This article applies an intersectional approach to Roman invective (and praise) to elucidate how those at the centre of Roman power exploited discriminatory and laudatory ideologies relating to intersections of identity to sway a Roman jury. Analysing the depiction of an unnamed woman in the Pro Scauro shows how Cicero plays upon normalized prejudices to bias the jury against ista Sarda. These internalized prejudices could also be utilized to discredit women with privileged intersectional identities, as demonstrated by Cicero's portrayal of (...) Clodia and Sassia in the Pro Caelio and the Pro Cluentio, a process that helps reify the marginalization of certain identities. (shrink)

Engineers encounter difficult ethical problems in their practice and in research. In many ways, these problems are like design problems: they are complex, often ill-defined; resolving them involves an iterative process of analysis and synthesis; and there can be more than one acceptable solution. This book offers a real-world, problem-centered approach to engineering ethics, using a rich collection of open-ended scenarios and case studies to develop skill in recognizing and addressing ethical issues.

Background: Family members and healthcare providers play an integral role in a person’s assisted dying journey. Their own needs during the assisted dying journey are often, however, unrecognized and underrepresented in policies and guidelines. Circumstances under which people choose assisted dying, and relational contexts such as the sociopolitical environment, may influence the experiences of family members and healthcare providers. Ethical considerations: Ethics approval was not required to conduct this review. Aim: This scoping review aims to identify the relational influences on (...) the experiences of family members and healthcare providers of adults who underwent assisted dying and of those unable to access assisted dying due to the loss of capacity to consent. Methods: A literature search was conducted in four databases, including MEDLINE, EMBASE, Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature and PsycINFO. The search retrieved 12,074 articles, a number narrowed down to 172 articles for full-text screening. Thirty-six articles met the established inclusion criteria. A feminist relational framework guided the data analysis. Results: Five key themes on the influences of family members’ and healthcare providers’ experiences throughout the assisted dying process were synthesized from the data. They include relationships as central to beginning the process, social and political influences on decision making, complex roles and responsibilities of family members and healthcare providers, a unique experience of death, and varying experiences following death. Conclusion: The feminist relational lens, used to guide analysis, shed light on the effect of the sociopolitical influences and the relationships among patients, families, and healthcare providers on each other’s experiences. Addressing the needs of the family members and healthcare providers is vital to improving the assisted dying process. Including families’ and healthcare providers’ needs within institutional policies and enhancing collaboration and communication among those involved could improve the overall experience. (shrink)

It is widely held that free speech is a distinctive and privileged social kind. But what is free speech? In particular, is there any unified phenomenon that is both free speech and which is worthy of the special value traditionally attached to free speech? We argue that a descendent of the classic Millian justification of free speech is in fact a justification of a more general social condition; and, via an argument that 'free speech' names whatever natural social kind is (...) justified by the best arguments, that free speech is therefore this more general condition. This condition involves not merely the orthodox freedom (in some sense) of speakers to distribute words, but also two less frequently acknowledged dimensions of free speech: audience understanding and consideration. We conclude with some discussion of the policy implications of this conception of free speech. (shrink)

The much-commented prologue of Jean Renart's Roman de la Rose is a rich source for literary speculation, and it is unlikely that successive generations of critics will ever exhaust its many interpretive possibilities. Jean himself, active in the first two decades of the thirteenth century, remains an enigmatic figure: critical agreement makes him the author of three works, the Lai de l'Ombre, in which he names himself ; the Roman de l'Escoufle, attributed to him on account of allusions to the (...) first work and stylistic similarities; and, lastly, what is now most commonly called the Roman de la Rose. Jean emerges playfully from within the lines of his works: humor and ingenuity appear as his trademarks, and are more revealing of his character than the one extant reference to his name. The following analysis explores but one small aspect of Jean's creativity and narrative engin. Beginning with a reading of the prologue, and a consideration of the status of lyric insertions in the romance, I will contend that the amount of clothing exchanged in the Roman de la Rose and the extraordinary concentration on it render this work highly unusual and that it has potential as a metaphor for the intricate textual exchange inherent in the circulation of poetry. In short, a matrix of imagery concerned with fabric and clothing highlights the status of lyric insertions in the text. The argument will be that the exchange of clothing in the romance echoes the circulation of song: robes, mantels, and tunics are the material correlatives of the various kinds of song that adorn the text aurally as the clothes do visually. While it might seem improbable at first, Jean's prologue plants the idea with his analogy of textual composition to cloth production. (shrink)

