A Professor of Medical Ethics and a theatre director, also mother and daughter, talk about health, illness, suffering, performance and practice. Using the lenses of ethical and performance theory, they explore what it means to be a patient, a spectator and a practitioner and cover many plays, texts and productions: Samuel Beckett’s Not I and All That Fall, Sarah Kane’s Crave, Tim Crouch’s An Oak Tree, Enda Walsh’s Ballyturk, Annie Ryan’s adaptation of Eimear McBride’s novel A Girl Is a Half-Formed (...) Thing, Duncan MacMillan’s People, Place and Things and Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. These were selected because first we have seen, studied or worked with each and they have continued to inspire us. Second, they offer rich and revealing insights into the ways in which meaning is/are both negotiated and contested in relation to health and illness. It is the iterative negotiation of meaning that, it is argued, is the essence of narrative practice, be it in medicine or in the theatre. The difference and divergence of perception, response and interpretation to dramatic performance can test relationships, be they professional, creative or familial. Yet, the capacity to understand, and embrace, disagreement and uncertainty is vital; fundamental to a flourishing life. For it is by recognising our part in creating narratives, broken and otherwise, that we can begin to recognise the necessary interactionism and humanity of both medicine and theatre. (shrink)

Current debates on collective intentionality focus on the cognitive capacities, attitudes, and mental states that enable individuals to take part in joint actions. It is typically assumed that collective intentionality is a capacity which is added to other, pre-existing, capacities of an individual and is exercised in cooperative activities like carrying a table or painting a house together. We call this the additive account because it portrays collective intentionality as a capacity that an individual possesses in addition to her capacity (...) for individual intentionality. We offer an alternative view according to which the primary entity to which collective intentionality has to be ascribed is not the human individual, but a “form of life.” As a feature of a form of life, collective intentionality is something more than the specific capacity exercised by an individual when she cooperates with others. Collective intentionality transforms all the capacities of the bearers of this specific form of life. We thus call our proposal the transformative account of collective intentionality. (shrink)

New products and services that tackle grand societal challenges often require changes in societal norms, values, and expectations. This research investigates the question of how innovating actors shape these informal institutions throughout the innovation process by drawing on the literature on social innovation and institutional theory. In a comparison of four case studies, we observe that all innovating actors under study engage in a diverse set of practices to challenge and shape societal norms and expectations as well as user habits (...) and routines throughout the innovation process. These activities can be clustered into unilateral, bilateral, and multilateral change processes, depending on the number of actors involved. Our findings highlight how different types of direct and indirect interactions between innovating actors and users along the innovation process shape the understanding of social innovation, and stress the central role of physical experiences and positive emotions among (future) users. Thereby, we provide for a more nuanced view of how companies that aim to bring technologies with different characteristics of innovativeness to the market shape the informal institutional environment throughout the different phases of the innovation process. (shrink)

In response to an accusation of having said something inappropriate, the accused may exploit the difference between the explicit contents of their utterance and its implicatures. Widely discussed in the pragmatics literature are those cases in which arguers accept accountability only for the explicit contents of what they said while denying commitment to the implicature. In this paper, we sketch a fuller picture of commitment denial. We do so, first, by including in our discussion not just denial of implicatures, but (...) also the mirror strategy of denying commitment to literal meaning and, second, by classifying strategies for commitment denial in terms of classical rhetorical status theory. In addition to providing a systematic categorization of our data, this approach offers some clues to determine when such a defence strategy is a reasonable one and when it is not. (shrink)

