Background: Nurses face ethical issues and experience moral distress in their everyday work. A nursing ethics champion program was developed at a hospital in the United States. Methods: As part of a quality improvement project, pre- and post-training surveys were developed to assess whether the program was feasible and sustainable, enhanced nurse confidence in recognizing and addressing ethical issues and moral distress, and increased nurse knowledge of institutional resources for addressing the same. Qualitative and quantitative analyses were performed. Results: Thirteen (...) nurses from both the critical care and medical/surgical settings participated in the program. The program proved feasible. Attrition after the educational sessions raised concerns about sustainability. Survey results suggest an association between participating in the program’s educational sessions and increased nurse confidence in recognizing and addressing ethical issues and moral distress, as well as identifying institutional resources that can assist nurses with the same. Discussion: Opportunities for future nursing ethics champion programs include increasing the interactivity and duration of educational sessions, making programs multidisciplinary, and creating materials for nurses to more easily share with colleagues. It would be valuable for future research to measure the impact of nursing ethics champion programs on nursing turnover. Implications: A nursing ethics champion program has the potential to help nurses feel better equipped to navigate ethical issues and moral distress in their everyday work. (shrink)

In a highly influential work, List and Pettit (Group Agency: The Possibility, Design, and Status of Corporate Agents, Oxford University Press, 2011) draw upon the theory of judgement aggregation to offer an argument for the existence of nonreductive group agents; they also suggest that nonreductive group agency is a widespread phenomenon. In this paper, we argue for the following two claims. First, that the axioms they consider cannot naturally be interpreted as either descriptive characterisations or normative constraints upon group judgements, (...) in general. This makes it unclear how the List and Pettit argument is to apply to real world group behaviour. Second, by examining empirical data about how group judgements are made by a powerful international regulatory board, we show how each of the List and Pettit axioms can be violated in ways which are straightforwardly explicable at the level of the individual. This suggests that group agency may best be understood as a pluralistic phenomenon, where close inspection of the dynamics of intragroup deliberation can reveal that what prima facie appears to be a nonreductive group agent is, in fact, reducible. (shrink)

The predominant view of moral virtue can be traced back to Aristotle. He believed that moral virtue must involve intellectual excellence. To have moral virtue one must have practical wisdom - the ability to deliberate well and to see what is morally relevant in a given context. Julia Driver challenges this classical theory of virtue, arguing that it fails to take into account virtues which do seem to involve ignorance or epistemic defect. Some 'virtues of ignorance' are counterexamples to (...) accounts of virtue which hold that moral virtue must involve practical wisdom. Modesty, for example, is generally considered to be a virtue even though the modest person may be making an inaccurate assessment of his or her accomplishments. Driver argues that we should abandon the highly intellectualist view of virtue and instead adopt a consequentialist perspective which holds that virtue is simply a character trait which systematically produces good consequences. (shrink)

Consequentialism is the view that the rightness or wrongness of actions depend solely on their consequences. It is one of the most influential, and controversial, of all ethical theories. In this book, Julia Driver introduces and critically assesses consequentialism in all its forms. After a brief historical introduction to the problem, Driver examines utilitarianism, and the arguments of its most famous exponents, John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham, and explains the fundamental questions underlying utilitarian theory: what value is to (...) be specified and how it is to be maximized. Driver also discusses indirect forms of consequentialism, the important theories of motive consequentialism and virtue consequentialism, and explains why the distinction between subjective and objective consequentialism is so important. Including helpful features such as a glossary, chapter summaries, and annotated further reading at the end of each chapter, Consequentialism is ideal for students seeking an authoritative and clearly explained survey of this important problem. (shrink)

