how responsible an agent is for some outcome is fully grounded in facts about the agent, the outcome and the relationships between them; it does not depend, in particular, (...) on how responsible anyone else is for that same outcome. In this paper, I explore how the pie fallacy can arise by considering several different kinds of case in which two or more agents are responsible for the same outcome. I’ll end with some brief remarks on the potential consequences of my arguments for how to think about responsibility in war. (shrink)

Background The COVID-19 pandemic forced governments, multilateral public health organisations and research institutions to undertake research quickly to inform their responses to the pandemic. Most COVID-19-related studies required swift approval, creating ethical and practical challenges for regulatory authorities and researchers. In this paper, we examine the landscape of ethics review processes in Africa during public health emergencies (PHEs). Methods We searched four electronic databases (Web of Science, PUBMED, MEDLINE Complete, and CINAHL) to identify articles describing ethics review processes during public (...) health emergencies and/or pandemics. We selected and reviewed those articles that were focused on Africa. We charted the data from the retrieved articles including the authors and year of publication, title, country and disease(s) reference, broad areas of (ethical) consideration, paper type, and approach. Results Of an initial 4536 records retrieved, we screened the titles and abstracts of 1491 articles, and identified 72 articles for full review. Nine articles were selected for inclusion. Of these nine articles, five referenced West African countries including Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone, and experiences linked to the Ebola virus disease. Two articles focused on South Africa and Kenya, while the other two articles discussed more general experiences and pitfalls of ethics review during PHEs in Africa more broadly. We found no articles published on ethics review processes in Africa before the 2014 Ebola outbreak, and only a few before the COVID-19 outbreak. Although guidelines on protocol review and approval processes for PHEs were more frequently discussed after the 2014 Ebola outbreak, these did not focus on Africa specifically. Conclusions There is a gap in the literature about ethics review processes and preparedness within Africa during PHEs. This paper underscores the importance of these processes to inform practices that facilitate timely, context-relevant research that adequately recognises and reinforces human dignity within the quest to advance scientific knowledge about diseases. This is important to improve fast responses to PHEs, reduce mortality and morbidity, and enhance the quality of care before, during, and after pandemics. (shrink)

The present paper looks at one of the most thorough articles on the intelligence of GPT, research conducted by engineers at Microsoft. Although there is a great deal of value in their work, I will argue that, for familiar philosophical reasons, their methodology, ‘Black-box Interpretability’ is wrongheaded. But there is a better way. There is an exciting and emerging discipline of ‘Inner Interpretability’ (also sometimes called ‘White-box Interpretability’) that aims to uncover the internal activations and weights of models in order (...) to understand what they represent and the algorithms they implement. In my view, a crucial mistake in Black-box Interpretability is the failure to appreciate that how processes are carried out matters when it comes to intelligence and understanding. I can’t pretend to have a full story that provides both necessary and sufficient conditions for being intelligent, but I do think that Inner Interpretability dovetails nicely with plausible philosophical views of what intelligence requires. So the conclusion is modest, but the important point in my view is seeing how to get the research on the right track. Towards the end of the paper, I will show how some of the philosophical concepts can be used to further refine how Inner Interpretability is approached, so the paper helps draw out a profitable, future two-way exchange between Philosophers and Computer Scientists. (shrink)

We investigate the impact of informal arguments on judgments about thought experiment cases in light of Deutsch and Cappelen’s mischaracterization view, which claims that philosophers’ case judgments are primarily based on arguments and not intuitions. If arguments had no influence on case judgments, this would seriously challenge whether they are, or should be, based on arguments at all—and not on other cognitive sources instead, such as intuition. In Experiment 1, we replicated Wysocki’s (Rev Philos Psychol 8(2):477–499, 2017) pioneering study on (...) a Gettier-style case, and we confirmed that the informal arguments used by him had no significant effect. However, we also included an improved argument for ascribing knowledge, which did have a significant effect even in Wysocki’s original design. We therefore followed up with Experiment 2 on three Gettier-style cases, where we used a more natural dialogical format for presenting both case descriptions and informal arguments. Overall, we found a clear impact of prima facie good pro and con arguments on case judgments. The issue of argument impact is thus no obstacle to arguing about thought experiments. (shrink)

