Many authors suggest the need to define ‘sustainable development’in operational terms. This paper looks at the problems ofattempting to ask whether peasant farming systems are sustainable.Any attempt at sustainability assessment needs to consider issuesrelated to the selected indicators or performance criteria, spatialscale or boundaries, and temporal scale. While there is certainlya need for more rigorous analysis of sustainability issues, thereis limited outlook for an approach based on indicators. Even if themany purely technical problems associated with specific indicatorscan be surmounted, will (...) accurate bio-physical data advance ourknowledge about sustainability? Peasant systems arepolitically-guided management systems, whose boundaries are the state,not the field or the farm. Given the dynamic nature of peasant farmingsystems, where do we draw the line in assessing sustainability?Attempts at sustainability assessment 100 years ago or even 20–30years ago would have been completely superseded by events. We drawattention to the system as a whole, to a web of interconnections,causes and effects – of varying significance over both time andspace. (shrink)

Inasmuch as a good many of the Australian philosophers one would like to see included are not represented, and some of the contributors are no longer teaching in Australia, the title of this volume is somewhat misleading. It contains an introduction by Alan Donagan and the following original essays: J. Passmore, "Russell and Bradley"; L. Goddard, "The Existence of Universals"; B. Ellis, "An Epistemological Concept of Truth"; P. Herbst, "Fact, Form, and Intentionality"; M. Deutscher, "A Causal Account of Inferring"; D. (...) M. Armstrong, "Colour-Realism and the Argument from Microscopes"; K. Campbell, "Colours"; C. B. Martin, "People"; M. C. Bradley, "Two Arguments Against the Identity Thesis"; D. H. Monro, "Mill's Third Howler"; G. Schlesinger, "The Passage of Time." Though the essays are original and admirable, there does not seem to be anything distinctively Australian, rather than American or British, about their contents. Perhaps the most enlightening fact about them is that neither the Andersonian tradition of Sydney nor the Wittgensteinian tradition of Melbourne which dominated the Australian philosophical scene in the early 1950's is pre-eminent any longer, or even in evidence.--A. B. M. (shrink)

The 21 selections are divided into three conceptual approaches to the study of perception: the neurophysiology, the psychology, and the phenomenology of perception, with a final section, some problematic studies. In effect, however, the editor is challenging the metaphysical position hidden in the attitude that behavioral physiology should be an "exact science" without philosophical commitments. Parts II and IV, no less than the explicit statements of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Gurwitsch and Erwin Strauss in Part III, stand over against a point of (...) view which, beginning with Cartesian dualism, attempts to resolve it in a materialist reduction, a point of view in which behavior is always reaction, of nervous systems to physical stimulation from an "external," "real," world. Tibbetts is pressing two points--first, that all science must be based on some presuppositions or other and second, that any metapsychology ignores physiological and behavioral research only at its peril. In Part I, Bain, Lashley and Sperry are among the authors. In Parts II and IV Tibbetts brings together selections by Hochberg, Gregory, Gibson, Penfield, Donald Campbell, a bit of Piaget, team research reports, and more to provide in one place material not easily at hand. Some authors provide bibliographical references, and the editor gives nine more pages of bibliography.--M. B. M. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: In That Case: Medical Ethics in Everyday Practice. By Alastair Campbell and Roger Higgs. Medical Genetics Casebook: A Clinical Introduction to Medical Ethics Systems Theory. By Colleen D. Clements. Cases in Bioethics from the Hastings Center Report. Edited by Carol Levine and Robert M. Veatch. Hastings‐on‐Hudson.

In this comprehensive collection of essays, most of which appear for the first time, eminent scholars from many disciplines—philosophy, economics, sociology, political science, demography, theology, history, and social psychology—examine the causes, nature, and consequences of present-day consumption patterns in the United States and throughout the world.

