A new reading of Plato's account of conventionalism about names in the Cratylus. It argues that Hermogenes' position, according to which a name is whatever anybody 'sets down' as one, does not have the counterintuitive consequences usually claimed. At the same time, Plato's treatment of conventionalism needs to be related to his treatment of formally similar positions in ethics and politics. Plato is committed to standards of objective natural correctness in all such areas, despite the problematic consequences which, as he (...) himself shows, arise in the case of language. (shrink)

Among Aristotle’s criticisms of the Form of the Good is his claim that the knowledge of such a Good could be of no practical relevance to everyday rational agency, e.g. on the part of craftspeople. This critique turns out to hinge ultimately on the deeply different assumptions made by Plato and Aristotle about the relation of ‘good’ and ‘good for’. Plato insists on the conceptual priority of the former; and Plato wins the argument.

This study offers a ckomprehensive new interpretation of one of Plato's dialogues, the _Cratylus_. Throughout, the book combines analysis of Plato's arguments with attentiveness to his philosophical method.

Plato's account of the tripartite soul is a memorable feature of dialogues like the Republic, Phaedrus and Timaeus: it is one of his most famous and influential yet least understood theories. It presents human nature as both essentially multiple and diverse - and yet somehow also one - divided into a fully human 'rational' part, a lion-like 'spirited part' and an 'appetitive' part likened to a many-headed beast. How these parts interact, how exactly each shapes our agency and how they (...) are affected by phenomena like erôs and education is complicated and controversial. The essays in this book investigate how the theory evolves over the whole of Plato's work, including the Republic, Phaedrus and Timaeus, and how it was developed further by important Platonists such as Galen, Plutarch and Plotinus. They will be of interest to a wide audience in philosophy and classics. (shrink)

This discussion emphasises the diversity, philosophical seriousness and methodological distinctiveness of sophistic thought. Particular attention is given to their views on language, ethics, and the social construction of various norms, as well as to their varied, often undogmatic dialectical methods. The assumption that the sophists must have shared common doctrines (not merely overlapping interests and professional practices) is called into question.

A generally ignored feature of Aristotle’s famous function argument is its reliance on the claim that practitioners of the crafts (technai) have functions: but this claim does important work. Aristotle is pointing to the fact that we judge everyday rational agency and agents by norms which are independent of their contingent desires: a good doctor is not just one who happens to achieve his personal goals through his work. But, Aristotle argues, such norms can only be binding on individuals if (...) human rational agency as such is governed by objective teleological norms.
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Plato’s depiction of the first city in the Republic (Book II), the so-called ‘city of pigs’, is often read as expressing nostalgia for an earlier, simpler era in which moral norms were secure. This goes naturally with readings of other Platonic texts (including Republic I and the Gorgias) as expressing a sense of moral decline or crisis in Plato’s own time. This image of Plato as a spokesman for ‘moral nostalgia’ is here traced in various nineteenth- and twentieth-century interpretations, and (...) rejected. Plato’s pessimism about human nature in fact precludes any easy assumption that things, or people, were better in the old days. (shrink)

Platonic arguments often have premises of a particular form which is misunderstood. These sentences look like universal generalizations, but in fact involve an implicit qua phrase which makes them a fundamentally different kind of predication. Such general implicit redoubled qua predications (girqps) are not an expression of Plato's proprietary views; they are also very common in everyday discourse. Seeing how they work in Plato can help us to understand them.

Pyrrhonian sceptics claim, notoriously, to assent to the appearances without making claims about how things are. To see whether this is coherent we need to consider the philosophical history of ‘appearance’(phainesthai)-talk, and the closely related concept of an impression (phantasia). This history suggests that the sceptics resemble Plato in lacking the ‘non-epistemic’ or ‘non-doxastic’ conception of appearance developed by Aristotle and the Stoics. What is distinctive about the Pyrrhonian sceptic is simply that the degree of doxastic commitment involved in his (...) assent to an impression is asymptotally low. (shrink)

It is very difficult to get a clear picture of how the Stoic is supposed to deliberate. This paper considers a number of possible pictures, which cover such a wide range of options that some look Kantian and others utilitarian. Each has some textual support but is also unworkable in certain ways: there seem to be genuine and unresolved conflicts at the heart of Stoic ethics. And these are apparently due not to developmental changes within the school, but to the (...) Stoics’ having adopted implicitly incompatible solutions in response to different philosophical challenges. (shrink)

Socrates’ refutations of Thrasymachus in Republic I are unsatisfactory on a number of levels which need to be carefully distinguished. At the same time several of his arguments are more powerful than they initially appear. Of particular interest are those which turn on the idea of a craft, which represents a shared norm of practical rationality here contested by Socrates and Thrasymachus.