I defend an empirically-oriented approach to the analysis and remediation of social injustice. My springboard for this argument is a debate—principally represented here between Tommie Shelby and Elizabeth Anderson, but with much deeper historical roots and many flowering branches—about whether racial-justice advocacy should prioritize integration (bringing different groups together) or community development (building wealth and political power within the black community). Although I incline toward something closer to Shelby’s “egalitarian pluralist” approach over Anderson’s single-minded emphasis on integration, many of Shelby’s (...) criticisms of integrationism are misguided, and his handling of the empirical literature is profoundly unbalanced. In fact, while both Shelby and Anderson defend the importance of social science to their projects, I’ll argue that each takes a decidedly unempirical approach, which ultimately obscures the full extent of our ignorance about what we can and ought to do going forward. A more authentically empirical tack would be more epistemically humble, more holistic, and less organized around what I’ll call prematurely formulated “Grand Unified Theories of Social Change.” I defend a more “diversified experimentalist” approach, which rigorously tests an array of smaller-scale interventions before trying to replicate and scale up the most promising results. (shrink)

Continuing correspondence on 'gender identity'.

The lack of access to gender-affirming surgery represents a significant unmet health care need within the transgender community, frequently resulting in depression and self-destructive behavior. While some transgender people may have access to gender reassignment surgery, an overwhelming majority cannot afford facial feminization surgery. The former may be covered as a “medical necessity,” but FFS is considered “cosmetic” and excluded from insurance coverage. This demarcation between “necessity” and “cosmetic” in transgender health care based on specific body parts is in direct (...) opposition to the scientific community’s understanding of gender dysphoria and professional guidelines for transgender health. GRS affects one’s ability to function in an intimate relationship, while FFS has the same impact on social interactions an, therefore may have a far greater implication for one’s quality of life. FFS is a cost-effective intervention that needs to be covered by insurance policies. The benefits of such coverage far exceed the insignificant costs. (shrink)

In this paper, we present two variants of Peirce’s Triadic Logic within a language containing only conjunction, disjunction, and negation. The peculiarity of our systems is that conjunction and disjunction are interpreted by means of Peirce’s mysterious binary operations Ψ and Φ from his ‘Logical Notebook’. We show that semantic conditions that can be extracted from the definitions of Ψ and Φ agree (in some sense) with the traditional view on the semantic conditions of conjunction and disjunction. Thus, we support (...) the conjecture that Peirce’s special interest in these operations is due to the fact that he interpreted them as conjunction and disjunction, respectively. We also show that one of our systems may serve as a suitable base for an interesting implicative expansion, namely the connexive three-valued logic by Cooper. Sound and complete natural deduction calculi are presented for all systems examined in this paper. (shrink)

Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the United States and the second cause of death among those ages 15–24 years. The current standard of care for suicidality management often involves an involuntary hospitalization deemed necessary by the attending psychiatrist. The purpose of this article is to reexamine the ethical tradeoffs inherent in the current practice of involuntary psychiatric hospitalization for suicidal patients, calling attention to the often-neglected harms inherent in this practice and proposing a path for future (...) research. With accumulating evidence of the harms inherent in civil commitment, we propose that the relative value of this intervention needs to be reevaluated and more efficacious alternatives researched. Three arguments are presented: (1) that inadequate attention has been given to the harms resulting from the use of coercion and the loss of autonomy, (2) that inadequate evidence exists that involuntary hospitalization is an effective method to reduce deaths by suicide, and (3) that some suicidal patients may benefit more from therapeutic interventions that maximize and support autonomy and personal responsibility. Considering this evidence, we argue for a policy that limits the coercive hospitalization of suicidal individuals to those who lack decision-making capacity. (shrink)

An important moral category—dishonest speech—has been overlooked in theoretical ethics despite its importance in legal, political, and everyday social exchanges. Discussion in this area has instead been fixated on a binary debate over the contrast between lying and ‘merely misleading’. Some see lying as a distinctive wrong; others see it as morally equivalent to deliberately omitting relevant truths, falsely insinuating, or any other species of attempted verbal deception. Parties to this debate have missed the relevance to their disagreement of the (...) notion of communicative dishonesty. Communicative dishonesty need not take the form of a lie, yet its wrongness does not reduce to the wrongness of seeking to deceive. This paper therefore proposes a major shift of attention away from the lying/misleading debate and towards the topic of communicative dishonesty. Dishonesty is not a simple notion to define, however. It presupposes a difficult distinction between what is and is not expressed in a given utterance. This differs from the more familiar distinction between what is and is not said, the distinction at the heart of the lying/misleading debate. This paper uses an idea central to speech act theory to characterize dishonesty in terms of the utterer’s communicative intentions, and applies the resulting definition to a variety of contexts. (shrink)

