As the size of the published scientific literature has increased exponentially over the past 30 years, review articles play an increasingly important role in helping researchers to make sense of original research results. Literature reviews can be broadly classified as either “systematic” or “narrative”. Narrative reviews may be broader in scope than systematic reviews, but have been criticised for lacking synthesis and rigour. The submission of more scientific manuscripts requires more researchers acting as peer reviewers, which requires adding greater numbers (...) of new reviewers to the reviewing population over time. However, whereas there are many easily accessible guides for reviewers of primary research manuscripts, there are few similar resources to assist reviewers of narrative reviews. Here, I summarise why literature reviews are valued by their diverse readership and how peer reviewers with different levels of content expertise can improve the reliability and accessibility of narrative review articles. I then provide a number of recommendations for peer reviewers of narrative literature reviews, to improve the integrity of the scientific literature, while also ensuring that narrative review articles meet the needs of both expert and non-expert readers. (shrink)

There are increasing concerns that research regulatory requirements exceed those required to manage risks, particularly for low- and negligible-risk research projects. In particular, inconsistent documentation requirements across research sites can delay the conduct of multi-site projects. For a one-year, negligible-risk project examining biobank operations conducted at three separate Australian institutions, we found that the researcher time required to meet regulatory requirements was eight times greater than that required for the approved research activity. In total, 76 business days were required to (...) obtain the necessary approvals, and site-specific processes required twice as long as primary Human Research Ethics Committee and Research Governance Office processes. We describe the impact of this administrative load on the conduct of a one-year, externally-... (shrink)

Research on pornography has distinguished between its violent and nonviolent forms. Analyses of the content of violent pornography have largely focused on readily available soft-core images in adult films and magazines. However, current research has not adequately addressed pornography on the Internet. We show that discussions about violent pornography are incomplete without an understanding of the Internet as a unique and rapidly expanding medium for disseminating images of sexual violence against women. This article attempts to fill that gap by examining (...) violent pornography using a sample of 31 free Internet sites. Each site was analyzed for its portrayal of women victims, male perpetrators, and its story of rape. Please be advised that the analysis contains graphic descriptions of violence toward women found on Internet rape sites. (shrink)

This article uses critical discourse analysis to investigate artificial intelligence (AI) generated images of aged care nurses and considers how perspectives and perceptions impact upon the recruitment and retention of nurses. The article demonstrates a recontextualization of aged care nursing, giving rise to hidden ideologies including harmful stereotypes which allow for discrimination and exploitation. It is argued that this may imply that nurses require fewer clinical skills in aged care, diminishing the value of working in this area. AI relies on (...) existing data sets, and thus represent existing stereotypes and biases. The discourse analysis has highlighted key issues which may further impact upon nursing recruitment and retention, and advocates for stronger ethical consideration, including the use of experts in data validation, for the way that aged care services and nurses are depicted and thus valued. (shrink)

Ruth Byrne presents a three-step argument to the conclusion that counterfactual imagining is rational. Insofar as this argument is valid, the conclusion is weaker than it seems. More importantly, it does not represent the central contributions of this book – contributions that, if anything, point instead to what is irrational about counterfactual imagining.

Augustine famously claimed that the virtues of pagan Rome were nothing more than splendid vices. This critique reinvented itself as a suspicion of acquired virtue as such, and true Christian virtue has, ever since, been set against a false, hypocritical virtue alleged merely to conceal pride. _Putting On Virtue_ reveals how a distrust of learned and habituated virtue shaped both early modern Christian moral reflection and secular forms of ethical thought. Jennifer Herdt develops her claims through an argument of (...) broad historical sweep, which brings together the Aristotelian tradition as taken up by Thomas Aquinas with the early modern thinkers who shaped modern liberalism. In chapters on Luther, Bunyan, the Jansenists, Mandeville, Hume, Rousseau, and Kant, she argues that efforts to make a radical distinction between true Christian virtue and its tainted imitations actually created an autonomous natural ethics separate from Christianity. This secular value system valorized pride and authenticity, while rendering graced human agency less meaningful. Ultimately, _Putting On Virtue_ traces a path from suspicion of virtue to its secular inversion, from confession of dependence to assertion of independence. (shrink)

