The last thirty years have seen a resurgence of interest in virtue among philosophers, psychologists, and educators. This co-authored book brings an interdisciplinary response to the study of virtue: it not only provides a framework for quantifying virtues, but also explores how we can understand virtue in a philosophically-informed way that is compatible with the best current thinking in personality psychology. The volume presents a major contribution to theemerging science of virtue and character measurement.

ABSTRACT Conceptual engineering provides a prima facie attractive alternative to traditional, conceptual analysis based approaches to philosophical method – particularly for those with doubts about the epistemic merits of intuition. As such, it seems to be a natural fit for those persuaded by the critiques of intuition offered by experimental philosophy. Recently, a number of authors [Schupbach, J. 2015. “Experimental Explication.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 94 : 672–710; Shepherd, J., and J. Justus. 2015. “X-Phi and Carnapian Explication.” Erkenntnis 80 : (...) 381–402; Fisher, J. 2015. “Pragmatic Experimental Philosophy.” Philosophical Psychology 28: 412–433; Machery, E. 2017. Philosophy Within its Proper Bounds. Oxford University Press] have suggested that experimental philosophy might be employed in service of conceptual engineering. In this paper, I provide a novel argument for x-phi’s relevance to conceptual engineering, based on a ‘functionalist’ approach to conceptual engineering. In short, I argue that experimental philosophy is distinctively well-suited to investigation of the purposes or functions which our concepts serve, and the means by which they fulfil those functions. Experimental philosophy thereby uncovers potential engineering solutions that may serve as models for the conceptual engineer. (shrink)

This paper provides a general introduction to the use of causal models in the metaphysics of causation, specifically structural equation models and directed acyclic graphs. It reviews the formal framework, lays out a method of interpretation capable of representing different underlying metaphysical relations, and describes the use of these models in analyzing causation.

Humans have distinctive powers of reflection: no other animal seems to have anything like our capacity for self-examination. Many philosophers hold that this capacity has a uniquely important guiding role in our cognition; others, notably Hilary Kornblith, draw attention to its weaknesses. Kornblith chiefly aims to dispel the sense that there is anything ‘magical’ about second-order mental states, situating them in the same causal net as ordinary first-order mental states. But elsewhere he goes further, suggesting that there is something deeply (...) misleading about reflection’s first-person view of cognition. This chapter takes a closer look at the conditions under which reflection is misleading. Even if humans are the only reflective animals, we are no longer the only creatures that can be questioned about their claims. Chatbots can also be asked to explain themselves, and by studying the conditions under which they produce clarification as opposed to confabulation, we can develop a non-skeptical account of the epistemic value of reflection. I argue that this capacity naturally supports the distribution of complex problem solving among multiple agents. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question of what constitutes an apt interpreted model for the purpose of analyzing causation. I first collect universally adopted aptness principles into a basic account, flagging open questions and choice points along the way. I then explore various additional aptness principles that have been proposed in the literature but have not been widely adopted, the motivations behind their proposals, and the concerns with each that stand in the way of universal adoption. I conclude that the remaining (...) work of articulating aptness for a SEM analysis of causation is tied up with issues to do with modality, ontology, and mereology. Continuing this work is therefore likely to shed light on the relationship between these areas and causation more generally. (shrink)

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.

Background Few studies have been conducted to assess the quality of orientation practices for ethics advisory committees that conduct ethics consultation. This survey study focused on several Harvard teaching hospitals, exploring orientation quality and committee members’ self-evaluation in the American Society of Bioethics and Humanities ethics consultation competencies. Methods We conducted a survey study that involved 116 members and 16 chairs of ethics advisory committees, respectively. Predictor variables included professional demographics, duration on committees and level of training. Outcome variables included (...) familiarity with and preparedness in the ASBH competencies and satisfaction with orientations. We hypothesised that responses would be associated with both the aforementioned predictors and whether or not participants had encountered the ASBH competencies in training. Results A majority of respondents found their orientation curricula to be helpful, although a significant portion of respondents did not receive any orientation or were unsatisfied with their orientation. Familiarity with ASBH competencies was a statistically significant predictor of respondents’ self-evaluation in particular categories. Standard educational materials were reported as offered during orientation, such as readings and case studies ; different medium resources were less evidenced such as videos on ethics consultation. Conclusions Institutions should re-evaluate orientation practices for ethics committee members that perform ethics consultation. Integrating ASBH competencies and useful methods into a resourceful pedagogy will help improve both member satisfaction with orientation and preparation in consultation. (shrink)