Introduction: A general trend in the psychological literature suggests that guilt contributes to morality more than shame does. Unlike shame-prone individuals, guilt-prone individuals internalize the causality of negative events, attribute responsibility in the first person, and engage in responsible behavior. However, it is not known how guilt- and shame-proneness interact with the attribution of responsibility to others. -/- Methods: In two Web-based experiments, participants reported their attributions of moral culpability (i.e., responsibility, causality, punishment and decision-making) about morally ambiguous acts of (...) killing in different conditions. In Study 1 the vignettes were presented in the 1st person, while in Study 2 in the 3rd person. To test proneness to guilt and shame, we utilized the GASP scale, which differentiates between the affective and behavioral components of each emotion. Statistical analyses were performed in Matlab and R. -/- Results: We found that guilt- and shame-proneness were associated with the severity of attributions in both the first and the third person, but the effect was strong only in the guilt case (both subtypes) and shame-affect case, and not in the shame-behavior case. We call this the Moralizing Effect. -/- Discussion: We wonder whether our finding that guilt-prone people tend to attribute a higher degree of culpability to others is really consistent with the view that guilt motivates people to choose the “moral paths in life”. This echoes views about the harmful aspects of guilt, which have been expressed historically in philosophy, for example, by Friedrich Nietzsche. (shrink)

We propose that the crucial difference between human cognition and that of other species is the ability to participate with others in collaborative activities with shared goals and intentions: shared intentionality. Participation in such activities requires not only especially powerful forms of intention reading and cultural learning, but also a unique motivation to share psychological states with others and unique forms of cognitive representation for doing so. The result of participating in these activities is species-unique forms of cultural cognition and (...) evolution, enabling everything from the creation and use of linguistic symbols to the construction of social norms and individual beliefs to the establishment of social institutions. In support of this proposal we argue and present evidence that great apes understand the basics of intentional action, but they still do not participate in activities involving joint intentions and attention. Human children's skills of shared intentionality develop gradually during the first 14 months of life as two ontogenetic pathways intertwine: the general ape line of understanding others as animate, goal-directed, and intentional agents; and a species-unique motivation to share emotions, experience, and activities with other persons. The developmental outcome is children's ability to construct dialogic cognitive representations, which enable them to participate in earnest in the collectivity that is human cognition. Key Words: collaboration; cooperation; cultural learning; culture; evolutionary psychology; intentions; shared intentionality; social cognition; social learning; theory of mind; joint attention. (shrink)

As Next Generation Sequencing technologies are increasingly implemented in biomedical research and care, the number of study participants and patients who ask for release of their genomic raw data is set to increase. This raises the question whether research participants and patients have a legal and moral right to receive their genomic raw data and, if so, how this right should be implemented into practice. In a first step we clarify some central concepts such as “raw data”; in a second (...) step we sketch the international legal framework. The third step provides an extensive ethical analysis which comprehends two parts: an evaluation of whether there is a prima facie moral right to receive one’s raw data, and a contextualization and discussion of the right in light of potentially conflicting interests and rights of the data subject herself and third parties; in a last fourth step we emphasize the main practical consequences of the ethical analyses and propose recommendations for the release of raw data. In several legislations like the new European General Data Protection Regulation, patients do in principle have the right to receive their raw data. However, the procedural implementation of this right and whether it involves genetic counselling is at the discretion of the Member States. Even more questions remain with respect to the research context. The ethical analysis suggests that patients and research subjects have a moral right to receive their genomic raw data and addresses aspects which are also of relevance for the legal discussion such as the costs of release of raw data and its impact on academic freedom. Taking into account the specific nature and implications of genomic raw data and the contexts of research and health care, several concerns and potentially conflicting interests of the data subjects themselves and involved researchers, physicians, biomedical institutions and relatives arise. Instead of using them to argue in favor of restrictions of the data subjects’ legal and moral right to genomic raw data, the concerns should be addressed through provision of information and other measures. To this end, we propose relevant recommendations. (shrink)

A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2012! Contemporary picturebooks open up spaces for philosophical dialogues between people of all ages. As works of art, picturebooks offer unique opportunities to explore ideas and to create meaning collaboratively. This book considers censorship of certain well-known picturebooks, challenging the assumptions on which this censorship is based. Through a lively exploration of children's responses to these same picturebooks the authors paint a way of working philosophically based on respectful listening and creative and authentic interactions, rather (...) than scripted lessons. This dialogical process challenges much current practice in education. The authors propose that a courageous and critical practice of listening is central to the facilitation of mutually educative dialogue. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of education studies, philosophy of education, literacy teaching and learning, children's literature, childhood and pedagogy. (shrink)

The volume explores the hitherto uncharted late medieval religious landscape of Northern Germany. Through discussion of a rich, varied selection of mystical and devotional texts, also translated into English, a fascinating regional "mystical culture" with a far-reaching impact is revealed.