This paper discusses two related questions about Plato’s account of the tripartite soul in the Republic and Phaedrus. One is whether we should accept the recently prominent ‘analytical’ reading of the theory, according to which the three parts of the soul are animal-like sub-agents, each with its own distinctive and autonomous package of cognitive and desiderative capacities. The other question is how far Plato’s account so interpreted resembles the findings of contemporary neuroscience, given that this also depicts the mind as (...) complex, partitioned, subject to conflict, and only very incompletely rational. The paper sketches the analytical reading, outlines the similarities and disanologies of the theory so understood to contemporary neuropsychology, and then steps back to consider three problems with such an interpretation. None is decisive; but they raise doubts as to whether the question of the title can really be answered in the way both the analytical reading and the modern parallel presume. (shrink)

The Cratylus is Plato's principal discussion of language, and has generated immense interpretive controversy. This thesis offers a new interpretation of the Cratylus, starting from the idea that it is essentially a normative enquiry, to be interpreted alongside Plato's ethical and political works. Just as the Statesman attempts to determine the nature of the statesman, so too the basic project of the Cratylus is to discover what constitutes a true, correct name. But this aim is doomed in the case of (...) language: names turn out to be a kind of imitation, and as such incapable of real correctness. ;The Cratylus discusses two theories of 'the correctness of names': conventionalism and naturalism. First, Socrates refutes the conventionalist thesis that any name anyone sets down for an object is correct. This thesis is, I suggest, of interest as a reasonable way to support the commonsensical assumption that all actual names are correct--an assumption which would preclude Plato's normative project. Socrates then elaborates naturalism, with an outsize, vaguely playful etymological discussion which has baffled interpreters. I argue that the etymological section serves above all as an agonistic display, establishing the authority of the philosopher to determine the value of etymologising and to treat the subject of names as he deems fit. ;Etymology is succeeded by the mimetic account of names as imitations. This is followed by a 'reexamination' of naturalism in which Socrates apparently turns against it, concluding with a partial rehabilitation of convention. This conclusion is the other major interpretive stumbling-block of the Cratylus. Here I argue that no rejection of naturalism is implied. Rather, its status is shown to be limited by its own consequences--a paradox, but one which does amount to or entail conventionalism. This reading is developed further by reference to the similar position expressed in the Seventh Letter. ;An End-Note discusses the explanation of false statement presented in the Sophist: I argue against the common view that it uses syntactic ideas in a way which represents a significant departure from the Cratylus. (shrink)

A generally ignored feature of Plato’s celebrated image of the cave in Republic VII is that the ascent from the cave is, in its initial stages, said to be brought about by force. What kind of ‘force’ is this, and why is it necessary? This paper considers three possible interpretations, and argues that each may have a role to play.

Are the long, wildly inventive etymologies in Plato’s Cratylus just some kind of joke, or does Plato himself accept them? This standard question misses the most important feature of the etymologies: they are a competitive performance, an agôn by Socrates in which he shows that he can play the game of etymologists like Cratylus better than they can themselves. Such show-off performances are a recurrent feature of Platonic dialogue: they include Socrates’ speeches on eros in the Phaedrus, his rhetorical discourse (...) in the Menexenus, and his literary interpretation in the Protagoras. The paper compares these cases to work out the ground rules, purposes and implications of the Platonic agôn, and the Cratylus etymologies in particular. (shrink)

This book derives from Annas’s 1997 Townsend Lectures at Cornell University, and it retains the invigorating clarity and fast pace of a first-rate lecture series. In it Annas discusses assorted topics in Plato’s ethics and their ancient interpretation: her unifying theme is that we have much to learn from ancient readings of Plato, and those of the Middle Platonists in particular.

Simplicius’ project of harmonizing previous philosophers deserves to be taken seriously as both a philosophical and an interpretive project. Simplicius follows Aristotle himself in developing charitable interpretations of his predecessors: his distinctive project, in the Neoplatonic context, is the rehabilitation of the Presocratics (especially Parmenides, Anaxagoras and Empedocles) from a Platonic-Aristotelian perspective. Simplicius’ harmonizations involve hermeneutic techniques which are recognisably those of the serious historian of philosophy; and harmonization itself has a distinguished history as a constructive philosophical method.

This paper explores in detail Gorgias' defense of rhetoric in Plato 's Gorgias, noting its connections to earlier and later texts such as Aristophanes' Clouds, Gorgias' Helen, Isocrates' Nicocles and Antidosis, and Aristotle's Rhetoric. The defense as Plato presents it is transparently inadequate; it reveals a deep inconsistency in Gorgias' conception of rhetoric and functions as a satirical precursor to his refutation by Socrates. Yet Gorgias' defense is appropriated, in a streamlined form, by later defenders of rhetoric such as Isocrates (...) and Aristotle. They present it as an effective reductio against a critique of rhetoric that depends on the "harm criterion." This is puzzling, since Plato 's own critique of rhetoric does not depend on the harm criterion. On the other hand, Plato does seem to embrace the harm criterion as a more general principle—as if pre-emptively embracing the reductio —in his arguments about the good in the Meno and Euthydemus. Nonetheless, Isocrates and Aristotle seem to be deliberately misreading Plato on rhetoric: where he intends to criticize its intrinsic nature, they respond as if he were merely complaining about its contingent effects. (shrink)

Iakovos Vasiliou argues for reading Plato’s early dialogues and the Republic in light of “the aiming/determining distinction.” Aiming questions are concerned with the selection of our overriding ends. Determining questions ask how we can identify actions which secure those ends. As Vasiliou argues, Socrates claims to know an answer to the central aiming question, namely that virtue must be supreme (SV). Virtue functions sometimes as an explicit end and always as a limiting condition: we must never do wrong. For wrong (...) action damages the soul, which is the most important locus of harms and benefits for us. Vasiliou traces this argument as it is offered with increasing fullness in the Crito, Gorgias, and Republic. .. (shrink)

An important virtue of Emotion and Virtue is its careful and sophisticated discussion of the central yet ill-understood virtue of courage. However, Sreenivasan’s treatment of courage raises as many questions as it answers; several of these can be brought into sharper focus by comparison with the argument of Plato and Aristotle on the topic.

