The most powerful films have an afterlife. Their sensory appeal and their capacity to elicit involvement in story, character and conflict reaches beyond the screen to subtly reframe the way spectators view ethical issues and agents. This book questions how cinematic narratives relate to and affect ethical life.

The influence of film's compelling images, characters and storylines has polarized perspectives on cinema and the moral imagination. Does film stimulate the audience's imagination and foster imitation in morally dangerous ways, or elicit ethical insight and empathy? Might the presentation of images on screen denude the capacity to conjure images in the mind's eye, or cultivate the imaginative capacity for moral vision as spectators attend to the plight of protagonists? Using Imitation of Life to interrogate paradoxical perspectives on the cinematic (...) imagination, this article develops an account of the moral imagination focusing on sensory, emotional and empathic aspects of the audience's imaginative relationship with screen characters and their innermost thoughts and feelings. (shrink)

This article sets up a neurophenomenological approach to understanding cinema spectatorship in order to investigate how embodied engagement with technologies of sound and motion can foster a sense of experiential realism. It takes as a starting point the idea that the empirical study of emotive, perceptual, motor, and cognitive processes involved in film spectatorship is impoverished without a phenomenological account of the lived experience under investigation. Correspondingly, engaging with neuroscientific studies enriches the scope of phenomenological inquiry and offers new insights (...) into the film experience. Analysis of diverse films including Interstellar, Leviathan, San Andreas and The Thin Red Line reveals how technological innovations dating from Hale’s Tours to contemporary D-BOX and Dolby Atmos systems have enhanced the audience’s sense of immersion and corporeal investment in the film experience. Building on the research of Vivian Sobchack and Vittorio Gallese, I argue that aesthetic techniques including the use of low frequency sound effects and wearable cameras facilitate shared affective engagement and a form of embodied simulation associated with kinaesthetic empathy and augmented narrative involvement. (shrink)

The long-form television drama series Hannibal thematises the embodied imagination and the elicitation of empathy and ethical understanding at the level of narrative and characterisation as well as through character engagement and screen aesthetics. Using Hannibal as a case study, this research investigates how stylistic choices frame the experiences of screen characters and engender forms of intersubjectivity based on corporeal and cognitive routes to empathy; in particular, it examines the capacity for screen media to facilitate what neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese terms (...) intercorporeality. As a constitutive aspect of intersubjectivity and social understanding that works through embodied simulation, intercorporeality invites a reconceptualisation of empathy and its association with ethical motivation and insight. Hannibal also introduces cannibalism as a dark metaphor for the incorporation of another into oneself, reflecting on empathy's ill-understood potential for negative affect and... (shrink)

Dying serves so often within the narratives of Western popular culture, as an exercise in self-improvement both to the individual dying and to those looking on. It enlightens, ennobles and renders exceptional all those affected by it. Though mainstream cinema's “grammar of dying” is mired in similar myths, film has the potential to do dying differently: it can, instead, connect us, ethically, to the vulnerability of others. The aim of this article is to pursue this potential of film. Using the (...) mainstream grammar of dying as a starting point, I will consider how the moving image, and this ethical potential, is harnessed within two hybrid-media pieces about a loved-one's decline and death: George Saxon's art installation, “A Record of Undying” (2014) and photographer Briony Campbell's short film The Dad Project (2009). While these works will be located within the traditions and transformations of moving image practice, the primary concern here is with how such emotionally resonant pieces navigate our relation to, and responsibility for, our own and others' harsh realities. In this way, the question of ethics is grounded not in the solipsistic circuits of affective modes – whether as the catharsis or betterment of mainstream myths, or what Jane Stadler privileges as the ethical effects of empathy – but in something more inherently, more inevitably, political. (shrink)

The abortion debate rages on. Yet the two most popular positions seem to be clearly mistaken. Conservatives maintain that a human life begins at conception and that therefore abortion must be wrong because it is murder. But not all killings of humans are murders. Most notably, self defense may justify even the killing of an innocent person.Liberals, on the other hand, are just as mistaken in their argument that since a fetus does not become a person until birth, a woman (...) may do whatever she pleases in and to her own body. First, you cannot do as you please with your own body if it affects other people adversely. Second, if a fetus is not a person, that does not imply that you can do to it anything you wish. Animals, for example, are not persons, yet to kill or torture them for no reason at all is wrong. (shrink)