ObjectivesTo describe reporting of informed consent in pragmatic trials, justifications for waivers of consent and reporting of alternative approaches to standard written consent. To identify factors associated with (1) not reporting and (2) not obtaining consent.MethodsSurvey of primary trial reports, published 2014–2019, identified using an electronic search filter for pragmatic trials implemented in MEDLINE, and registered in ClinicalTrials.gov.ResultsAmong 1988 trials, 132 (6.6%) did not include a statement about participant consent, 1691 (85.0%) reported consent had been obtained, 139 (7.0%) reported a (...) waiver and 26 (1.3%) reported consent for one aspect (eg, data collection) but a waiver for another (eg, intervention). Of the 165 trials reporting a waiver, 76 (46.1%) provided a justification. Few (53, 2.9%) explicitly reported use of alternative approaches to consent. In multivariable logistic regression analyses, lower journal impact factor (p=0.001) and cluster randomisation (p<0.0001) were significantly associated with not reporting on consent, while trial recency, cluster randomisation, higher-income country settings, health services research and explicit labelling as pragmatic were significantly associated with not obtaining consent (all p<0.0001).DiscussionNot obtaining consent seems to be increasing and is associated with the use of cluster randomisation and pragmatic aims, but neither cluster randomisation nor pragmatism are currently accepted justifications for waivers of consent. Rather than considering either standard written informed consent or waivers of consent, researchers and research ethics committees could consider alternative consent approaches that may facilitate the conduct of pragmatic trials while preserving patient autonomy and the public’s trust in research. (shrink)

Wherever philosophers disagree, one of the things at issue is likely to be what they disagree about, itself. In addition to asking whether moral realism is true, and which forms of moral realism are more likely to be true than others, we can also ask what it would mean for some form of moral realism to be true. The usual aspiration of such inquiry is to find definitions that all can agree on, so that we can use terms in a (...) uniform way. But we doubt that this aspiration is always possible, or even desirable. It will be our goal in this chapter to sketch out some of our reasons for such skepticism, and to lay out a picture of what philosophical inquiry can look like in metaethics and beyond, even when it is impossible to reach uniform agreement on the terms of the debate. (shrink)

This chapter argues that despite the recent, welcome interest in autobiographical writing about depression, its use for research purposes presents an epistemological challenge because the extent to which these descriptions illuminate the true nature of depressive experience cannot be discerned. Contextualized within the genre of autobiography as well as the subgenre of illness memoir, the depression memoir exhibits ambiguities, it is shown, imposed by the constraints of its genre, and by the nature of autobiographical memory. Sources of ambiguity distinctive to (...) depression memoirs are next introduced, some tied to cultural meanings, others to the status of depressive states as constituted by moods. Finally, some empirical corroboration for these claims is cited, in findings indicating that depression affects autobiographical memory and writing style. The indeterminacy identified here is not a reason to dismiss depression memoirs, it is concluded, so much as to employ caution in drawing inferences from them. (shrink)

What virtues do good stewards typically have and can these virtues move people to be good stewards of nature? Why focus on the virtues of stewards rather than on trying to construct and defend morally obligatory rules to govern human behavior? I argue that benevolence and loyalty are crucial for good stewardship and these virtues can and do motivate people to act as good stewards of nature. Moreover,since it is a matter of dispute whether rational considerations can move us to (...) perform a given act in the absence of disposition to do so, I argue we should try to determine which moral dispositions (if any) will motivate people to be concerned for the environment so that the development of environmentally sensitive character may be encouraged. (shrink)

Although early emotion theorists posited that bodily changes contribute to emotion, the primary view in affective science over the last century has been that emotions produce bodily changes. Recent findings from physiology, neuroscience, and neuropsychology support the early intuition that body representations can help constitute emotion. These findings are consistent with the modern psychological constructionist hypothesis that emotions emerge when representations of bodily changes are conceptualized as an instance of emotion. We begin by introducing the psychological constructionist approach to emotion. (...) With Schachter as inspiration, we next examine how embodied representations contribute to affective states, and ultimately emotion, with inflammation as a key example. We close by looking forward to future research on how body representations contribute to human experience. (shrink)

