We bear witness to a sweeping social movement for change—fostered and driven by a powerful group of Black nurses and nursing students determined to call out and dismantle anti‐Black racism and discrimination within the profession of nursing. The Black Nurses Task Force, launched by the Registered Nurses' Association of Ontario (RNAO) in July 2020, is building momentum for long‐standing change in the profession by critically examining the racist and discriminatory history of nursing, listening to and learning from the lived experiences (...) of the Black nursing community, and shaping concrete, actionable steps to confront anti‐Black racism and discrimination in academic settings, workplaces, and nursing organizations. The Black Nurses Task Force and the RNAO are standing up and speaking out in acknowledgment of the magnitude of anti‐Black racism and discrimination that exist in our profession, health system, justice system, and economic system. This social movement is demonstrating, in actions, how individuals and a collective act as change agents to drive meaningful and widespread change for our present and future Black nurses. We also acknowledge the Black nurses who have gone before us. (shrink)

Racism against Black people, Indigenous and other racialized people continues to exist in healthcare and academic settings. Racism produces profound harm to racialized people. Strategies to address systemic racism must be implemented to bring about sustainable changes in healthcare and academic settings. This quality improvement initiative provides strategies to address systemic racism and discrimination against Black nurses and nursing students in Ontario, Canada. It is part of a broader initiative showcasing Black nurses in action to end racism and discrimination. We (...) have found that people who have experienced racism need healing, support and protection including trauma-related services to facilitate their healing. Implementing multi-level, multi-pronged interventions in workplaces will create healthy work environments for all members of society, especially Black nurses who are both clients/patients and providers of healthcare. (shrink)

International research, sponsored by for-profit companies, is regularly criticised as unethical on the grounds that it exploits research subjects in developing countries. Many commentators agree that exploitation occurs when the benefits of cooperative activity are unfairly distributed between the parties. To determine whether international research is exploitative we therefore need an account of fair distribution. Procedural accounts of fair bargaining have been popular solutions to this problem, but I argue that they are insufficient to protect against exploitation. I argue instead (...) that a maximin principle of fair distribution provides a more compelling normative account of fairness in relationships characterised by extreme vulnerability and inequality of bargaining potential between the parties. A global tax on international research would provide a mechanism for implementing the maximin account of fair benefits. This model has the capacity to ensure fair benefits and thereby prevent exploitation in international research. (shrink)

When game theory was introduced to biology, the components of classic game theory models were replaced with elements more befitting evolutionary phenomena. The actions of intelligent agents are replaced by phenotypic traits; utility is replaced by fitness; rational deliberation is replaced by natural selection. In this paper, I argue that this classic conception of comprehensive reapplication is misleading, for it overemphasizes the discontinuity between human behavior and evolved traits. Explicitly considering the representational roles of evolutionary game theory brings to attention (...) neglected areas of overlap, as well as a range of evolutionary possibilities that are often overlooked. The clarifications this analysis provides are well-illustrated by—and particularly valuable for—game theoretic treatments of the evolution of social behavior. (shrink)

In discussing water justice, this paper distinguishes four concepts of water justice: Distributive justice claims a fair share of water, ecological justice focuses on the integrity of water as a vulnerable resource, cultural justice addresses values attached to water reservoirs, and procedural justice explicates fair procedures in negotiating water conflicts. After having given an overview over recent contributions to the various meanings of water justice, the paper tries to answer the question of how standards of justice can be integrated into (...) an approach that overcomes the alleged tragedies of the commons. It focuses on the example of a water reservoir whose access conditions provoke conflicts among neighbors. (shrink)

This essay seeks to establish that Catholic community pharmacists should refuse to verify, dispense, and counsel on hormonal medications used for contraception on the grounds of professional and personal beliefs as these services constitute immoral immediate material cooperation. In this controversial area of patient care, pharmacists are more frequently being called upon to facilitate medication use for contraceptive purposes. Contraceptive acts are believed by some healthcare providers to be morally harmful to a patient’s well-being. Pharmacists who hold beliefs that contraception (...) does not promote positive patient outcomes are professionally bound to refuse immediate cooperation through providing pharmaceutical services related to contraception. (shrink)