Research using mHealth apps has the potential to positively impact health care management and outcomes. However, choosing an appropriate mHealth app may be challenging for the health researcher. The author team used existing evaluation tools, checklists, and guidelines to assess selected mHealth apps to identify strengths, challenges, and potential gaps within existing evaluation tools. They identified specific evaluation tool components, questions, and items most effective in examining app content, usability, and features, including literacy demand and cultural appropriateness; technical information; practical (...) aspects of app functionality; and evolving capabilities of mobile medical apps. Challenges included the subjective nature of the results, time required to complete the evaluation, lack of emphasis on evidence‐based content, and inadequate tool flexibility. Health researchers considering the integration of mobile apps into research will benefit from evaluation tools that assess both evidence‐based content and the ability of the mobile app to securely integrate with other digital technologies involved in patient care. Next steps will include the involvement of health care providers and professionals, including nurses a wide range of expertise, to develop an mHealth evaluation tool that focuses on identifying quality, evidence‐based mobile apps into patient outcomes research. (shrink)

During a pandemic, where there is widespread human infection, various and varying measures are taken that are targeted at public health objectives. During the early stages of a pandemic, these objectives may focus on containing the disease and minimizing its spread, but they may switch to mitigation as the emergent infectious disease takes hold in a population. There has been considerable debate and elucidation of the ethical principles and framework for the various responses including the need to fast track research (...) and vaccine development. However, the measures imposed during a pandemic would have unintended and untoward effect on ongoing clinical research. For example, precautionary measures, such as social distancing, may hamper ongoing clinical research, because recruitment and participation of patients and healthy volunteers is a potential source of virus spread. In this paper, we argue that a framework is needed to ensure the continuity of such research. Such a framework that considers the pertinent issues would need the ‘buy in’ of the key stakeholders (policy makers, funding agencies, institutional authorities, researchers and subjects) to ensure that the issues that are ethically relevant to pandemic planning would not be neglected or overlooked. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Evolution of the Society for the Advancement of American PhilosophyJames Campbelldespite my increasingly decrepit appearance, I can lay no claim to being one of the founders of SAAP. When I joined the Society in the mid-1970s, it was already a well-functioning organization—if a much smaller one than today. After a few years of attending meetings, I began to submit papers, and I first appeared on the program at (...) our sixth annual meeting at John Carroll University in 1979. (See Fig. 1, the complete program, below.) While I was not one of the founders of SAAP, I did know them all. Presiding at the early meetings were, in the order of their presidencies, such elders as John Lachs, John J. McDermott, Darnell Rucker, James Gouinlock, Beth J. Singer, Peter H. Hare, Sandra B. Rosenthal, Thelma Z. Lavine, Joseph Betz, Charlene Haddock Seigfried, and Andrew J. Reck. Serving in the background at the same time were such patron saints as Justus Buchler, Douglas Greenlee, Abraham Edel, Max Harold Fisch, Elizabeth Flower, Edward H. Madden, David L. Miller, Frank M. Oppenheim, Evelyn Shirk, John E. Smith, and H. S. Thayer. It was a good time to be coming to American Philosophy, under the guidance of a Society that respected the fundamentals of pluralism and "fallibilism."1IThe brief discussion of the evolution of SAAP that I offer here initially emphasizes what the Society has meant to me over nearly five decades.2 As I was entering graduate school in 1974, I was drawn by the American philosophical tradition. It was, as William James writes, my "dumb conviction" that the best answers were to be found in this philosophical direction and not in the others, and that my job was to pursue these answers.3 What I found in this tradition was a refuge from both the analytic style of philosophy then dominant in America, with what I saw as its obsession with truth4 and its [End Page 1] confusion of cleverness with wisdom, and the alternatives of the various continental traditions that, although they pursued wisdom, seemed to me to rely too strongly on the mysterious or the untranslatable. My own sense of the American philosophical tradition at the time was an amalgam of Puritanism, Deism, Transcendentalism, Pragmatism in its various forms, and a large dose of Columbia Naturalism. Through further study and especially through my interactions at SAAP meetings, I became more grounded in these approaches and more open to other strands within the tradition.5 For me, cooperative interaction with others was essential to further understanding. Just as for Josiah Royce, the secret was "the community."6Among the lessons that I drew from the American philosophical tradition were the following. I knew that it was necessary to resist the human tendency to believe that what works for me will work for everyone else. As George Santayana reminds us, all philosophy is "personal."7 Thus, certain thinkers and certain thoughts will benefit from their initial plausibility to us, and other thoughts and thinkers will be initially suspect. To counter this personal prejudice, we need to partake in careful, long-term study. On a related point, Ralph Waldo Emerson urges us to seek insight from others, to accept what he calls "provocation" while not accepting their answers.8 At the same time, we live among these other individuals, marry them, teach their children, and benefit from their contributions to our social existence. In other words, American Philosophy teaches us that people are social creatures—a point which both Emerson and James were wary of, but not blind to—and that our thinking should focus on the world of shared experience. As Benjamin Franklin writes, our efforts in "Philosophy" make sense only when our pursuit of wisdom is related to human well-being.9 This point is so important that we need to wonder how our efforts were ever allowed to narrow and separate from a broad sense of human welfare to focus upon supposedly more important minutiae. With John Dewey, I saw the job of philosophers to be helping individuals to understand and deal with their philosophical "problems" of living.10 And, perhaps more... (shrink)

