Replacing the value-free ideal (VFI) for science requires attention to the broader understanding of how science in society should function. In public spaces, science needed to project the VFI in norms for science advising, science education, and science communication. This resulted in the independent science advisor model and a focus on science literacy for science education and communication. Attending to these broader implications of the VFI which structure science and society relationships is crucial if we are to properly replace the (...) VFI with a better ideal. (shrink)

Of all humanities disciplines, none is more resistant to the program of positive psychology or more hostile to the prevailing discourse of human flourishing than literary studies. The approach taken in this volume of essays is neither to gloss over that antagonism nor to launch a series of blasts against positive psychology and the happiness industry. Rather, the essays are attempts to reflect on how the kinds of literary research the contributors themselves are doing, the kinds of work to which (...) they are personally committed, might become part of an interdisciplinary conversation about human flourishing. The authors' specific fields of work are wide ranging, covering literary aesthetics, book history, digital humanities, and reader reception, as well as the important "inter-disciplines" of gender and sexuality studies, disability studies, and black studies-fields in which issues of stigma and exclusion are paramount, and which have critiqued the discourse of human flourishing for its failure to grapple with structural inequality and human difference. Taken together, the essays contribute more points of ambiguity and hesitation to the study of human flourishing than decisive advancements. Literary scholars are drawn more readily to the problematic than to the decidable. But by dwelling on the trouble spots in a field of inquiry still largely confined to the sciences, this volume provides the groundwork for new and more productive forms of interdisciplinary collaboration and exchange. (shrink)

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) crisis provoked an organizational ethics dilemma: how to develop ethical pandemic policy while upholding our organizational mission to deliver relationship- and patient-centered care. Tasked with producing a recommendation about whether healthcare workers and essential personnel should receive priority access to limited medical resources during the pandemic, the bioethics department and survey and interview methodologists at our institution implemented a deliberative approach that included the perspectives of healthcare professionals and patient stakeholders in the policy development process. Involving (...) the community more, not less, during a crisis required balancing the need to act quickly to garner stakeholder perspectives, uncertainty about the extent and duration of the pandemic, and disagreement among ethicists about the most ethically supportable way to allocate scarce resources. This article explains the process undertaken to garner stakeholder input as it relates to organizational ethics, recounts the stakeholder perspectives shared and how they informed the triage policy developed, and offers suggestions for how other organizations may integrate stakeholder involvement in ethical decision-making as well as directions for future research and public health work. (shrink)

Background At the beginning of the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic, many non-Covid healthcare services were suspended. In April 2020, the Department of Health in England mandated that non-Covid services should resume, alongside the continuing pandemic response. This ‘resetting’ of healthcare services created a unique context in which it became critical to consider how ethical considerations did (and should) underpin decisions about integrating infection control measures into routine healthcare practices. We draw on data collected as part of the ‘NHS Reset Ethics’ project, (...) which explored the everyday ethical challenges of resetting England’s NHS maternity and paediatrics services during the pandemic. Methods Healthcare professionals and members of the public participated in interviews and focus group discussions. The qualitative methods are reported in detail elsewhere. The focus of this article is our use of Frith’s symbiotic empirical ethics methodology to work from our empirical findings towards the normative suggestion that clinical ethics should explicitly attend to the importance of relationships in clinical practice. This methodology uses a five-step approach to refine and develop ethical theory based on a naturalist account of ethics that sees practice and theory as symbiotically related. Results The Reset project data showed that changed working practices caused ethical challenges for healthcare professionals, and that infection prevention and control measures represented harmful barriers to the experience of receiving and offering care. For healthcare professionals, offering care as part of a relational interaction was an ethically important dimension of healthcare delivery. Conclusions Our findings suggest that foregrounding the importance of relationships across a hospital community will better promote the ethically important multi-directional expression of caring between healthcare professionals, patients, and their families. We offer two suggestions for making progress towards such a relational approach. First, that there is a change of emphasis in clinical ethics practice to explicitly acknowledge the importance of the relationships (including with their healthcare team) within which the patient is held. Second, that organisational decision-making should take into account the moral significance afforded to caring relationships by healthcare professionals, and the role such relationships can play in the negotiation of ethical challenges. (shrink)