This fully revised second edition suggests ways in which you can introduce philosophical enquiry to your Personal, Social and Health Education and Citizenship teaching and across the curriculum.

In The Conditions for Ethical Chemical Restraint, Crutchfield and Redinger (2024) propose ethical standards for the use of chemical restraints, which they consider normatively distinct from physica...

In recent years, campaigns across the globe have called for the removal of objects symbolic of white supremacy. This paper examines the ethics of altering or removing such objects. Do these strategies sanitize history, destroy heritage and suppress freedom of speech? Or are they important steps towards justice? Does removing monuments and renaming schools reflect a lack of parity and unfairly erase local identities? Or can it sometimes be morally required, as an expression of respect for the memories of people (...) who endured past injustices; a recognition of this history's ongoing legacies; and a repudiation of unjust social hierarchies? (shrink)

Rather than focus on effects, the isolatable and measureable outcomes of events and interventions, the papers assembled here offer different perspectives on the affective dimension of the meaning and politics of human/non-human relations. The authors begin by drawing attention to the constructed discontinuity between humans and non-humans, and to the kinds of knowledge and socialities that this discontinuity sustains, including those underpinned by nature-culture, subject-object, body-mind, individual-society polarities. The articles presented track human/non-human relations through different domains, including: humans/non-humans in history (...) and animal welfare science (Fudge and Buller); the relationship between the way we live, the effects on our natural environment and contested knowledges about ‘nature’ (Whatmore); choreographies of everyday life and everyday science practices with non-human animals such as horses, meerkats, mice, and wolves (Latimer, Candea, Davies, Despret). Each paper also goes on to offer different perspectives on the human/non-human not just as division, or even as an asymmetrical relation, but as relations that are mutually affective, however invisible and inexpressible in the domain of science. Thus the collection contributes to new epistemologies/ontologies that undercut the usual ordering of relations and their dichotomies, particularly in that dominant domain of contemporary culture that we call science. Indeed, in their impetus to capture ‘affect’, the collection goes beyond the usual turn towards a more inclusive ontology, and contributes to the radical shift in the epistemology and philosophy of science’s terms of engagement. (shrink)

Bringing together scholars from a broad range of theoretical perspectives, The Language of Argumentation offers a unique overview of research at the crossroads of linguistics and theories of argumentation. In addition to theoretical and methodological reflections by leading scholars in their fields, the book contains studies of the relationship between language and argumentation from two different viewpoints. While some chapters take a specific argumentative move as their point of departure and investigate the ways in which it is linguistically manifested in (...) discourse, other chapters start off from a linguistic construction, trying to determine its argumentative function and rhetorical potential. The Language of Argumentation documents the currently prominent research on stylistic aspects of argumentation and illustrates how the study of argumentation benefits from insights from linguistic models, ranging from theoretical pragmatics, politeness theory and metaphor studies to models of discourse coherence and construction grammar. (shrink)

Experience indicates that the questioning and democratic nature of the community of enquiry can be demanding and unsettling for teachers, present.