FEATURED IN EVENTAL AESTHETICS RETROSPECTIVE 1. LOOKING BACK AT 10 ISSUES OF EVENTAL AESTHETICS. What kind of things are damaged art-objects? Are they junk, trash, mere stuff? Or do they remain art by virtue of their distinguished provenance or still discernible design? What kind of powers do such things have as material bodies and forces? Instead of attempting to locate proper concepts for salvaged art-things, this essay, from a perspective centered on the power of bodies-in-encounter – where “power” in Spinoza’s (...) sense is the capacity to affect and be affected – attempts to home in on the presence of a material vibrancy in the hope of better understanding the postures, reactions, and comportments that damaged art pieces inspire as we engage with them. This article proposes that even so-called “inanimate” things convey specific degrees of animacy even if not all of them qualify under the biological definition of life. (shrink)

Emerging infectious diseases remain a significant and dynamic threat to the health of individuals and the well-being of communities across the globe. Over the last decade, in response to these threats, increasing scientific consensus has mobilised in support of a One Health approach so that OH is now widely regarded as the most effective way of addressing EID outbreaks and risks. Given the scientific focus on OH, there is growing interest in the philosophical and ethical dimensions of this approach, and (...) a nascent OH literature is developing in the humanities. One of the key issues raised in this literature concerns ethical frameworks and whether OH merits the development of its very own ethical framework. In this paper, we argue that although the OH approach does not demand a new ethical framework, an OH approach does furnish the theoretical resources to support a novel ethical framework, and there are benefits to developing one that may be lost in its absence. We begin by briefly explaining what an OH approach to the threats posed by EIDs entails before outlining two different ways of construing ethical frameworks. We then show that although on one account of ethical frameworks there is no need for OH to generate its own, there may be advantages for its advocates in doing so. (shrink)

The United Kingdom’s approach to encouraging environmentally positive behaviour has been three-pronged, through voluntarism, incentives and regulation, and the balance between the approaches has fluctuated over time. Whilst financial incentives and regulatory approaches have been effective in achieving some environmental management behavioural change amongst farmers, ultimately these can be viewed as transient drivers without long-term sustainability. Increasingly, there is interest in ‘nudging’ managers towards voluntary environmentally friendly actions. This approach requires a good understanding of farmers’ willingness and ability to take (...) up environmental activities and the influences on farmer behavioural change. The paper aims to provide insights from 60 qualitative farmer interviews undertaken for a research project into farmers’ willingness and ability to undertake environmental management, particularly focusing on social psychological insights. Furthermore, it explores farmers’ level of engagement with advice and support networks that foster a genuine interest, responsibility and a sense of personal and social norm to sustain high quality environmental outcomes. Two conceptual frameworks are presented for usefully exploring the complex set of inter-relationships that can influence farmers’ willingness to undertake environmental management practices. The research findings show how an in-depth understanding of farmer’s willingness and ability to adopt environmental management practices and their existing level of engagement with advice and support are necessary to develop appropriate engagement approaches to achieve sustained and durable environmental management. (shrink)

This article offers a feminist deconstruction of legitimacy regarding the intentional decision by midlife independent single women to enter solo parenthood. Data collection involved interviews with 26 single mothers by choice and two years of participant observation in two Single Mothers by Choice support groups. Their accounts indicate that SMCs feel entitled to enter solo motherhood because they possess four essential attributes: age, responsibility, emotional maturity, and fiscal capability. SMCs use economic, moral, and religious justifications to further legitimize their decisions. (...) These justifications allow SMCs to present themselves as competent, ethical, and mainstream mothers. (shrink)

There is an apparent tension between the open-ended aspect of the ordinal sequence and the assumption that the set-theoretical universe is fully determinate. This tension is already present in Cantor, who stressed the incompletable character of the transfinite number sequence in Grundlagen and avowed the definiteness of the totality of sets and numbers in subsequent philosophical publications and in correspondence. The tension is particularly discernible in his late distinction between sets and inconsistent multiplicities. I discuss Cantor’s contrasting views, and I (...) conclude that his account of that distinction is only tenable if the definiteness of the set-theoretical universe is rejected. (shrink)

Innovative surgery raises four kinds of ethical challenges: potential harms to patients; compromised informed consent; unfair allocation of healthcare resources; and conflicts of interest. Lack of adequate data on innovations and lack of regulatory oversight contribute to these ethical challenges. In this paper these issues and the extent to which problems may be resolved by better evidence-gathering and more comprehensive regulation are explored. It is suggested that some ethical issues will be more resistant to resolution than others, owing to special (...) features of both surgery and innovation. (shrink)