:A common goal of ethics education is to equip students who later become health practitioners to not only know about the ethical principles guiding their practice, but to also autonomously recognize when and how these principles might apply and assist these future practitioners in providing care for patients and families. This article aims to contribute to discussions about ethics education pedagogy and teaching, by presenting and evaluating the use of the visual arts as an educational approach designed to facilitate students’ (...) moral imagination and independent critical thinking about ethics in clinical practice. We describe a sequence of ethics education strategies over a 3 year Doctor of Physiotherapy program, focusing on the final year professional ethics assessment task, which involved the use of visual arts to stimulate the exploration of ethics in healthcare. The data were analyzed using both thematic and content analysis. Two key themes centered on emotional responses and lateral thinking. The use of artwork appeared to facilitate imaginative, emotional, and conceptual thinking about ethics and clinical experience. This study provides some evidence to support the effectiveness of the use of the visual arts in promoting students’ recognition of ethical dimensions within their clinical experience and reflection on their emerging professional identity. As one student noted, she left the museum “somewhat changed.”. (shrink)

This pioneering book explores in depth the role of neurotransmitters in conscious awareness. The central aim is to identify common neural denominators of conscious awareness, informed by the neurochemistry of natural, drug induced and pathological states of consciousness. Chemicals such as acetylcholine and dopamine, which bridge the synaptic gap between neurones, are the 'neurotransmitters in mind' that form the substance of the volume, which is essential reading for all who believe that unravelling mechanisms of consciousness must include these vital systems (...) of the brain.Up-to-date information is provided on: Psychological domains of attention, motivation, memory, sleep and dreaming that define normal states of consciousness. Effects of chemicals that alter or abolish consciousness, including hallucinogens and anaesthetics. Disorders of the brain such as dementia, schizophrenia and depression considered from the novel perspective of the way these affect consciousness, and how this might relate to disturbances in neurotransmission.(Series B). (shrink)

Euglenids comprise a group of single‐celled eukaryotes with diverse modes of nutrition, including phagotrophy and photosynthesis. The level of morphological diversity present in this group provides an excellent system for demonstrating evolutionary transformations in morphological characters. This diversity also provides compelling evidence for major events in eukaryote evolution, such as the punctuated effects of secondary endosymbiosis and mutations in underlying developmental mechanisms. In this essay, we synthesize evidence for the origin, adaptive significance and diversification of the euglenid cytoskeleton, especially pellicle (...) ultrastructure, pellicle surface patterns, pellicle strip number and the feeding apparatus. We also highlight holes in our knowledge that must be filled before we are able to confidently describe euglenid cell biology and infer the earliest stages in euglenid evolution. Nonetheless, by possessing combinations of characters resulting from adaptive change and morphostasis, euglenids have retained key pieces of evidence necessary for reconstructing the early evolution and diversification of eukaryotic life. BioEssays 29:987–1000, 2007. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

The use of prisoners as research participants is controversial. Efforts to protect them in response to past exploitation and abuse have led to strict regulations and reluctance to involve them as participants. Hence, prisoners are routinely denied the opportunity to participate in research. In the absence of comprehensive information regarding prisoners’ current involvement in research, we examined UK prisoners’ involvement through review of research applications to the UK National Research Ethics Service. We found that prisoners have extremely limited access to (...) research participation. This analysis was augmented by a survey of those involved in research and research governance (UK researchers and Research Ethics Committee members). Our results suggest that pragmatic concerns regarding the perceived burden of including prisoners are far more prominent in motivating their exclusion than ethical concerns or knowledge of regulations. While prisoners may remain a vulnerable research population due to constraints upon their liberty and autonomy and the coercive nature of the prison environment, routine exclusion from participation may be disadvantageous. Rigorous ethical oversight and the shift in the prevailing attitude towards the risks and benefits of participation suggest that it may be time for research to be more accessible to prisoners in line with the principle of equivalence in prison healthcare. We suggest the necessary first step in this process is a re-examination of current guidance in the UK and other countries with exclusions. (shrink)

Systems for color naming across languages have been a fascinating topic for decades. Zaslavsky and colleagues challenge Gibson's argument that color names are shaped by patterns of communicative need. Using an information‐theoretic analysis, they show that color naming is shaped by both perceptual structure (as is usually argued) but also by communication need.