I argue in this paper that our concept of pictorial realism should include a reference to perceptual proficiency relative to a cultural context. I argue this by demonstrating the greater explanatory power of such a concept for understanding pictorial realism. The central idea is that gestalt-like mechanisms that are normally involved in object recognition can be deployed at a second order level in picture perception. Styles of picturing that exploit this second order gestalt-like mechanism are learnable and transferable. The hypothesis (...) is that once a style of picturing is internalised, a picture that exploits this style will be experienced as true and fitting. (shrink)

This symposium is inspired by the round tables organised by James Elkins in Cork, Ireland and Chicago which aimed to create a dialogue between art historians and philosophers on concepts which are central to the way both disciplines conduct their respective endeavours. For our symposium, art historians and philosophers will discuss topics and concepts which are likely to be given different interpretations by the respective disciplines. We will attempt to bridge the gap between the respective interpretations by inviting a closer (...) consideration of the alternative perspective. The first topic will be the relation of aesthetic and moral considerations in evaluating the photography of Bill Henson. The second will be "Beauty" and the third, will be the nature of "Aesthetic Autonomy". (shrink)

This edited collection sets forth a new understanding of aesthetic-moral judgment organised around three key concepts: pleasure, reflection, and accountability. The overarching theme is that art is not merely a representation or expression like any other, but that it promotes shared moral understanding and helps us engage in meaning-making. This volume offers an alternative to brain-centric and realist approaches to aesthetics. It features original essays from a number of leading philosophers of art, aesthetics, ethics, and perception, including Elizabeth Burns Coleman, (...) Garrett Cullity, Cynthia A. Freeland, Ivan Gaskell, Paul Guyer, Jane Kneller, Keith Lehrer, Mohan Matthen, Jennifer A. McMahon, Bence Nanay, Nancy Sherman, and Robert Sinnerbrink. Part I of the book analyses the elements of aesthetic experience— pleasure, preference, and imagination—with the individual conceived as part of a particular cultural context and network of other minds. The chapters in Part II explain how it is possible for cultural learning to impact these elements through consensus building, an impulse to objectivity, emotional expression, and reflection. Finally, the chapters in Part III converge on the role of dissonance, difference, and diversity in promoting cultural understanding and advancement. Social Aesthetics and Moral Judgment will appeal to philosophers of art and aesthetics, as well as to scholars in other disciplines interested in issues related to art and cultural exchange. (shrink)

Plato’s distinction between appearance and reality which he attempts to demonstrate in his allegory of the cave established the conceptual framework for theories of knowledge for many centuries. The quest for certainty set us on the path to believing that reality is there to be discovered. We only have to open our eyes and minds. Yet a recurring question about the interface between culturally acquired concepts and objective sense perception remains a point of contention. Mischa Kuball’s Platon’s Mirror addresses this (...) question. Kuball’s Platon’s Mirror exhibited at Artspace Sydney during September 2011 is an intriguing exploration of the various layers involved in the process of meaning. Light is the metaphor. Light is filtered through a variety of devices to reveal disparate aspects of the one apparent object. The easy distinction between appearance and reality is deliberately thrown into disarray. Kuball provides a meditation on the blurring of reality and meaning which suggests a recurrent philosophical theme in Kuball’s oeuvre, the nature of meaning and value. (shrink)

In order to establish a rational framework within which to discuss aesthetic matters, I attempt to find grounds to support the notion that objectivity in aesthetic evaluation is possible, within the visual arts. I begin by exploring the possibility that the foundations of our aesthetic response are innate, because, if this is the case, it would indicate that aesthetic considerations have a common basis within us all, rather than belonging to a purely personal and subjective realm. In Part One, in (...) search of foundations, I turn to the art of those who are relatively unprogrammed in our artistic conventions, in an attempt to distinguish between innate impulses and conditioned responses. Next, by looking for the motivation behind the aesthetic impulse, and what this can tell me about how the aesthetic is constituted, I consider the possibility that the aesthetic impulse is in some way linked to characteristics which aid survival. This includes studying the nature of perception, including various innate perceptual mechanisms and the part they play in the way our idea of the aesthetic is constituted, and some theories concerned with the psychological aspects involved in creativity, which link the aesthetic impulse with creativity in all fields of enquiry. In Part Two, I study examples of how discussions on aesthetic matters are conducted in our culture, to see whether there is evidence to support the notion of objectivity in aesthetic evaluation. While recognizing that it is common for aesthetic discussions to be conducted in a confused and even unintelligible manner, often using criteria actually irrelevant to aesthetic value (an example of which I provide), I seek out examples of reviews which are conducted in a rational and intelligible manner, based on relevant objective criteria. Also, by analysing the terms we use when discussing an art work, I ascertain whether these terms refer to properties in the actual art work, which we believe exist independently from the spectator, or whether these terms describe how we feel when viewing a work. In other words, I examine whether we have the concepts to support the idea that objectivity in aesthetic evaluation in the visual arts is possible. (shrink)