The Paleolithic paintings and drawings found on cave walls at sites in France and Spain, such as Lascaux, Altamira and Vallon-Pont-D'Arc, have profound effects on those who see them. In addition to their historical interest, they are prized for their aesthetic and spiritual qualities, which have had an important influence on modern art. But the caves are small and the paintings are fragile. Access to them has been sharply limited: some caves have been closed to protect the paintings from the (...) damage caused by human respiration; access to others is limited to those who negotiate a daunting reservation scheme. Despite being the heritage of humanity as a whole, the cave paintings are, and must be, restricted to a very few. Not everyone who wants to see the paintings can do so if they are to survive. (shrink)

I respond to Sarah Buss first by considering Socrates as an exemplar of courageous resistance to injustice, then by adding two caveats: exemplary resistance seems to flow from very diverse psychological profiles, and cowardice may not always be best understood as expressing fearful self‐attachment.

Plato's Republic has proven to be of astounding influence and importance. Justly celebrated as Plato's central text, it brings together all of his prior works, unifying them into a comprehensive vision that is at once theological, philosophical, political and moral. The essays in this volume provide a picture of the most interesting aspects of the Republic, and address questions that continue to puzzle and provoke, such as: Does Plato succeed in his argument that the life of justice is the most (...) attractive one? Is his tripartite analysis of the soul coherent and plausible? Why does Plato seem to have to force his philosopher-guardians to rule when they know this is something that they ought to do? What is the point of the strange and complicated closing Myth of Er? This volume will be essential to those looking for thoughtful and detailed excursions into the problems posed by Plato's text and ideas. (shrink)

In this provocative book, a professor of philosophy examines the arguments for and against euthanasia, analyzes specific case studies, including those of Baby Jane Doe and Barney Clark, and offers an alternate theory on the morality of euthanasia. Various traditional distinctions--between "human" and "non-human," intentional and nonintentional, killing and "letting die"--are taken into account to determine whether euthanasia is permissible or not. Rachels presents a systematic argument against the traditional view, defending an alternative position based on the belief that (...) there is a profound difference between having a life and merely being alive. (shrink)

