Healthcare workers carry a substantial risk of harm from infectious disease, particularly, but not exclusively, during outbreaks. More can be done by healthcare institutions to identify risks, quantify the current burden of preventable infectious disease amongst HCWs and identify opportunities for prevention. We suggest that institutional obligations should be clarified with respect to the mitigation of infectious disease risks to staff, and question the duty of HCWs to care while healthcare institutions persist with a reactive rather than proactive attitude to (...) infectious disease threats. (shrink)

Because factory-farmed meat production inflicts gratuitous suffering upon animals and wreaks havoc on the environment, there are morally compelling reasons to become vegetarian. Yet industrial plant agriculture causes the death of many field animals, and this leads some to question whether consumers ought to get some of their protein from certain kinds of non factory-farmed meat. Donald Bruckner, for instance, boldly argues that the harm principle implies an obligation to collect and consume roadkill and that strict vegetarianism is thus immoral. (...) But this argument works only if the following claims are true: all humans have access to roadkill, roadkill would go to waste if those who happen upon it don’t themselves consume it, it’s impossible to harvest vegetables without killing animals, the animals who are killed in plant production are all-things-considered harmed by crop farming, and the best arguments for vegetarianism all endorse the harm principle. As I will argue in this paper, each claim is deeply problematic. Consequently, in most cases, humans ought to strictly eat plants and save the roadkill for cats. (shrink)

Some animal ethicists argue that eating roadkill is permissible because salvaging and consuming already dead animals doesn’t cause harm to anyone. Moreover, some argue that eating roadkill is actually obligatory, insofar as a diet that includes some roadkill is less harmful than a diet that consists of protein (animal or plant) obtained only from grocery stores and restaurants. Against this view, Abbate argues that eating roadkill is wrong for at least two reasons: (1) better consequences would be produced if roadkill (...) were either left in surrounding habitats for scavenger animals or given to other would-be meat eaters (such as meat-eating friends, family, and/or neighbors), and (2) those who salvage and consume roadkill both benefit from and are involved in wrongdoing, insofar as the animals who are killed by motor vehicles are killed as a result of injustice. (shrink)

Presents a plethora of approaches to developing human potential in areas not conventionally addressed. Organized in two parts, this international collection of essays provides viable educational alternatives to those currently holding sway in an era of high-stakes accountability.

My title is of course drawn from William James's Pragmatism: A New Name for some Old Ways of Thinking. The five excellent critics of Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein have zeroed in on the profound questions at the heart of pragmatism. All of us working in the tradition should thank them, and I happily do so. In what follows, I will explore the supposed differences between their views and my own. I hope to persuade my (...) critics that sometimes there is no difference; that sometimes there is a fruitful difference; and that it does indeed make a difference to differentiate pragmatism from other positions.A running theme in the commentaries is my distinction between a more objective... (shrink)

Jecker et al. (2024) offer seven principles with which to guide conference organizers and assess how ethically a conference is organized. While focused on bioethics, these principles are relevant t...

Beyond Power offers fresh ways to approach the burning political, religious, and scientific issues of our time. It also provides a compelling overview of the work of the great French philosopher Simone Weil, whom Albert Camus saw as "the only great mind of our time" and T. S. Eliot saw as "a woman of genius, a kind of genius akin to that of the saints.".

It’s often assumed that if white people have a sexual preference for other white people, they, when using intimate dating platforms, have the right to skip over the profiles of Black people. As some argue, we have the right to act on our sexual preferences, including racialized sexual preferences, because doing so isn’t harmful, and even if it were harmful, this wouldn’t matter because either our “right” to act on our sexual preferences outweighs the harm and/or we cannot even control (...) our sexual preferences. Against this view, I argue that (1) when white people act on anti-Black sexual preferences, white people harm Black people insofar as they reduce their objective welfare level, and (2) we can in fact, to some degree, control our racialized sexual preferences. Moreover, I argue that because white people who engage in racialized sexual discrimination against Blacks disrespect and demean Black people and we don’t have any kind of right to disrespect and demean persons, white people don’t have even a prima facie right to act on anti-Black sexual preferences. Indeed, white racialized sexual discrimination against Black people is always deeply wrong, not only because it wrongs Black people, but it also wrongs the discriminators themselves. (shrink)

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)

Those who claim to be committed to the moral equality of animals don’t always act as if they think all animals are equal. For instance, many animal liberationists spend hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars each year on food, toys, and medical care for their companion animals. Surely, more animals would be helped if the money spent on companion animals were donated to farmed animal protection organizations. Moreover, many animal liberationists feed their companion animals the flesh of farmed animals, and (...) some let their cats roam outdoors, foreseeing that they will kill wildlife. Maybe these companion-animal loving animal liberationists are moral hypocrites. Or maybe their behavior is justified. I defend the latter claim. By developing an ethic that emphasizes the moral significance of life-meaning and recognizes the important role that companion animals play in giving meaning to human lives, I argue that there are stringent side-constraints that apply to companion animals, but not to other animals. Consequently, it isn’t hypocritical to prioritize companion animals over other animals. We can have (and value) our carnivorous companions and be animal liberationists too. (shrink)

Pairing bright, hilarious illustrations with witty one-liners that most people would never dare say out loud, each Co-edikit book is a celebration of the human experience and the kind of gift that ensures its reader will maintain a laughing perspective on life. "I don't like morning people...or mornings...or people." On those days when life gets on your last nerve, Sarcasm is the perfect pick-me-up!