S-frames and i-frames do not represent two opposed types of intervention. Rather they are interpretive lenses for focusing on specific aspects of interventions, all of which include individual and structural dimensions. There is no sense to be made of prioritizing either system change or individual change, because each requires the other.

Volume 20, Issue 7, July 2020, Page W7-W11.

Este trabalho apresenta algumas considerações a respeito da Base Nacional Comum Curricular (BNCC), no referente às questões ligadas ao ensino da língua portuguesa no Brasil, à territorialidade e ao pertencimento racial, processos históricos, que envolvem, no campo da educação, a formação docente e a construção da cidadania dos educandos e das educandas nestes tempos de reafirmação do Estado democrático de direito e da vaga decolonial. Portanto, trata-se de uma abordagem política em termos do pensamento de Paulo Freire, patrono da educação (...) brasileira, que considerava político o ato de educar (FREIRE, 1980; 1983; 1989; 1996). É com base nesta perspectiva que a BNCC será abordada, mas sob o aporte teórico da análise pragmática do discurso, tributária da análise discursivo-desconstrutiva (cf. ARAÚJO, 2020). (shrink)

In the last decade there has been a torrent of work at the intersection of philosophy and linguistics on predicates of personal taste, subjective expressions like fun and tasty that are used to express opinions rather than matters of fact. In each section of this paper I discuss a phenomenon that has been largely overlooked in the literature on PPTs. In Section 1, I identify a neglected experiential reading of these adjectives. All other theories of expressions like fun take them (...) to express some standing property, but distributional and compositional considerations suggest that the basic meaning of fun adjectives is experiential. In Section 2, I discuss the relation between fun claims relativized to particular experiencers and their unrelativized counterparts, arguing that previous theories fail to capture the evaluativity unique to the latter. Finally, I argue... (shrink)

There is a need to consider the impact of the new resident-hours regulations on the variety of aspects of medical education and patient care. Most existing literature about this subject has focused on the role of fatigue in resident performance, education, and health care delivery. However, there are other possible consequences of these new regulations, including a negative impact on decision ownership. Our main assumption of is that increased shift work in medicine can decrease ownership of treatment decisions and impact (...) negatively on quality of care. We review some potential components of decision ownership in treatment context and suggest possible ways in which the absence of decision ownership may decrease the quality of medical decision making. The article opens with the definition of decision ownership and the overview of some contextual factors that may contribute to the development of ownership in medical residency. The following section discusses decision ownership in medical care from the perspe... (shrink)

Data platforms represent a new paradigm for carrying out health research. In the platform model, datasets are pooled for remote access and analysis, so novel insights for developing better stratified and/or personalised medicine approaches can be derived from their integration. If the integration of diverse datasets enables development of more accurate risk indicators, prognostic factors, or better treatments and interventions, this obviates the need for the sharing and reuse of data; and a platform-based approach is an appropriate model for facilitating (...) this. Platform-based approaches thus require new thinking about consent. Here we defend an approach to meeting this challenge within the data platform model, grounded in: the notion of ‘reasonable expectations’ for the reuse of data; Waldron’s account of ‘integrity’ as a heuristic for managing disagreement about the ethical permissibility of the approach; and the element of the social contract that emphasises the importance of public engagement in embedding new norms of research consistent with changing technological realities. While a social contract approach may sound appealing, however, it is incoherent in the context at hand. We defend a way forward guided by that part of the social contract which requires public approval for the proposal and argue that we have moral reasons to endorse a wider presumption of data reuse. However, we show that the relationship in question is not recognisably contractual and that the social contract approach is therefore misleading in this context. We conclude stating four requirements on which the legitimacy of our proposal rests. (shrink)

In some severely uncertain situations, exemplified by climate change and novel pandemics, policymakers lack a reasoned basis for assigning probabilities to the possible outcomes of the policies they must choose between. I outline and defend an uncertainty averse, egalitarian approach to policy evaluation in these contexts. The upshot is a theory of distributive justice which offers especially strong reasons to guard against individual and collective misfortune.