This essay discusses Cecilia Heyes’ groundbreaking new book Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking. Heyes’ point of departure is the claim that current theories of cultural evolution fail adequately to make a place for the mind. Heyes articulates a cognitive psychology of cultural evolution by explaining how eponymous “cognitive gadgets,” such as imitation, mindreading and language, mental technologies, are “tuned” and “assembled” through social interaction and cultural learning. After recapitulating her explanations for the cultural and psychological origins of these (...) gadgets, we turn to criticisms. Among those, we find Heyes’ use of evolutionary theory confusing on several points of importance; alternative theories of cultural evolution, especially those of the Tomasello group and of Boyd, Richerson and Henrich, are misrepresented; the book neglects joint attention and other forms of intersubjectivity in its explanation of the origins of cognitive gadgets; and, whereas Heyes accuses other theories of being “mindblind,” we find her theory ironically other-blind and autistic in character. (shrink)

The amount allocated to publicly funded health care for 2005/06 in New Zealand, a small country of some four million people, is $NZ 9.68 billion, or 6.2% of GDP, an increase from the 5.7% of GDP in 2000/01. The Minister of Finance has recently signalled that spending in health and education has outpaced economic growth, and that the present rate of growth in health spending, which has grown at about 7% a year over the last decade, is unsustainable. Despite these (...) big funding increases in recent years, the perception of New Zealanders is that the extra spending has made little difference, at least to hospital services and to people’s ability to access treatment. In surveys, health emerges as a leading concern for New Zealanders. Their concern is apparently less about the quality of services, than about their ability to access treatment - whether they will be able to access timely health care when they or their family members need it. (shrink)

This paper broadens out existing challenges to the divisions between the human and the animal that keep humans distinct, and apart, from other animals. Much attention to date has focused on how the Euro-American individuation of the human subject intensifies the asymmetries inculcated by these divisions. This paper rehearses some of this literature but goes on to attend to how these divisions undercut understandings of sociality and limit social organization to interaction between persons. Drawing together debates around the human/animal relation, (...) the paper juxtaposes different perspectives of nature-cultures to bring ‘worlds’ of relations into view. Specifically, I distinguish here between the state of ‘being alongside’ and the process of ‘being-with’. Ranging from approaches that try to settle ideas of difference through appeals to ‘ethical health’, through to work on identity that ‘unconceals’ a wealth of connection, this distinction will help to keep apart those situated moments of relations, where the constituent parts are left more provisional and contingent, from more sought-out relationships, where a sense of togetherness purposefully dominates the conjoining of activities. Contrasting hybridity as a totalizing form of ‘being-with’, with alongsideness, as a form of intermittent and partial connection, the analysis eschews the obfuscation of difference entrenched in contemporary emphasis on connectivity. Proposing instead the importance of creatures as ‘division preserving', the paper theorizes ways to sustain regard for division as well as connection as key to understanding the arts of dwelling amidst different kinds. (shrink)

In Polish historiography on radio in the Stalinist period, the official propaganda broadcast by Polish Radio is very often juxtaposed with the free and unbiased broadcasting of Radio Free Europe (RFE), which can create the impression that RFE was the only source of information in Poland and tends to diminish the importance of Polish Radio. In fact, both broadcasting institutions were crucial players in Cold War warfare, which was described by George F. Kennan in terms of Clausewitz's “fog of war.” (...) Indeed, both RFE and Polish Radio were listening to each other through the Iron Curtain because “white propaganda” (along with the intelligence obtained from political refugees) was one of the most important sources of information. The two broadcasting stations were more alike than we are willing to admit. For instance, the Polish section of RFE mimicked the post-war strategy of Polish Radio. While the latter pretended to be the continuation and successor of the pre-war institution, RFE's propaganda shaped the programme of Polish Radio for many years. Using this case study on RFE's attitude toward Poland's western borders along the Odra and Nysa Rivers, I show how these two opposing broadcasting stations functioned within an endless propaganda feedback loop. (shrink)

