Elselijn Kingma maintains that Christopher Boorse and other naturalists in the philosophy of medicine cannot deliver the value-free account of disease that they promise. Even if disease is understood as dysfunction and that notion can be applied in a value-free manner, values still manifest themselves in the justification for picking one particular operationalization of dysfunction over a number of competing alternatives. Disease determinations depend upon comparisons within a reference class vis-à-vis reaching organism goals. Boorse considers reference classes for a species (...) to consist in the properties of age and sex and organism goals to comprise survival and reproduction. Kingma suggests that naturalists are influenced by value judgments and may rely upon implicit assumptions about disease in their choice of reference classes and goals to determine which conditions are diseased. I argue that she is wrong to claim that these choices cannot be defended without arguing in a circular manner or making certain arbitrary or value-driven judgments. (shrink)

This book is a selection of articles by David Zilberman, a prolific author, whose tragic untimely death did not allow to finish many of his undertakings. Zilberman’s work represents a fresh word in the way of philosophizing or philosophy-building and the technique of modal methodology. This book comprises of thirteen independent articles that are not related by content. The point of thematic convergence of these articles is the way they reflect the new way of methodological thinking through the application (...) and benefits of modalization or modal methodology that unfolds unbound possibilities of philosophic elaborations. By shifting constantly from one position to another, Zilberman disclosed the antinomicity of all types of thought. Such an approach led him to outline for the first time his major attempt to start creating not "systems" but "sums" of philosophies so that the philosophical activity would be able to re-emerge on the slopes of such "sums." The book can be used as a starting point of a discussion, especially in study of philosophy. We imagine it can be used in undergraduate classes on World Philosophies or Intercultural Philosophy courses. With that, it can serve as a useful resource for adding intercultural elements into Western-centered courses. (shrink)

In this collection, Stations on the Journey of Inquiry, David Burrell launches a revolutionary reinterpretation of how any inquiry proceeds, boldly critiquing presumptuous theories of knowledge, language, and ethics. While his later publications, Analogy and Philosophical Language (1973) and Aquinas: God and Action (1979), elucidate Aquinas's linguistic theology, these early writings show what often escapes articulation: how one comes to understanding and "takes" a judgment. Although Aquinas serves as an axial figure for Burrell's expansive corpus of scholarship spanning more (...) than fifty years, this selection of essays presents other positions and counterpositions to whom his own philosophical theology is beholden: Plato, Aristotle, Cajetan, Kant, Peirce, Moore, Wittgenstein, Sellars, Weiss, Ross, McInerny, and Lonergan. With renewed interest in philosophy of language by postmodern thinkers as well as in the wake of Mulhall's Stanton Lectures on Wittgenstein and "Grammatical Thomism," the publication of these formative writings proves timely for the academy at large. Burrell invites us to reconsider not only the way in which we conduct an inquiry, but what it is we take language to be and how we take responsibility for what we say. (shrink)

Research has suggested that nostalgia is a mixed, albeit predominantly positive emotion. One proposed function of nostalgia is to attenuate the negative consequences of loneliness. This restorative effect of nostalgia, however, has been demonstrated with cross sectional and experimental methods that lack ecological validity. In studies that have measured nostalgia in daily life, however, nostalgia has been negatively related to well-being. We propose an alternative theory that posits that the effect of nostalgia on well-being depends on the event or experience (...) that elicits nostalgia. We tested this theory by measuring daily states of nostalgia, loneliness, and affect across five daily diary studies (N = 504; 6,004 daily reports) that lasted for 14 days. Using multilevel modeling, we found that nostalgia and loneliness were negatively related to positive affect and positively related to negative affect. The negative effects of nostalgia on affective well-being were significantly stronger on days when people felt more lonely as opposed to less lonely. Viewed alternatively, the negative effects of loneliness on affective well-being were stronger on days when people felt more vs. less nostalgic. Thus, in contrast to experimental findings, nostalgia did not attenuate, but rather exaggerated the negative effects of loneliness on affective well-being. These findings support a theoretical account that proposes that the effect of nostalgia on well-being depends on the natural context in which nostalgia is elicited. (shrink)

During the past decade scientists, public policy analysts, politicians, and laypeople, have become increasingly aware of the importance of ethical conduct in scientific research. In this timely book, David B. Resnik introduces the reader to the ethical dilemmas and questions that arise in scientific research. Some of the issues addressed in the book include ethical decision-making, the goals and methods of science, and misconduct in science. The Ethics of Science also discusses significant case studies such as human and animal (...) cloning, the Challenger accident and Tobacco research. This is essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand the importance of ethics in science. (shrink)