The emerging field of synthetic biology aims to engineer novel biological entities. The envisioned future bio-based economy builds largely on “cell factories”: organisms that have been metabolically engineered to sustainably produce substances for human ends. In this paper, we argue that synthetic biology’s goal of creating efficient production vessels for industrial applications implies a set of ontological assumptions according to which living organisms are machines. Traditionally, a machine is understood as a technological, isolated and controllable production unit consisting of parts. (...) But modified organisms, or hybrids, require us to think beyond the machine paradigm and its associated dichotomies between artificial and natural, organisms and artefacts. We ask: How may we conceptualise hybrids beyond limiting ontological categories? Our main claim is that the hybrids created by synthetic biology should be considered not as machines but as metabolic systems. We shall show how the philosophical account of metabolism can inform an ontology of hybrids that moves beyond what we call the “machine ontology”, considering that metabolism enables thinking beyond the dominant dichotomies and allows us to understand and design lifeforms in a bio-based economy. Thus, the aim of this paper is twofold: first, to develop the philosophical ontology of hybrids, and second, to move synthetic biology beyond the problematically limiting view of hybrids. (shrink)

Leibniz puts forward an intriguing argument against the moral permissibility of chattel slavery in a text from 1703. This argument has three independent layers or sub-arguments. The first is that slavery violates natural rights. The second is that moral laws such as the principles of equity and piety oppose slavery, or at least severely limit the permissible actions toward slaves. The third and final layer is that slavery can at most be justified if the slave is permanently incapable of conducting (...) herself well. Yet, it is very doubtful that any actual human beings satisfy that description. This paper analyzes and evaluates Leibniz’s argument, which scholars have so far largely neglected. Even though some elements of the argument are not original to Leibniz, it is of considerable importance for the scholarship of early modern philosophy: it sheds light on Leibniz’s views not only on the moral status of slavery itself, but also on moral rights and obligations more generally. (shrink)

Leibniz portrays the most fundamental entities in his mature ontology in at least three different ways. In some places, he describes them as mind-like, immaterial substances that perceive and strive. Elsewhere, he presents them as hylomorphic compounds. In yet other passages, he characterizes them in terms of primitive and derivative forces. Interpreters often assume that the first description is the most accurate. In contrast, I will argue that the third characterization is more accurate than the other two. If that is (...) correct, Leibniz’s monadological metaphysics is even more radical than it initially seems: his ontology is best understood not as a substance-mode ontology but as a force ontology. At the metaphysical ground floor, we do not find substances that possess force; instead, we just find forces. Interpreting Leibniz as a force ontologist has far-reaching consequences. For instance, it requires us to reconsider the status of time in Leibniz’s system and to revise our understanding of appetitions and perceptions. (shrink)

National legislation, as well as arguments of experts, in Germany and Israel represent opposite regulatory approaches and positions in bioethical debates concerning end-of-life care. This study analyzes how these positions are mirrored in the attitudes of laypeople and influenced by the religious views and personal experiences of those affected. We qualitatively analyzed eight focus groups in Germany and Israel in which laypeople were asked to discuss similar scenarios involving the withholding or withdrawing of treatment, physician-assisted suicide, and euthanasia. In both (...) countries, respect for patient autonomy and patients’ wishes to die with dignity found broad consent. Laypeople argued in favor of accepting such wishes when they were put down in an advance directive. Laypeople in non-religious groups in both countries argued on the basis of a respect for autonomy for the possibility of euthanasia in severe cases but, at the same time, cautioned against its possible misuse. National contrast was apparent in the moral reasoning of lay respondents concerning the distinction between withholding and withdrawing treatment. The modern religious laypeople in Israel, especially, argued strongly, on the basis of the halakhic tradition, against allowing the withdrawal of treatment in accord with a patient’s wish. We conclude by discussing the emergent notion of shared responsibility and views of professional responsibility, which we connect through relevant cultural themes such as religion and national culture. (shrink)