Most presentations of the problem of moral luck invoke the notion of control, but little has been said about what control amounts to. We propose a necessary condition on an agent's having been in control of performing an action: that the agent's effort to perform the action ensured that the agent performed the action. The difficulty of satisfying this condition leads many on both sides of the moral luck debate to conclude that much of what we do is not within (...) our control, and, at the limit, underpins agential skepticism, the view that no one has ever been in control of having performed an action in the external world. We propose a response to the agential skeptic modeled on the epistemological disjunctivist's response to the skeptic about perceptual experience. According to agential disjunctivism, the necessary condition on control can be met, thus undermining agential skepticism and one motivation for the problem of moral luck. Our view can be understood as resisting moral luck not by shrinking the domain of robust moral evaluation but by refusing to contract the realm of robust control. (shrink)

Constitutivism holds that an account of what a thing is yields those normative standards to which that thing is by nature subject. We articulate a minimal form of constitutivism that we call _formal, non-epistemological constitutivism_ which diverges from orthodox versions of constitutivism in two main respects. First: whereas orthodox versions of constitutivism hold that those ethical norms to which people are by nature subject are sui generis because of their special capacity to motivate action and legitimate criticism, we argue that (...) these features are compatible with treating these norms as of a piece with those ‘formal’ natural-historical norms which can be used to assess living things. Second: unlike orthodox versions of constitutivism, our version does not seek to use a non-normative account of that kind of being which we are as a means of identifying those normative claims to which we are are by nature subject. We then indicate how our position can afford us the resources to address some of the familiar difficulties that face cognitivism in ethics. (shrink)

Dominance feminism and afropessimist theory, despite their critical appearances three decades apart, are undergirded by similar rhetorical strategies, political commitments and argumentative moves. This is the case even as afropessimism’s citational trajectory rarely invokes dominance feminism, and often positions itself as a critique of feminism’s imagined conception of gender as white, one that is thought to be most emphatically announced in the work of scholars like MacKinnon who invest in a gender binary, and in women’s oppressed location in this binary. (...) In this article, I insist on reading dominance feminism and afropessimism together. In so doing, I aspire to challenge afropessimism’s prevailing conception of gender, revealing that while it is often critical of feminist conceptions of gender – particularly conceptualisations of gender that are thought to insist on the shared experiences and positions of women – it actually relies on similar argumentative moves, and even rhetorical seductions, as dominance feminism. (shrink)

Like more than two hundred thousand other Americans, George Floyd howled horribly for air before his death. But his breathlessness was not born from a virus. He was murdered with the burden of anti...

Over the last decade, empirical research on compassion has burgeoned in the biomedical, clinical, translational, and foundational sciences. Increasingly sophisticated understandings and measures of compassion continue to emerge from the abundance of multi- and cross-disciplinary studies. Naturally, the diversity of research methods and theoretical frameworks employed presents a significant challenge to consensus and synthesis of this knowledge. To bring the empirical findings of separate and sometimes siloed disciplines into conversation with one another requires an examination of their disparate assumptions about (...) what compassion is and how it can be known. Here, we present an integrated theoretical review of methodologies used in the empirical study of compassion. Our goal is to highlight the distinguishing features of each of these ways of knowing compassion, as well as the strengths and limitations of applying them to specific research questions. We hope this will provide useful tools for selecting methods that are tailored to explicit objectives (methods matching), taking advantage of methodological complementarity across disciplines (methods-mixing), and incorporating the empirical study of compassion into fields in which it may be missing. (shrink)

A comprehensive account of the role of the imagination in Hegel's philosophy.