In 1936 Tarski sketched a rigorous definition of the concept of logical consequence which, he claimed, agreed quite well with common usage-or, as he also said, with the common concept of consequence. Commentators of Tarski's paper have usually been elusive as to what this common concept is. However, being clear on this issue is important to decide whether Tarski's definition failed (as Etchemendy has contended) or succeeded (as most commentators maintain). I argue that the common concept of consequence that Tarski (...) tried to characterize is not some general, all-purpose notion of consequence, but a rather precise one, namely the concept of consequence at play in axiomatics. I identify this concept and show that Tarski's definition is fully adequate to it. (shrink)

Clinical ethics consultants (CECs) often face some of the most difficult communication and interpersonal challenges that occur in hospitals, involving stressed stakeholders who express, with strong emotions, their preferences and concerns in situations of personal crisis and loss. In this article we will give examples of how much of the important work that ethics consultants perform in addressing clinical ethics conflicts is incompletely conceived and explained in the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities Core Competencies for Healthcare Ethics Consultation and (...) the clinical ethics literature. The work to which we refer is best conceptualized as a specialized type of interviewing, in which the emotional barriers of patients and their families or surrogates can be identified and addressed in light of relevant ethical obligations and values within the context of ethics facilitation. (shrink)

This article discusses the [development and] use of a video life-world schema to explore alternative orientations to the shared health consultation. It is anticipated that this schema can be used by practitioners and consumers alike to understand the dynamics of videoed health consultations, the role of the participants within it and the potential to consciously alter the outcome by altering behaviour during the process of interaction. The study examines health consultation participation and develops an interpretative method of analysis that includes (...) image elicitation (via videos), phenomenology (to identify the components of the analytic framework), narrative (to depict the stories of interactions) and a reflexive mode (to develop shared meaning through a conceptual framework for analysis). The analytic framework is derived from a life-world conception of human mutual shared interaction which is presented here as a novel approach to understanding patient-centred care. The video materials used in this study were derived from consultations in a Walk-in Centre (WiC) in East London. The conceptual framework produced through the process of video analysis is comprised of different combinations of movement, knowledge and emotional conversations that are used to classify objective or engaged WiC health care interactions. The videoed interactions organise along an active or passive, facilitative or directive typical situation continuum illustrating different kinds of textual approaches to practice that are in tension or harmony. The schema demonstrates how practitioners and consumers interact to produce these outcomes and indicates the potential for both consumers and practitioners to be educated to develop practice dynamics that support patient-centred care and impact on health outcomes. (shrink)

References to strength of mind, a character trait implying “the prevalence of the calm passions above the violent”, occur in a number of important discussions of motivation in the Treatise and the Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals. Nevertheless, Hume says surprisingly little about what strength of mind is, or how it is achieved. This paper argues that Hume’s theory of the passions can provide an interesting and defensible account of strength of mind. The paper concludes with a brief comparison (...) of Humean strength of mind with autonomy. (shrink)

This paper presents an ethical approach to the use of lobbying within the context of the relationships among U.S. organizations, their lobbyists, and government officials. After providing a brief history of modern-day lobbying activities, lobbying is defined and described focusing on its role as a strategic marketing tool. Then ethical frameworks for understanding the impact of these practices on various external constituencies are delineated with an emphasis on the communitarian movement advanced by Etzioni. Consistent with the call for "informed advocacy" (...) by Laczniak (1993), the paper closes with an examination of the ethics of specific lobbying activities. (shrink)

Diagrams make it possible to present scientific facts in more abstract and generalized form. While some detail is lost, simplified and accessible knowledge is gained. E. B. Wilson's work in cytology provides a case study of changing uses of diagrams and accompanying abstraction. In his early work, Wilson presented his data in photographs, which he saw as coming closest to “fact.” As he gained confidence in his interpretations, and as he sought to provide a generalized textbook account of cell development, (...) he relied on increasingly abstract diagrams. In addition, he came to see that highly abstract and even schematic drawings could provide more than pictures directly from life. (shrink)

In this volume we will focus on how educators in high schools (grades 9-12) can incorporate the teaching of ethics effectively across all disciplines.

: In response to allegations that China is a "shame culture," scholars of Confucian ethics have made use of new studies in psychology, anthropology, and philosophy that present shame in a more favorable light. These studies contend that shame involves internalization of social moral codes. By adapting these new internal models of shame, Confucian ethicists have attempted to rehabilitate the emphasis on shame in early Confucianism, but in doing so they have inadvertently highlighted the striking absence in early Confucian texts (...) of such prominent shame metaphors as being seen, particularly with genitals exposed. This essay analyzes these visual metaphors for shame, in contrast to contact metaphors, and considers the implications for Confucian ethics that they might be two different types of shame. (shrink)

Charlotte Perkins Gilman and John Dewey were both pragmatists who recognized the need to restructure the environment to bring about social progress. Gilman was even more of a pragmatist than Dewey, however, because she addressed problems he did not identify-much less confront. Her philosophy is in accord with the spirit of Dewey's work but in important ways, it is more consistent, more comprehensive and more radical than his instrumentalism.