It is a difficult task to succinctly describe the professional accomplishments of Arthur Caplan, PhD. For the uninitiated, Dr. Caplan is perhaps the most prominent voice in the conversation between bioethicists and the general public, as well as being a prolific writer and academic. He is currently the Drs. William F. and Virginia Connolly Mitty Professor of Bioethics at NYU Langone Medical Center and NYU School of Medicine, having founded the Division of Bioethics there in 2012. Additionally, he co-founded the (...) NYU Sports and Society Program, where he currently serves as Dean, and heads the ethics program for NYU’s Global Institute for Public Health. Prior to joining NYU, he created the Center for Bioethics and Department of Medical Ethics at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, serving as the Sidney D. Caplan Professor of Bioethics. Dr. Caplan is a Hastings Center fellow, also holding fellowships at The New York Academy of Medicine, the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American College of Legal Medicine. He received the lifetime achievement award of the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities in 2016. Dr. Caplan’s experience is not at all limited to the academic realm: he has served on numerous advisory counsels at the national and international level, and is an ethics advisor for organizations tackling issues from synthetic biology to world health to compassionate care. Dr. Caplan has been awarded the McGovern Medal of the American Medical Writers Association, the Franklin Award from the City of Philadelphia, the Patricia Price Browne Prize in Biomedical Ethics, the Public Service Award from the National Science Foundation, and the Rare Impact Award from the National Organization for Rare Disorders; he also holds seven honorary degrees. Kaitlynd Hiller and Rachel Bloom, both M.S. Bioethics graduates of Columbia University, had the opportunity to meet with Dr. Caplan last winter to conduct a candid exploration of his career as a bioethicist. Their conversation touched on moments in Dr. Caplan’s personal history that planted the seeds for his future professional involvement with bioethics, discussing his evolving views over time. Reflecting on his own impact to the field, Dr. Caplan leaves us with wisdom for bioethicists beginning their career in the public sphere. A lightly-edited transcript can be found below. INITIAL INTEREST IN BIOETHICS Rachel: Can you tell us anecdotally how you became interested in bioethics as a field? Caplan: There is sort of a deep psychoanalytic kind of reason and then more of a recent causation kind of reason. When I was little I had polio and I was in the hospital for a long time. I was six -- a little, little kid -- in Boston where I grew up. At that time, it was so long ago, your parents couldn’t stay over. In fact, your parents didn’t visit that much. I think I saw them three times a week and I liked my parents, at least at that time. I didn’t see my dog, ever, for nine months. They managed to get me my homework, which didn’t seem great, but the main things were kids were dying, they wouldn’t tell us the truth. We knew they were dying because they looked so bad. They said they went home. They didn’t really listen to complaints about, you know, why’re the visiting hours are so strict. Why can’t my friends come and see me? That sort of stuff. It definitely got me thinking about what we would now call ethics issues, although they certainly didn’t call them that back then, they were just issues. And even as a little, little kid, it was bothersome. So I’m sure that got my interest going. Later, I was going to go to med school. I was a premed at Brandeis, outside of Boston, and I went to Columbia [for medical school] briefly and saw all kinds of interesting ethical things going on. I started to talk to the deans and other people about when we could explore this stuff. And they said, “Well you just talk about it with your attending.” Which you were never going to do, ever, because they would consider that an insult and they would have you washing bedpans for weeks. So – Rachel: Questioning the ethicality of their actions? Caplan: Or even say, explain it. I didn’t know about the field of bioethics, although it was getting underway. We’re talking mid ’70s, so the Hastings Center and the Kennedy Institute already existed; I just didn’t know it. And I went down to the Columbia Philosophy Department and said I would like to get a Master’s Degree in Ethics and take time off to do that and they said, “Well, first of all, we don’t have a Master’s Degree in Ethics, because we only take PhD students. And second of all, we aren’t interested in” -- I think the phrase was “the ethics of plumbers.” Meaning doctors. And I said, “OK. I’ll sign up for it anyway.” And so I went into the PhD program, but I thought I’m just going to dropout and then get a Master’s Degree and it’ll be all good. Not really interested in philosophy, but the issues were fun, other students were smart, and I liked it. So I thought I’m going to do the degree and then go back, but I never really went back. I went back as the medical ethics guy and sort of started the program that you guys are now in, except by a long, twisty course. WHAT IS BIOETHICS? Rachel: I was just going to comment, I think a lot of people are thinking about bioethical issues without necessarily knowing the name to attach to it. Caplan: Yes. I often say, “I do bioethics,” and people are like, “What’s that?” And then you say, “Well, you know, end of life care; Terri Schiavo; Jack Kevorkian; cloning; stem cells; genetic engineering.” And they’re just, “Oh. Oh. I get it.” Yeah, absolutely true. You know, “Should we quarantine people, should we give people drugs without testing them?” They get that. They understand right away that there are good ethics issues there. Sometimes they’re also a little afraid of “ethics,” so you have to be careful how you use that word because ethics could also mean people who are going to church or you’re going to yell at me for being a derelict, or whatever it is; people also confuse ethics with what I’ll call politeness or manners. PERSONAL INTEREST AND TRANSPLANTATION Rachel: When you entered the field, were your goals more along the lines of drawing on your personal experiences, focused on patients having different, better experiences in the future? Caplan: Well, despite the motivation of wanting it to be nicer for kids, that wasn’t really what was driving me by the time I got into this. I was interested in the theory. And I began almost by writing about things like, what sort of concepts of health and disease should drive medicine? How do you define them? What are medicine’s goals? What we now call philosophy of medicine, which I’m still interested in and I still write about; what is health, what is illness, what is disease-type stuff. But nobody ever seems to ask me about it – they just don’t find it as interesting as, should the surrogate mother have to get an abortion if the commissioning couple wants her to? It’s like, that gets them. “What is Health” is like, you know, call me when you figure it out. So it was more theoretical stuff. But I began to get interested in this new area that was emerging of transplants. And it was sort of high tech and very risky and a lot of the people who got the first transplants died. And some hospitals actually prohibited people from doing transplants, they were so dangerous. And that just got my attention and then I began to wonder -- because I was still going to Columbia -- why weren’t we doing more transplants? Because we had a lot of people with kidney failure and only a small dialysis unit to take care of them. And it turned out that one problem was there weren’t enough organs. So that was a very practical problem and I said, “OK. You go and try and examine that, why aren’t there more organs to transplant?” Because we had the capability, we just didn’t have the parts. And that led me to still be interested in transplant ethics, you know, 30 years later. And I did some very practical things there, if you want to talk practical. We figured out the people at hospitals were not asking about organs when people died. You have to ask for them to get them, so I wrote up a law and got it through the New York State Legislature called Required Request, which was you had to ask when somebody died. They didn’t have to give, but you at least had to ask them. And that became law in most states and then it became a hospital accreditation requirement, then it became part of Medicare funding eligibility. So, it’s everywhere and people have to do it. Then I also realized that [institutions] weren’t sharing organs. They weren’t playing nicely with each other. They got an organ, if they couldn’t use it, they threw it away, literally. So they would, like, say, “Well, if we can’t use it at NYU, then we’re not giving it to Columbia. They’re our competition, so we’re not going to send it there.” So, eventually I hooked up with Al Gore, who was a Congressman from Tennessee and interested in medicine and science and technology, and we worked out with his staff the United Network for Organ Sharing. We built the system that became the distributor of organs and that was a lot of work; very interesting, and it stood the test of time. So those were two very early experiences, practical bioethics, changing laws, sitting down in the real world and saying, “You’re going to get a kidney and you’re not. Here’s why and these are the criteria and this is how we do it. And if you don’t like it, you can complain, but