My aim in this chapter is to explain how and why all human cognition depends on the body for Leibniz. I will show that there are three types of dependence: (a) the body is needed in order to supply materials, or content, for thinking; (b) the body is needed in order to give us the opportunity for the discovery of innate ideas; and (c) the body is needed in order to provide sensory notions as vehicles of thought. The third type (...) is intimately connected to the faculty of the imagination, which supplies the sensory vehicles of thought. Hence, the paper will also examine Leibniz’s account of that faculty and its operations. Before doing any of this, however, I will address the elephant in the room: Leibniz’s claim that mind and body do not interact at all, metaphysically speaking. The correspondence between mind and body is merely a matter of what he calls ‘pre-established harmony’. At first glance, this Leibnizian doctrine may suggest a radical disembodiment of all human cognition. Yet, I will argue that this is not the case and that, quite to the contrary, pre-established harmony requires that cognition is embodied in one important sense. (shrink)

The present study evaluated the relationship between job satisfaction and unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB), directly as well as indirectly, through organizational commitment. Multidimensional constructs were utilized for job satisfaction and organizational commitment to provide a granular understanding of how these constructs can motivate employees to engage in UPB, which can threaten organizations' success and diminish the public's confidence in organizations. In order to test these relationships, a diverse sample of 617 participants was recruited through the online survey distribution platform Amazon (...) Mechanical Turk (MTurk®) to test the theoretical model using structural equation modeling (SEM). The results indicated that identification, affiliation, and exchange commitment served as intervening variables between growth satisfaction and UPB, while no significant indirect effect of internal work motivation on UPB was found. Implications for research and practice are discussed. (shrink)

The present study evaluated the relationship between job satisfaction and unethical pro-organizational behavior, directly as well as indirectly, through organizational commitment. Multidimensional constructs were utilized for job satisfaction and organizational commitment to provide a granular understanding of how these constructs can motivate employees to engage in UPB, which can threaten organizations' success and diminish the public's confidence in organizations. In order to test these relationships, a diverse sample of 617 participants was recruited through the online survey distribution platform Amazon Mechanical (...) Turk to test the theoretical model using structural equation modeling. The results indicated that identification, affiliation, and exchange commitment served as intervening variables between growth satisfaction and UPB, while no significant indirect effect of internal work motivation on UPB was found. Implications for research and practice are discussed. (shrink)

The sexual assaults reported on New Year’s Eve 2015 in Cologne posed major challenges to feminists struggling with the tensions and entanglements of feminism, imperialism, racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, sexism and nationalism. The aim of the present article is to examine these tensions through an analysis of the pressures framing the positionality of discourses. It examines how feminists, framed by the larger Western debates about the ‘failure of multiculturalism’ and the global Islamophobia underpinning the ‘war on terror’ era, engaged with the (...) moral panic which pervaded the mediatization of the assaults. It argues that feminist initiatives like #ausnahmslos’, which situated anti-racism at the core of any engagement for gender equality, were a reaction to the femonationalist approach to the events pervading the media and the political debate, and attempts to counter arguments which associated the sexual assaults with cultural practices imported through immigration and which demanded stricter immigration laws and state surveillance of Muslims. Then, this article addresses the challenges posed by some feminists from Germany and from North African countries and/or with a Muslim background, who argued that the analysis of Cologne should address the religious-cultural background of the suspects. The article argues that the difficulty in engaging with their contributions in Germany derives from internal pressures, namely the risk of having their arguments co-opted by Islamophobic and anti-immigration agendas. By pointing at the role of positionality in defining priorities in a globalized world, this article addresses the constraints and potentials in developing transnational approaches to sexual violence. (shrink)

According to Richard Swinburne, the principle of simplicity is of great importance to theory choice scenarios and theoretical changes in the sciences. In particular, he holds that the theory choice criterion of fit with background evidence can be reduced to the criteria of simplicity and of yielding the data. We will, however, rebut this reduction thesis and show that three central aspects of theoretical change (confirming power of empirical data, reliability of experimental methods, and truth of new theoretical proposals) cannot (...) be adequately reconstructed if simplicity is regarded as a key criterion of theory choice. (shrink)