Niche construction is a concept that captures a wide array of biological phenomena, from the environmental effects of metabolism to the creation of complex structures such as termite mounds and beaver dams. A central point in niche construction theory is that organisms do not just passively undergo developmental, ecological, or evolutionary processes, but are also active participants in them Evolution: From molecules to men, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983; Laland KN, Odling-Smee J, Feldman MW, In: KN Laland and T Uller (...) Evolutionary causation: Biological and philosophical reflections, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2019). In this paper, we distinguish between two fundamentally different ways in which organisms are active participants: as agents and as contributors. Roughly, organisms act as agents when niche constructing effects are a result of a goal-directed behavior over which the organisms have some degree of control. Organisms act as contributors when the niche constructing effects do not arise from a goal to perform the constructive activity. As illustrative examples we discuss plants altering leaf-morphology to optimize light exposure as reported by Sultan and bacteria creating novel niches through excreting energy-rich metabolites. The difference between agential and contributional niche construction is important for understanding the different ways organisms can actively participate in development, ecology, and evolution. Additionally, this distinction can increase our understanding of how the capacity of agency is distributed across the tree of life and how agency influences developmental and evolutionary processes. (shrink)

Children like Baby G, born with complex chronic medical conditions that compromise function in the long term, are an increasing presence in tertiary-level neonatal intensive care units. The parents and health-care providers of these children are faced with profoundly difficult decisions. Whether severe congenital anomalies with poor prognosis are diagnosed antenatally or are discovered at the time of birth, the issues are vexing, and the impact decisions will have on everyone in the family is profound. What should such decisions be (...) based upon? What values and principles might guide the decision-making process? What moral justifications allow for pursuing.. (shrink)

Those who claim to be committed to the moral equality of animals don’t always act as if they think all animals are equal. For instance, many animal liberationists spend hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars each year on food, toys, and medical care for their companion animals. Surely, more animals would be helped if the money spent on companion animals were donated to farmed animal protection organizations. Moreover, many animal liberationists feed their companion animals the flesh of farmed animals, and (...) some let their cats roam outdoors, foreseeing that they will kill wildlife. Maybe these companion-animal loving animal liberationists are moral hypocrites. Or maybe their behavior is justified. I defend the latter claim. By developing an ethic that emphasizes the moral significance of life-meaning and recognizes the important role that companion animals play in giving meaning to human lives, I argue that there are stringent side-constraints that apply to companion animals, but not to other animals. Consequently, it isn’t hypocritical to prioritize companion animals over other animals. We can have (and value) our carnivorous companions and be animal liberationists too. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Roadmap Needed:How to Help Parents Navigate the Worst Day of Their LivesCheryl KilpatrickOn January 14, 2010, our 3–year–old daughter, Maggie, was rushed to an emergency room at a satellite medical center. I am an occupational therapist and was actually scheduled to work at a hospital that day. I was wearing my purple scrubs. Maggie had been showing “strange” symptoms all week that I thought might be a sign that (...) she was getting a cold or the flu. She had been extremely tired, having morning headaches and ataxia (balance problems). When I dropped Maggie off at preschool the morning of January 14, 2010 she began to have trouble using her left arm. The teacher noticed that her smile was crooked. I did a quick neurological assessment and saw that her [End Page E9] left arm was much weaker than her right arm. I thought to myself, “My kid looks as if she is having a stroke. But she is only 3–years–old. This doesn’t make any sense.” The teacher gave me a look as if to say, “Are you going to take Maggie to the hospital or am I going to have to do it?” I just stood there. I suppose I was in the first stages of shock. I turned to the teacher and said, “We are going to the hospital.”As we walked toward the ER admissions desk I was surprised to see that we were the only people in the waiting area. It didn’t take long before we were called into the examination room. The ER doctor did a neurological assessment on Maggie like I had done only 30 minutes earlier and said that a CAT scan was needed. He thought that we would most likely be transferred to a local children’s hospital. The CAT scan revealed that Maggie had a large mass in her thalamus. I just looked at the ER doctor and said, “Just tell me what I need to do and I will do it.” No tears, no screams, no emotion. I just went into “mommy mode” and made sure that my child felt safe every step of the way. My husband was on his way home from a business trip when I called to tell him the news. He had no idea what he would find when he finally got to us.As expected, we were transported by ambulance to the local children’s hospital. I remember sitting in the front seat with the driver and feeling like this was all a dream. It was all very surreal. Maggie calmly chatted with the EMS personnel in the back of the ambulance as if nothing was happening. I had no idea how our lives would change once we reached the hospital. This ride to the hospital began our journey into uncharted territory. Nothing in my life had prepared me for what was about to happen.We arrived at the children’s hospital around 11:00 a.m. As we walked into ER department, I could feel the eyes of the ER staff following us. I turned to look at them and they smiled. The look on their faces told me that something was very wrong with my daughter. I felt like we were a sideshow at the carnival. I hated those looks. I didn’t want their smiles. I wanted to know what was happening. I wanted information.My husband arrived about an hour after our arrival. He walked into the room and found his little girl looking very spacey and unable to walk to him without falling. When Maggie and I stepped out into the hallway to find the restroom, I turned to look back into the room and saw my husband with his face in his hands. He was crying. I was not. I was still in “mommy mode” or just plain shock. I knew that my daughter was not well. But then again, neither was I. I was not crying. I was not screaming. I was numb. What I needed was someone to take my “emotional pulse.”We waited patiently in that small room watching the hours pass by as each doctor came... (shrink)