these are the rules until we change them.” BIOETHICIST AS EXPERT Rachel: How has your experience been shaped being a bioethicist, but not a healthcare professional? Have you found particular challenges from this? Caplan: Yes. When I first started out, I was not only not a doc, but I was too young. So, going after somebody’s ethics who’s senior, who’s a very established doc, is a real challenge. You have to be very political about it and very diplomatic about it. It’s always been an issue in terms of making sure that you know enough medicine and science to be credible to the group you’re talking to and I came as a premed and I did spend a lot of time at the Columbia Hospital, sort of a long internship. Most people assume I’m a doctor today because I sound the jargon and do the walk and in the transplant community, I’m like an honorary member of the International Transplant Society. I mean, I’m treated like a transplant doc and that’s all been good and very helpful, but without acquiring that mastery of one of the sub-disciplines and knowing the jargon and knowing what’s going on at the bedside, it would be very hard to be taken seriously, even to this day. So we tried to force students to spend at least a little time learning how the hospital functions, what people do, how it operates. ISSUES IN BIOETHICS Kaitlynd: What issues in bioethics today do you think are overemphasized or talked too much about? And which ones are not discussed enough, but are really important? Caplan: The stuff I’m not interested in gets talked about too much and what I’m interested in doesn’t get talked about enough. I would say there’s a shift that will surprise you. There’s a lot of interest in public health ethics overseas that gets talked about a little too much. There’s plenty of public health problems here. You don’t have to go overseas. Part of me gets a little irritated when somebody says, I’m going to go solve the problem of poor people in Sierra Leone, if there’s a bunch of poor people in the Bronx. It’s sort of like, can we do them first? It’s easier to deal with people who won’t talk back or are going to give you a hard time. I like public health ethics, but I don’t think it all has to be in the poorest places on earth where the great white saviors arrive. There’s probably too much attention to some of the weird reproductive technology stuff, because it’s rare. It doesn’t impact that many people. I get the interest, it’s just eternally fascinating, but it gets overemphasized. Underutilized: nursing home ethics, rehab ethics, mental health. Last year I put out a reader on mental health ethics to try and get people interested in that area. The only time people seem interested in mental health ethics is when there’s a mass shooting, otherwise they don’t seem to care a whole lot. Chronic illness doesn’t get a ton of attention. Acute stuff does. High tech gets a ton of attention and I pay attention to high tech and I pay attention to cutting edge, whether it’s CRISPR or stem cells, but I try to be across the board with it. I think I’ve probably written two-thirds of the literature on rehab ethics, because I’ve written about six papers on it. You know, it’s not a big area. I try to get people to pay attention, but it’s not drama. It’s sort of like – it was once said we should develop a cardboard box and put lights in it and tell people they had to stick their head in it and charge them a lot and say this is the Rehabitron. And then people would say, “Oh! We’ve got to pay attention to rehab. Should we pay for the Rehabitron?” PAST IDEOLOGY Kaitlynd: You’ve written extensively over many, many years – are there any positions that you took in past debates that you might disagree with today or go back on or change? Caplan: Yes. I’ll give you a current example: I was an early critic of Oregon’s assisted suicide law. I thought it would get abused. I thought people would get coerced into selecting death. I thought people would have their families pressure them to not spend all their money. Empirically, it just didn’t happen. I know people still say it does, but I try to look very hard and I don’t see any evidence of coercion or forcing people or any discontent at all with the law. So I’ve switched and become a supporter, at least of terminal illness as a trigger to allowing people physician-assisted suicide. I was a believer for a long time that if we switched from an opt-in system to get organs to an opt-out system that that would get us more organs. I’m not sure the evidence bears that out either. So I’ve slowly shifted -- it’s not that I’m against presumed consent, but I don’t think it’s going to have the impact that I once dreamed of because families and doctors still behave the same whether it’s opt-in or opt-out. They still go and ask the family, they just do, you know, when somebody dies. So I think you have to find ways to expand the donor pool. Maybe bring people who are dying to the ICU and put them on machines. If you don’t expand the pool, whether you have a market or a presumed consent, I don’t think it’s going to matter much, and I used to. It’s also funny when you change your mind or shift, because people are often citing you on their side, so I’m like, “I’m not on that side anymore.” FUTURE ISSUES Kaitlynd: What are the next issues you see yourself focusing on? Caplan: I’m definitely starting to pay attention to germline genetic engineering. I’ve been long interested in genetics, was interested in gene therapy, and you didn’t ask me this, but when Jesse Gelsinger died, that became a big crisis -- here’s this young man and he dies and his father doesn’t think the consent is very good and they’re off protocol in terms of what they were doing in the study and it was a mess and so, trying to figure out: how do I respond to that as the house ethicist? I hadn’t been at Penn that long, so I had to work through sort of thinking about what do you do when you get a sort of catastrophe in your own institution. That early experience around genetics stuff, I didn’t lose that. You probably know too that I’ve written an awful a lot about Nazi science and the Holocaust and how it shaped experimentation. Well, germline engineering, you know, when you’re starting to edit hereditary traits, it gets us back to a place where a lot of scientists said we’ll never go; we’re not going to touch the germline, which I always thought was utter bullshit, because they didn’t know how to do it, but now we do know how. So that theme there is very interesting for me. It’s pretty clear that rationing scarce resources is going to be a big issue for a variety of reasons; cost, aging population. This experiment with unapproved drugs is going to lead to a continuing interest on my part in how to allocate resources fairly. I’m very interested in research ethics issues and particularly things like what trial designs are the most ethical, depending on whether it’s an emergency or just some boring hair growth remedy thing -- how do you design the trials? If informed consent -- written informed consent isn’t working all that well, then what will? For profit IRBs are here. What’s that going to look like? So I’m interested in all of that. I would say still, because of the recent experience with Ebola and pandemic flu, I’m interested in the ethics of humanitarian emergencies, the ethics of what to do when there’s a sort of a massive threat. PEER IMPACT Kaitlynd: Is there someone, a clinician or another academic, whose work has had an impact on your career? Caplan: Oh yeah, many. I was lucky. I had pretty good mentors. In the Philosophy Department at Columbia, Ernest Nagel, a famous philosopher of science, definitely encouraged me. He didn’t know what I was doing, but encouraged me and said, “You know, you’re a good speaker, you can explain things well, you should think about more of a public role, not just wind up in the classroom or in the ivory tower like a philosopher.” When I got to Columbia, there was a guy named Bernard Schoenberg, David Rothman, this guy I mentioned is the Bernard Schoenberg professor. Schoenberg was one of the guys who said, “Why don’t you go down and see if you can get a Master’s Degree in philosophy. I support you in your interest in medical ethics.” He was supportive and he would offer good comments and tips how to deal with doctors and that sort of stuff. Dan Callahan and Will Gaylin at The Hastings Center were very influential for me because Dan was a good writer and he edited me to the extent that I can write clearly and well. Dan was the kind of person who would edit your lunch order; if you sent it to him and it had typos, he would fix them. So he was pretty committed. Will was an early pioneer in bioethics in the public. He did the first TV show on public television about bioethics. He would talk to journalists and I watched him and thought, I could do that, and I think that’s important to do. And so he was useful that way. And there were others; there was a woman at Hastings named Ruth Macklin. You’ve probably run across Ruth -- so I was a junior graduate student at the Hastings, she was there as one of the first staff members, and I watched her make arguments and interact with people and I thought, ah, that’s pretty cool. She was very friendly. I got to know her very well. And she was an influence in terms of seeing how you could argue and use persuasive argument to change people’s minds about things. FINDING A PUBLIC PLATFORM Rachel: We had a question just asking about your general ubiquity in the mainstream media when it comes to issues of bioethics. You were mentioning your advisor