In this paper I outline an “agent-centered” approach to learning ethics. The approach is “agent-centered” in that its central aim is to prepare students toact wisely and responsibly when faced with moral problems. The methods characteristic of this approach are suitable for integrating material on professional and research ethics into technical courses, as well as for free-standing ethics courses. The analogy I draw between ethical problems and design problems clarifies the character of ethical problems as they are experienced by those (...) who must respond to them. It exposes the mistake, common in ethics teaching, of misrepresenting moral problems as multiple-choice problems, especially in the form of ‘dilemmas’, that is, a forced choice between two unacceptable alternatives. Furthermore, I clarify the importance for responsible practice of recognizing any ambiguity in the problem situation. (shrink)

This paper examines the way in which causal relations are understood in the dominant model in contemporary medicine. It argues that the causal relation is not definable in terms of the condition relation, but that in general for conditions of an occurrence to be among its causes they must answer instrumental interests in a certain way, and there are further criteria for distinguishing 'the' cause of a disease (i.e., its etiological agent) from other causal factors, which are based upon instrumental (...) interests peculiar to medicine. It also argues that diseases are complex processes of which both clinical and underlying patho-physiological manifestations are proper parts (as contrasted with effects). (shrink)

This article reports on a method of group mentoring to strengthen responsible research conduct. A key feature of this approach is joint exploration of the issues by trainees and their faculty research supervisors. These interactions not only help participants learn about current ethical norms for research practice, but also draw on the accumulated experience of faculty and staff about practical problems of research conduct, and help to make faculty more articulate about responsible research conduct and so better able to guide (...) their trainees. By working with departments or laboratories as a whole the method facilitates the formulation of specific norms appropriate to particular research situations and to strengthen the group’s ability to support appropriate behavior and deal with new issues as they arise. It also gives students more ways to ask questions about research practice and to benefit from the experience of all members of their department or group as well as their own research supervisors. The method is well tested and has been well received by a wide variety of departments and research groups. It provides the means for a constructive and enjoyable response to the Public Health Service’s (PHS) new Policy on Instruction in the Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) that requires education in the responsible conduct of research for all those funded by PHS funds, including faculty and staff as well as trainees. (shrink)

We typically judge that hasteners are causes of what they hasten, while delayers are not causes of what they delay. These judgements, I suggest, are sensitive to an underlying metaphysical distinction. To see this, we need to pay attention to a relation that I call positive security-dependence, where an event E security-depends positively on an earlier event C just in case E could more easily have failed to occur if C had not occurred. I suggest that we judge that an (...) event C is a cause of a later event E only if E security-depends positively on C. This explains our causal judgements in typical cases of hastening and delaying as well as in atypical cases, where we judge that hasteners are not causes of what they hasten or that delayers are causes of what they delay. (shrink)

Should our commitment to freedom of speech extend to freedom of hate speech: speech that promotes hatred toward an individual or group on the basis of a characteristic such as race, gender, sexuality, nationality, or religion—often, although perhaps not exclusively, using slurs and epithets? Drawing on philosophy of language and empirical research, this essay outlines five theoretical models of how hate speech may function, and explores their implications for this issue. I argue that (some) hate speech can be regulated without (...) compromising freedom of expression; and furthermore that, under certain circumstances, considerations of free speech may favour regulating hate speech. (shrink)

Ray and Cooper (2024) present a clear and compelling argument for giving greater prioritization to environmental injustice in the work we do as bioethicists. Their discussion of justice and vulnera...