It seems that no philosopher these days wants a theory of truth which can be accused of being metaphysical. But even if we agree that grandiose metaphysics is to be spurned, even if we agree that our theory of truth should be a deflated one, the controversy does not die down. A variety of deflationist options present themselves. Some, with Richard Rorty, take the notion of truth to be so wedded to metaphysics that we are advised to drop it altogether. (...) Others, with Paul Horwich, take the disquotational or equivalence schema—'p' is T if and only if p—to completely capture the content of the predicate 'is true'. And others argue that there is a conception of truth to be had which is non-metaphysical but which goes beyond the triviality expressed by the disquotational schema. (shrink)

It seems that no philosopher these days wants a theory of truth which can be accused of being metaphysical. But even if we agree that grandiose metaphysics is to be spurned, even if we agree that our theory of truth should be a deflated one, the controversy does not die down. A variety of deflationist options present themselves. Some, with Richard Rorty, take the notion of truth to be so wedded to metaphysics that we are advised to drop it altogether. (...) Others, with Paul Horwich, take the disquotational or equivalence schema—'p' is T if and only if p—to completely capture the content of the predicate 'is true'. And others argue that there is a conception of truth to be had which is non-metaphysical but which goes beyond the triviality expressed by the disquotational schema. (shrink)

When participants make judgments about the onset of self-initiated movements they typically report the movement occurred earlier than it had [Obhi, S. S., & Haggard, P. . Free will and free won’t. American Scientific, 92, 358–365.]. One interpretation is that feed-forward processes lead to awareness of the movement prior to execution. Because individuals with autism experience reduced preparatory activity prior to a voluntary movement, the present study sought to determine whether these anticipatory biases are exhibited by persons with autism. Participants (...) watched a dot move in a circle and pressed the spacebar any time after one revolution. A tone either followed the participants’ voluntary movement or was computer generated. Participants in both groups made anticipatory judgements regarding movement initiation . When the movement and tone occurred together this anticipatory bias was also present, regardless of which event participants focused on. Individuals with autism appear to have access to a similar representation of voluntary movements, however this representation may be more variable. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of TruthCheryl MisakRobert B. Westbrook Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005. xvi + 246 pp.Robert Westbrook, who in my view is our best intellectual historian of pragmatism, has written what is sure to be a major contribution to the study of pragmatist political theory, a branch of political theory which has recently seen (...) a salutary surge of interest. Democratic Hope: Pragmatism and the Politics of Truth is beautifully written, with a steady eye on the non-philosopher, yet it is sophisticated and nuanced so as to engage the most careful philosophers in the field and to genuinely advance current debates.It is interesting to see just what benefits come from having such an excellent intellectual historian take the long and wide view on pragmatism. For instance, Westbrook doesn't merely look at the classical pragmatist he thinks has the most important things to say about politics. Dewey is usually is taken to be the pragmatist of choice in political theory, although I myself have been rather single-minded about Peirce's implied account of politics. Westbrook gives us excellent accounts of Dewey and Peirce, but he also looks at James, at Mead, at how pragmatism and Marxism have had an off-again, on-again relationship, etc. That is, he gives us a panoramic view of how the pragmatists—classical and contemporary—line up in political theory. This is not only extremely useful to any student of pragmatism, but it is fascinating as well.Westbrook's abilities as an intellectual historian also have him making bang-on points about the debate within pragmatism for the heart and soul of pragmatism. Pragmatism, he says, has always been less a coherent philosophical school than a contentious family of thinkers holding distinct but related positions on the "workmanlike" nature of knowledge, meaning, and truth (p.1).The central debate within pragmatism is between those who take pragmatism to be akin to post-modern views, where there is no truth and objectivity to be had anywhere, and those who take pragmatism to promise a less absolutist account of truth—an account of truth on which we can make sense of aiming at the truth. On the one side of the debate we have Rorty and his [End Page 279] predecessors saying that there is no truth at which we might aim—only solidarity or agreement within a community. In some moods he goes as far as claiming that truth and objectivity are nothing more than what our peers will let us get away with saying. On the other side of the divide, we have those who think of pragmatism as rejecting an ahistorical, transcendental, or metaphysical theory of truth, but nonetheless being committed to doing justice to the objective dimension of human inquiry—to the fact that those engaged in deliberation and investigation take themselves to be aiming at getting things right, avoiding mistakes, and improving their beliefs and theories. On this more objective kind of pragmatism, the fact that our inquiries are historically situated does not entail that they lack objectivity. And the fact that standards of objectivity themselves come into being and evolve does not strip them of their worth. In James' well-known words, the trail of the human serpent is over everything, but (as James himself may or may not have seen) this does not toss us into a sea of arbitrariness, where there is no truth or where truth varies from person to person and culture to culture. Westbrook puts the issue nicely: "Post-modernist skeptics and their few neopragmatist admirers turn to the old pragmatists because they (correctly) see them as potential partners in a struggle against 'strong', that is, absolutist and 'totalizing', conceptions of truth. But what they neglect is the old pragmatists' conviction (shared by many neopragmatists) that once they had overcome absolutism, they could then resume traveling down the road of inquiry in a more fuel-efficient vehicle than Reason toward a more modest destination than Truth" (p. 7).Westbrook aligns himself with the kind of pragmatism that aims to take account of our human cognitive aspirations... (shrink)

