Emotions can enhance our evaluative understanding by mobilizing directed reflection, but notoriously, emotional reflection can also lead us astray. If our goal is evaluative understanding, then we...

This paper offers an analysis of the primary wrong of epistemic injustice, namely, of the intrinsic harm that constitutes its action itself. Contrary to Miranda Fricker, I shall argue that there is...

Alcohol use has been recognized as a challenge in eldercare and social care, and some anticipate that problems related to alcohol use will increase in the future as the current adult generation has high alcohol consumption rates. Accordingly, it is suggested that care workers are at risk of becoming passive bystanders to the destructive lifestyles of vulnerable older adults and even facilitating these lifestyles. In the present paper, we suggest that alcohol exacerbates and underscores inherent difficulties in eldercare, such as (...) finding an appropriate balance between the personal freedom of the older adult and the responsibility of the care worker to provide care. The specific focus in the paper regard the communication and interaction involving values between people in eldercare in cases of problematic alcohol‐related situations to uncover the difficulties. We found it noteworthy that the objectives and perspectives of older adults, care workers, managers and relatives have implications regarding their interactions and communications because their varying experiences involve values that are not necessarily aligned. Sometimes, care workers have no choice but to act against what, in the public sphere and to the other care workers, is ruled out by virtue of their professional ethics. It is suggested that care workers describe and judge situations where alcohol is present paradoxically by virtue of their professional ethics, yet regulate their care to preserve the dignity of older adults, even when they find the situation to be an apparent dilemma. (shrink)

The skeptical challenge to politics is that if knowledge is in short supply and it is a condition for the proper use of political power, then there is very little just politics. Cicero’s Republicanism is posed as a program for political legitimacy wherein both citizens and their states are far from ideal. The result is a form of what is termed negative conservatism, which shows political gridlock in a more positive light.

In this chapter, we will offer a sketch of the state of the art as concerns existing accounts of virtue acquisition in relation to automaticity. In particular, we will focus on the so-called “skill model,” which we aim to improve by questioning its rather common underlying dualistic picture of the mind. Then we will propose an account of skillful emotions by identifying the features that make them both automatic and embedded in an intelligent practice. Finally, we will show how this (...) view can help the skill model by offering a better description of emotion shaping in virtue acquisition. By doing so, we will contend that emotions contribute autonomously and actively to the skillfulness of the habits in which they are embedded. (shrink)

This chapter provides an overview of the issues involved in recent debates about the epistemological relevance of emotions. We first survey some key issues in epistemology and the theory of emotions that inform various assessments of emotions’ potential significance in epistemology. We then distinguish five epistemic functions that have been claimed for emotions: motivational force, salience and relevance, access to facts and beliefs, non-propositional contributions to knowledge and understanding, and epistemic efficiency. We identify two core issues in the discussions about (...) such epistemic functions of emotions: First, even though it is plausible that emotions are involved in epistemic processes, it may be doubted whether they really matter for the normative question of what counts as knowledge or justified belief. Second, some of the epistemic functions claimed for emotions in general may only be attributed to some specifically epistemic emotions, which have been present all along in traditional epistemology, albeit under different labels such as ‘intuitions’. (shrink)

Connie Wang ABSTRACT: Accounts of deep disagreements can generally be categorized as optimistic or pessimistic. Pessimistic interpretations insist that the depth of deep disagreements precludes the possibility of rational resolution altogether, while optimistic variations maintain the contrary. Despite both approaches’ respective positions, they nevertheless often, either explicitly or implicitly, agree on the underlying assumption that...