Many critics of Locke have worried that restricting knowledge to relationships among ideas would bar knowledge from extending to the outer reality which "corresponds to" these ideas. The question of how well Locke can answer such concerns leads us into a number of peculiar and intriguing passages on knowledge and the relationships between perception, reality, pain, and pleasure. This chapter examines what John Locke has to say about sensitive knowledge, to investigate several ways in which his remarks on this topic (...) can be reconciled with what he says elsewhere. It also talks about the idea of sensation, and assesses the merits of Locke's conception of sensitive knowledge both as a response to skepticism and as a part of the larger picture of human understanding painted in the Essay. Two passages in the Essay describe sensitive knowledge in some detail, both beginning with a description of the skeptical problem. (shrink)

Aristotelian naturalism (AN) holds that the norms governing the human will are special instances of a broader type of normativity that is also found in other living things: natural goodness and natural defect. Both critics and defenders of AN have tended to focus on the thorny issues that are specific to human beings. But some philosophers claim that AN faces other difficulties, arguing that its broader conception of natural normativity is incompatible with current biological science. This paper has three aims. (...) First, we consider a distinctive and nuanced critique of AN’s general understanding of natural normativity put forward by Tim Lewens. Second, after giving a defense of AN, we explore and evaluate Lewens’ proposed alternative view—Kantian projectivism about life forms. We present a problem for Kantian projectivism and suggest reasons for thinking that AN is, after all, the superior position. Finally, we clarify and explain how AN’s claims about life forms and our knowledge of them, relate to empirical observation and to contemporary biological science. (shrink)

This article examines the growing body of commemorative feminist work on intersectionality – the myriad journals and books that have marked intersectionality’s twentieth anniversary and celebrated the analytic’s field-defining status and cross-disciplinary circulation. I argue that this commemorative scholarship is marked by its own genre conventions, including the emergence of originalism, an investment in returning to the ‘inaugural’ intersectional texts – namely Crenshaw’s two articles (1989, 1991) – and assessing later feminist work on intersectionality by its fidelity to those texts. (...) The article reveals that intersectional originalism is its own practice of re-reading and re-interpretation that has its own complex temporal and racial politics, and which is animated by a desire to rescue intersectionality from critique in a moment in which identity politics are increasingly suspect. (shrink)

Previous research has identified different moral judgments in liberals and conservatives. While both care about harm/fairness (‘individualizing’ foundations), conservatives emphasize in-group/authority/purity (‘binding’ foundations) more than liberals. Thus, some argue that conservatives have a more complex morality. We suggest an alternative view—that consistent with conservatism as ‘motivated social cognition’, binding foundation activation satisfies psychological needs for social structure/security/certainty. Accordingly, we found that students who were dispositionally threat-sensitive showed stronger binding foundation activation, and that conservatives are more dispositionally threat-sensitive than liberals. We (...) also found that in a heightened threat situation liberals (especially social liberals) showed increased binding foundation activation. These results support the view that the binding foundations function differently in our moral cognition than the individualizing foundations. (shrink)

While the role of discourse connectives has long been acknowledged in argumentative frameworks, these approaches often take a coarse-grained approach to connectives, treating them as a unified group having similar effects on argumentation. Based on an empirical study of the straw man fallacy, we argue that a more fine-grained approach is needed to explain the role of each connective and illustrate their specificities. We first present an original corpus study detailing the main features of four causal connectives in French that (...) speakers routinely use to attribute meaning to another speaker, which is a key element of straw man fallacies. We then assess the influence of each of these connectives in a series of controlled experiments. Our results indicate each connective has different effects for the persuasiveness of straw man fallacies, and that these effects can be explained by differences in their semantic profile, as evidenced in our corpus study. Taken together, our results demonstrate that connectives are important for argumentation but should be analyzed individually, and that the study of fallacies should include a fine-grained analysis of the linguistic elements typically used in their formulation. (shrink)

Skepticism about the epistemic value of intuition in theoretical and philosophical inquiry fueled by the empirical discovery of irrational bias (e.g., the order effect) in people's judgments has recently been challenged by research suggesting that people can introspectively track intuitional instability. The two studies reported here build upon this, the first by demonstrating that people are able to introspectively track instability that was experimentally induced by introducing conflicting expert opinion about certain cases, and the second by demonstrating that it was (...) the presence of instability?not merely the presence of conflicting information?that resulted in changes in the relevant attitudinal states (i.e., confidence and belief strength). The paper closes with the suggestion that perhaps the best explanation for these (and other) findings may be that intuitional instability is not actually ?intuitional.? (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)