In this dissertation I seek to answer the question, “What are the virtues of the excellent citizen in a liberal democracy?" This question is important on three levels. First, if civic virtue is as important to the perpetuation of liberal democratic community as neo-liberal and communitarian thinkers have argued, then curiosity alone should motivate us. Second, if projects to foster the virtues are critical, then we must understand the virtues in order to foster them effectively and appropriately. Third, those who (...) wish to attain greater excellence in citizenship need to know what the virtues are so that they may pursue them. In Chapters One and Two, I argue that current accounts of civic virtue are deficient because they fail to explore its basis, nature, and constituents. To better understand civic virtue, we must explore specific citizen virtues. To fulfill this aim, we require a citizen virtue catalog structured by an explanatory framework that is anchored in the role-based nature of citizen virtue. Such a framework provides the rationale for determining which virtues should be included in the catalog and which should not as well as a basis for comparing competing catalogs. As the role of citizen is to assist his state, the citizen virtues are those qualities that enable the citizen to assist the state in achieving its aims” in protecting, promoting, and realizing the liberal democratic ideals (namely, freedom, equality, self-government, collective cooperation, and stability). In the remaining chapters, I survey neo-liberal accounts of citizen virtue proposed by Richard Dagger, William Galston, David Jones, Mark Kingwell, Stephen Macedo, and Thomas Spragens, Jr. I apply the Chapter Two framework to assess the virtue candidates they propose. These chapters share a common format but differ in focus. Chapter Three takes up the citizen virtues that treat political community: cooperation, participation, vigilance, deliberative excellence, and obedience to law. Chapter Four, the liberal citizen virtues: allegiance to liberal democratic community, tolerance, and respect for rights. And Chapter Five, the citizen virtues relating to self-governance: autonomy, responsibility, and restraint. Chapter Six concludes. (shrink)

Information and communication technologies (ICT) enable citizens to communicate across state borders with greater ease than ever before, exciting much speculation about the emergence of transnational public spheres. This highly original work introduces this debate to International Relations, by investigating the socio-political implications of ICT in a global governance framework. Classic Habermasian theory is radically reconstructed to take account of contemporary trends in state sovereignty and global civil society. It is argued that if access is not widened and free speech (...) not sufficiently protected, the early promise of ICT as a liberating force will be neutralized. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought to light significant failures and fragilities in our food, health, and market systems. Concomitantly, it has emphasized the urgent need for a critical re-evaluation of many of the policies and practices that have created the conditions in which viral pathogens can spread. However, there are many factors that are complicating this process; among others, the uncertain, rapidly evolving, and often poorly reported science surrounding the virus’ origins has contributed to a politically charged and often rancorous (...) public debate, which is concerning insofar as the proliferation of divisive discourse may hinder efforts to address complex and collective concerns in a mutually cooperative manner. In developing ethical and effective responses to the disproportionate risks associated with certain food production and consumption practices, we argue that the focus should be on mitigating such risks wherever they arise, instead of seeking to ascribe blame to specific countries or cultures. To this end, this article is an effort to inject some nuance into contemporary conversations about COVID-19 and its broader implications, particularly when it comes to trade in wildlife, public health, and food systems reform. If COVID-19 is to represent a turning point towards building a more equitable, sustainable, and resilient world for both humans and nonhuman animals alike, the kind of fractioning that is currently being exacerbated by the use of loaded terms such as “wet market” must be eschewed in favour of a greater recognition of our fundamental interconnectedness. (shrink)

In recent decades, the expansion of economic activity has been accompanied by negative environmental impacts. In response, there have been dramatic changes worldwide in terms of an increased demand for environmentally friendly products and services. To achieve these eco-innovations, firms have sought to acquire knowledge and implement operational flexibility by cooperating with different agents such as universities through a value cocreation system that is also expected to enhance firms’ performance. Using a sample of 250 companies, the present paper examines the (...) role of cooperation with universities in the development of diverse environmental innovations and building operational flexibility and, through this, improving firm performance. Results show that firms that value cooperation with universities develop a wider range of environmental innovations and increase their sales and benefits. (shrink)

Sex and sensibility: The role of social selection Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9464-6 Authors Erika L. Milam, Department of History, University of Maryland, 2115 Francis Scott Key Hall, College Park, MD 20742, USA Roberta L. Millstein, Department of Philosophy, University of California, Davis, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616, USA Angela Potochnik, Department of Philosophy, University of Cincinnati, P.O. Box 210374, Cincinnati, OH 45221, USA Joan E. Roughgarden, Department of Biology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-5020, USA Journal Metascience (...) Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796. (shrink)

We applaud Ray and Cooper (2024) for emphasizing environmental health as a bioethics issue. As a team of interdisciplinary pediatric researchers and providers who are part of an institutional clima...