Against the two dominant ethical paradigms of continental philosophy–Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of the other and Michel Foucault’s ethics of self-cultivation—The Self-Emptying Subject theorizes an ethics of self-emptying, or kenosis, one that reveals the immanence of an impersonal and dispossessed life without a why. Rather than align immanence with the enclosures of the subject, Dubilet engages the history of Christian mystical theology, modern philosophy, and contemporary theories of the subject to rethink immanence as what precedes and exceeds the very difference between (...) the (human) self and the (divine) other, between the subject and transcendence. By arguing that transcendence operates on life in secular as well as religious domains, the book challenges a dominant distribution of concepts within contemporary theoretical discourse, which associates transcendence exclusively with religion and theology and immanence exclusively with modern secularity and philosophy. -/- The Self-Emptying Subject argues that it is important to resist framing the relationship between medieval theology and modern philosophy as a transition from the affirmation of divine transcendence to the establishment of autonomous subjects. Through an engagement with Meister Eckhart, G. W. F. Hegel, and Georges Bataille, it uncovers a medieval theological discourse that rejects the primacy of pious subjects and the transcendence of God (Eckhart); retrieves a modern philosophical discourse that critiques the creation of self-standing subjects through a speculative rewriting of the concepts of Christian theology (Hegel); and explores a discursive site that demonstrates the subjecting effects of transcendence across theological and philosophical operations and archives (Bataille). Taken together, these interpretations suggest that if we suspend the antagonistic relationship between theological and philosophical discourses and decenter our periodizing assumptions and practices, we might encounter a yet unmapped theoretical fecundity of self-emptying that frees life from transcendent powers that incessantly subject it to their own ends. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume Studies Volume XXIV, Number 2, November 1998, pp. 335-354 "An Unaccountable Pleasure": Hume on Tragedy and the Passions ALEX NEILL Hume begins his essay "Of Tragedy" with a description of what he calls "a singular phaenomenon": It seems an unaccountable pleasure, which the spectators of a well-written tragedy receive from sorrow, terror, anxiety, and other passions, that are in themselves disagreeable and uneasy. The more they are (...) touched and affected, the more are they delighted with the spectacle; and as soon as the uneasy passions cease to operate, the piece is at an end.... They are pleased in proportion as they are afflicted, and never are so happy as when they employ tears, sobs, and cries to give vent to their sorrow, and relieve their heart, swoln with the tenderest sympathy and compassion. The few critics who have had some tincture of philosophy, have remarked this singular phaenomenon, and have endeavoured to account for it.1 The account of the audience's experience of tragedy that Hume goes on to offer in "Of Tragedy" has been the target of criticism since the essay was published. My purpose in what follows is to show that some of what may appear to be the most damaging of that criticism is based on a misinterpretation of the thesis that Hume develops in the essay. I shall not attempt to argue that Hume's thesis is persuasive; indeed, I believe and have argued Alex Neill is at the Department of Philosophy, University of Southampton, Hants Sl 7 IBJ ENGLAND. 336 Alex Neill elsewhere that it is not.2 My project here is almost entirely interpretive: it is an attempt to get clear about what Hume's thesis concerning our experience of tragedy really is. To that end, it should be noted that the apparently "unaccountable" pleasure Hume describes at the beginning of "Of Tragedy" is something that he has remarked on before. In Book I of the Treatise, he notes that in matters of religion men take a pleasure in being terrify'd, and that no preachers are so popular, as those who excite the most dismal and gloomy passions. In the common affairs of life, where we feel and are penetrated with the solidity of the subject, nothing can be more disagreeable than fear and terror; and 'tis only in dramatic performances and in religious discourses, that they ever give pleasure? The phenomenon that Hume finds so remarkable in these passages from "Of Tragedy" and the Treatise is thus, at a minimum, that in certain circumstances, such as when we are at the theatre, we may find agreeable the experience of "the most dismal and gloomy passions." The explanation he gives of this phenomenon in the Treatise is as follows: In these latter cases the imagination reposes itself indolently on the idea; and the passion, being soften'd by the want of belief in the subject, has no more than the agreeable effect of enlivening the mind, and fixing the attention. (T 115) Hume's explanation of how the experience of "uneasy" passions can be enjoyed when we are in church and at the theatre thus has two components. First, because we do not believe the stories we are told in church4 and at the theatre, the uneasy passions we experience are not so very uneasy; as he puts it later in the Treatise, in such circumstances the passion in question "lies not with that weight upon us: It feels less firm and solid" (T 631). Second, a weakly disagreeable passion of this sort agreeably "enlivens" the mind and "fixes" (or as he says later, "rouzes") our attention. By the time he wrote "Of Tragedy," however, Hume had come to regard this explanation of his "singular phaenomenon" as inadequate. With regard to the idea that the passions, even if "uneasy," have the pleasurable effect of "enlivening" the mind (an idea which in "Of Tragedy" he attributes to Dubos), Hume objects that having one's mind "enlivened," one's attention "fixed" or "rouzed," need not be pleasurable: "the same object of distress, which pleases in a tragedy, were it really set before us, would give the most unfeigned uneasiness; though it... (shrink)