I argue that the best scientific package is anti-Humean in its ontology, but Humean in its laws. This is because potencies and the best system account of laws complement each other surprisingly well. If there are potencies, then the BSA is the most plausible account of the laws of nature. Conversely, if the BSA is the correct theory of laws, then formulating the laws in terms of potencies rather than categorical properties avoids three serious objections: the mismatch objection, the impoverished (...) worlds objection, and the metaphysical 'oomph' objection. I argue that combining anti-Humean properties with Humean laws into a Potency-Best System Account of Laws is a powerful and science-friendly account---something that people on both sides should be able to appreciate. (shrink)

When encoding a real-life, continuous stimulus, the same neural circuits support processing and integration of prior as well as new incoming information. This ongoing interplay is modulated by attention, which is evident in the prefrontal cortex sections of the task positive network (TPN), and in the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), a hub of the default mode network (DMN). Yet the exact nature of such modulation is still unclear. To investigate this issue, we utilized an fMRI task that employed movies as (...) the encoded stimuli and manipulated attentional load via an easy or hard secondary task that was performed simultaneously with encoding. Results showed increased intersubject correlation (inter-SC) levels when encoding movies in a condition of high, as compared to low attentional load. This was evident in bilateral ventrolateral and dorsomedial prefrontal cortices and the dorsal PCC (dPCC). These regions became more attuned to the combination of the movie and the secondary task as the attentional demand of the task increased. Activation analyses revealed that at higher load the frontal TPN regions were more activated, whereas the dPCC was more deactivated. Attentional load also influenced connectivity within and between the networks. At high load the dPCC was anti-correlated to the frontal regions, which were more functionally coherent amongst themselves. Finally and critically, greater inter-SC in the dPCC at high load during encoding predicted lower memory strength when that information was retrieved. This association between inter-SC levels and memory strength suggest that as attentional demands increased, the dPCC was more attuned to the secondary task at the expense of the encoded stimulus, thus weakening memory for the encoded stimulus. Together, our findings show that attentional load modulated the function of core TPN and DMN regions. Furthermore, the observed correlation between memory strength and the modulation of the dPCC points to this region as a key area involved in the manipulation of attentional load on memory function. (shrink)

The diverse array of plants at Kew is a haven for wildlife throughout the year. In spring, enchanting wildlfowl babies appear; summer flowers attract a host of insect pollinators; come autumn, parakeets and squirrels raid chestnuts, while in winter swans court – this is Heather Angel’s Wild Kew. In all, a stunning array of photographs and advice, the result of devoting a year to capturing Kew’s wildlife.

This book presents a new theory of the relationship between vagueness, context-sensitivity, gradability, and scale structure in natural language. Heather Burnett argues that it is possible to distinguish between particular subclasses of adjectival predicatesDLrelative adjectives like tall, total adjectives like dry, partial adjectives like wet, and non-scalar adjectives like hexagonalDLon the basis of how their criteria of application vary depending on the context; how they display the characteristic properties of vague language; and what the properties of their associated orders (...) are. It has been known for a long time that there exist empirical connections between context-sensitivity, vagueness, and scale structure; however, a formal system that expresses these connections had yet to be developed. This volume sets out a new logical system, called DelTCS, that brings together insights from the Delineation Semantics framework and from the Tolerant, Classical, Strict non-classical framework, to arrive at a full theory of gradability and scale structure in the adjectival domain. The analysis is further extended to examine vagueness and gradability associated with particular classes of determiner phrases, showing that the correspondences that exist between the major adjectival scale structure classes and subclasses of determiner phrases can also be captured within the DelTCS system. (shrink)

People frequently make ethical choices they later regret. Causal Loop Archetypes offer a basic systems framework for analyzing the unintended consequences of personal and professional ethical decisions. Pressure or enticement or defensiveness can stymie individuals’ rational sensemaking. Causal Loop Thinking, and in particular the “Fixes That Fail” Archetype, draw on the familiar decision model of identifying the problem, specifying the alternative courses of action andtheir consequences, to guide our final choice. As students grapple with their own conflicts and business school (...) faculty look for tools to anticipate professional ethical dilemmas, Causal Loop Thinking can expand our awareness of the context of choices and actions, thus leading to a more fully assessed decision. (shrink)

A diabetic woman awakens from a coma having forgotten the last ten years of her life. A Haitian immigrant has nightmares that begin bleeding into his waking hours. A retired teacher loses the use of her right hand due to pain of no known origin. Noga Arikha began studying these patients and their confounding symptoms in order to explore how our physical experiences inform our identities. Soon after she initiated her work, the question took on unexpected urgency as Arikha's (...) own mother began to show signs of Alzheimer's disease. In The Ceiling Outside, Arikha recounts this life-changing experience and grapples with the unbreakable links between our bodies and our sense of self. Weaving together stories of her subjects' troubles and her mother's decline, Arikha searches for some meaning in the science she has set out to study. The result is an unforgettable journey across the ever-shifting boundaries between ourselves and each other."--. (shrink)

Douglas proposes a new ideal in which values serve an essential function throughout scientific inquiry, but where the role values play is constrained at key points, protecting the integrity and objectivity of science.