Editors of Pliny's Naturalis Historia have not had to deplore the paucity of the MS. tradition, but rather its value; while MSS. belonging to the ordo recentiorum are numerous and fairly complete, those of the ordo uetustiorum are very few, and never contain more than a few books, often with considerable gaps. They are A ii 196–vi 51, M xi–xv, P and H parts of xviii, I xxiii, xxv, B xxxii–xxxvii . There are also some scattered fragments. Detlefsen indeed claimed (...) that the restoration of the original text of the N.H. is more difficult than that of any other Latin author owing to the mutilated and defective transmission of considerable parts. (shrink)

Editors of Pliny's Naturalis Historia have not had to deplore the paucity of the MS. tradition, but rather its value; while MSS. belonging to the ordo recentiorum are numerous and fairly complete, those of the ordo uetustiorum are very few, and never contain more than a few books, often with considerable gaps. They are A ii 196–vi 51, M xi–xv, P and H parts of xviii, I xxiii, xxv, B xxxii–xxxvii. There are also some scattered fragments. Detlefsen indeed claimed that (...) the restoration of the original text of the N.H. is more difficult than that of any other Latin author owing to the mutilated and defective transmission of considerable parts. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: In That Case: Medical Ethics in Everyday Practice. By Alastair Campbell and Roger Higgs. Medical Genetics Casebook: A Clinical Introduction to Medical Ethics Systems Theory. By Colleen D. Clements. Cases in Bioethics from the Hastings Center Report. Edited by Carol Levine and Robert M. Veatch. Hastings‐on‐Hudson.

It is widely assumed that disability is typically a bad thing for those who are disabled. Our purpose in this essay is to critique this view and defend a more nuanced picture of the relationship between disability and well-being. We first examine four interpretations of the above view and argue that it is false on each interpretation. We then ask whether disability is thereby a neutral trait. Our view is that most disabilities are neutral in one sense, though we cannot (...) make simple generalizations about disability's relationship to well-being in other important senses. After defending this view, we discuss its practical implications for selective abortion for disability, nondisabled people's interactions with disabled people, and the use of QALYs in health policy. (shrink)

On the traditional view, moral distress arises only in cases where an individual believes she knows the morally right thing to do but fails to perform that action due to various constraints. We seek to motivate a broader understanding of moral distress. We begin by presenting six types of distress that fall outside the bounds of the traditional definition and explaining why they should be recognized as forms of moral distress. We then propose and defend a new and more expansive (...) definition of moral distress and examine how it can enable the development of a taxonomy of moral distress. (shrink)

It is widely recognized that lives and activities can be meaningful or meaningless, but few have appreciated that they can also be anti-meaningful. Anti-meaning is the polar opposite of meaning. Our purpose in this essay is to examine the nature and importance of this new and unfamiliar topic. In the first part, we sketch four theories of anti-meaning that correspond to leading theories of meaning. In the second part, we argue that anti-meaning has significance not only for our attempts to (...) theorize about meaning in life, but also for our ability to lead meaningful lives in the modern world. (shrink)

Is arguing over ontology a mistake? A recent proposal by Karen Bennett suggests that some metaphysical disputes, such as those over constitution and composition, can be dismissed on epistemic grounds. Given that both sides in a dispute try to minimize the differences between them, there are no good metaphysical grounds for choosing between them. In this paper, I expand on her epistemic dismissivism, arguing that given the Quinean conception of the task and method of metaphysics, we are warranted in believing (...) that all ontological disputes will end in a draw, even if they have not yet done so. By a draw, I mean that while both sides in a dispute are genuinely disagreeing about what there is and there are still moves open to them, there are no moves remaining that will advance the discourse further. (shrink)