Indifferent lies have been proposed as a counterexample to the claim that lying requires an intention to deceive. In indifferent lies, the speaker says something she believes to be false (in a trut...

In this paper, we consider Andrew Loke’s recent contributions to the successive addition argument. Although he claims to develop the discussion, we conclude that he fails to provide anything that goes beyond the position critiqued by Fellipe Leon. When analysing Loke’s position, we find that his proposals either directly collapse back into those critiqued by Leon, or beg the relevant question at hand. We conclude with some speculations about why this sort of mistake may have arisen.

In this work, we propose a variant of so-called informational semantics, a technique elaborated by Voishvillo, for two infectious logics, Deutsch’s |${\mathbf{S}_{\mathbf{fde}}}$| and Szmuc’s |$\mathbf{dS}_{\mathbf{fde}}$|⁠. We show how the machinery of informational semantics can be effectively used to analyse truth and falsity conditions of disjunction and conjunction. Using this technique, it is possible to claim that disjunction and conjunction can be rightfully regarded as such, a claim which was disputed in the recent literature. Both |${\mathbf{S}_{\mathbf{fde}}}$| and |$\mathbf{dS}_{\mathbf{fde}}$| are formalized in (...) terms of natural deduction. This allows us to solve several problems: to develop a natural deduction calculus for |${\mathbf{S}_{\mathbf{fde}}}$| containing the standard form of disjunction elimination (in contrast to the calculus by Petrukhin), to introduce the first natural deduction calculus for |$\mathbf{dS}_{\mathbf{fde}}$| and to reflect the fundamental symmetry between |${\mathbf{S}_{\mathbf{fde}}}$| and |$\mathbf{dS}_{\mathbf{fde}}$| on proof-theoretical level forming a convenient basis for obtaining their well-known extensions |$\mathbf{K}^{\mathbf{w}}_{\mathbf{3}}$| and |$\mathbf{PWK}$|⁠. (shrink)

Este trabalho busca refletir sobre a política linguística nacional veiculada nos Parâmetros Curriculares Nacionais de Português (ensino fundamental) cujo discurso se traduz em um método sofisticado de controle e em uma forma eficaz de gerir a mudança (LAWN, 2001, p. 117). Nesse sentido, pode-se dizer que “todo sistema de educação é uma maneira política de manter ou de modificar a apropriação dos discursos, com os saberes e os poderes que eles trazem consigo”(FOUCAULT, 2008, p. 45). A partir da abordagem discursivo-desconstrutiva (...) (CORACINI, 2003), pretende-se apresentar e discutir aqui os resultados analisados, cujo foco recai sobre as representações da (s) identidade (s) e competências construídas para os professores neste discurso, representações sociais da profissão do professor na sociedade contemporânea brasileira, marcada pelos acontecimentos que sucederam ao período ditatorial, portanto, a fase de redemocratização do país e de modernização do Estado frente às exigências da mundialização. (shrink)

I defend an iterated knowledge condition on responsibility for outcomes: one is responsible for a consequence of one's action only if one was in a position to know that, for all one was in a position to know, one's action would have that consequence.