Functional theories posit that emotions are elicited by particular goal-related situations that represented adaptive problems and that emotions are evolved features of coordinated responses to those situations. Yet little theory or research has addressed the evolutionary aspects of these theories. We apply five criteria that can be used to judge whether features are adaptations. There is evidence that sadness, anger, and anxiety relate to unique changes in physiology, cognition, and behavior, those changes are correlated, situations that give rise to emotions (...) are consistent, and emotions are complex. To date, there is little experimental evidence regarding whether discrete emotions resolve adaptive problems and do so relatively efficiently. Evidence supporting all criteria is required to claim that discrete emotions are evolved features. (shrink)

Although epistemic values have become widely accepted as part of scientific reasoning, non-epistemic values have been largely relegated to the "external" parts of science (the selection of hypotheses, restrictions on methodologies, and the use of scientific technologies). I argue that because of inductive risk, or the risk of error, non-epistemic values are required in science wherever non-epistemic consequences of error should be considered. I use examples from dioxin studies to illustrate how non-epistemic consequences of error can and should be considered (...) in the internal stages of science: choice of methodology, characterization of data, and interpretation of results. (shrink)

Much of the discussion of Naive Realism about veridical experience has focused on a consequence of adopting it—namely, disjunctivism about perceptual experience. However, the motivations for being a Naive Realist in the first place have received relatively little attention in the literature. In this paper, I will elaborate and defend the claim that Naive Realism provides the best account of the phenomenal character of veridical experience.

Over the past decade, feminist philosophers have gone a long way toward identifying and explaining the phenomenon that has come to be known as epistemic injustice. Epistemic injustice is injustice occurring within the domain of knowledge (e.g., knowledge production and transmission), which typically impacts structurally marginalized social groups. In this paper, we argue that, as they currently work, algorithms on social media exacerbate the problem of epistemic injustice and related problems of social distrust. In other words, we argue that algorithms (...) on social media recreate and reify the conditions that lead to some groups being systematically denied the full status of knowers, thereby corrupting the epistemic terrain and, with it, systems of social trust and cooperation. We argue that algorithms do this in two ways—namely, via what we are calling algorithmic targeting and algorithmic sorting. (shrink)

Might paranoia bear some promise, not only danger, for democratic theory and politics? To suggest that we should treat paranoia with anything but disdain today, in the age of Q anon and other white-supremacist lies, seems dangerous. But three decades ago, feminist theorist Naomi Schor took the risk and defended female paranoia, arguing that paranoia is an appropriate affect for feminist theory and critique. This essay follows Schor’s invitation to risk proximity to paranoia. I argue that the political importance of (...) Schor’s essay lies in one particular attribute of female paranoia that she celebrates: its love of detail. To explore the promise and limitations of the paranoid love of detail I pair Schor with two 20th-century theorists – Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir. Each studies a paranoid woman who clings to details: Arendt’s Rahel Varnhagen counts the number of teacups that she serves in her German salon. Beauvoir’s housewife collects tufts of dust. With Schor, Arendt and Beauvoir, the article argues that love of detail is a critical component not only of paranoid indictments of the world, but also of any project that desires to repair the world in the wake of paranoia. (shrink)

Bachs Kunst der Fuge biedt even die samenhang, die harmonie waarnaar wij hunkeren in ons leven.

This essay reads Hannah Arendt’s Rahel Varnhagen alongside Sigmund Freud’s case history of paranoia, The Schreber Case, two texts about 18th- and 19th-century personalities caught up in the gender and ethnic politics of their times. Noting affinities between the fantasies documented in Varnhagen’s and Schreber’s memoirs, I compare Seyla Benhabib’s and Eric Santner’s readings of these two texts as political, not psychological, documents. I propose a reading of paranoia positioned between Benhabib’s too optimistic dismissal of paranoia and Santner’s too tragic (...) approach. The result is a new reading of Varnhagen’s story and an approach to paranoia as a potentially promising political affect. Might paranoia stand not just for world-withdrawal but also for world-building? If so, this would be in keeping with Arendt’s own treatment of her subject’s persecution fantasies not only as a “verdict against the world” but also as a desire for a world. (shrink)