The likelihood of nurse reflection is examined from the theoretical perspectives of Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action and Moral Action and Sumner's Moral Construct of Caring in Nursing as Communicative Action, through a critical social theory lens. The argument is made that until the nurse reaches the developmental level of post-conventional moral maturity and/or Benner's Stage 5: expert, he or she is not capable of being inwardly directed reflective on self. The three developmental levels of moral maturity and Benner's stages (...) are presented with discussion on whether or not there can be self-reflection because of an innate vulnerability that leads to self-protective behaviours. It is only when the confidence from mastery of practice has been achieved can the nurse be comfortable with reflection that enables him or her to become enlightened, emancipated, and empowered. The influences and constraints of the knowledge power between nurse and patient are acknowledged. The power hierarchy of the institution is recognized as constraining. (shrink)

George Boolos has described an interpretation of a fragment of ZFC in a consistent second-order theory whose only axiom is a modification of Frege's inconsistent Axiom V. We build on Boolos's interpretation and study the models of a variety of such theories obtained by amending Axiom V in the spirit of a limitation of size principle. After providing a complete structural description of all well-founded models, we turn to the non-well-founded ones. We show how to build models in which foundation (...) fails in prescribed ways. In particular, we obtain models in which every relation is isomorphic to the membership relation on some set as well as models of Aczel's anti-foundation axiom (AFA). We suggest that Fregean extensions provide a natural way to envisage non-well-founded membership. (shrink)

We thank Zohar Lederman and Benjamin Capps for engaging with our paper on One Health and ethical frameworks, however we want to take issue with them on three points. First, they appear to misunderstand the distinction we appeal to between ethical theory and ethical frameworks, and so misinterpret what we are trying to achieve in our paper. Second, in spite of what they seem to imply, we agree that an OH approach can obscure differences in values, and that to progress (...) the field there needs to be recognition of competing values and their implications for OH. Finally, we are puzzled by their interest in pursuing a deliberative process, as this seems at odds with other positions they take in their paper, and also opens up many questions that need to be addressed. (shrink)

Just over a decade on from a spike of interest in Jacques Rancière’s writing within educational philosophy and theory, I revisit his interventions on democracy and education to make the case for (re)engaging with Rancière’s writing now to address important questions about contemporary education policy, the role of schools in democratic societies and public debate over the curriculum. Specifically, I argue that Rancière’s interventions on the Platonism that characterises both ‘progressive’ and ‘traditional’ arguments about school curricula in such contexts offer (...) a vital tool for understanding the shifts in education policy and educational debate that animate our current political moment. Building on work that has applied Rancière’s writing to analyse neoliberal education policy, I argue that Rancière’s writing provides a distinctive analytical lens for interpreting a recent shift towards neo-conservative education policy agendas, and the imbrication of schools within the ‘culture-wars’ that characterise the contemporary political landscape in several national settings. Taking recent policies concerned with the teaching of values in England as an example, I argue that a Rancierian perspective on such policy is helpful for revitalising research concerned with education and the role of public schooling in societies that wish to maintain some claim to democracy. (shrink)

This paper describes the experience of an academic institution, the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), developing training courses about research integrity practices in authorship, publication, and Journal Peer Review. The importance of providing research integrity training in these areas is now widely accepted; however, it remains an open question how best to conduct this training. For this reason, it is vital for institutions, journals, and peak bodies to share learnings.We describe how we have collaborated across our institution to develop training (...) that supports QUT’s principles and which is in line with insights from contemporary research on best practices in learning design, universal design, and faculty involvement. We also discuss how we have refined these courses iteratively over time, and consider potential mechanisms for evaluating the effectiveness of the courses more formally. (shrink)

This paper presents selected findings from a historical analysis of change in the discursive construction of social identity in UK education policy discourse from 1972–2005. My chief argument is that through its linguistic forms of self-identification the government construes educational roles, relations and responsibilities not only for itself, but also for other educational actors and wider society. More specifically, I argue that New Labour's distinctive mode of self-representation is an important element in its hegemonic project, textually manufacturing consent over its (...) policy decisions, and helping to articulate its self-styled ‘enabling’ model of governance. As evidence for these claims I discuss two prominent trends in New Labour's education policy rhetoric, which I characterise as ‘personalisation’ and ‘managerialisation’. Respectively, these relate to the discursive representation of social identity and social action. (shrink)