Science is the study of our world, as it is in its messy reality. Nonetheless, science requires idealization to function—if we are to attempt to understand the world, we have to find ways to reduce its complexity. Idealization and the Aims of Science shows just how crucial idealization is to science and why it matters. Beginning with the acknowledgment of our status as limited human agents trying to make sense of an exceedingly complex world, Angela Potochnik moves on to (...) explain how science aims to depict and make use of causal patterns—a project that makes essential use of idealization. She offers case studies from a number of branches of science to demonstrate the ubiquity of idealization, shows how causal patterns are used to develop scientific explanations, and describes how the necessarily imperfect connection between science and truth leads to researchers’ values influencing their findings. The resulting book is a tour de force, a synthesis of the study of idealization that also offers countless new insights and avenues for future exploration. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss two questions. What does Kant understand by mechanical explanation in the Critique of judgment? And why does he think that mechanical explanation is the only type of the explanation of nature available to us? According to the interpretation proposed, mechanical explanations in the Critique of judgment refer to a particular species of empirical causal laws. Mechanical laws aim to explain nature by reference to the causal interaction between the forces of the parts of matter and (...) the way in which they form into complex material wholes. Just like any other empirical causal law, however, mechanical laws can never be known with full certainty. The conception according to which we can explain all of nature by means of mechanical laws, it turns out, is based on what Kant calls ‘regulative’ or ‘reflective’ considerations about nature. Nothing in Kant’s Critique of judgment suggests that these considerations can ever be justified by reference to how the natural world really is. I suggest that what, upon first consideration, appears to be a thoroughly mechanistic conception of nature in Kant is much more limited than one might have expected. (shrink)

The 1940s and 1950s were marked by intense debates over the origin of drug resistance in microbes. Bacteriologists had traditionally invoked the notions of ‘training’ and ‘adaptation’ to account for the ability of microbes to acquire new traits. As the field of bacterial genetics emerged, however, its participants rejected ‘Lamarckian’ views of microbial heredity, and offered statistical evidence that drug resistance resulted from the selection of random resistant mutants. Antibiotic resistance became a key issue among those disputing physiological vs. genetic (...) explanations of variation in bacteria. Postwar developments connected with the Lysenko affair gave this debate a new political valence.Proponents of the neo-Darwinian synthesis weighed in with support for the genetic theory. However, certain features of drug resistance seemed inexplicable by mutation and selection, particularly the phenomenon of ‘multiple resistance’—the emergence of resistance in a single strain against several unrelated antibiotics. In the late 1950s, Tsutomu Watanabe and his collaborators solved this puzzle by determining that resistance could be conferred by cytoplasmic resistance factors rather than chromosomal mutation. These R factors could carry resistance to many antibiotics and seemed able to promote their own dissemination in bacterial populations. In the end, the vindication of the genetic view of drug resistance was accompanied by a recasting of the ‘gene’ to include extrachromosomal hereditary units carried on viruses and plasmids. (shrink)

This paper examines the US Atomic Energy Commission’s radioisotope distribution program, established in 1946, which employed the uranium piles built for the wartime bomb project to produce specific radioisotopes for use in scientific investigation and medical therapy. As soon as the program was announced, requests from researchers began pouring into the Commission’s office. During the first year of the program alone over 1000 radioisotope shipments were sent out. The numerous requests that came from scientists outside the United States, however, sparked (...) a political debate about whether the Commission should or even could export radioisotopes. This controversy manifested the tension between the aims of the Marshall Plan and growing US national security concerns after World War II. Proponents of international circulation of radioisotopes emphasized the political and scientific value of collaborating with European scientists, especially biomedical researchers. In the end, radioisotopes were shipped from the Commission’s Oak Ridge facility to many laboratories in England and continental Europe, where they were used in biochemical research on animals, plants, and microbes. However, the issue of radioisotope export continued to draw political fire in the United States, even after the establishment of national atomic energy facilities elsewhere. (shrink)