This article discusses the idea of intra-generational education. Drawing on Braidotti’s nomadic subject and Barad’s conception of agency, we consider what intra-generational education might look like ontologically, in the light of critical posthumanism, in terms of natureculture world, nomadism and a vibrant indeterminacy of knowing subjects. In order to explore the idea of intra-generationalism and its pedagogical implications, we introduce four concepts: homelessness, agelessness, playfulness and wakefulness. These may appear improbable in the context of education policy-making today, but they are (...) born of theorising our practices in the age-transgressive field of Philosophy with Children. We argue that these concepts help to reconfigure intra-generational relations, ways of being and becoming. They express the longing, corporeality and visionary epistemology of nomadic enquiry. These inventions express a non-hierarchical philosophy of immanence. We draw some tentative conclusions about educational practices more generally. (shrink)

This paper examines the difficulties of dealing with child labour in the supply chain. It begins by identifying a number of the factors which make global supply chains so difficult to manage. It goes on to outline a framework of different approaches that can be taken to managing the supply chain with relation to child labour, moving from national and international regulation, through to the role of NGOs and the companies themselves. Focusing on an ‘engagement’ strategy for dealing with child (...) labour, the paper traces a case study of Adidas‐Salomon and its attempts to implement their ‘standards of engagement’ in this area with relation to one of their supplier factories in Vietnam. The research draws on the direct involvement of one of the authors who visited the site and was able to interview staff and observe the operation in practice. Her findings are supported by wider work on the implementation of corporate approaches to human rights at a range of companies interviewed by another of the authors. The paper aims to highlight the issues needing to be addressed for companies considering the ‘involvement’ approach to child labour. It also aims to develop theory on our understanding of different approaches to corporate rights. (shrink)

The article reconsiders the nature and location of science in the development of genetic classification. Drawing on field studies of medical genetics, we explore how patient categorization is accomplished in between the clinic and laboratory. We focus on dysmorphology, a specialism concerned with complex syndromes that impair physical development. We show that dys-morphology is about more than fitting patients into prefixed diagnostic categories and that diagnostic process is marked by moments of uncertainty, ambiguity, and deferral. We describe how different forms (...) of evidence are brought into play and how patterns of physical features are identified as genetic or not. We suggest that clinical categorical work helps articulate the genetic as an emergent domain of medical classification and that moments of ambiguity and deferral create an imperative space that helps legitimate the need for more technoscience, and consequently, more clinical judgment with which to fix the genetic future. (shrink)

Consent governs innumerable everyday social interactions, including sex, medical exams, the use of property, and economic transactions. Yet little is known about how ordinary people reason about the validity of consent. Across the domains of sex, medicine, and police entry, Study 1 showed that when agents lack autonomous decision-making capacities, participants are less likely to view their consent as valid; however, failing to exercise this capacity and deciding in a nonautonomous way did not reduce consent judgments. Study 2 found that (...) specific and concrete incapacities reduced judgments of valid consent, but failing to exercise these specific capacities did not, even when the consenter makes an irrational and inauthentic decision. Finally, Study 3 showed that the effect of autonomy on judgments of valid consent carries important downstream consequences for moral reasoning about the rights and obligations of third parties, even when the consented-to action is morally wrong. Overall, these findings suggest that laypeople embrace a normative, domain-general concept of valid consent that depends consistently on the possession of autonomous capacities, but not on the exercise of these capacities. Autonomous decisions and autonomous capacities thus play divergent roles in moral reasoning about consent interactions: while the former appears relevant for assessing the wrongfulness of consented-to acts, the latter plays a role in whether consent is regarded as authoritative and therefore as transforming moral rights. (shrink)

This chapter examines the relevance of the cognitive science of morality to moral epistemology, with special focus on the issue of the reliability of moral judgments. It argues that the kind of empirical evidence of most importance to moral epistemology is at the psychological rather than neural level. The main theories and debates that have dominated the cognitive science of morality are reviewed with an eye to their epistemic significance.