In this multiple case study, the authors compare the instruction of two high school civics teachers during the 2012 Presidential Election. Both were highly-qualified practitioners who worked in schools with one-to-one laptop initiatives, creating an environment in which access to digital technology ceased to be an issue. Although both teachers regularly used technology in their classrooms, the authors describe stark differences in the complexity and authenticity of their instruction, which the authors attribute to the teachers’ technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPCK). (...) The authors conclude by discussing implications for better understanding TPCK within civics instruction, specifically in classrooms with one-to-one laptop access. (shrink)

The contributions in the current issue of Ethical Perspectives mainly derive from a conference on Catholic Intellectual Traditions organized jointly by the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and the Erasmus Institute, University of Notre Dame, and held at Leuven from November 10th to the 11th, 2000. As the reader can see from a quick perusal of the table of contents, the contributions cover a diverse range of topics. The reader might well ask what such contributions have to do with a journal concerned (...) with ethical perspectives. What do contributions bearing on religious themes from literature, or reflections on mystical love, or on Catholicism and modern scholarship, have to do with a journal devoted to ethics? Surely we have all learned to our benefit from Kant that ethics is entirely autonomous with respect to religion. If there is a relation, it is one that must respect that autonomy, and not muddy the waters by bringing back the outmoded promiscuity of religion and ethics, and especially it must guard against religion trying to sly its way back to dominion over ethics once again.A reply to this line of reflection would be that Ethical Perspectives is concerned not only with perspectives, not only with what happens within perspectives, but with ethical perspectives as themselves coming to articulation within contexts that contain all the richness of human life as lived. Such contexts cannot be considered apart from serious reflection on religion as expressing the sense of ultimate worth that humans understand and try to live diversely. Contexts have to do with the ethos within which ethical perspectives, and our determinate address to specific ethical dilemmas occur. The practice of a religion, or the absence of it, or indeed the rejection of such practice, communicates something of our sense of the most ultimate ethos of being, and its goodness.Clearly this communication will also be effected in a diversity of ways: for instance, in the understanding we have of the economy and the state as serving, or despoiling, the worth of human life; or in the art and literature that offer us images of significant human possibility set forth for imaginative contemplation with a forthrightness more integral than the confused flux of everyday life allows; or in the secret love of prayer that draws the human soul towards its most extreme abandonment and adoration. Ethical perspectives do not make full sense in the determinate terms they overtly set forth, but draw from sources of value that more often than not remain implicit and intimate to the perspectives themselves. Full ethical reflection requires mindfulness of these more intimate sources, and an honest address towards our religious being is demanded by such reflection. Such honesty is asked of a non-believer as of a believer. Both indeed may be differently called into question by that honesty.If the conference was organized with reference to Catholic Traditions, does this indicate a kind of sectarian narrowness for the intellectual, despite what the word `catholic' might betoken? It will be evident from the contributions that no such narrowness is here at work. Quite the opposite: it is the rich diversity that is striking. One does hear reference to the `ghetto' of Catholic ways, perhaps Church ways, perhaps Christian ways generally. This is a very interesting word: `ghetto'. The discerning reader will note in some of the contributions a strong sympathy for Judaism. But in some instances we will be urged to get out of our `ghetto'. It might seem that as `Catholics' or `Christians' we are already `Jews'. Who put us into the `ghetto'? Is this self-incurred? It seems there are some who have consigned themselves to their own `ghetto', but while this may be true, are there not `ghettos' of religion that are the afterlives of certain Enlightenment ways of thinking about religion, afterlives internalized by those religious who would get out of this now self-imposed ghetto, and make their accommodation with more enlightened ways. How delightfully tangled it all is! We preach repentance and wonder at the end who it is that needs to repent, perhaps we the preachers! One thinks of Lear telling the judge to bring the lash to himself. I don't believe Lear was a Catholic, but he certainly was not an Enlightenment intellectual.There is a question worth asking here, in that for not a few the notion of a `Catholic intellectual' or `Christian intellectual' is an oxymoron. To be a real intellectual is not to be affiliated to an organization that already knows in advance what the truth is. One is reminded of