Modern science is big business. Governments, universities, and corporations have invested billions of dollars in scientific and technological research in the hope of obtaining power and profit. For the most part, this investment has benefited science and society, leading to new discoveries, inventions, disciplines, specialties, jobs, and career opportunities. However, there is a dark side to the influx of money into science. Unbridled pursuit of financial gain in science can undermine scientific norms, such as objectivity, honesty, openness, respect for research (...) participants, and social responsibility. In The Price of Truth, David B. Resnik examines some of the important and difficult questions resulting from the financial and economic aspects of modern science. How does money affect scientific research? Have scientists become entrepreneurs bent on making money instead of investigators searching for the truth? How does the commercialization of research affect the public's perception of science? Can scientists prevent money from corrupting the research enterprise? What types of rules, polices, and guidelines should scientists adopt to prevent financial interests from adversely affecting research and the public's opinion of science? (shrink)

Do psychological traits predict philosophical views? We administered the PhilPapers Survey, created by David Bourget and David Chalmers, which consists of 30 views on central philosophical topics (e.g., epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language) to a sample of professional philosophers (N = 314). We extended the PhilPapers survey to measure a number of psychological traits, such as personality, numeracy, well-being, lifestyle, and life experiences. We also included non-technical ‘translations’ of these views for eventual use (...) in other populations. We found limited to no support for the notion that personality or demographics predict philosophical views. We did, however, find that some psychological traits were predictive of philosophical views, even after strict correction for multiple comparisons. Findings include: higher interest in numeracy predicted physicalism, naturalism, and consequentialism; lower levels of well-being and higher levels of mental illness predicted hard determinism; using substances such as psychedelics and marijuana predicted non-realist and subjectivist views of morality and aesthetics; having had a transformative or self-transcendent experience predicted theism and idealism. We discuss whether or not these empirical results have philosophical implications, while noting that 68% of our sample of professional philosophers indicated that such findings would indeed have philosophical value. (shrink)

David B. Wong proposes that there can be a plurality of true moralities, moralities that exist across different traditions and cultures, all of which address facets of the same problem: how we are to live well together. Wong examines a wide array of positions and texts within the Western canon as well as in Chinese philosophy, and draws on philosophy, psychology, evolutionary theory, history, and literature, to make a case for the importance of pluralism in moral life, and to (...) establish the virtues of acceptance and accommodation. Wong's point is that there is no single value or principle or ordering of values and principles that offers a uniquely true path for human living, but variations according to different contexts that carry within them a common core of human values. We should thus be modest about our own morality, learn from other approaches, and accommodate different practices in our pluralistic society. (shrink)

This essay explains the inescapability of moral demands. I deny that the individual has genuine reason to comply with these demands only if she has desires that would be served by doing so. Rather, the learning of moral reasons helps to shape and channel self- and other-interested motivations so as to facilitate and promote social cooperation. This shaping happens through the “embedding” of reasons in the intentional objects of motivational propensities. The dominance of the instrumental conception of reason, according to (...) which reasons must be based in desires of the individual, has made it harder to recognize that reasons shape desires. I attempt to undermine this dominance by arguing that the concept of a self that extends over time is constructed to meet the demands of social cooperation. Prudential reasons to act on behalf of the persisting self's desires are often taken to constitute the paradigm of reasons based on desires of the individual. But such reasons, along with the very concept of the persisting self, are constructed to promote human cooperation and to shape the individual's desires. (shrink)

Evidence suggests that psychedelics bring about their therapeutic outcomes in part through the subjective or qualitative effects they engender and how the individual interprets the resulting experiences. However, psychedelics are contraindicated for individuals who have been diagnosed with certain mental illnesses, on the grounds that these subjective effects may be disturbing or otherwise counter-therapeutic. Substantial resources are therefore currently being devoted to creating psychedelic substances that produce many of the same biological changes as psychedelics, but without their characteristic subjective effects. (...) In this article, we consider ethical issues arising from the prospect of such potential “nonsubjective” psychedelics. We are broadly supportive of efforts to produce such substances for both scientific and clinical reasons. However, we argue that such nonsubjective psychedelics should be reserved for those special cases in which the subjective effects of psychedelics are specifically contraindicated, whereas classic psychedelics that affect subjective experience should be considered the default and standard of care. After reviewing evidence regarding the subjective effects of psychedelics, we raise a number of ethical concerns around the prospect of withholding such typically positive, meaningful, and therapeutic experiences from most patients. (shrink)