Writing and that which it entails are the subject of countless texts by Maurice Blanchot. In particular, Blanchot has focused on the notion of the work, or more precisely on a groundlessness or an absence of the work, which he has designated from different perspectives over the course of more than half a century. In various ways, Blanchot has conceived of the work as an affirmation of its undoing. The question of narration, often about a confrontation with death, is fundamentally (...) important, as is evident for example in Blanchot’s Death Sentence, The Madness of the Day or The Instant of My Death. In a sense, it is bound up with the possibility of the work. Writing about Henry James in “The Turn of the Screw” 2 in The Book to Come, Blanchot discusses narration. What is described is indeed a certain absence of the work relating to the writer’s difficult struggle to narrate everything. I will examine Blanchot’s reading of James to expose this conception of narration centred on seizing the truth. It is apparent that Blanchot approaches the question very differently in “Narrative Voice ,” in The Infinite Conversation in which there is a decentring of the work. 3 I will show that this text as well as certain writings by Derrida make it possible to arrive at a conception of narration in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw which strongly contrasts with the one put forward by Blanchot in The Book to Come. Thus, alongside Blanchot’s reading of The Turn of the Screw which relates to the project of realising the work as a totality, Blanchot makes possible a more radical approach to the text, illustrating the non-totalization of the work whose borders are uncertain. In this way, Blanchot can be shown to step beyond an impossible conception of the absence of the work. (shrink)

In the first edition of The Gay Science (GS), Nietzsche proposes that we treat knowledge as unconditionally valuable and life as a tragic quest for truth. In the second edition of GS, he seems to retract this proposal, suggesting that we substitute “incipit parodia” for “incipit tragœdia.” But Nietzsche does not say what he means by “parody,” or what role he believes it should play in our evaluative lives. This article proposes that by introducing parody into GS, Nietzsche intends not (...) only to correct the original text by mocking his earlier treatment of science as tragic, but also to designate parody as a basis for new tasks, duties, and values beyond what science can offer. This article speculates that parodic value creation might consist in the imitation of behaviors and practices associated with preexisting values without the reproduction of the beliefs and feelings corresponding to those practices. (shrink)

The ‘Ashley treatment’ has raised much ethical controversy. This article starts from the observation that this debate suffers from a lack of careful philosophical analysis which is essential for an ethical assessment. I focus on two central arguments in the debate, namely an argument defending the treatment based on quality of life and an argument against the treatment based on dignity and rights. My analysis raises doubts as to whether these arguments, as they stand in the debate, are philosophically robust. (...) I reconstruct what form good arguments for and against the treatment should take and which assumptions are needed to defend the according positions. Concerning quality of life, I argue that to make a discussion about quality of life possible, it needs to be clear which particular conception of the good life is employed. This has not been sufficiently clear in the debate. I fill this lacuna. Regarding rights and dignity, I show that there is a remarkable absence of references to general philosophical theories of rights and dignity in the debate about the Ashley treatment. Consequently, this argument against the treatment is not sufficiently developed. I clarify how such an argument should proceed. Such a detailed analysis of arguments is necessary to clear up some confusions and ambiguities in the debate and to shed light on the dilemma that caretakers of severely disabled children face. (shrink)

This question lies at the heart of a debate that raises fundamental issues about just when, and on what grounds, the state is justified in using its coercive powers to limit the freedom of individuals.

In Canada, all institutions that conduct publicly funded, animal-based research are expected to comply with the standards of the Canadian Council on Animal Care (CCAC). The CCAC promotes the use of animal alternatives, and uses the “3Rs” principles of Replacement, Reduction, and Refinement as a guiding ethical framework. To ensure these standards are strictly enforced, internal ethics committees at each institution are tasked with creating “Animal Use Protocol” (AUP) forms to be filled out by researchers and evaluated by the committees. (...) In this paper, we assess AUP forms from Canada’s top research universities to identify the extent to which they conform to, or advance, the 3Rs framework. Our results show various deficiencies that call into question the quality of information elicited by these forms. To remedy this, we recommend that the CCAC assume responsibility for creating a standardized 3Rs section to be used on all AUP forms. In addition, proposal forms and experimental results for all research at CCAC-certified institutions should be digitized and uploaded into a national database. We argue that this would offer higher quality information for researchers at the experimental design stage, while strengthening the CCAC’s mandate to be accountable to the Canadian public. (shrink)