On average, women make up half of introductory-level philosophy courses, but only one-third of upper-division courses. We contribute to the growing literature on this problem by reporting the striking results of our study at the University of Oklahoma. We found that two attitudes are especially strong predictors of whether women are likely to continue in philosophy: feeling similar to the kinds of people who become philosophers, and enjoying philosophical puzzles and issues. In a regression analysis, they account for 63% of (...) variance. Importantly, women are significantly less likely to hold these attitudes than men. Thus, instructors who care about improving the retention of women undergraduates should find ways to improve these attitudes – for instance, by demonstrating the ways in which professional philosophers are like them. We will discuss some tentative but intuitively plausible suggestions for interventions, though further research is required to establish the effectiveness of those interventions. (shrink)

How looking beautiful has become a moral imperative in today’s world The demand to be beautiful is increasingly important in today's visual and virtual culture. Rightly or wrongly, being perfect has become an ethical ideal to live by, and according to which we judge ourselves good or bad, a success or a failure. Perfect Me explores the changing nature of the beauty ideal, showing how it is more dominant, more demanding, and more global than ever before. Heather Widdows argues (...) that our perception of the self is changing. More and more, we locate the self in the body--not just our actual, flawed bodies but our transforming and imagined ones. As this happens, we further embrace the beauty ideal. Nobody is firm enough, thin enough, smooth enough, or buff enough—not without significant effort and cosmetic intervention. And as more demanding practices become the norm, more will be required of us, and the beauty ideal will be harder and harder to resist. If you have ever felt the urge to "make the best of yourself" or worried that you were "letting yourself go," this book explains why. Perfect Me examines how the beauty ideal has come to define how we see ourselves and others and how we structure our daily practices—and how it enthralls us with promises of the good life that are dubious at best. Perfect Me demonstrates that we must first recognize the ethical nature of the beauty ideal if we are ever to address its harms. (shrink)

This paper addresses what we consider to be the most pressing challenge for the emerging science of consciousness: the measurement problem of consciousness. That is, by what methods can we determine the presence of and properties of consciousness? Most methods are currently developed through evaluation of the presence of consciousness in humans and here we argue that there are particular problems in application of these methods to nonhuman cases—what we call the indicator validity problem and the extrapolation problem. The first (...) is a problem with the application of indicators developed using the differences between conscious and unconscious processing in humans to the identification of other conscious vs. nonconscious organisms or systems. The second is a problem in extrapolating any indicators developed in humans or other organisms to artificial systems. However, while pressing ethical concerns add urgency to the attribution of consciousness and its attendant moral status to nonhuman animals and intelligent machines, we cannot wait for certainty and we advocate the use of a precautionary principle to avoid causing unintentional harm. We also intend that the considerations and limitations discussed in this paper can be used to further analyze and refine the methods of consciousness science with the hope that one day we may be able to solve the measurement problem of consciousness. (shrink)

‘Sentience’ sometimes refers to the capacity for any type of subjective experience, and sometimes to the capacity to have subjective experiences with a positive or negative valence, such as pain or pleasure. We review recent controversies regarding sentience in fish and invertebrates and consider the deep methodological challenge posed by these cases. We then present two ways of responding to the challenge. In a policy-making context, precautionary thinking can help us treat animals appropriately despite continuing uncertainty about their sentience. In (...) a scientific context, we can draw inspiration from the science of human consciousness to disentangle conscious and unconscious perception (especially vision) in animals. Developing better ways to disentangle conscious and unconscious affect is a key priority for future research. (shrink)

What is a virtue, and how are virtues different from vices? Do people with virtues lead better lives than the rest of us? Do they know more? Can we acquire virtues if so, how? In this lively and engaging introduction to this core topic, Heather Battaly argues that there is more than one kind of virtue. Some virtues make the world a better place, or help us to attain knowledge. Other virtues are dependent upon good intentions like caring about (...) other people or about truth. Virtue is an original approach to the topic, which carefully situates the fields of virtue ethics and virtue epistemology within a general theory of virtue. It argues that there are good reasons to acquire moral and intellectual virtues virtuous people often attain greater knowledge and lead better lives. As well as approaching virtue in a novel and illuminating way, Battaly ably guides the reader through the dense literature surrounding the topic, deftly moving from important specific and technical points to more general issues and questions. The final chapter proposes strategies for helping university students acquire intellectual virtues. Battaly’s insights are complemented by entertaining examples from popular culture, literature, and film, really bringing this topic to life for readers. Virtue is the ideal introduction to the topic. It will be an equally vital resource for students who are encountering the topic for the first time, and for scholars who are deeply engaged in virtue theory. (shrink)