A number of philosophers have recently argued that we should interpret the debate over moral responsibility as a debate over the conditions under which it would be “fair” to blame a person for her attitudes or conduct. What is distinctive about these accounts is that they begin with the stance of the moral judge, rather than that of the agent who is judged, and make attributions of responsibility dependent upon whether it would be fair or appropriate for a moral judge (...) to react to the agent in various (negative) ways. This is problematic, I argue, because our intuitions about whether and when it would be fair to react negatively to another are sensitive to a host of considerations that appear to have little or nothing to do with an agent’s responsibility or culpability for her attitudes or behavior. If this is correct, then theories which make attributions of responsibility dependent upon the appropriateness of our reactions as moral judges will turn out to be fundamentally misguided. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIt has recently become fashionable among those who write on questions of moral responsibility to distinguish two different concepts, or senses, of moral responsibility via the labels ‘responsibility as attributability’ and ‘responsibility as accountability’. Gary Watson was perhaps the first to introduce this distinction in his influential 1996 article ‘Two Faces of Responsibility’ , but it has since been taken up by many other philosophers. My aim in this study is to raise some questions and doubts about this distinction and (...) to argue that it has led to confusion rather than clarification in debates over moral responsibility. In place of the attributability/accountability distinction, I propose that there is a single concept of moral responsibility underlying our actual moral practices. This core notion of moral responsibility, which I call ‘responsibility as answerability’, is well positioned to explain thos.. (shrink)

Recently, a number of philosophers have begun to question the commonly held view that choice or voluntary control is a precondition of moral responsibility. According to these philosophers, what really matters in determining a person’s responsibility for some thing is whether that thing can be seen as indicative or expressive of her judgments, values, or normative commitments. Such accounts might therefore be understood as updated versions of what Susan Wolf has called “real self views,” insofar as they attempt to ground (...) an agent’s responsibility for her actions and attitudes in the fact (when it is a fact) that they express who she is as a moral agent. As such, they seem to be open to some of the same objections Wolf originally raised to such accounts, and in particular to the objection that they cannot license the sorts of robust moral assessments involved in our current practices of moral responsibility. My aim in this paper is to try to respond to this challenge, by clarifying the kind of robust moral assessments I take to be licensed by (at least some) non-volitional accounts of responsibility and by explaining why these assessments do not in general require the agent to have voluntary control over everything for which she is held responsible. I also argue that the limited applicability of the distinction between “bad agents” and “blameworthy agents” on these accounts is in fact a mark in their favor. (shrink)

There is increasing attention to the centrality of idealization in science. One common view is that models and other idealized representations are important to science, but that they fall short in one or more ways. On this view, there must be an intermediary step between idealized representation and the traditional aims of science, including truth, explanation, and prediction. Here I develop an alternative interpretation of the relationship between idealized representation and the aims of science. In my view, continuing, widespread idealization (...) calls into question the idea that science aims for truth. I argue that understanding must replace truth as the ultimate epistemic aim of science. Additionally, science has a wide variety aims, epistemic and non-epistemic, and these aims motivate different kinds of scientific products. Finally, I show how these diverse aims---all rather distant from truth---result in the expanded influence of social values on science. (shrink)

Using data collected at two phases, this study examines why and how ethical leadership behavior influences employees’ evaluations of organization-focused justice, i.e., procedural justice and distributive justice. By proposing ethical leaders as moral agents of the organization, we build up the linkage between ethical leadership behavior and the above two types of organization-focused justice. We further suggest trust in organization as a key mediating mechanism in the linkage. Our findings indicate that ethical leadership behavior engenders employees’ trust in their employing (...) organization, which in turn promotes their justice perceptions toward the organization. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed, and some directions for future research are suggested. (shrink)

We can observe a connection between some serious environmental problems caused by the overexploitation of environmental resources and the particular conceptions of property rights that are claimed to hold with regard to these resources. In this paper, I investigate whether Kant’s conception of property rights might constitute a basis for justifying property regimes that would overcome some of these environmental problems. Kant’s argument for the right to property, put forward in his Doctrine of right, is complex. In Section 2, I (...) attempt an interpretation. Section 3 works out the defining characteristics of the conception of property rights that Kant’s argument establishes and investigates their implications for determining property regimes in environmental resources. Kant proposes a minimalist notion of the right to property as a triadic relation between persons with regard to an object, justified only on the condition that it is universalizable in the given circumstances. I argue that this notion offers a promising account for determining property relations with regard to environmental resources. By way of illustration, in Section 4, I focus on an example of Kantian property rights in one type of environmental resource: the marine fisheries. (shrink)