In this paper, I draw from Kantian and Husserlian reflections on the self-awareness of thinking for a contribution to the cognitive phenomenology debate. In particular, I draw from Kant’s conceptions of inner sense and apperception, and from Husserl’s notions of lived experience and self-awareness for an inquiry into the nature of our awareness of our own cognitive activity. With particular consideration of activities of attention, I develop what I take to be Kant’s and Husserl’s “agentive” and “proprietary” accounts. These, I (...) believe, augment contemporary discussions in interesting ways and further bolster the case for cognitive phenomenology. Moreover, the historical comparison highlights a number of assumptions made today that were not yet part of the framework at the time of Kant or at the time of Husserl. This helps reflect on the legitimacy of these assumptions. (shrink)

Leibniz sometimes tells us that there are only two fundamental types of mental states: perceptions and appetitions, that is, mental representations and desire-like states. While this may sound like an overly sparse ontology of mental states, the philosophy of mind that Leibniz builds from these elements is surprisingly nuanced and powerful. What makes this possible is that he distinguishes different sub-types of these mental states. Leibniz famously differentiates between unconscious and conscious perceptions, which gives him an advantage over philosophers like (...) Descartes, for whom all perceptions are conscious. He also distinguishes between reflective and unreflective perceptions, as well as between degrees of perceptual distinctness. Leibniz furthermore follows scholastic thinkers like Thomas Aquinas in distinguishing different types of appetitions. Uncovering what those are and what roles they play in Leibniz’s philosophy of mind are the central aims of this chapter. (shrink)

Moral rationalists and sentimentalists traditionally disagree on at least two counts, namely regarding the source of moral knowledge or moral judgements and regarding the source of moral motivation. I will argue that even though Leibniz's moral epistemology is very much in line with that of mainstream moral rationalists, his account of moral motivation is better characterized as sentimentalist. Just like Hume, Leibniz denies that there is a necessary connection between knowing that something is right and the motivation to act accordingly. (...) Instead, he believes that certain affections are necessary for moral motivation. On my interpretation, then, Leibniz is an externalist about judgements and motivation: he is committed to a gap between the judgement that something is morally right and the motivation to act accordingly. As a matter of fact, I will argue that there are two gaps. The first and less controversial one has to do with the fact that Leibniz reconciles his psychological egoism with ethical altruis.. (shrink)

Leibniz’s correspondence with Antoine Arnauld is one of the clearest and most comprehensive expressions of Leibniz’s philosophy in the so-called middle period. This chapter will explore the philosophical content of this correspondence. It will concentrate on four of the most central topics: (a) complete concepts and contingency, (b) substance and body, (c) causation, and (d) the special status of rational souls in God’s plan.

Recently, political models which employ lottery-selection instead of ballot voting have been proposed. Proponents argue that such lottocratic models can improve the representation of the population and reduce undemocratic influences. In this paper, I argue that these proposals also satisfy the egalitarian requirement of democracy. I claim that having an equal chance to be selected by lot is equally egalitarian as having an equally weighed vote for two reasons: first, having a chance to be selected by lot satisfies the requirement (...) for political justice better than electoral democracy, and second, it provides citizens with equal political influence and not merely equal impact. (shrink)

Children’s ability to understand irony is believed to be acquired late compared to other pragmatic skills. To explore this assertion, this article presents a review of four decades of research, to determine the age at which children actually do become capable of understanding ironic utterances, and what the crucial influencing factors are. As this systematic examination of the state of research shows, children do indeed seem to gain an understanding of irony later than other forms of non-literal language. In seeking (...) an explanation for this finding, this article discusses the methodological orientation of previous research. It might be that the predominant use of offline methods, especially metalinguistic judgment tasks, paints a somewhat distorted picture of children’s irony comprehension. The article therefore argues for the use of eye-tracking, and a re-examination of the thesis of late acquisition of irony comprehension in children in the near future. (shrink)

There is an ongoing expert debate with regard to financial incentives in order to increase organ supply. However, there is a lacuna of empirical studies on whether citizens would actually support financial incentives for organ donation.

