This paper criticizes Langton's speech act account of MacKinnon's claim about (the subordinating force of) pornography and offers a different account of how speech might enact harmful norms and thus constitute harm.

Human microbiome research makes causal connections between entire microbial communities and a wide array of traits that range from physiological diseases to psychological states. To evaluate these causal claims, we first examine a well-known single-microbe causal explanation: of Helicobacter pylori causing ulcers. This apparently straightforward causal explanation is not so simple, however. It does not achieve a key explanatory standard in microbiology, of Koch’s postulates, which rely on manipulations of single-microorganism cultures to infer causal relationships to disease. When Koch’s postulates (...) are framed by an interventionist causal framework, it is clearer what the H. pylori explanation achieves and where its explanatory strengths lie. After assessing this ‘simple’, single-microbe case, we apply the interventionist framework to two key areas of microbiome research, in which obesity and mental health states are purportedly explained by microbiomes. Despite the experimental data available, interventionist criteria for explanation show that many of the causal claims generated by microbiome research are weak or misleading. We focus on the stability, specificity and proportionality of proposed microbiome causal explanations, and evaluate how effectively these dimensions of causal explanation are achieved in some promising avenues of research. We suggest some conceptual and explanatory strategies to improve how causal claims about microbiomes are made. (shrink)

Human microbiome research makes causal connections between entire microbial communities and a wide array of traits that range from physiological diseases to psychological states. To evaluate these causal claims, we first examine a well-known single-microbe causal explanation: of Helicobacter pylori causing ulcers. This apparently straightforward causal explanation is not so simple, however. It does not achieve a key explanatory standard in microbiology, of Koch’s postulates, which rely on manipulations of single-microorganism cultures to infer causal relationships to disease. When Koch’s postulates (...) are framed by an interventionist causal framework, it is clearer what the H. pylori explanation achieves and where its explanatory strengths lie. After assessing this ‘simple’, single-microbe case, we apply the interventionist framework to two key areas of microbiome research, in which obesity and mental health states are purportedly explained by microbiomes. Despite the experimental data available, interventionist criteria for explanation show that many of the causal claims generated by microbiome research are weak or misleading. We focus on the stability, specificity and proportionality of proposed microbiome causal explanations, and evaluate how effectively these dimensions of causal explanation are achieved in some promising avenues of research. We suggest some conceptual and explanatory strategies to improve how causal claims about microbiomes are made. (shrink)

Janet Malek (91–102, 2019) argues that a “clinical ethics consultant’s religious worldview has no place in developing ethical recommendations or communicating about them with patients, surrogates, and clinicians.” She offers five types of arguments in support of this thesis: arguments from consensus, clarity, availability, consistency, and autonomy. This essay shows that there are serious problems for each of Malek’s arguments. None of them is sufficient to motivate her thesis. Thus, if it is true that the religious worldview of clinical ethics (...) consultants should play no role whatsoever in their work as consultants, this claim will need to be defended on some other ground. (shrink)

Achieving equity in international research is one of the pressing concerns of the twenty-first century. In this era of progressive globalization, there are many opportunities for the deliberate or accidental export of unethical research practices from high-income regions to low- and middle-income countries and emerging economies. The export of unethical practices, termed “ethics dumping,” may occur through all forms of research and can affect individuals, communities, countries, animals, and the environment. Ethics dumping may be the result of purposeful exploitation but (...) often arises from lack of awareness of good ethical and governance practice. This chapter describes the work of the TRUST project toward counteracting the practice of ethics dumping through the development of tools for the improvement of research governance structures. Multi-stakeholder consultation informs all of TRUST’s developments. Most importantly, this gives voice to marginalized vulnerable groups and indigenous people, who have been equal and active partners throughout the project. At the heart of the TRUST project is an ambitious aim to develop a Global Code of Conduct for Research in Resource-Poor Settings. Uniquely, the Code provides guidance across all research disciplines in clear, short statements, focusing on research collaborations that entail considerable imbalances of power, resources and knowledge and using a new framework based on the values of fairness, respect, care, and honesty. The code was recently adopted by the European Commission as a reference document for Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe. (shrink)

Clinical ethics consultants (CECs) are not moral authorities. Standardization of CECs’ professional role does not confer upon them moral authority. Certification of particular CECs does not confer upon them moral authority (nor does it reflect such authority). Or, so we will argue. This article offers a distinctly Orthodox Christian response to those who claim that CECs—or any other academically trained bioethicist—retain moral authority (i.e., an authority to know and recommend the right course of action). This article proceeds in three parts. (...) First, we discuss recent movements toward the certification of CECs in the United States, focusing primarily on proposals and programs put forth by the American Society for Humanities and Bioethics (ASBH). Second, we outline two secular reasons to be concerned about the relevant trends toward certification. For one thing, certification is currently being advanced via political dominance, rather than gaining authority by reliance on rigorous philosophical argument or reason. For another, the trends operate on the assumption that there exists a secular, content-full, canonical, morality. There is no such morality. Next, we argue that Orthodox Christians should resist the current trends toward certification of CECs. Specifically, we unpack ways in which the ASBH’s certification program (and those like it) conflict with Orthodox claims about moral authority and the moral life more generally. We conclude that Orthodox Christians should resist the current certification trends. (shrink)