those debates earlier in the 20th century between Bertrand Russell and Frederick Copleston. Russell: You are a Catholic, ergo you already know the answer, ergo you cannot honestly ask the question, ergo what you do cannot be philosophy, that is, free thinking.Very clever, of course, and not without some truth. Do we have to agree with Heidegger that a Christian philosophy is a round square? The problem here, of course, is philosophical. I would say: to be a philosopher is to be able to ask about anything, including religion. But the how of the asking is very important. The asking about religion might well seek a confirmation for what is held beforehand. But this holds true of the critics of religion as much as the sympathizers. The shoe is sometimes on the other foot. It is not only the apologetic Catholics who bring presuppositions to bear on the asking of a question, but so also do those critics who, mirabile dictu, strangely often find their own presuppositions confirmed once again. How easy to accuse the other of not being a `real' intellectual; how galling when it turns out that one's own practice of the free intellect mirrors one's chained opponent.The lesson I take: we inevitably bring fundamental presuppositions to bear in the asking of determinate questions. And it is these presuppositions we need to understand as much as the determinate questions and determinate answers. We are all put to the test. This is more catholic than the offensive critic or the defensive apologist. But you must have trust in mind to be willing to let one's thought be thus open. Such trust cannot be accounted for fully in the determinate ideas one explores or defends. It is interesting also that this trust, in the how of asking questions, mirrors the trust in the how of a person's faith or hope in God. This trust bears on this and that situation or difficulty, but it is in excess of this or that determinate situation or difficulty. It concerns sources of expectation in truth and goodness that are more than we can determine in advance. They are more than we can ever determine completely, since they make our determining possible. We are given to be in this expectation which we cannot completely determine through ourselves alone. And one might say that religion is the way we are given to keep open our communication to these sources of ultimate trust. Russell's cleverness is admirable, but that cleverness will not do to deal with the issue. If the issue concerns ethos or context in the sense implied above, cleverness will never do justice to that. While religion has the power to make us more discerning here, there is a cleverness that tends to make us obtuse.Of course, we intellectuals and academics love cleverness, since we think we are very clever ourselves. Here is one of our sources of difficulty with religion. People who are not clever like us also seem to be religious. If so, one might be tempted to say: being religious then cannot be the same as being clever; it might not even be clever to be religious; ergo to be a truly clever intellectual and academic, I must leave religion in my youth, and put on adult ways of thinking. One might even add to the clinching argument: for ethical reasons we must leave that behind, for just as our thinking must be autonomous, so we must our being ethical become entirely autonomous. Adieu religion!There is an argument here, but one wonders if there are also hints of the operation of a sly process of shaming. We now live in a time where processes of embarrassment are often at work in the initiation of young academics and intellectuals. I hear it said, or rather I hear the significant silence saying this: “It is not that we argue against religion, it's just that well, we real intellectuals don't talk about such things anymore”. We may speak at the top of our heads as post-modernists who have robustly deconstructed the Enlightenment ideal, but at the level of the more elusive and intimate embarrassment we are unself-conscious children of the Enlightenment. But did not the Enlightenment tell us no longer to be children. But now, with our heads we postmoderns tell ourselves we no longer want to be children of the Enlightenment, but in our hearts with regard to religion we are still such children — I mean children of the Enlightenment. Is it not time for that child also to grow up. If I were allowed to prophesy — and of course I am not allowed, since prophecy is now said not only to be inadmissible but impossible — I would inadmissibly and impossibly have to say that at the end of that growing up being religious might again wait gently for this stout child. How galling this will be, I do not prophesy, since we will then have to make our peace with all those people there who are not as clever as we are.We all know Kant's remarks about Enlightenment freeing us from self-incurred tutelage. And of course, our servility to spiritual despots and priestly powers was part of that tutelage. And so we have become autonomous thinkers. What if this autonomy comes to mean that we substitute for self-incurred tutelage a kind of self-incurred spiritual mutilation? If God is the distinguished thing, this may be so; and no amount of self-exculpation, not even ethical self-exculpation, in terms of our being denizens of the epoch of the death of God, will quite exonerate our blasé lack of urgency about divine ultimacy. (shrink)