said you shouldn’t want to be a part of the ivory tower, so how did you come to find a public platform? Caplan: Well, it’s interesting. It was deliberate, not an accident. After watching Will do this back in the ’80s at the Hastings Center, bioethics was still struggling to try and be legitimate, get grants, be in journals, not just bioethics journals, but get into the New England Journal, get into JAMA, places where routinely there are bioethics articles today. In fact, I don’t put a lot of my articles into bioethics journals; I put them into medical journals because they have a bigger audience. But it also seemed to me that if we were going to talk to patients and then have a practical impact, that wasn’t going to work through the journals because it just doesn’t. And the only way you can change policy, which I knew from my transplant experience, was to get the attention of politicians, and they watch the media. So the media becomes important as a vehicle to talk to patients, talk to politicians. So, I said, “You know, when I get the opportunities, I’m going to do this.” I taught a couple of guest lectures in the Columbia School of Journalism Science class. Volunteered to do it with a guy I knew named Ken Goldstein. Then a couple of events like the Barney Clark Artificial Heart, the Loma Linda University baboon heart transplant came into public attention and I wrote some bad articles about them and sort of muscled my way forward and said, “You know, these are scientifically interesting, but they raise all kinds of important ethical issues. You should think about the ethics.” I did that with answering journalists’ calls when they came; no one else at Hastings wanted to do it, so I did it, or sometimes actually calling them up and saying, “You know, I read your story, but you don’t have a word in here about ethics and you should pay attention to the cost or the who gets it or the why are we doing this at all because it didn’t work on animals, so.” And then, as I said, there were big issue cases, Baby Doe, the fights about handicapped infants that were just sort of presenting themselves and I thought, these are natural teaching opportunities. [To build a public platform], you have to be good at it. Most bioethicists are not. You got to be quick, witty, on point, succinct. These are not traits that capture a lot of bioethics. I quickly moved to starting to write my own stuff. You’ll see me doing op-eds all the time and I started doing a syndicated newspaper column back when I moved to Minnesota. It ran in like 150 papers, but then I had my own voice. So taking control and having a footprint where people started to say, I see this guy writing opinion pieces. I would try to keep my scholarship going so that people couldn’t dump on me as just a Carl Sagan or Steven Gould popularizer. So of all the people in bioethics, I believe it’s true that I’ve written more period papers than anybody. That said, a) academics don’t like popularization; and b) they are envious of it. I can’t tell you the number of people who say, “Well, I don’t own a TV, so I don’t really care what you do.” But then they would say, “But I heard you on public radio or I saw you in the New York Times.” Kaitlynd: Well not only would you get flak from people, but has anybody given you criticism about you being the sort of spokesperson for the bioethics community as a whole? Caplan: Constantly. My attitude and my answer has always been, “Take what you get. You only get a minute thirty, so, you don’t want to do it, don’t do it. But if you think you’re going to build in seven distinctions in your 20-second sound bite, probably not doing that.” I hear some of the criticisms of, “Why are you the public face of bioethics?” Part of me says, “Because I know how to do it.” And that’s why. It’s pretty simple. They’ll go to people they think can do it. If I wasn’t good at it, they wouldn’t come back. IMPACT ON THE FIELD Rachel: If you may be so bold, what impact do you think your work has had on the field? Caplan: Well, it’s funny in a couple of ways. In setting up bioethics programs at Minnesota, at Penn, and here [at NYU], that definitely has an impact because people watch the Penn program; a lot of people are training with me, so I can see the Stanford Bioethics Program is all people that were at Penn with me, junior people then, now they run it; Peter Ubel at Duke, David at Louisville. Upstate New York did a lot of programs that have spun out from my teaching, and I try pay attention to mentoring. I think it’s very important. I had good mentors; I want to be a good mentor. Part of my job is to make new scholars and new people for the field,it isn’t just to throw my name onto their papers or steal their research, which does go on and I don’t like it. The field is known around policy circles and by at least some people around the world and I think I drove that. Nobody writes articles anymore on medicine science without paying attention to ethics. That wasn’t true when I started. It’s true now. They always have something. They feel guilty if they don’t say something about, you know, there’s an ethical issue with whatever stupid new technology it is; the new thermometer. I think that’s been good. I think I perfected public policy in some useful ways. Transplant, absolutely. Built a way to get organs. Built a way to distribute them. Now working on this compact idea with J&J to distribute unapproved drugs. It’s drawing on the transplant experience; I think that’s going to work. I could cite four of five other policy places, but I definitely had a direct impact on change in terms of fixing a problem or trying to get something solved that wasn’t solved and I like that. I think that’s -- bioethics should do that. And it’s funny because it’s similar to when I first got into it. When somebody says, “Do you want to try and implement it?” We should say, “Yes.” Not, “Gosh. I’m too afraid.” Or, “I’m hiding now.” Or, “Why don’t you read my articles.” Or something. So, yeah, in a lot of ways. I fought stupid things like quarantining Ebola and sort of beat that to death. Helped patient groups a lot behind the scenes. I mean, I -- it’s funny, it’s like egomaniacal hour, but I helped set up the National Marrow Donor Program. Made sure we protected the donors and that sort of thing. Ran the Blood Safety Advisory Committee. Eventually got them to flip the ban on gay men donating blood, although it took 15 years, but finally got it. I like to think I set a tone that is somewhat lighter than the usual dreary world of academia, which very much matters to me. I’m friendly with my critics for the most part. It takes a lot to get me to really jump down somebody’s throat in an angry way, but I’m trying to say, you know, we can argue about these things. I could be wrong, but we can kind of enjoy the whole thing. We don’t have to sort of, you know, treat ourselves like we’re having an argument amongst the minor Greek Gods. ADVICE TO BIOETHICS STUDENTS Rachel: In the interest of broadening this field of which you’re currently at the head, what advice would you give to people who want to take the issues they’re learning about and make it more public? Kaitlynd: To be part of the societal conversation about bioethics. Caplan: Oh, I think I’ve wedged open the idea that there is a conversation. So that’s out there to be used. Second, you’ve got to be scholarly to be credible. So there is no shortcut. You can’t just go out there and say, I’m going to write op-eds all day on Twitter and share my views because eventually someone’s going to say, what is this based on? There is relatively little that I comment on that I haven’t written something about. You know, I write a lot, so, it gets me a big portfolio, but if you hang around long enough, pretty soon you’ve written about everything. But you’ve got to have that foundation. Decide what you can credibly comment on and stick to it. Third, you’ve got to practice, which means write some of your own opinion pieces, try blogs, see what works and learn. Ask for feedback. Show stuff to your peers; what do you like about it? Show stuff to your mother; what do you like about it? You know, try it out. I do that. My dad and my mother are still big commentators on things I do. They hear me on public radio in Boston every week now and they feedback to me vigorously at 95 and 92. I think it’s also important to realize that people are not interested in the same thing that a bioethics colloquium would be interested in. They don’t really want your reasons. They want to know what their options and alternatives are. So it’s a little bit more translational in terms of what you’re trying to achieve. Then if they ask, you supply them with arguments. Lastly, you know, a lot of what I do, I take positions on lots of things and I’m not afraid to do that, but often all I’m trying to say is CRISPR [or another biomedical shift] is coming, it raises a whole slew of issues, and you ought to pay attention. That’s what I call the prophetic mode. We try to look ahead and say, “This thing is going to make issues and here’s what some of them I think are.” And that’s it. That’s useful in the conversation; it isn’t just having answers; it’s sometimes raising questions in the Socratic way, if you want to think of Socrates in the marketplace. There’s some of that that goes on and it’s very important to be ahead of the game. I mean, we were talking about cloning 15 years before Dolly appeared. Stem cells, same thing. And that means being on top of science. So, you got to know where it’s going so you can flag it in a timely manner. (shrink)