A central idea of Romanticism in the arts is the idea that art or the aesthetic experience of nature reveals truth or insight about the human condition and relation to nature. What kind of truth could this be and how could perceptual objects reveal it?

The idea of a ‘global’ concept of art might suggest a transcending of the categories which would locate an artwork relative to one place and one time. Is this possible? If we answer in the negative, this suggests that a global concept of art is not possible, but on the positive side, the significance of the particular is kept intact. If we answer in the affirmative, then a global concept of art is possible, but we lose the very aspect that (...) defines art: its particularity. I will argue that we can limit the damage all round by construing art in a way that allows the particular features of an artwork’s time and place to feature within the broader placeholders of a global concept of art. According to the global concept of art I will present here, art is a normative system. Its place holders could be a narrative, representation, expression of emotion or perceptual experience but what in each case explains our engagement with it as art rather than say a scientific experiment or an historical record is the particular kind of reflection that the form of the work gives rise to. Hence the form of the work or the form that our engagement with it takes is what qualifies the narrative, representation, expression of emotion or perceptual experience as art. The damage referred to above is not eliminated entirely though. The norms in a system are taken on board through day to day interaction with others who engage these norms. As such, when art is construed according to such systems, the meanings it embodies as art may be inaccessible to those not acculturated into the relevant norms. A theory of art for a global concept of art, then, must identify in what sense art is a normative system and it must provide some account of how we engage with it when we engage with it as art. For the former, I draw upon philosophical analyses of moral judgment, and for the latter, I turn to that much maligned, indeed bogus, divide between the aesthetic and the antiaesthetic. I conclude that a global concept of art is one that maintains the integrity of the artwork, and that writing is art historical rather than merely historical when it is conducted from within the culture that grounds the art under discussion. (shrink)

This paper comments on an article by V.S. Ramachandran and William Hirstein (JCS,1999) in which they purport to be identifying the neurological principles of beauty. I draw attention to the way the problem of beauty is construed in the philosophical literature by Mary Mothersill (1984) and Immanuel Kant (Critique of Judgment). I argue that Ramachandran and Hirsteins' principles do not address the problem of beauty because they do not differentiate between the experience of beauty and other closely related phenomena. I (...) then show how one might address the problem of beauty within the framework that they have adopted. (shrink)

This paper treats the political and ethical issues associated with the new caretaking technologies. Given the number of feminists who have raised serious concerns about the future of care work in the United States, and who have been critical of the degree to which society “free rides” on women's caretaking labor, I consider whether technology may provide a solution to this problem. Certainly, if we can create machines and robots to take on particular tasks, we may lighten the care burden (...) that women currently face, much of which is heavy and repetitious, and which results in injury and care “burnout” for many female caretakers. Yet, in some contexts, I argue that high-tech robotic care may undermine social relationships, cutting individuals off from the possibility of social connectedness with others. (shrink)

Very little research into women farmers in developed countries has been produced by economists, but much of what has been studied by scholars in other disciplines has economic implications. This article reviews such research produced by scholars in all disciplines to explore to what extent women farmers are becoming more equal to men farmers and to suggest further contributions to the literature. As examples, topics that has been widely researched in developing countries but have received almost no attention in developed (...) countries include comparisons of men and women farmers’ productivity and their access to and use of resources. Discoveries in these and other areas will be important not only for their insights into the agricultural industry in developed countries, but also because they will inform, and be informed by, research on women farmers in developing countries. (shrink)