The contributions in the current issue of Ethical Perspectives mainly derive from a conference on Catholic Intellectual Traditions organized jointly by the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and the Erasmus Institute, University of Notre Dame, and held at Leuven from November 10th to the 11th, 2000. As the reader can see from a quick perusal of the table of contents, the contributions cover a diverse range of topics. The reader might well ask what such contributions have to do with a journal concerned (...) with ethical perspectives. What do contributions bearing on religious themes from literature, or reflections on mystical love, or on Catholicism and modern scholarship, have to do with a journal devoted to ethics? Surely we have all learned to our benefit from Kant that ethics is entirely autonomous with respect to religion. If there is a relation, it is one that must respect that autonomy, and not muddy the waters by bringing back the outmoded promiscuity of religion and ethics, and especially it must guard against religion trying to sly its way back to dominion over ethics once again.A reply to this line of reflection would be that Ethical Perspectives is concerned not only with perspectives, not only with what happens within perspectives, but with ethical perspectives as themselves coming to articulation within contexts that contain all the richness of human life as lived. Such contexts cannot be considered apart from serious reflection on religion as expressing the sense of ultimate worth that humans understand and try to live diversely. Contexts have to do with the ethos within which ethical perspectives, and our determinate address to specific ethical dilemmas occur. The practice of a religion, or the absence of it, or indeed the rejection of such practice, communicates something of our sense of the most ultimate ethos of being, and its goodness.Clearly this communication will also be effected in a diversity of ways: for instance, in the understanding we have of the economy and the state as serving, or despoiling, the worth of human life; or in the art and literature that offer us images of significant human possibility set forth for imaginative contemplation with a forthrightness more integral than the confused flux of everyday life allows; or in the secret love of prayer that draws the human soul towards its most extreme abandonment and adoration. Ethical perspectives do not make full sense in the determinate terms they overtly set forth, but draw from sources of value that more often than not remain implicit and intimate to the perspectives themselves. Full ethical reflection requires mindfulness of these more intimate sources, and an honest address towards our religious being is demanded by such reflection. Such honesty is asked of a non-believer as of a believer. Both indeed may be differently called into question by that honesty.If the conference was organized with reference to Catholic Traditions, does this indicate a kind of sectarian narrowness for the intellectual, despite what the word `catholic' might betoken? It will be evident from the contributions that no such narrowness is here at work. Quite the opposite: it is the rich diversity that is striking. One does hear reference to the `ghetto' of Catholic ways, perhaps Church ways, perhaps Christian ways generally. This is a very interesting word: `ghetto'. The discerning reader will note in some of the contributions a strong sympathy for Judaism. But in some instances we will be urged to get out of our `ghetto'. It might seem that as `Catholics' or `Christians' we are already `Jews'. Who put us into the `ghetto'? Is this self-incurred? It seems there are some who have consigned themselves to their own `ghetto', but while this may be true, are there not `ghettos' of religion that are the afterlives of certain Enlightenment ways of thinking about religion, afterlives internalized by those religious who would get out of this now self-imposed ghetto, and make their accommodation with more enlightened ways. How delightfully tangled it all is! We preach repentance and wonder at the end who it is that needs to repent, perhaps we the preachers! One thinks of Lear telling the judge to bring the lash to himself. I don't believe Lear was a Catholic, but he certainly was not an Enlightenment intellectual.There is a question worth asking here, in that for not a few the notion of a `Catholic intellectual' or `Christian intellectual' is an oxymoron. To be a real intellectual is not to be affiliated to an organization that already knows in advance what the truth is. One is reminded of those debates earlier in the 20th century between Bertrand Russell and Frederick Copleston. Russell: You are a Catholic, ergo you already know the answer, ergo you cannot honestly ask the question, ergo what you do cannot be philosophy, that is, free thinking.Very clever, of course, and not without some truth. Do we have to agree with Heidegger that a Christian philosophy is a round square? The problem here, of course, is philosophical. I would say: to be a philosopher is to be able to ask about anything, including religion. But the how of the asking is very important. The asking about religion might well seek a confirmation for what is held beforehand. But this holds true of the critics of religion as much as the sympathizers. The shoe is sometimes on the other foot. It is not only the apologetic Catholics who bring presuppositions to bear on the asking of a question, but so also do those critics who, mirabile dictu, strangely often find their own presuppositions confirmed once again. How easy to accuse the other of not being a `real' intellectual; how galling when it turns out that one's own practice of the free intellect mirrors one's chained opponent.The lesson I take: we inevitably bring fundamental presuppositions to bear in the asking of determinate questions. And it is these presuppositions we need to understand as much as the determinate questions and determinate answers. We are all put to the test. This is more catholic than the offensive critic or the defensive apologist. But you must have trust in mind to be willing to let one's thought be thus open. Such trust cannot be accounted for fully in the determinate ideas one explores or defends. It is interesting also that this trust, in the how of asking questions, mirrors the trust in the how of a person's faith or hope in God. This trust bears on this and that situation or difficulty, but it is in excess of this or that determinate situation or difficulty. It concerns sources of expectation in truth and goodness that are more than we can determine in advance. They are more than we can ever determine completely, since they make our determining possible. We are given to be in this expectation which we cannot completely determine through ourselves alone. And one might say that religion is the way we are given to keep open our communication to these sources of ultimate trust. Russell's cleverness is admirable, but that cleverness will not do to deal with the issue. If the issue concerns ethos or context in the sense implied above, cleverness will never do justice to that. While religion has the power to make us more discerning here, there is a cleverness that tends to make us obtuse.Of course, we intellectuals and academics love cleverness, since we think we are very clever ourselves. Here is one of our sources of difficulty with religion. People who are not clever like us also seem to be religious. If so, one might be tempted to say: being religious then cannot be the same as being clever; it might not even be clever to be religious; ergo to be a truly clever intellectual and academic, I must leave religion in my youth, and put on adult ways of thinking. One might even add to the clinching argument: for ethical reasons we must leave that behind, for just as our thinking must be autonomous, so we must our being ethical become entirely autonomous. Adieu religion!There is an argument here, but one wonders if there are also hints of the operation of a sly process of shaming. We now live in a time where processes of embarrassment are often at work in the initiation of young academics and intellectuals. I hear it said, or rather I hear the significant silence saying this: “It is not that we argue against religion, it's just that well, we real intellectuals don't talk about such things anymore”. We may speak at the top of our heads as post-modernists who have robustly deconstructed the Enlightenment ideal, but at the level of the more elusive and intimate embarrassment we are unself-conscious children of the Enlightenment. But did not the Enlightenment tell us no longer to be children. But now, with our heads we postmoderns tell ourselves we no longer want to be children of the Enlightenment, but in our hearts with regard to religion we are still such children — I mean children of the Enlightenment. Is it not time for that child also to grow up. If I were allowed to prophesy — and of course I am not allowed, since prophecy is now said not only to be inadmissible but impossible — I would inadmissibly and impossibly have to say that at the end of that growing up being religious might again wait gently for this stout child. How galling this will be, I do not prophesy, since we will then have to make our peace with all those people there who are not as clever as we are.We all know Kant's remarks about Enlightenment freeing us from self-incurred tutelage. And of course, our servility to spiritual despots and priestly powers was part of that tutelage. And so we have become autonomous thinkers. What if this autonomy comes to mean that we substitute for self-incurred tutelage a kind of self-incurred spiritual mutilation? If God is the distinguished thing , this may be so; and no amount of self-exculpation, not even ethical self-exculpation, in terms of our being denizens of the epoch of the death of God, will quite exonerate our blasé lack of urgency about divine ultimacy. (shrink)