This book provides a framework for approaching ethical and policy dilemmas in research with human subjects from the perspective of trust. It explains how trust is important not only between investigators and subjects but also between and among other stakeholders involved in the research enterprise, including research staff, sponsors, institutions, communities, oversight committees, government agencies, and the general public. The book argues that trust should be viewed as a distinct ethical principle for research with human subjects that complements other principles, (...) such as autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice. The book applies the principle of trust to numerous issues, including informed consent, confidentiality, risk minimization, risks and benefits, protection of vulnerable subjects, experimental design, research integrity, and research oversight.This work also includes discussions of the history of research involving human subjects, moral theories and principles, contemporary cases, and proposed regulatory reforms. The book is useful for undergraduate and graduate students studying ethical policy issues related to research with human subjects, as well as for scientists and scholars who are interested in thinking about this topic from the perspective of trust. (shrink)

The fact that the names of biological species refer independently of identifying descriptions does not support the view of Ghiselin and Hull that species are individuals. Species may be regarded as natural kinds whose members share an essence which distinguishes them from the members of other species and accounts for the fact that they are reproductively isolated from the members of other species. Because evolutionary theory requires that species be spatiotemporally localized their names cannot occur in scientific laws. If natural (...) kind status is denied to species on this ground, it must also be denied to most classes of concrete entities which are now accorded such status. (shrink)

David Albert claims that classical electromagnetic theory is not time reversal invariant. He acknowledges that all physics books say that it is, but claims they are ``simply wrong" because they rely on an incorrect account of how the time reversal operator acts on magnetic fields. On that account, electric fields are left intact by the operator, but magnetic fields are inverted. Albert sees no reason for the asymmetric treatment, and insists that neither field should be inverted. I argue, to (...) the contrary, that the inversion of magnetic fields makes good sense and is, in fact, forced by elementary geometric considerations. I also suggest a way of thinking about the time reversal invariance of classical electromagnetic theory -- one that makes use of the invariant (four-dimensional) formulation of the theory -- that makes no reference to magnetic fields at all. It is my hope that it will be of interest in its own right, Albert aside. It has the advantage that it allows for arbitrary curvature in the background spacetime structure, and is therefore suitable for the framework of general relativity. (The only assumption one needs is temporal orientability.). (shrink)

The main lines of this exploration are quite simply drawn. That the God whom Jews, Christians, and Muslims worship outstrips our capacities for characterization, and hence must be unknowable, will be presumed as uncontested. The reason that God is unknowable stems from our shared confession that ‘the Holy One, blessed be He’, and ‘the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth’, and certainly ‘Allah, the merciful One’ is one ; and just why God's oneness entails God's being unknowable deserves discussion, (...) though that will occur as we move along. The issue facing us is the one which preoccupied al-Ghazali: how does a seeker respond to that unknowability? The root meaning of the Arabic word for ‘student’ means ‘seeker’, and that attitude of ‘seeking the face of God’, along with the indescribability of the face, will be presumed throughout our discussion. That's why we are struck with the clumsy term ‘unknowable’ rather than its more euphonious Greek form ‘agnostic’. For Western agnostics are such largely because they cannot find God sufficiently compelling, while they ‘would not have the impudence to claim to be atheists’ – as one contemporary seeker puts it. So theologians feel it necessary to enclose the term in quotation marks when discussing, say, Aquinas' ‘agnosticism’ regarding divinity. Yet a genuine unknowing does lie at the heart of the inquiry of the Jew, Christian or Muslim seeking after God; indeed, it is the unknowing which distinguishes a search for God from lusting after idols. So let us follow al-Ghazali in an effort to discover the lineaments of both search and seeker after an unknowable God. (shrink)

Bioethics, Volume 36, Issue 7, Page 735-741, September 2022.