This article revisits a principle of distributive justice accepted by most, if not all, scholars of climate justice. The principle at stake, the limit, protects those who are very badly off from bearing the costs of climate change mitigation. The persistent noncompliance of developed states with their obligations toward burden sharing, however, means that this principle is increasingly in tension with successful climate change mitigation, given it seems to require that those in poverty have continued access to emissions in cases (...) where alternative forms of energy are not provided. In the first half of the paper I outline this tension and show how the dominant expression of the limit in the literature, advanced by Henry Shue, must be abandoned. I argue that any attempt to articulate the limit in current circumstance, where the carbon budget is very scarce, must consider the climate harm associated with continued subsistence emissions. The second half of the article defends a principle, the exemption, which is best able to maintain the strong commitment to shielding those below the minimal threshold from the costs of mitigation, even in light of the potential harm that will result if they require emissions to fuel their energy needs. (shrink)

The pregnancy rescue case (PRC) is supposed to show that when forced between preventing a fetus from being killed and preventing someone from remaining unwillingly pregnant, we are morally required to do the former. If this is true, then Hendricks argues that the typical abortion is morally wrong. I pose four problems for PRC and how Hendricks uses it here. First, one might simply deny the intuition Hendricks takes PRC to pump for reasons having to do with the moral status (...) of the fetus. Second, even if it is true that we should prevent the fetus from being killed in PRC, this might not tell us much about the moral permissibility of abortion in typical cases because there are important differences between PRC and the typical abortion. Third, I propose some modifications to PRC that would better isolate whether fetal personhood does any work to pump the target intuition. Fourth, I argue that PRC only succeeds if we presuppose that Thomson’s defence is unsound, but presupposing this comes at too high a cost. (shrink)

When a novel scientific theory conflicts with otherwise plausible moral assumptions, we do not treat that as evidence against the theory. We may scrutinize the empirical data more keenly and take extra care over its interpretation, but science is in some core sense immune to moral refutation. Can the same be said of philosophical theories (or the non-ethical, ‘metaphysical’ ones at least)? If a position in the philosophy of mind, for example, is discovered to have eye-widening moral import, does that (...) count against it at all? Actual responses by philosophers to the question of whether unanticipated moral consequences of metaphysical theories have evidential force are scattered, implicit, divergent, under-argued, and sometimes even self-undermining. The present discussion is, most immediately, an attempt to sort out the confusion. Beyond that, it exploits the new perspective this question gives us on a familiar topic: the relation of philosophy to science. (shrink)

A crucial assumption of the recently developed schema model of self-control is that people’s perceived self-control efforts are related to the experience of lowered subjective vitality. In the present study, this assumption was tested. It was also examined whether perceived self-control effort is related to a diffuse affective experience or is discretely related to subjective vitality, general positive affect, and general negative affect. Based on the previous literature, it was expected that the latter would better fit the data. In a (...) survey study, university students completed standardized measures of their perceived self-control effort, subjective vitality, general positive affect, and general negative affect with regard to a specific frame of reference. Bivariate correlations and confirmatory factor analyses revealed the expected relationships, meaning that perceived self-control effort was negatively related to subjective vitality and that the statistical model with three distinct affective variables fit the data better than the model with subjective vitality, positive affect, and negative affect incorporated into one common factor. It was concluded that the findings are in line with the schema model of self-control. (shrink)

According to the schema model of self-control, individuals’ self-control efforts activate the fatigue/decreased vitality schema. A precondition for this schema activation is that the cognitive concepts of self-control effort and decreased vitality are associated in individuals’ minds. In the present two studies, the existence of such a cognitive association was tested. In Study 1, 133 school students from Switzerland read two similar stories in a random order. In one story, a fictitious individual engaged in effortful self-control, while in the other (...) story, he/she did not. In Study 2, 251 online workers from the United States, per random assignment, received either a story describing an individual exerting self-control or a similar story describing an individual not exerting self-control. In both studies, the participants rated how vital the fictitious individuals felt at the time the story ended. As expected, in both studies, the fictitious individual exerting self-control was rated as feeling less vital compared to the one not exerting self-control. This finding is in line with the schema model of self-control, as it indicates that the concepts of self-control exertion and decreased vitality are related to each other in a cognitive associative structure. Additional results suggest that emotional valence and calmness are irrelevant in this association. Moreover, the self-control exertion-decreased vitality association was independent from the raters’ own momentary feelings of self-control exertion, effort, and exhaustion. (shrink)