In this thesis I argue that the received view of autonomy is insufficient for both biomedical ethics and feminist theory. I begin with an examination of the received view of autonomy; I then indicate the way in which this view of autonomy has been applied to health care ethics. A feminist relational approach to autonomy is explored: I argue that such an approach has many strengths in that it gives us a more accurate picture of the self-in-relationships and that it (...) recognizes many social and structural conditions that may impede an individual's attempts to be autonomous. ;This feminist relational approach to autonomy, once defined, is applied to the medical/social practices of cosmetic surgery and contract motherhood. I do this to show the practical implications of this contextual approach to autonomy. (shrink)

In communities of inquiry, dialogue is central as both the means and the outcome of collective inquiry. Indeed, features of dialogue—including formulating and asking questions, developing hypotheses and explanations, and offering and requesting reasons—are often highlighted as playing a significant role in the quality of the dialogue that unfolds. We inquire further into the quality of dialogue by arguing that dialogue should enable the expansion of epistemic openness, rather than its contraction, and that this is especially important in multicultural communities (...) of inquiry to acknowledge the cultural, perspectival, and experiential differences that exist alongside of similarities as resources for dialogue. The purpose of this article is to highlight two discourse practices that exemplify the nature of discourse as social practice and can be used in communities of inquiry. Attending to these discourse practices may enable teachers and students to reflect upon dialogue as it unfolds. First, we situate ourselves in multicultural classrooms in British Columbia, Canada. Then we articulate three principles of communities of inquiry. Next we describe and exemplify two discourse practices: heteroglossic attunement and lexical awareness. When attended to by teachers and students, 1) heteroglossic attunement enables teachers and students to begin to identify, reflect upon, and discuss the voices and perspectives that are drawn upon as participants inquire together and 2) lexical awareness enables teachers and students to begin to identify their attributions of thinking and feeling to social actors and to recognize how naming social actors positions them in an evolving set of social relations. Rather than a neutral medium of communication, social speech and dialogue is inherently value laden. Attending closely to the discourse that constitutes dialogue in a community of inquiry is a significant pedagogical tool for both teachers and students to expand epistemic openness and make visible learning as it unfolds. (shrink)

As scholars integrate empirical approaches to ethical questions in healthcare, relational autonomy theory must inform research design and change practice. Qualitative approaches are well suited to issues where patient values play a central role, and they can be combined with relational autonomy theory to investigate the factors influencing autonomy-rich experiences. This paper draws upon my experience conducting bioethics research related to clinical trial decision-making to develop a systematic method for applying relational autonomy as a theoretical lens to qualitative health research. (...) The resultant practical guide utilizes Susan Sherwin’s theory of relational autonomy and presents an empirical method responsive to autonomy-relevant questions. (shrink)

Neoliberal cultural frames of individual choice inform mothers’ accounts of why they refuse state-mandated vaccines for their children. Using interviews with 25 mothers who reject recommended vaccines, this article examines the gendered discourse of vaccine refusal. First, I show how mothers, seeing themselves as experts on their children, weigh perceived risks of infection against those of vaccines and dismiss claims that vaccines are necessary. Second, I explicate how mothers see their own intensive mothering practices—particularly around feeding, nutrition, and natural living—as (...) an alternate and superior means of supporting their children’s immunity. Third, I show how they attempt to control risk through management of social exposure, as they envision disease risk to lie in “foreign” bodies outside their networks, and, therefore, individually manageable. Finally, I examine how these mothers focus solely on their own children by evaluating—and often rejecting—assertions that their choices undermine community health, while ignoring how their children benefit from the immunity of others. By analyzing the gendered discourse of vaccines, this article identifies how women’s insistence on individual maternal choice as evidence of commitment to their children draws on and replicates structural inequality in ways that remain invisible, but affect others. (shrink)

This paper will consider ethical issues arising from medical tort litigation. I will argue that deep changes are required to ensure fairness in litigation and in order to hold morally responsible those corporations that take unnecessary risks with consumers’ lives.