The politics of precarity have emerged on the contemporary scene of critical theory with great social force in recent years. This paper looks at the risks and obstacles of positing precariousness and vulnerability as the basis of a universal ethics while also arguing for the socially transformative potential of such a model. More broadly, it considers the crucial question of what stands in the way of human relation and ethical life in an age of neoliberalism and biopolitics, and posits an (...) ethics of resemblance grounded in the commonality of flesh and in the at once singular and universal experience of loss. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Women and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Germany ed. by Corey W. DyckJulia BorcherdingCorey W. Dyck, editor. Women and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 272. Hardback, $85.00.In more ways than one, this volume constitutes an important contribution to ongoing efforts to reconfigure and enrich our existing philosophical canon and to question the narratives that have led to its current shape. To start, while there is (...) a growing amount of research dedicated to recovering the contributions of women to early modern philosophy, much of this work focuses on the seventeenth century, and geographically centers on England, France, and Italy. By turning the spotlight on eighteenth-century Germany, this volume broadens the scope of these efforts in an important way. Further, with the historiography of this period still shaped by a long-standing dismissive treatment of post-Leibnizian German philosophy and by the long shadow cast by the success of Kant's Critical philosophy, which eclipsed many of the thinkers opposed to it, challenges to its traditional narratives seem especially important. The editor's earlier collection (coedited with Falk Wunderlich) on Kant and his German contemporaries already succeeded in mounting such a challenge by showing that German philosophy throughout the eighteenth century in fact presents us with an extraordinarily rich tableau of intellectual life (Kant and His German Contemporaries. Vol. 1: Logic, Mind, Epistemology, Science and Ethics [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018]).The present volume stands as a further valuable contribution to relativizing the still dominant narrative of German philosophy as the story of a select few brilliant minds. It successfully dispenses not only with the idea that those minds were few, but also with the equally persistent one that they were exclusively male. Already in the nineteenth century, we find historians such as Karl Joël explicitly casting the new age of German philosophy inaugurated by Kant as its "masculine epoch"—an image undoubtedly furthered by its main protagonist, who cast philosophical acumen in decidedly male terms when he observed that "[a] woman who has a head full of Greek, like Madame Dacier, or one who engages in debate about the intricacies of mechanics, like the Marquise du Châtelet, might just as well have a beard; for that expresses in a more recognizable form the profundity for which she strives" (Karl Joël, Die Frauen in der Philosophie [Hamburg, 1896], 48; Immanuel Kant, Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen [Königsberg, 1764], translation in Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989], 146; both cited in Eileen O'Neill, "Disappearing Ink: Early Modern Women Philosophers and Their Fate in History," in Philosophy in a Feminist [End Page 154] Voice: Critiques and Reconstructions, ed. Janet A. Kourany [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997], 17–62). Yet as the contributions to this volume forcefully illustrate, women in the period did—in spite of the numerous severe social, religious, and political obstacles they faced—in fact manage to gain access to its intellectual sphere, and actively shaped its philosophical landscape.While the papers collected here are of high quality throughout, they do vary in their approach. Many chapters, especially in the earlier parts of the volume, investigate female figures as philosophers in their own right, and carve out their self-standing contributions to prominent philosophical movements and debates. Focusing on Sophie of Hanover's correspondence with Leibniz, Christian Leduc's chapter begins by examining her metaphysical views and argues, against standing interpretations, that her main aim is to defend a version of the doctrine of physical influence as an account of mind-body interaction while rejecting metaphysical commitments regarding the nature of the soul in favor of a more agnostic, Lockean empiricist approach. In chapter 3, Stefanie Buchenau shows how women engaging with Wolffian Schulphilosophie began to view themselves as more than teachers and translators and started to claim the title of philosophers. Using the example of Johanna Charlotte Unzer, Buchenau convincingly argues that despite the "feminine," aesthetic garb of her thought, Unzer in fact offers a serious critique and revision of the Wolffian model of... (shrink)