The concept of hierarchical organization is commonplace in science. Subatomic particles compose atoms, which compose molecules; cells compose tissues, which compose organs, which compose organisms; etc. Hierarchical organization is particularly prominent in ecology, a field of research explicitly arranged around levels of ecological organization. The concept of levels of organization is also central to a variety of debates in philosophy of science. Yet many difficulties plague the concept of discrete hierarchical levels. In this paper, we show how these difficulties undermine (...) various implications ascribed to hierarchical organization, and we suggest the concept of scale as a promising alternative to levels. Investigating causal processes at different scales offers a way to retain a notion of quasi-levels that avoids the difficulties inherent in the classic concept of hierarchical levels of organization. Throughout, our focus is on ecology, but the results generalize to other invocations of hierarchy in science and philosophy of science. (shrink)

The predominant view is that a study using health data is observational research and should require individual consent unless it can be shown that gaining consent is impractical. But recent arguments have been made that citizens have an ethical obligation to share their health information for research purposes. In our view, this obligation is sufficient ground to expand the circumstances where secondary use research with identifiable health information is permitted without explicit subject consent. As such, for some studies the Institutional (...) Review Board/Research Ethics Committee review process should not assess the practicality of gaining consent for data use. Instead the review process should focus on assessing the public good of the research, public engagement and transparency. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to show that animal rights are not necessarily at odds with the use of animals for research. If animals hold basic moral rights similar to those of humans, then we should consequently extend the ethical requirements guiding research with humans to research with animals. The article spells out how this can be done in practice by applying the seven requirements for ethical research with humans proposed by Ezekiel Emanuel, David Wendler and Christine Grady to (...) animal research. These requirements are i) social value, ii) scientific validity, iii) independent review, iv) fair subject selection, v) favorable risk-benefit ratio, vi) informed consent, and vii) respect for research subjects. In practice, this means that we must reform the practice of animal research to make it more similar to research with humans, rather than completely abolish the former. Indeed, if we banned animal research altogether, then we would also deprive animals of its potential benefits – which would be ethically problematic. (shrink)

In this paper, I first outline the view developed in my recent book on the role of idealization in scientific understanding. I discuss how this view leads to the recognition of a number of kinds of variability among scientific representations, including variability introduced by the many different aims of scientific projects. I then argue that the role of idealization in securing understanding distances understanding from truth, but that this understanding nonetheless gives rise to scientific knowledge. This discussion will clarify how (...) my view relates to three other recent books on understanding by Henk de Regt, Catherine Elgin, and Kareem Khalifa. (shrink)

Some mental states seem to be "of" or "about" things, or to "say" something. For example, a thought might represent that grass is green, and a visual experience might represent a blue cup. This is intentionality. The aim of this book is to explain this phenomenon. -/- Once we understand intentionality as a phenomenon to be explained, rather than a posit in a theory explaining something else, we can see that there are glaring empirical and in principle difficulties with currently (...) popular tracking and functional role theories of intentionality, which aim to account for intentionality in terms of tracking relations and functional roles. -/- This book develops an alternative theory, the phenomenal intentionality theory (PIT), on which the source of intentionality is none other than phenomenal consciousness, the subjective, felt, or qualitative aspect of mental life. While PIT avoids the problems that plague tracking and functional role theories, it faces its own challenges in accounting for the rich and complex contents of thoughts and the contents of nonconscious states. In responding to these challenges, this book proposes a novel version of PIT, on which all intentionality is phenomenal intentionality, though we in some sense represent many non-phenomenal contents by ascribing them to ourselves. This book further argues that phenomenal consciousness is an intrinsic feature of mental life, resulting in a view that is radically internalistic in spirit: Our phenomenally represented contents are literally in our heads, and any non-phenomenal contents we in some sense represent are expressly targeted by us. (shrink)