Jennifer Johnston’s fiction presents the conditions of Irish culture and society by exploring the separations between interior and exterior realms and past and present temporalities persisting within the insulating privacy of the familial home space. In _The Christmas Tree_ (1981), the home is both haven and prison for Johnston’s heroine. In this paper, I argue that the home—which assumes the form of the individual body and the familial home—is paradoxical. The protagonist leaves 1950s Ireland because of the country’s rigid (...) gender roles in order to pursue an autonomous life as a writer in England, but she is unable to publish her writing within the confines of the patriarchal publishing world. The home of her body becomes paradoxical when she becomes a single mother as an avenue for creativity but is then diagnosed with terminal cancer. She returns to her father’s home to die, which she re-orders and reclaims through the disorder of the uncanny—represented by her non-conformity and illness brought into the patriarchal home. By writing her life story and creating a brief, alternative maternal relationship with her young caretaker, the protagonist confronts her own ambivalence toward her parents, who also represent aspects of oppressive heteronormative gender expectations. (shrink)

This essay addresses feminist approaches to medical aid in dying (MAID), considering whether it is a practice that should be supported for women and other marginalized groups. Some feminists have raised rights and justice-based arguments in support of MAID; others have taken a care-based approach to suggest that the practice violates relationships of care and only worsens distrust between marginalized groups and the medical establishment. I argue that we need to adopt both justice and care approaches to develop a robust (...) feminist account of MAID. I defend a woman’s right to choose death in cases of terminal illness or suffering but argue that relational concerns of care, trust, and trustworthiness must be addressed at the same time to ensure that MAID is justly practiced and accessible to all those who want it. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Why Do We Date? A Brief History of Dating Calculated Relationship Initiation and Maintenance All “Perfect” Dating Relationships Stumble, but Not in the Same Way Dating as a Particular Genre of Friendship Against Unconditional Love Conclusion.

Aesthetic autonomy is sometimes equated with an art for art’s sake approach to art. On the contrary, the philosophers whose work is often cited as backup to this concept of aesthetic autonomy held a very different conception of it. I will trace an alternative notion of aesthetic autonomy in the work of Adorno and Habermas, the origins of which can be found in Immanuel Kant’s aesthetic theory, the popular notion of his formalism, notwithstanding. I draw upon the art practice of (...) the contemporary Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson in order to demonstrate this alternative notion of aesthetic autonomy. (shrink)

In this introduction to a cluster of three articles on eighteenth-century ethics written by Mark Larrimore, John Bowlin, and Mark Cladis, the author maintains that although the broad narrative tracing the emergence of a religiously neutral or naturalistic moral language in the eighteenth century is a familiar one, many central questions concerning this development remain unanswered and require further historical study. Against those who contend that historical study is antecedent to, but not part of, the proper substance of religious ethics, (...) the author argues that historical and normative studies are interdependent, each helping to define the questions central to the other. The introduction concludes with an overview of the three articles and suggests ways in which religious ethicists can, in the future, make a distinctive contribution to the history of ethics. (shrink)

This paper applies a relational and familial ethic to address concerns relating to nursing home deaths and advance care planning during Covid‐19 and beyond. The deaths of our elderly in nursing homes during this pandemic have been made more complicated by the restriction of visitors even at the end of life, a time when families would normally be present. While we must be vigilant about preventing unnecessary deaths caused by coronavirus outbreaks in nursing homes, some deaths of our elders are (...) inevitable. Thus, it is essential that advanced care planning occurs in a way that upholds the familial and relational aspects of elders’ lives that often matter to them the most. We invoke concepts from feminist ethicists like Hilde Lindemann and Eva Kittay and introduce Avery Weisman and Thomas Hackett’s concept of “appropriate death” to suggest better ways of planning for those deaths of our elderly that cannot be avoided. Our hope is to allow for deaths that are as meaningful as possible for both the elderly and the family members who survive them. (shrink)

The doctrine of the image of God is often regarded as grounding human dignity in something permanent and unchanging that transcends our attitudes and behaviors. Yet we persistently encounter the argument that particular human individuals or groups have acted so as to forfeit their moral standing as fellow humans. They are bestialized, categorized as non-human animals, lifting ordinary restraints on punishment. I examine the logic of this argument in John Locke, Thomas Aquinas, and contemporary felony disenfranchisement, showing how it involves (...) slippage between the unobjectionable notion that specific rights may in particular circumstances be forfeited, and the deeply troubling claim that one’s moral standing as human can as such be forfeited. I argue that an apparently similar rhetoric of dehumanization employed by Frederick Douglass, in contrast, refrains from stripping the opponent of moral considerability. (shrink)