The so-called Disability Paradox arises from the apparent tension between the popular view that disability leads to low well-being and the relatively high life-satisfaction reports of disabled people. Our aim in this essay is to make some progress toward dissolving this alleged paradox by exploring the relationship between disability and various “goods of life”—that is, components of a life that typically make a person’s life go better for her. We focus on four widely recognized goods of life (happiness, rewarding relationships, (...) knowledge, achievement) and four common types of disability (sensory, mobility, intellectual, and social) and systematically examine the extent to which the four disability types are in principle compatible with obtaining the four goods of life. Our findings suggest that that there is a high degree of compatibility. This undermines the widespread view that disabilities, by their very nature, substantially limit a person’s ability to access the goods of life, and it provides some guidance on how to dissolve the Disability Paradox. (shrink)

This essay introduces and defends a new analysis of prudential value. According to this analysis, what it is for something to be good for you is for that thing to contribute to the appeal or desirability of being in your position. I argue that this proposal fits well with our ways of talking about prudential value and well-being; enables promising analyses of the related concepts of luck, selfishness, self-sacrifice, and paternalism; preserves the relationship between prudential value and the attitudes of (...) concern, love, pity, and envy; and satisfies various other desiderata. I also highlight two ways in which the analysis is informative and can lead to progress in our substantive theorizing about the good life. (shrink)

Disability and enhancement are often treated as opposing concepts. To become disabled in some respect is to move away from those who are enhanced in that same respect; to become enhanced is to move away from the corresponding state of disability. This chapter examines how best to understand the concepts of disability and enhancement in this symmetrical way. After considering various candidates, two types of accounts are identified as the most promising: welfarist accounts and typical-functioning accounts. The authors ultimately defend (...) a complex typical-functioning account as the best way to achieve a symmetrical understanding of disability and enhancement. (shrink)

It seems better to have a life that begins poorly and ends well than a life that begins well and ends poorly. One possible explanation is that the very shape of a life can be good or bad for us. If so, this raises a tough question: when can the shape of our lives be good or bad for us? In this essay, I present and critique an argument that the shape of a life is a non-synchronic prudential value—that is, (...) something that can be good or bad for us in a way that is not good or bad for us at any particular time. After distinguishing two interpretations of ‘the shape of a life’, I argue that the first type of shape can be good or bad for us at particular moments while the other cannot be good or bad for us at all. This suggests that the shape of a life gives us no reason to posit non-synchronic prudential values. (shrink)

BackgroundCommunity engagement within biomedical research is broadly defined as a collaborative relationship between a research team and a group of individuals targeted for research. A Community Advisory Board is one mechanism of engaging the community. Within genomics research CABs may be particularly relevant due to the potential implications of research findings drawn from individual participants on the larger communities they represent. Within such research, CABs seek to meet instrumental goals such as protecting research participants and their community from research-related risks, (...) as well as intrinsic goals such as promoting the respect of participants and their community. However, successful community engagement depends on the degree to which CABs legitimately represent and engage with communities targeted for research. Currently, there is little literature describing the use of CABs in genomics research taking place in developing countries, and even less in the field of genomics research relating to mental illness. The aim of this article is to describe and consider the contributions made by a researcher-driven, population-specific CAB in a genomics of schizophrenia research project taking place in South Africa, from the perspective of the research team.DiscussionFour broad discussion topics emerged during the CAB meetings namely: 1) informed consent procedures, 2) recruitment strategies, 3) patient illness beliefs and stigma experiences, and 4) specific ethical concerns relating to the project. The authors consider these discussions in terms of their contributions to instrumental and intrinsic goals of community engagement.SummaryThe CAB gave valuable input on the consent processes and materials, recruitment strategies and suggested ways of minimizing the potential for stigma and discrimination. All of these contributions were of an instrumental nature, and helped improve the way in which the research took place. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, the CAB made a unique and important contribution relating to intrinsic functions such as promoting the respect and dignity of research participants and their community. This was particularly evident in ensuring sensitivity and respect of the community’s traditional beliefs about schizophrenia and its treatment, and in this way promoting a respectful relationship between the research team and the participants. (shrink)

It is commonly thought that disability is a harm or “bad difference” because having a disability restricts valuable options in life. In his recent essay “Disability, Options and Well-Being,” Thomas Crawley offers a novel defense of this style of reasoning and argues that we and like-minded critics of this brand of argument are guilty of an inconsistency. Our aim in this article is to explain why our view avoids inconsistency, to challenge Crawley's positive defense of the Options Argument, and to (...) suggest that this general line of reasoning employs a double standard. (shrink)