Rachel Barney proposes that Plato’s theory of the tripartite soul is plausibly compared to scientific theories today. I depart from Barney by proposing that the tripartite soul is a model and that its status is hypothetical. And I raise four questions: What follows from the Plato-science comparison, as Barney conceives of it? Which questions emerge if science is looked at in the sophisticated mode that Barney employs in her discussion of Plato? Current science invokes a (...) multitude of subsystems relevant to motivation. Why compare it with tripartition? Stoic psychology may share more fundamental ideas with current science, including the premise that all goings-on in the soul are physiological movements. If tripartition is a model, why would one expect it to account for all dimensions of epistemic activity? (shrink)

1. Animal Cruelty Industrial farming is appallingly abusive to animals. Pigs. In America, nine-tenths of pregnant sows live in “gestation crates. ” These pens are so small that the animals can barely move. When the sows are first crated, they may flail around, in an attempt to get out. But soon they give up. Crated pigs often show signs of depression: they engage meaningless, repetitive behavior, like chewing the air or biting the bars of the stall. The sows live like (...) this for four months. Gestation crates will be phased out in Europe by the end of 2012, but they will still be used in America.1 In nature, pigs nurse their young for about thirteen weeks. But in industrial farms, piglets are taken from their mothers after about ten days. Because the piglets are weaned prematurely, they develop a lifelong craving to suck and chew. But the farmers don’t want them sucking and chewing on other pigs’ tails. So the growers routinely snip off the tails of all their pigs. They do this with a pair of pliers and no anesthetic. However, the whole tail is not removed; a tender stump remains. The point is to render the area sensitive, so the pigs being chewed on will fight back. Which they do.2 Over 113 million pigs are slaughtered each year in America.3 Typically, these pigs are castrated, their needle teeth are clipped, and one of their ears is notched for identification —all without pain relief.4 In nature, pigs spend up to three quarters of their waking hours foraging and exploring their environment.5 But in the factory farms, “tens of thousands of hogs spend their entire lives ignorant of earth or straw or sunshine, crowded together beneath a metal roof standing on metal slats suspended over a septic tank. ”6 Bored, and in constant pain, the pigs must perpetually inhale the fumes of their own waste. These pigs often get sick, and their ill health is exacerbated by the overcrowding. In 2000, the U.S. Department of Agriculture compared hog farms containing over 10,000 pigs—which is the norm—with farms containing under 2,000 pigs. (shrink)