In America today, the problem of achieving racial justice--whether through "color-blind" policies or through affirmative action--provokes more noisy name-calling than fruitful deliberation. In Color Conscious, K. Anthony Appiah and Amy Gutmann, two eminent moral and political philosophers, seek to clear the ground for a discussion of the place of race in politics and in our moral lives. Provocative and insightful, their essays tackle different aspects of the question of racial justice; together they provide a compelling response to our nation's most (...) vexing problem.Appiah begins by establishing the problematic nature of the idea of race. He draws on the scholarly consensus that "race" has no legitimate biological basis, exploring the history of its invention as a social category and showing how the concept has been used to explain differences among groups of people by mistakenly attributing various "essences" to them. Appiah argues that, while people of color may still need to gather together, in the face of racism, under the banner of race, they need also to balance carefully the calls of race against the many other dimensions of individual identity; and he suggests, finally, what this might mean for our political life.Gutmann examines alternative political responses to racial injustice. She argues that American politics cannot be fair to all citizens by being color blind because American society is not color blind. Fairness, not color blindness, is a fundamental principle of justice. Whether policies should be color-conscious, class conscious, or both in particular situations, depends on an open-minded assessment of their fairness. Exploring timely issues of university admissions, corporate hiring, and political representation, Gutmann develops a moral perspective that supports a commitment to constitutional democracy.Appiah and Gutmann write candidly and carefully, presenting many-faceted interpretations of a host of controversial issues. Rather than supplying simple answers to complex questions, they offer to citizens of every color principled starting points for the ongoing national discussions about race. (shrink)

We propose an "explanation scheme" for why the Gibbs phase average technique in classical equilibrium statistical mechanics works. Our account emphasizes the importance of the Khinchin-Lanford dispersion theorems. We suggest that ergodicity does play a role, but not the one usually assigned to it.

This book fills a gap in the literature on the Precautionary Principle by placing the principle within the wider context of precautionary reasoning and uses philosophical arguments and case studies to demonstrate when it does—and does not—apply. The book invites the reader to take a step back from the controversy surrounding the Precautionary Principle and consider the overarching rationales for responding to threats to the environment or public health. It provides practical guidance and probing insight for the intended audience, including (...) scholars, students, journalists, and policymakers. (shrink)

This essay analyzes the concept of public trust in science and offers some guidance for ethicists, scientists, and policymakers who use this idea defend ethical rules or policies pertaining to the conduct of research. While the notion that public trusts science makes sense in the abstract, it may not be sufficiently focused to support the various rules and policies that authors have tried to derive from it, because the public is not a uniform body with a common set of interests. (...) Well-focused arguments that use public trust to support rules or policies for the conduct of research should specify (a) which public is being referred to (e.g. the general public or a specific public, such as a particular community or group); (b) what this public expects from scientists; (c) how the rule or policy will ensure that these expectations are met; and (d) why is it important to meet these expectations. (shrink)

This paper discusses the economic, legal, moral, and political difficulties in developing drugs for the developing world. It argues that large, global pharmaceutical companies have social responsibilities to the developing world, and that they may exercise these responsibilities by investing in research and development related to diseases that affect developing nations, offering discounts on drug prices, and initiating drug giveaways. However, these social responsibilities are not absolute requirements and may be balanced against other obligations and commitments in light of economic, (...) social, legal, political, and other conditions. How a company decides to exercise its social responsibilities to the developing world depends on the prospects for a reasonable profit and the prospects for a productive business environment. Developing nations can either help or hinder the pharmaceutical industry’s efforts to exercise social responsibility through various policies and practices. To insure that companies can make a reasonable profit, developing nations should honor pharmaceutical product patents and adhere to international intellectual property treaties, such as the Trade‐Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights agreement. To insure the companies have a good business environment, developing nations should try to promote the rule of law, ethical business practices, stable currencies, reliable banking systems, free and open markets, democracy, and other conditions conducive to business. Overall, this paper advocates for reciprocity and cooperation between pharmaceutical companies and developing nations to address the problem of developing drugs for the developing world. In pursuing this cooperative approach, developing nations may use a variety of other techniques to encourage pharmaceutical companies to act responsibly, such as subsidizing pharmaceutical research, helping to design and implement research protocols, providing a guaranteed market, and bulk buying. (shrink)

Embryo rescue cases and minimal miscarriage prevention research have been interpreted as showing that even pro‐lifers are not really committed to the unborn having the same moral status as the born. I will suggest instead that judgments about embryo rescues are often distorted by triage considerations that reveal nothing about differences in moral status between those saved and those not. I will present metaphysical and ethical considerations – none assuming a difference in moral status – why preventing millions of miscarriages (...) does not warrant the massive redistribution of research funds that would occur to prevent the deaths of equal numbers of humans already born. (shrink)

Christopher Boorse is very skeptical of there being a pathocentric internal morality of medicine. Boorse argues that doctors have always engaged in activities other than healing, and so no internal morality of medicine can provide objections to euthanasia, contraception, sterilization, and other practices not aimed at fighting pathologies. Objections to these activities have to come from outside of medicine. I first argue that Boorse fails to appreciate that such widespread practices are compatible with medicine being essentially pathocentric. Then I contend (...) that the pathocentric essence, properly understood, does not prohibit physicians from engaging in actions that are not aimed at combating pathologies, but rather supports an internal morality of medicine that allows medical providers to refuse without penalty to engage in practices that promote pathologies. (shrink)