This entry summarizes an emerging subdiscipline of both empirical bioethics and experimental philosophy (“x-phi”) which has variously been referred to as experimental philosophical bioethics, experimental bioethics, or simply “bioxphi”. Like empirical bioethics, bioxphi uses data-driven research methods to capture what various stakeholders think (feel, judge, etc.) about moral issues of relevance to bioethics. However, like its other parent discipline of x-phi, bioxphi tends to favor experiment-based designs drawn from the cognitive sciences – including psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics – to (...) tease out why and how stakeholders think as they do. (shrink)

This paper examines the difficulties of dealing with child labour in the supply chain. It begins by identifying a number of the factors which make global supply chains so difficult to manage. It goes on to outline a framework of different approaches that can be taken to managing the supply chain with relation to child labour, moving from national and international regulation, through to the role of NGOs and the companies themselves. Focusing on an ‘engagement’ strategy for dealing with child (...) labour, the paper traces a case study of Adidas‐Salomon and its attempts to implement their ‘standards of engagement’ in this area with relation to one of their supplier factories in Vietnam. The research draws on the direct involvement of one of the authors who visited the site and was able to interview staff and observe the operation in practice. Her findings are supported by wider work on the implementation of corporate approaches to human rights at a range of companies interviewed by another of the authors. The paper aims to highlight the issues needing to be addressed for companies considering the ‘involvement’ approach to child labour. It also aims to develop theory on our understanding of different approaches to corporate rights. (shrink)

May assumes that if moral beliefs are counterfactually dependent on irrelevant factors, then those moral beliefs are based on defective belief-forming processes. This assumption is false. Whether influence by irrelevant factors is debunking depends on the mechanisms through which this influence occurs. This raises the empirical bar for debunkers and helps May avoid an objection to his Debunker’s Dilemma.

We examine the unique nature of agency problems within publicly traded family firms by investigating the earnings management decision of dominant family owners relative to non-family. To do so, we draw upon literature demonstrating that family owners are loss averse with respect to the family’s socioemotional wealth, or the affective endowment derived from firm ownership and control. Our theory and findings suggest that potential reputational consequences of earnings management lead family principals to engage in less of this practice relative to (...) non-family firms, and that founder family firms are less likely than non-founder family firms to use earnings management. Moreover, the family-firm effect varies with the firm size, the degree of CEO entrenchment, and the firm’s stock structure. We provide important insights regarding differences between family and non-family principals in the use of unethical accounting practices, thereby extending agency theory and advancing an underdeveloped research area. (shrink)

What should we do with statues and place‐names memorializing people who committed human‐rights abuses linked to slavery and postslavery racism? In this article, I draw on UN principles of transitional justice to address this question. I propose that a successful approach should meet principles of transitional justice recognized by the United Nations, including affirming rights to justice, truth, reparations, and guarantees of nonrecurrence of human rights violations. I discuss four strategies for handling contested heritage, examining strengths and weaknesses of each (...) strategy. Examples from Bristol, England, highlight common challenges and positive lessons. (shrink)

Science communication via testimony requires a certain level of trust. But in the context of ideologically-entangled scientific issues, trust is in short supply—particularly when the issues are politically ‘entangled’. In such cases, cultural values are better predictors than scientific literacy for whether agents trust the publicly-directed claims of the scientific community. In this paper, we argue that a common way of thinking about scientific literacy—as knowledge of particular scientific facts or concepts—ought to give way to a second-order understanding of science (...) as a process as a more important notion for the public’s trust of science. (shrink)

In an influential paper, James Lenman argues that consequentialism can provide no basis for ethical guidance, because we are irredeemably ignorant of most of the consequences of our actions. If our ignorance of distant consequences is great, he says, we can have little reason to recommend one action over another on consequentialist grounds. In this article, I show that for reasons to do with statistical theory, the cluelessness objection is too pessimistic. We have good reason to believe that certain patterns (...) of action will tend to have better consequences, and we have good reason to recommend acting in accordance with strategies based on those advantageous patterns. I close by saying something about the strategies that this argument should lead us to favour. (shrink)