Death, as a social ritual, is one of the great turning points in human existence, but prior to this classic work, it had been subjected to little scientific study. American perspectives on death seem strangely paradoxical - the brutal fact of death is confronted daily in our newspapers yet Americans are unwilling to talk openly about the process of dying itself. Awareness of Dying, using a highly original theory of awareness, examines the dying patient and those about him in social (...) interaction. It gives readers a language and tools of analysis for understanding who knows what about dying, under what circumstances, and what difference it makes. (shrink)

Scholars have critiqued mainstream economic approaches to environmental valuation for decades. These critiques have intensified with the increased prominence of environmental valuation in decision-making. This paper has three goals. First, we summarise prominent critiques of monetary valuation, drawing mostly on the work of Clive Spash, who worked extensively on cost–benefit analysis early in his career and then became one of monetary valuation's most thorough and ardent critics. Second, we, as a group of scholars who study relational values, describe how relational (...) values research engages with and addresses many of the critiques of monetary valuation. Third, we offer suggestions for relational values research that continues and deepens its ability to respond to critiques of monetary valuation and contributes to transformative change towards sustainability. (shrink)

Organisations that are able to adapt quickly to changing circumstances in their operating environment have a competitive advantage. This level of “agility” involves more than simply developing new strategies and organisational structures to enable the rapid gathering of relevant information and equally rapid response times. Agility also—if not primarily—requires an ability on the part of people in the organisation to collaborate effectively to improve their decision-making abilities both as far as speed and quality of outcome are concerned. Collaboration involves more (...) than the mere acquisition of a particular skills set, e.g., to listen and communicate effectively, or procedural adeptness. Creating a collaborative working environment requires a climate of trust within the organisation and a mindset that is focused on working with, rather than against others to achieve common organisational goals and objectives. Given the human propensity to compete and the so-called trust deficit prevalent in organisations, trustworthiness on the part of leaders and an ability to instil a culture of collaboration are required. However, a number of human and organisational obstacles would need to be overcome to achieve this. (shrink)

On the traditional relationalist conception of singular thought, a thought has singular content when it is based on an ‘information relation’ to its object. Recent work rejects relationalism and suggests singular thoughts are distinguished from descriptive thoughts by their inferential role: only thoughts with singular content can be employed in ‘direct’ inferences, or inferences that ‘trade on identity’. Firstly this view is insufficiently clear, because it conflates two distinct ideas—one about a kind of inference, the other a kind of process (...) that grounds inferences—under the title, ‘trading on identity’. Secondly, this leaves us without a notion that can be used as an alternative to relationalism about singular thought. The first notion is no more applicable to singular than to descriptive thought. The second may help us better understand singular thought, but does so, not by replacing the view that singular thoughts are information-based, but by helping us understand the nature of information-based thought. (shrink)

Despite the increased prevalence of bioethics research that seeks to use empirical data to answer normative research questions, there is no consensus as to what an appropriate methodology for this would be. This review aims to search the literature, present and critically discuss published Empirical Bioethics methodologies.

Simple claims with the verb ‘seem’, as well as the specific sensory verbs, ‘look’, ‘sound’, etc., require the speaker to have some relevant kind of perceptual acquaintance (Pearson, 2013; Ninan, 2014). But different forms of these reports differ in their perceptual requirements. For example, the copy raising (CR) report, ‘Tom seems like he’s cooking’ requires the speaker to have seen Tom, while its expletive subject (ES) variant, ‘It seems like Tom is cooking’, does not (Rogers, 1972; Asudeh and Toivonen, 2012). (...) This contrast has led some theorists to hold that the matrix subject in CR constructions is uniformly interpreted as the perceptual source (p-source) (Asudeh and Toivonen, 2012; Rett and Hyams, 2014). Others, based on examples of CR reports that seem not to require perception of the referent of the matrix subject, have taken the p-source interpretation instead to be non-uniform across CR reports (Landau, 2011; Doran, 2015). We reconsider these theoretical approaches to copy raising in light of new experimental work probing the sensitivity of these requirements to the matrix verb, the embedded ‘like’-clause, and the context. While we find some motivation for a non-uniform p-source analysis, it comes from importantly different cases than those others have relied on. Furthermore, our findings cast doubt on the prevalent assumption that the perceptual requirements of CR reports are to be captured solely by the presence or absence of the p-source interpretation. We suggest that the data motivating a non-uniform p-source view are better captured by an alternative approach, which makes use of a more minimal evidential source role, in place of the perceptual source role. We close by considering the relationship between English copy raising and evidential constructions cross-linguistically. (shrink)