One of the primary concerns in animal research is ensuring the welfare of laboratory animals. Modern views on animal welfare emphasize the role of animal sentience, i.e. the capacity to experience subjective states such as pleasure or suffering, as a central component of welfare. The increasing official recognition of animal sentience has had large effects on laboratory animal research. The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness (Low et al., University of Cambridge, 2012) marked an official scientific recognition of the presence of sentience (...) in mammals, birds, and cephalopods. Animal sentience has furthermore been recognized in legislation in the European Union, UK, New Zealand and parts of Australia, with discussions underway in other parts of the world to follow suit. In this paper, we analyze this shift towards recognition of sentience in the regulation and practice in the treatment of laboratory animals and its effects on animal welfare and use. (shrink)

In the first section of this paper, after briefly arguing for the assumption that experiential content is propositional, I’ll distinguish three interpretations of the claim that experience has content (the Mild, Medium, and Spicy Content Views). In the second section, I’ll flesh out Naïve Realism in greater detail, and I’ll reconstruct what I take to be the main argument for its incompatibility with the Content Views. The third section will be devoted to evaluation of existing arguments for the Mild Content (...) View (the arguments from accuracy and appearing), and the development of what I take to be a stronger argument (the argument from belief generation). In the final section, I’ll identify a flaw in the argument for the incompatibility of Naïve Realism with the Content Views, which opens the door to a reconciliation. (shrink)

Animal welfare is a concept that plays a role within both our moral deliberations and the relevant areas of science. The study of animal welfare has impacts on decisions made by legislators, producers and consumers with regards to housing and treatment of animals. Our ethical deliberations in these domains need to consider our impact on animals, and the study of animal welfare provides the information that allows us to make informed decisions. This thesis focusses on taking a philosophical perspective to (...) answer the question of how we can measure the welfare of animals. Animal welfare science is an applied area of biology, aimed at measuring animal welfare. Although philosophy of animal ethics is common, philosophy focussing on animal welfare science is rare. Despite this lack, there are definitely many ways in which philosophical methods can be used to analyse the methodologies and concepts used in this science. One of the aims of the work in this thesis is to remedy this lack of attention in animal welfare. Animal welfare science is a strong emerging discipline, but there is the need for conceptual and methodological clarity and sophistication in this science if it is to play the relevant informative role for our practical and ethical decision-making. There is thus is a strong role here for philosophical analysis for this purpose. The central aim of this thesis is to provide an account of how we can measure subjective animal welfare, addressing some of the potential problems that may arise in this particular scientific endeavour. The two questions I will be answering are: what is animal welfare, and how do we measure it? Part One of the thesis looks at the subjective concept of animal welfare and its applications. In it, I argue for a subjective welfare view - that animal welfare should be understood as the subjective experience of individuals over their lifetimes - and look at how the subjective welfare concept informs our ethical decision-making in two different cases in applied animal ethics. Part Two of the thesis looks more closely at the scientific role of welfare. Understanding welfare subjectively creates unique measurement problems, due to the necessarily private nature of mental states and here I address a few of these problems, including whether subjective experience is measurable, how we might validate indicators of hidden target variables such as welfare, how we can make welfare comparisons between individual animals and how we might compare or integrate the different types of experience that make up welfare. I end with a discussion of the implications of all these problems and solutions for the practice of welfare science, and indicate useful future directions for research. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the way to reduce the power of overdemanding beauty ideals is not to advocate that individuals have a ‘duty to resist’, a duty to stop engaging in appearance enhancing practices and body work. I begin by arguing against the claim that women who ‘do’ beauty are suffering from false consciousness. I then give four further additional arguments against advocating a ‘duty to resist’ as an effective means to challenge dominant beauty norms. First, that as (...) a tactic it is ineffective. Second, it is an individual approach which divides and silences. Third, it induces shame and blame, and undermines effective collective action. Fourth, it fails to recognize the privilege of the group norms which make resistance possible. (shrink)

In this essay, we discuss Simona Ginsburg and Eva Jablonka’s The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul from an interdisciplinary perspective. Constituting perhaps the longest treatise on the evolution of consciousness, Ginsburg and Jablonka unite their expertise in neuroscience and biology to develop a beautifully Darwinian account of the dawning of subjective experience. Though it would be impossible to cover all its content in a short book review, here we provide a critical evaluation of their two key ideas—the role of Unlimited (...) Associative Learning in the evolution of, and detection of, consciousness and a metaphysical claim about consciousness as a mode of being—in a manner that will hopefully overcome some of the initial resistance of potential readers to tackle a book of this length. (shrink)