As part of a series of case studies titled “In the Humanities Classroom,” this contribution reports in detail on the initial class taught by the author in the spring of 2015, during her time at Princeton University as a visiting lecturer in art history. By presenting students with three sets of devotional materials—two papier-mâché medallions painted by nuns at the convent of Wienhausen in northern Germany on the eve of the Reformation; a n'kisi n'kondi figure from the Yombe group of (...) Kongo peoples in the nineteenth-century; and a description, taken from Marilynne Robinson's novel Gilead, of a child baptizing kittens with creek water—the instructor raises questions about how materials convey holiness and influence viewers or worshippers. She prods history and literature students, both graduate and undergraduate, to take physical objects seriously as evidence, and she challenges those in art history to study objects and also texts normally regarded as outside of their purview. (shrink)

Sade's personal fate has too long encouraged critics to concentrate on his personal isolation and personal revolt. Extraordinary as his life was, the light that it throws on his work casts into shade the intellectual context that was much more important to its generation than his actual experience. This book is about how Sade took a pure version of eighteenth-century materialism and rendered it into an even purer form of pornography. The eternal yet unequal clashing of atomic bodies became the (...) endless torture of human ones. It traces the intellectual genealogy that links Sade to his materialist forebears (d'Holbach, Condillac, Buffon, Diderot, La Mettrie, Robinet, Delisle de Sales) and shows how the germs of cruel pleasure were already present in elements of their work, as much in their rhetoric and stylistics as in their arguments. Sade, aided by his grounding in the interpretative techniques of illicit clandestine and libertine literature, read them attentively and developed their presentation as well as their content into a flawlessly logical and self-referential system. Thus the arrogant philosopher (the author / the libertine) did not just mouth his cruel positions but enacted them, proving the behaviour of matter as he/she did so. This reading of Sade's work refers its principal elements - shape, style and contents - back to the hardcore of materialism, offering an account which, while not making it more tolerable, renders it at once more accessible and more comprehensible. (shrink)

The practice of relationship itself is seen to be the central vehicle through which human beings learn and understand themselves, others, and the world around them. The politics of sexual difference insists that the flourishing of sexual difference in both women and men, girls and boys, relies, ultimately, on both sexes taking up the challenge to rethink themselves and the world. This chapter explores the emergence of a whole new philosophical idea, brought into being by Luce Irigaray in the context (...) of the women's movements of the 1960s and 1970s in Europe. It then outlines how this idea was developed in Italy and Spain to restore the work of the mother to the origins of what we understand as education and philosophy, emphasising the need to bring relationship itself as the vehicle for this process onto centre stage and keep it there. (shrink)

It is a commonplace in liberal circles that individual persons have a right to individual autonomy or self-determination. Each mentally competent adult has a right to be at liberty to live and shape their own life in accordance with their own view about what makes for a good life, free from undue coercion or interference by others, so long as they do not harm others. In the words of John Stuart Mill, mentally-competent persons should have the liberty of “framing the (...) plan of our life to suit our own character, of doing as we like, subject to such consequences as may follow, without impediment from our fellow creatures, so long as what we do does not harm them, even though they may think our conduct foolish, perverse or wrong”. (shrink)

This article discusses the design methodology of the Benedictine monk-architect Dom Hans van der Laan, famous for his manifesto De Architectonische Ruimte, in which he proposed his ideal elementary architecture. In the past, this ideal achitecture was linked to Van der Laan’s proportional system and to his general approach as an architect rather than to his Catholic background. Consequently, the changing conceptual landscape in which he developed his ideas on the relation between religion and design was neglected. Yet, as this (...) article will argue, it is only by carefully exploring the relation between Van der Laan’s attempts to define a fundamental architecture and his ambition to understand the religious traditions they may have sprung from that one can understand how his religion and design methodology influenced each other. Based on unedited primary sources, this article reveals forgotten interconnections between Van der Laan’s religious and architectural thinking. By analysing these motifs, it offers new insights on the interrelationships between religion and architecture that go beyond the traditionalist-modernist dichotomy. (shrink)