Tool use research has suffered from a lack of consistent theoretical frameworks. There is a plethora of tool use definitions and the most widespread ones are so inclusive that the behaviors that fall under them arguably do not have much in common. The situation is aggravated by the prevalence of anecdotes, which have played an undue role in the literature. In order to provide a more rigorous foundation for research and to advance our understanding of the interrelation between tool use (...) and cognition, we suggest the adoption of Fragaszy and Mangalam's (2018) tooling framework, which is characterized by the creation of a body-plus-object system that manages a mechanical interface between tool and surface. Tooling is limited to a narrower suite of behaviors than tool use, which might facilitate its neurocognitive investigation. Indeed, evidence in the literature indicates that tooling has distinct neurocognitive underpinnings not shared by other activities typically classified as tool use, at least in primates. In order to understand the extent of tooling incidences in previous research, we systematically surveyed the comprehensive tool use catalog by Shumaker et al. (2011). We identified 201 tool use submodes, of which only 81 could be classified as tooling, and the majority of the tool use examples across species were poorly supported by evidence. Furthermore, tooling appears to be phylogenetically less widespread than tool use, with the greatest variability found in the primate order. However, in order to confirm these findings and to understand the evolution and neurocognitive mechanisms of tooling, more systematic research will be required in the future, particularly with currently underrepresented taxa. (shrink)

A clear-cut concept of the aesthetic is elusive. Kant’s Critique of Judgment presents one of the more comprehensive aesthetic theories from which we can extract a set of features, some of which pertain to aesthetic experience and others to the logical structure of aesthetic judgment. When considered together, however, these features present a number of tensions and apparent contradictions. Kant’s own attempt to dissolve these apparent contradictions or dichotomies was not entirely satisfactory as it rested on a vague notion of (...) indeterminacy. He addressed the emerging tensions with his distinction between pure and dependent beauty, which is a distinction I believe a satisfactory theory of aesthetic judgment would reveal as unfounded. In addition, Kant left a crucial connection unaccounted for. This was the connection between the two aspects that he envisaged characterized an aesthetic judgment. The two aspects to which I refer are the “purposiveness of form” provided by the Imagination and the associated mental content,which Kant called “aesthetic ideas.” More recent aesthetic theories treat only a subset of the features addressed in Kant’s aesthetic theory. Even so, the standard aesthetic theories, such as expressivism, cognitivism, and formalism, entrench the kind of thinking that grounds these dichotomies. In contrast, I will demonstrate that a naturalized aesthetic theory can accommodate all the features suggested by the Kantian analysis in such a way that they are shown to be complementary rather than contradictory. (shrink)

Schiller’s interests in theology, poetry, and literature influenced the way he responded to the ethics and aesthetics of the British philosopher the Third Earl of Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley-Cooper), and the German philosophers Moses Mendelssohn and Immanuel Kant. Often Schiller’s most significant philosophical contributions are those which represent alternatives to more influential views, such as his rejection of Kant’s understanding of the relation between the sensuous and rationality in the moral person. In what follows, Schiller’s key concepts within their eighteenth-century context (...) are presented, and their significance within this context is discussed by showing how he relates the sensuous to the rational through the following: “pleasure and morality” (Sects. “Introduction”, “Locating Schiller in His Intellectual Milieu” and “Pleasure and Morality”), “form and beauty” (Sect. “Form and Beauty”), and “freedom or nature” (Sects. “Freedom or Nature” and “Concluding Remarks”). (shrink)

Mammals have an XX:XY system of chromosomal sex determination in which a small heterochromatic Y controls male development. The Y contains the testis determining factor SRY, as well as several genes important in spermatogenesis. Comparative studies show that the Y was once homologous with the X, but has been progressively degraded, and now consists largely of repeated sequences as well as degraded copies of X linked genes. The small original X and Y have been enlarged by cycles of autosomal addition (...) to one partner, recombination onto the other and continuing attrition of the compound Y. This addition–attrition hypothesis predicts that the pseudoautosomal region of the human X is merely the last relic of the latest addition. Genes (including SRY) on the conserved or added region of the Y evolved functions in male sex determination and differentiation distinct from the general functions of their X‐linked partners. Although the gonadogenesis pathway is highly conserved in vertebrates, its control has probably changed radically and rapidly in vertebrate – even mammalian – evolution. (shrink)