A. Kenny, Frege, an introduction to the founder of modern analytic philosophy. London:Penguin, 1995. viii-h223pp. £7.99 T. Willamson, Vagueness. London:Routledge, 1994. xiii-f-325 pp. £35.00 TOM BU...

This case describes an adolescent in a crisis of a chronic medical condition whose situation is complicated by substance abuse and mental illness. D. Micah Hester provides an analytic approach, teasing apart the multiple layers of medical, developmental, and moral issues at hand and describing possible responses and outcomes. Amy T. Campbell examines existing legal guidelines for adolescent decision making, arguing that greater space exists for clinical discretion in these matters than commonly thought. Cheryl D. Lew discusses the development (...) of agency in adolescent patients, the ideal of autonomous decision making in the context of impairment and chronic illness, and the obligation of healthcare teams to examine an adolescent patient’s decisions in relation to her identity. (shrink)

The ideas Darwin published in On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man in the nineteenth century continue to have a major impact on our current understanding of the world in which we live and the place that humans occupy in it. Darwin’s theories constitute the core of the contemporary life sciences, and elicit enduring fascination as a potentially unifying basis for various branches of biology and the biomedical sciences. They can be used to understand the biological ground (...) of human cognition, common behavioral patterns and disorders, and psychopathology more generally in psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience. Perhaps the best known expression of this fact is Dobzhansky’s famous dictum that “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution” (Dobzhansky T. Am Zool 4:443–452, 1964: 449; Am Biol Teach 35:125–129, 1973: 125), and given that all human behavior supervenes on some biological basis, evolutionary thinking has a vast scope even just in this regard. (shrink)

Desmond Clarke's remarks on “my” absurdity argument are puzzling. i) Although I do indeed still believe it to be a valid argument, I certainly would not claim credit for it. I believe that “Reducibility: Another Side Issue?” put the general problem of the reducibility of mind into a somewhat unorthodox context, but the particular claim Clarke is attacking forms only one very unoriginal step in the general argument of that essay. ii) Some points that Clarke makes I would certainly (...) agree to, and believe I have agreed to in some of the texts he cites, while others are far from anything I meant to convey. Under Clarke's, 1) of course the “antinomies” of the paper above referred to trade on ambiguities. That's one of the points of the paper. 2) in both “Reducibility … ” and “To Have A Mind …”, I have tried to specify the sense in which “mechanism” was being used. That I do not take such terms as self-explanatory should be clear, for instance, from the remarks in the latter paper that immediately follow the passage Clarke criticizes. 3) I have no idea how physics is to develop in the future, nor did I wish to suggest that I did. With the rest of Clarke's I entirely agree. As to his, I fail to see its relevance to my argument, unless it simply leads up to and, with which, again, I wholeheartedly concur. Nancy Maull's paper, which Clarke refers to, for example, seems to me to shed great light on what used to be thought the problem of reduction; I don't see how her argument conflicts with “mine.” iii) Clarke's two “interpretations” of “my” argument are even more puzzling. The first paragraph is clear, as far as it goes. But the second is entirely murky. Perhaps I may try to reconstruct it. “The question for the scientist of a reductivist disposition in this context,” Clarke writes, “is: would it be possible to construct an alternative theory which adequately explains the same phenomena as the human sciences?” Fair enough. But apparently one is not allowed to reflect about an answer to this question. One has to wait and see if such a theory does develop. And meantime to notice that any theory by its very nature is intentional: this is to use some part of the human sciences to establish the explanatory power of all the human sciences. Is that what is meant? If so, I would reply: that the claim that theories are inherently intentional is not a thesis of any “human science” but a philosophical thesis about the nature of intelligible discourse. If a wholly non-intentional theory of human action were stated it would invalidate itself as theory. Thus, to respond to the major accusation of, we would have an answer to Clarke's question such that the question could not have been asked. What we have, then, is not a petitio but a valid reductio ad absurdum. (shrink)