Causal accounts of scientific explanation are currently broadly accepted (though not universally so). My first task in this paper is to show that, even for a causal approach to explanation, significant features of explanatory practice are not determined by settling how causal facts bear on the phenomenon to be explained. I then develop a broadly causal approach to explanation that accounts for the additional features that I argue an explanation should have. This approach to explanation makes sense of several aspects (...) of actual explanatory practice, including the widespread use of equilibrium explanations, the formulation of distinct explanations for a single event, and the tight relationship between explanations of events and explanations of causal regularities. (shrink)

Despite the recent proliferation of scientific, clinical, and narrative accounts of auditory verbal hallucinations, the phenomenology of voice hearing remains opaque and undertheorized. In this article, we outline an interdisciplinary approach to understanding hallucinatory experiences which seeks to demonstrate the value of the humanities and social sciences to advancing knowledge in clinical research and practice. We argue that an interdisciplinary approach to the phenomenology of AVH utilizes rigorous and context-appropriate methodologies to analyze a wider range of first-person accounts of AVH (...) at 3 contextual levels: cultural, social, and historical; experiential; and biographical. We go on to show that there are significant potential benefits for voice hearers, clinicians, and researchers. These include informing the development and refinement of subtypes of hallucinations within and across diagnostic categories; “front-loading” research in cognitive neuroscience; and suggesting new possibilities for therapeutic intervention. In conclusion, we argue that an interdisciplinary approach to the phenomenology of AVH can nourish the ethical core of scientific enquiry by challenging its interpretive paradigms, and offer voice hearers richer, potentially more empowering ways to make sense of their experiences. (shrink)

A common argument against explanatory reductionism is that higher‐level explanations are sometimes or always preferable because they are more general than reductive explanations. Here I challenge two basic assumptions that are needed for that argument to succeed. It cannot be assumed that higher‐level explanations are more general than their lower‐level alternatives or that higher‐level explanations are general in the right way to be explanatory. I suggest a novel form of pluralism regarding levels of explanation, according to which explanations at different (...) levels are preferable in different circumstances because they offer different types of generality, which are appropriate in different circumstances of explanation. (shrink)

Debate about cognitive science explanations has been formulated in terms of identifying the proper level(s) of explanation. Views range from reductionist, favoring only neuroscience explanations, to mechanist, favoring the integration of multiple levels, to pluralist, favoring the preservation of even the most general, high-level explanations, such as those provided by embodied or dynamical approaches. In this paper, we challenge this framing. We suggest that these are not different levels of explanation at all but, rather, different styles of explanation that capture (...) different, cross-cutting patterns in cognitive phenomena. Which pattern is explanatory depends on both the cognitive phenomenon under investigation and the research interests occasioning the explanation. This reframing changes how we should answer the basic questions of which cognitive science approaches explain and how these explanations relate to one another. On this view, we should expect different approaches to offer independent explanations in terms of their different focal patterns and the value of those explanations to partly derive from the broad patterns they feature. (shrink)

The value of optimality modeling has long been a source of contention amongst population biologists. Here I present a view of the optimality approach as at once playing a crucial explanatory role and yet also depending on external sources of confirmation. Optimality models are not alone in facing this tension between their explanatory value and their dependence on other approaches; I suspect that the scenario is quite common in science. This investigation of the optimality approach thus serves as a case (...) study, on the basis of which I suggest that there is a widely felt tension in science between explanatory independence and broad epistemic interdependence, and that this tension influences scientific methodology. (shrink)

Scientific explanations must bear the proper relationship to the world: they must depict what, out in the world, is responsible for the explanandum. But explanations must also bear the proper relationship to their audience: they must be able to create human understanding. With few exceptions, philosophical accounts of explanation either ignore entirely the relationship between explanations and their audience or else demote this consideration to an ancillary role. In contrast, I argue that considering an explanation’s communicative role is crucial to (...) any satisfactory account of explanation. (shrink)

The optimality approach to modeling natural selection has been criticized by many biologists and philosophers of biology. For instance, Lewontin (1979) argues that the optimality approach is a shortcut that will be replaced by models incorporating genetic information, if and when such models become available. In contrast, I think that optimality models have a permanent role in evolutionary study. I base my argument for this claim on what I think it takes to best explain an event. In certain contexts, optimality (...) and game-theoretic models best explain some central types of evolutionary phenomena. ‡Thanks to Michael Friedman, Helen Longino, Michael Weisberg, and especially Elliott Sober for comments on earlier drafts of this paper. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-2155; e-mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