In this commentary we describe the interplay between 1) contemporary popular and professional understandings of “risk” and “normality” in health and healthcare, and 2) the promotion by state and market forces of individual self-regulation of health. We draw upon the work of critical theorists who have described the relationship between risk, fear, and the notion of “normal” in health discourse to argue that these factors act, primarily via the popular media, to shape the discourse on, and overuse of, diagnostic tests (...) in Canada. (shrink)

Leibniz is almost unique among early modern philosophers in giving final causation a central place in his metaphysical system. All changes in created substances, according to Leibniz, have final causes, that is, occur for the sake of some end. There is, however, no consensus among commentators about the details of Leibniz's views on final causation. The least perfect types of changes that created substances undergo are especially puzzling because those changes seem radically different from paradigmatic instances of final causation. Building (...) on my more general discussion of efficient and final causation in ‘Leibniz on Causation – Part 1,’ I will examine and assess some of the rival interpretations of Leibniz's account of final causation. (shrink)

Metaphysics, traditionally conceived, has often been defined as the inquiry into what lies beyond or is independent of experience, but which nonetheless pertains to the fundamental structure of reality. Thus understood, metaphysics produces claims that are not empirically testable. The 20th century logical empiricists famously—and ferociously—criticised metaphysics on these grounds as being devoid of cognitive content. Despite logical empiricism’s seminal role in the genesis and propagation of the analytic tradition in academic philosophy, metaphysics has made a remarkable comeback during the (...) second half of the 20th century. Contemporary analytic metaphysicians unabashedly refer to intuitions, conceptual analysis, and other genuinely philosophical, speculative methods in their search for insights into the fundamental nature of reality. Or so it seems. (shrink)

This article points out the significance of the materiality of written language for the understanding of literature and aspects of poiesis. For this purpose it is necessary to consider the interaction of materiality and mediality from a general point of view. Reading E.T.A. Hoffmann’s novel »Lebens-Ansichten des Katers Murr« (The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr), this paper explores how literature reacts to technical changes in the production of books and subsequent juridical debates. I read the novel as an (...) intertextual play in reaction to an article by Johann Gottlieb Fichte on literary property (»Beweis der Unrechtmäßigkeit des Büchernachdrucks«). In trying to work through Fichte’s proposals concerning materiality and mediality, Hoffmann generates a new style of writing. (shrink)

Philip Kitcher’s account of scientific realism in 'The Advancement of Science' (AS) differs from his account in 'Science, Truth and Democracy' (STD). We demonstrate that (1) contrary to appearance, Kitcher in AS proposes a so-called Kantian realism that is accompanied not by a correspondence theory, but by a hybrid conception of truth. (2) Also, we point out that Kitcher does not pertain to the “promiscuous realism” proposed in STD stringently, but falls back on his Kantian realism of AS at points. (...) Here, we question Kitcher’s claim that his promiscuous-realist conception stems initially from commonsensical be-liefs. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Biomedical and philosophical traditions postulate the experience of pain either as quantifiable or as sociocultural phenomena. This critical assessment offers a close reading of Lara Parker’s Vagina Problems: Endometriosis, Painful Sex, and Other Taboo Topics (2020) and Abby Norman’s Ask Me About My Uterus: A Quest to Make Doctors Believe in Women’s Pain (2018), analyzing the authors’ use of language as a tool to comprehend and communicate pain. Norman’s and Parker’s memoirs narrate the lived experience of endometriosis, a condition diagnosed (...) almost exclusively in women and characterized by chronic pain. The essay looks at how metaphors are employed in living and narrating endometriosis in medical, social, and cultural settings that are highly skeptical of women’s pain and trace a shift in the use of pain metaphors towards an acceptance of the pain experience, which is conceptualized as empowering by the climax of the narrative. (shrink)

Preface to Journal of General Philosophy of Science, issue 2: Meta2physics. New Perspectives on Analytic and Naturalised Metaphysics of Science.