The rapid advance of life science within the context of increased international concern over the potential misuse of findings has resulted in the lack of agreement on the issues of responsibility, control and collaboration. This progress of knowledge outpaces the efforts of creating moral and legal guidelines for the detection and minimization of the risks in the research process. There is a need to identify and address normative aspects of dual-use research. This paper focuses on the issues of safety and (...) global collaboration in life science research by highlighting the importance of openness, enabling policies and cooperative governance. These safeguards are believed to reduce the risks related to the misuse of science while enabling the important research to move forward. The paper addresses the need for a better definition of dual use concept and, based on the historical precedents, explores the moral concerns and governmental strategies of dual-use research. The three necessary moves in addressing the issue of security in life sciences are suggested: the move from constraining to enabling types of policies, the move from secrecy to openness, and the move from segregation to integration of the public voice. (shrink)

This essay contends that the ethics around the use of spy technology to gather intelligence (TECHINT) during espionage and counterintelligence operations is ambiguous. To build this argument, the essay critically scrutinizes Cécile Fabre's recent and excellent book Spying through a Glass Darkly, which argues that there are no ethical differences between the use of human intelligence (HUMINT) obtained from or by human assets and TECHINT in these operations. As the essay explains, Fabre arrives at this position by treating TECHINT as (...) a like-for-like replacement for HUMINT. The essay argues instead that TECHINT is unlikely to act as a like-for-like replacement for HUMINT. As such, TECHINT might transform existing practices of espionage and counterintelligence, giving rise to new ethical challenges not captured in Fabre's analysis. To illustrate the point, the essay builds an analogy between TECHINT and recent armed conflicts in which precision weapons have been deployed. Although precision weapons seem ethically desirable, their availability has created new practices of waging war that are ethically problematic. By analogy, TECHINT, though not intrinsically undesirable, has the capacity to generate new practices of intelligence gathering that are ethically problematic—potentially more than HUMINT. Ultimately, recent negative experiences with the use of precision weaponry should caution against an overly positive assessment of TECHINT's ethical desirability. (shrink)

I present Modern Symbolic Logic, an introductory philosophy course in first-order logic, as a blended course. A blended course integrates online video learning with in-class activities, out of class supports, and deliverables into a cohesive and mutually supporting package. Blended courses are an enhancement on hybrid courses, which focus on online video learning but not on the additional supports needed for an effective learning experience. This paper has two central aims. The first is to present a blended course in action (...) in order to address a need in the literature for detailed reports of blended classes. The second is to advance an iterative approach to blended course design that significantly lowers the bar of entry for instructions hoping to create a blended course. (shrink)

This article examines the work of three artists – Harun Farocki, Hito Steyerl and Rabih Mroué – who in different ways mobilize the cinematic device of ‘shot/countershot’ in two distinct post-cinematic contexts (the moving image installation and the performance lecture) as a tool for scrutinizing images of war and violence from divergent historical, socio-economic, geopolitical and ethical perspectives. In returning to and reworking this classical cinematic device as an experimental and essayistic mode of montage and critical reflection, all three artists, (...) as I argue, variously seek to counter the ideological naturalization and interpretive framing of representations of war and violence under conditions of digitalization and globalization, as well as to interrogate the interconnections between forms of direct, symbolic and systemic violence. (shrink)

This paper explores the implications of empirical theories of migration for normative accounts of migration and distributive justice. It examines neo-classical economics, world-systems theory, dual labor market theory, and feminist approaches to migration and contends that neo-classical economic theory in isolation provides an inadequate understanding of migration. Other theories provide a fuller account of how national and global economic, political, and social institutions cause and shape migration flows by actively affecting people's opportunity sets in source countries and by admitting people (...) according to social categories such as class and gender. These empirical theories reveal the causal impact of institutions regulating migration and clarify moral obligations frequently overlooked by normative theorists. (shrink)