In humans, gender is both a concept and performance embodied by females and males, a corporeal technology that is produced dialectically. The process of gendering robots makes especially clear that gender belongs both to the order of the material body and to the social and discursive or semiotic systems within which bodies are embedded. This article explores and interrogates the gendering of humanoid robots manufactured today in Japan for employment in the home and workplace. Gender attribution is a process of (...) reality construction. Roboticists assign gender based on their common-sense assumptions about female and male sex and gender roles. Whereas the relationship between human bodies and genders is a contingent one, I argue that gendered robots render that relationship a necessary one by conflating bodies and genders. Humanoid robots are the vanguard of posthuman sexism, and are being developed within a reactionary rhetorical climate. (shrink)

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was met with condemnation from the European Union and the United States as an "unprovoked and unjustified military aggression" that undermines the liberal international order. However, some international relations scholars, such as John Mearsheimer, argue that Russia had genuine security concerns with regard to Ukraine and that the invasion was a response to the threat of NATO membership for Ukraine. Both liberal and realist perspectives on the invasion rely on the assumption of rational, (...) cost-benefit calculations by actors, but cultural factors and irreconcilable non-material interests may also be at play in shaping the actions and motivations of states. Understanding the cultural and national identity factors at play in the invasion of Ukraine is complex and difficult, but they cannot be ignored in attempting to understand and address the conflict. (shrink)

won a shopping spree on her birthday, but the 99-year-old Californian wanted nothing for herself. Instead, she used the opportunity to make well-stuffed holiday stockings for children in need, which she plans to distribute through her church. “I’m going to cry, I’m so happy,” she said last week as she filled her cart with toys and candy, along with essentials like toothbrushes and socks, at a 99-cent store in Beverly Hills. “I feel bad that I can’t do it for every (...) [poor child],” Goldstein said. “But it makes me feel very good that I am able to do what I can.”. (shrink)

A growing body of empirical research suggests that people's concrete‐case intuitions are unstable—i.e., vulnerable to biasing influences—with no way of anticipating the instability. This has led some to challenge the use of intuitions in philosophical practice. In this chapter, I consider responses to this challenge. One is that the empirical research cited has no bearing on the epistemic status of intuitions because it fails to actually test intuitions. While this is a worry worth taking seriously, there is another response available—namely, (...) that even if we grant that these studies successfully elicited intuitions, in the midst of the instability uncovered there was also a fair amount of stability. And an investigation into the features of unstable vs. stable judgments, and the contexts within which they are generated, suggests that the instability in question may not actually be intuitional. (shrink)

This article draws on the insight that people and communities have fundamental relationships with place. People are defined and shaped by place; and place is, in turn, defined and shaped by communi...

Since 1997 there has been a significant increase in the number and percentage of Kansas farmers who are women. Using Reskin and Roos’ model of “job queues and gender queues” I analyze changes in the agricultural industry in Kansas that resulted in more women becoming “principal farm operators” in the state. I find there are three changes largely responsible for women increasing their representation in the occupation: an increase in the demand for niche products, a decrease in the average farm (...) size, and greater societal acceptance of women as farmers. This study adds to the growing literature on women principal farm operators in developed countries, and is among the first to explore why women are becoming a larger percentage of the occupation in the United States. (shrink)

College cheating is prevalent, with rates ranging widely from 9 to 95%. Research has been exclusively conducted with enrolled college students. This study examined the prevalence of cheating in a sample of college alumni, who risk less in disclosing academic dishonesty than current students. A total of 273 alumni reported on their prevalence and perceived severity of 19 cheating behaviors. The vast majority of participants report having engaged in some form of cheating during their undergraduate career. The most common forms (...) of cheating were “copying from another student's assignment” and “allowing others to copy from your assignment.” More students reported cheating in classes for their major than other classes. Males and females cheated at the same rates in classes for their major, and males reported higher rates of cheating than females in nonmajor classes. Respondents reported that their top reasons for cheating were “lack of time” and “to help a friend.”. (shrink)

Our new issue brings unlikely philosophers into dialogue (for example, Adorno and Krishnamurti) for the first time as well as reconsiders some of the most important figures (for example, Nietzsche...