The precautionary principle holds that we should not allow scientific uncertainty to prevent us from taking precautionary measures in response to potential threats that are irreversible and potentially disastrous. Critics of the principle claim that it deters progress and development, is excessively risk-aversive and is unscientific. This paper argues that the principle can be scientific provided that the threats addressed by the principle are plausible threats, and the precautionary measures adopted are reasonable. The paper also argues that one may use (...) epistemic criteria, such as consistency, coherence and explanatory power, to determine whether a threat is plausible, and that one may use practical considerations, such as effectiveness, proportionality, cost-effectiveness, realism and consistency, to determine whether a response to a threat is reasonable. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to provide a broad sketch of the advantages of the debt/atonement approach to punishment. Such an approach is appealing for it can benefit both the victim and the remorseful victimizer. Compared to other theories, it gives a fuller and more unified account of our intuitions about paying debts, doing penance, alleviating guilt, granting forgiveness, and offsetting privileges, pleasures and burdens. The theory also allows us to avoid justifying punishment on the basis of using some (...) people to deter others. And it does all of this while channeling in a positive and productive way the deeply felt vindictive need to "get even." Thus, contrary to the traditional wisdom that justice and revenge are diametrically opposed, providing the former may actually depend upon allowing the latter. (shrink)

The idea that research with human participants should benefit society has become firmly entrenched in various regulations, policies, and guidelines, but there has been little in-depth analysis of this ethical principle in the bioethics literature. In this paper, I distinguish between strong and weak versions and the social benefits principle and examine six arguments for it. I argue that while it is always ethically desirable for research with human subjects to offer important benefits to society, the reasonable expectation of substantial (...) public benefit should be a necessary condition for regarding research as ethical only when it imposes more than minimal risks on non-consenting subjects; or it is supported by public resources. (shrink)

Environmental Health Ethics illuminates the conflicts between protecting the environment and promoting human health. In this study, David B. Resnik develops a method for making ethical decisions on environmental health issues. He applies this method to various issues, including pesticide use, antibiotic resistance, nutrition policy, vegetarianism, urban development, occupational safety, disaster preparedness and global climate change. Resnik provides readers with the scientific and technical background necessary to understand these issues. He explains that environmental health controversies cannot simply be reduced (...) to humanity versus environment and explores the ways in which human values and concerns - health, economic development, rights and justice - interact with environmental protection. (shrink)

Within the framework of general relativity, in some cases at least, it is a delicate and interesting question just what it means to say that an extended body is or is not "rotating". It is so for two reasons. First, one can easily think of different criteria of rotation. Though they agree if the background spacetime structure is sufficiently simple, they do not do so in general. Second, none of the criteria fully answers to our classical intuitions. Each one exhibits (...) some feature or other that violates those intuitions in a significant and interesting way. The principal goal of the paper is to make the second claim precise in the form of a modest no-go theorem. (shrink)

In recent years, many philosophers of science have rejected the “value-free ideal” for science, arguing that non-epistemic values have a legitimate role to play in scientific inquiry. However, this philosophical position raises the question of how to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate influences of values in science. In this paper, we argue that those seeking to address this “new” demarcation problem can benefit by drawing lessons from the “old” demarcation problem, in which philosophers tried to find a way of distinguishing (...) between science and non-science. Many of those who worked on this problem ultimately found that efforts to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for defining science failed, and most concluded that the best solution to the problem was to characterize scientific hypotheses, theories, and research programs in terms of some common norms. We suggest that those seeking to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate value influences on science would do well to adopt a similar approach. Rather than attempting to establish necessary and sufficient conditions for identifying appropriate value influences, it will be more fruitful to evaluate scientific activities based on their adherence to a set of epistemic and ethical norms that can be implemented in scientific practice by means of rules, conventions, policies, and procedures. (shrink)

The fifteen essays, written by such eminent scholars as Derrida, Heidegger, Deleuze, Klossowski, and Blanchot, focus on the Nietzschean concepts of the Will to ...

Valid Informed consent to medical treatment or research participation has traditionally been viewed as consisting of the following requirements: the person has t...

In this book, 13 leading philosophers of science focus on the work of Professor Howard Stein, best known for his study of the intimate connection between ...