Desmond’s ambitious effort to re-conceive the problem of dialectic and otherness is both timely and provocative. Moving beyond the “generous hermeneutic” of Hegel exemplified in Art and the Absolute, Desmond develops more fully a discussion about the alleged “closure” of dialectical philosophies generally and Hegel’s philosophy specifically. Whereas Art and the Absolute tended to defend Hegel’s insights and achievements — at least in aesthetic theory — against a wide variety of critical approaches, the work under review attempts to (...) engage seriously the persistent charge of “closure” made against Hegelian speculative philosophy. Repeated by critics as various as Habermas, Heidegger, Lonergan, and Derrida, the charge is too widespread and too frequently levelled to ignore. At issue seems to be the very possibility of an “absolute” knowing. How is it possible to know absolutely without trimming up the edges of the knowable, dotting all i’s and crossing all t’s, and leaving nothing for future philosophers but the relationships of disciple, exegete, or rebel angel? It is of course arguable that the self-developing categorial criticism in terms of which Hegel develops his doctrine of absolute knowing renders such objections irrelevant, but Desmond does not opt for this strategy. Rather, in the development of his own original metaphysics of origin, Desmond attempts to “sublate” the Hegelian philosophy. (shrink)

This is a series of reflections on the aesthetic dimensions of law (how it is presented and conveyed to its subjects) and justice (the ways in which justice can be aesthetically satisfying or dissatisfying).

The relationship between tort law jurisprudence and the ethics and phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas.

The pioneering anthology Home Girls features writings by Black feminist and lesbian activists on topics both provocative and profound. Since its initial publication in 1983, it has become an essential text on Black women's lives and writings. This edition features an updated list of contributor biographies and an all-new preface that provides a fresh assessment of how Black women's lives have changed-or not-since the book was first published. Contributors are Tania Abdulahad, Donna Allegra, Barbara A. Banks, Becky Birtha, Julie Carter, (...) Cenen, Cheryl Clarke, Michelle Cliff, Michelle T. Clinton, Willie M. Coleman, Toi Derricotte, Alexis De Veaux, Jewelle L. Gomez, Akasha (Gloria) Hull, Patricia Jones, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Raymina Y. Mays, Deidre McCalla, Chirlane McCray, Pat Parker, Linda C. Powell, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Spring Redd, Gwendolyn Rogers, Kate Rushin, Ann Allen Shockley, Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, Shirley O. Steele, Luisah Teish, Jameelah Waheed, Alice Walker, and Renita Weems. (shrink)

In times of transition and transformation, legal images metastasize. This idea can be usefully related both to Winnicott’s theory of transitional objects and Barthes’ theory of myth. But each tell only part of the full story. Barthes fails to fully account for the stabilizing effect of the reassuring signifier; Winnicott fails to fully account for the ideological adaptability—and implications—of the shifting signified. The legal image unites the iterability of the signifier and the polysemy of the signified, harnessing the affective intensity (...) of the former to the cultural mobility of the latter. In this article, I propose to illustrate this insight by reflecting on two notable images of law that appeared at a moment of profound legal transformation, at the dawn of the early modern era. The images of ‘blind justice’ and ‘sol justitiae’ which the article discusses are both ‘transitional myths’, facilitating through modes of affect a legal journey into uncharted territory. Paying attention to these images and above all to their transformation over time, we can observe not only the process of legal transition at work, but the function of the image in its authorization and modalization. (shrink)

Why do we learn some lessons more easily than others - indeed with alacrity and enthusiasm? Often these are not of the most attractive sort. It seems so frequently as if there is a sheer perversity in us.

Darwin hypothesized that some animals, when selecting sexual partners, possess a genuine “sense of beauty” that cannot be accounted for by the logic of natural selection. This hypothesis has been notoriously controversial. In this chapter I propose that the concept of agency can be useful to operationalize the “sense of beauty”, and can help identify the conditions under which one can infer that animals are acting as (aesthetic) agents. Focusing on a case study of the behavior of the Pavo cristatus, (...) I identify the types of evidence that would allow for the inference of agency through aesthetic choice. (shrink)

In this smart and timely book, the distinguished moral philosopher Sissela Bok ponders the nature of happiness and its place in philosophical thinking and writing throughout the ages. With nuance and elegance, Bok explores notions of happiness—from Greek philosophers to Desmond Tutu, Charles Darwin, Iris Murdoch, and the Dalai Lama—as well as the latest theories advanced by psychologists, economists, geneticists, and neuroscientists. Eschewing abstract theorizing, Bok weaves in a wealth of firsthand observations about happiness from ordinary people as well (...) as renowned figures. This may well be the most complete picture of happiness yet. This book is also a clarion call to think clearly and sensitively about happiness. Bringing together very different disciplines provides Bok with a unique opportunity to consider the role of happiness in wider questions of how we should lead our lives and treat one another—concerns that don’t often figure in today’s happiness equation. How should we pursue, weigh, value, or limit our own happiness, or that of others, now and in the future? Compelling and perceptive, _Exploring Happiness_ shines a welcome new light on the heart of the human condition. (shrink)