Levels of organization and their use in science have received increased philosophical attention of late, including challenges to the well-foundedness or widespread usefulness of levels concepts. One kind of response to these challenges has been to advocate a more precise and specific levels concept that is coherent and useful. Another kind of response has been to argue that the levels concept should be taken as a heuristic, to embrace its ambiguity and the possibility of exceptions as acceptable consequences of its (...) usefulness. In this chapter, I suggest that each of these strategies faces its own attendant downsides, and that pursuit of both strategies (by different thinkers) compounds the difficulties. That both kinds of approaches are advocated is, I think, illustrative of the problems plaguing the concept of levels of organization. I end by suggesting that the invocation of levels may mislead scientific and philosophical investigations more than it informs them, so our use of the levels concept should be updated accordingly. (shrink)

The fate of optimality modeling is typically linked to that of adaptationism: the two are thought to stand or fall together (Gould and Lewontin, Proc Relig Soc Lond 205:581–598, 1979; Orzack and Sober, Am Nat 143(3):361–380, 1994). I argue here that this is mistaken. The debate over adaptationism has tended to focus on one particular use of optimality models, which I refer to here as their strong use. The strong use of an optimality model involves the claim that selection is (...) the only important influence on the evolutionary outcome in question and is thus linked to adaptationism. However, biologists seldom intend this strong use of optimality models. One common alternative that I term the weak use simply involves the claim that an optimality model accurately represents the role of selection in bringing about the outcome. This and other weaker uses of optimality models insulate the optimality approach from criticisms of adaptationism, and they account for the prominence of optimality modeling (broadly construed) in population biology. The centrality of these uses of optimality models ensures a continuing role for the optimality approach, regardless of the fate of adaptationism. (shrink)

Philosophers traditionally recognize two main features of mental states: intentionality and phenomenal consciousness. To a first approximation, intentionality is the aboutness of mental states, and phenomenal consciousness is the felt, experiential, qualitative, or "what it's like" aspect of mental states. In the past few decades, these features have been widely assumed to be distinct and independent. But several philosophers have recently challenged this assumption, arguing that intentionality and consciousness are importantly related. This article overviews the key views on the relationship (...) between consciousness and intentionality and describes our favored view, which is a version of the phenomenal intentionality theory, roughly the view that the most fundamental kind of intentionality arises from phenomenal consciousness. (shrink)

There is an apparent tension in our everyday moral responsibility practices. On the one hand, it is commonly assumed that moral responsibility requires voluntary control: an agent can be morally responsible only for those things that fall within the scope of her voluntary control. On the other hand, we regularly praise and blame individuals for mental states and conditions that appear to fall outside the scope of their voluntary control, such as desires, emotions, beliefs, and other attitudes. In order to (...) resolve this apparent tension, many philosophers appeal to a tracing principle to argue that agents are morally responsible for those attitudes whose existence can be traced back, causally, to a voluntary action or omission in the past. My aim in this article is to critically evaluate this tracing strategy and to argue that it gives us a misguided picture of when and why we are morally responsible for our attitudes. I argue that we should accept a ‘judgment sensitivity’ condition of moral responsibility rather than a ‘voluntary control’ condition, and defend this account against various objections. (shrink)

In recent years, philosophy of science has witnessed a significant increase in attention directed toward the field’s social relevance. This is demonstrated by the formation of societies with related agendas, the organization of research symposia, and an uptick in work on topics of immediate public interest. The collection of papers that follows results from one such event: a 3-day colloquium on the subject of socially engaged philosophy of science (SEPOS) held at the University of Cincinnati in October 2012. In this (...) introduction, we first survey the recent history of philosophy of science’s social involvement (or lack thereof) and contrast this with the much greater social involvement of the sciences themselves. Next, we argue that the field of philosophy of science bears a special responsibility to contribute to public welfare. We then introduce as a term of art “SEPOS” and articulate what we take to be distinctive about social engagement, with reference to the articles in this collection as exemplars. Finally, we survey the current state of social engagement in philosophy of science and suggest some practical steps for individuals and institutions to support this trajectory. (shrink)