The focus of this paper will be to examine the implications that a “practical” approach to conceptual engineering might have for the “traditional” conception of philosophy as uncovering truths about phenomena of philosophical interest. In doing so, I will be building on the ideas of a figure that many take to be the first major philosopher to write on conceptual engineering: Rudolf Carnap. Though the current wave of interest in conceptual engineering goes back less than a decade, many conceptual engineers (...) have found precedent for their views in Carnap’s characterization of what he called “explication.” Interestingly, however, not nearly as much attention has been paid to another Carnapian thesis which seems to me to have deep relevance to methodological questions about conceptual engineering. I have in mind here the distinction between internal and external questions proposed in “Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology” (1950b) and the accompanying claim that external questions lack cognitive content and can be cogently approached only as a matter of pragmatic decision-making. This is the aspect of Carnap’s views upon which I propose to build. I'll first make the case that there is a suggestive similarity between Carnap’s claim that external questions are matters of pragmatic choice and the practical conceptual engineer’s claim that engineering success should be characterized in terms of suitability to a function or purpose. After that, I'll look at potential worries about the Carnapian distinction—including, e.g., the concern that it relies on the analytic/synthetic distinction. Finally, I will propose a somewhat modified and expanded version of the distinction and examine its consequences for the thesis that philosophy aims at discovering truths about phenomena of philosophical interest. (shrink)

_A comprehensive account of the role of the imagination in Hegel's philosophy._.

Inspired by early Confucian texts such as the Analects, Mencius, and Xunzi, defenders of Confucian role ethics argue that persons are constituted by their social roles and relationships. However, this has the puzzling implication that persons cannot survive changes in social roles and relationships. This paper proposes ways to understand this claim by appealing to the notions of essence, material constitution, and four-dimensionalism. In particular, it will be suggested that role ethicists should distinguish biological humans from persons and should say (...) either that (i) persons are materially constituted by biological humans, or that (ii) persons are four-dimensional objects that merely overlap with biological humans. There has thus far not been much contact between early Chinese philosophy and contemporary metaphysics in this vein. A secondary goal of this paper is to demonstrate that views in early Chinese philosophy can be examined within frameworks from contemporary metaphysics, and furthermore, that the results include novel theses not yet recognized in contemporary metaphysics. (shrink)

This chapter examines the best‐known intuitive counterexamples that have been pressed against Alvin Goldman's reliabilist theory of knowledge, and argues that something is wrong with them. It discusses the possibility that these intuitions might accord equally well with a more extreme externalist view, Williamson's “knowledge‐first” approach. Reliabilism has been examined largely in contrast to internalism, but its strengths and weaknesses arguably come into sharper focus if compare it with more radical forms of externalism as well. Goldman grants to the internalists (...) that Amanda and Mr. Truetemp are actually reliable in their belief formation, albeit reliable in a confusingly unfamiliar way. The chapter examines the consequences of taking the subject's acceptance as a causally necessary part of the formation of the beliefs one are supposed to evaluate. It argues that there is something strangely off‐target in BonJour's attempts to use a hypothetical process of acceptance as a diagnostic of the justification of unreflectively formed beliefs. (shrink)

Drawing on in-depth interviews, I analyze how teen fathers talk about the responsibility for having a baby at a young age. In addition to negotiating the stigma often associated with teen pregnancy, teen fathers also confront stereotypes that label them as selfish and uncaring. In telling their stories of “what happened,” they utilize three gendered discourses to deny responsibility for the pregnancy: the feminization of birth control, a discourse of uncontrollable male sexual desire, and love. Their narratives also reveal the (...) ways in which gendered norms can solve some problems while creating others. Aligning themselves with certain notions of masculinity can serve as a resource for denying responsibility for the pregnancy while also signifying their manhood, but these same discourses are also constraining in that they reinforce stereotypes of teen fathers as selfish, even predatory. While these approaches may allow teen fathers to claim masculine identities, they also stigmatize them as the wrong kind of men. In short, teen fathers are not only negotiating the potential stigma of teen pregnancy, they are also negotiating their identities as men. (shrink)