This paper argues that linguistic oppression is coherent; speech can oppress. Moreover, even though oppression is a structural phenomenon, a single utterance can nevertheless be an act of oppression. This paper also argues that ordinary utterances can oppress. That is, speakers do not need to have and be exercising authority in order for their speech to be oppressive. Furthermore, ordinary speech can oppress even though the speakers do not intend to oppress, even though the hearers do not take it to (...) oppress, even though the oppressed do not hear it, and even though the oppressed are unaware of being oppressed. On the account offered here, linguistic oppression is sneaky, hidden, and surprisingly widespread. (shrink)

Although others have focused on Catharine MacKinnon's claim that pornography subordinates and silences women, I here focus on her claim that pornography constructs women's nature and that this construction is, in some sense, false. Since it is unclear how pornography, as speech, can construct facts and how constructed facts can nevertheless be false, MacKinnon's claim requires elucidation. Appealing to speech act theory, I introduce an analysis of the erroneous verdictive and use it to make sense of MacKinnon's constructionist claims. I (...) also show that the erroneous verdictive is of more general interest. (shrink)

‘@AP: Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured’. So read a tweet sent from a hacked Associated Press Twitter account @AP, which affected financial markets, wiping out $136.5 billion of the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index’s value. While the speed of the Associated Press hack crash event and the proprietary nature of the algorithms involved make it difficult to make causal claims about the relationship between social media and trading algorithms, we argue that it helps (...) us to critically examine the volatile connections between social media, financial markets, and third parties offering human and algorithmic analysis. By analyzing the commentaries of this event, we highlight two particular currents: one formed by computational processes that mine and analyze Twitter data, and the other being financial algorithms that make automated trades and steer the stock market. We build on sociology of finance together with media theory and focus on the work of Christian Marazzi, Gabriel Tarde and Tony Sampson to analyze the relationship between social media and financial markets. We argue that Twitter and social media are becoming more powerful forces, not just because they connect people or generate new modes of participation, but because they are connecting human communicative spaces to automated computational spaces in ways that are affectively contagious and highly volatile. (shrink)

This study investigated the relative contribution of perception/cognition and language-specific semantics in nonverbal categorization of spatial relations. English and Korean speakers completed a video-based similarity judgment task involving containment, support, tight fit, and loose fit. Both perception/cognition and language served as resources for categorization, and allocation between the two depended on the target relation and the features contrasted in the choices. Whereas perceptual/cognitive salience for containment and tight-fit features guided categorization in many contexts, language-specific semantics influenced categorization where the two (...) features competed for similarity judgment and when the target relation was tight support, a domain where spatial relations are perceptually diverse. In the latter contexts, each group categorized more in line with semantics of their language, that is, containment/support for English and tight/loose fit for Korean. We conclude that language guides spatial categorization when perception/cognition alone is not sufficient. In this way, language is an integral part of our cognitive domain of space. (shrink)

Legal judgment writing mobilises a process of story-telling, drawing on existing judicial discourses, precedents and practices to create a narrative relevant to the specific case that is articulated by the presiding judge. In the Feminist Judgments projects feminist scholars and activists have sought to challenge and reinterpret legal judgments that have disadvantaged, discriminated against or denied women’s experiences. This paper reflects on the process of writing as a feminist judge in the Australian Project, in an intimate homicide case, R v (...) Middendorp. Drawing on the work of Judith Butler on intelligibility, iterability and the communality of violence and vulnerability, this article argues that feminist judgments necessarily require some uncomfortable compromises with unjust gendered institutions. While ‘donning the robes’ may be an uncomfortable process, a feminist re-articulation of the law’s carceral power serves to unsettle and challenge some aspects of gendered oppression, even though it cannot unsettle the operation of the institution. The article concludes that effective feminist interventions by members of the judiciary may require donning robes that are not entirely comfortable in order to persuade and advocate for change. (shrink)

Silencing is a speech-related harm. We here focus on one particular account of silencing offered by Jennifer Hornsby and Rae Langton. According to this account, silencing is systematically generated, illocutionary-communicative failure. We here raise an apparent challenge to that account. In particular, we offer an example—the drowning case—that meets these conditions of silencing but does not intuitively seem to be an instance of it. First, we explore several conditions one might add to the Hornsby-Langton account, but we argue that none (...) are satisfactory. Then, we further explore the systematicity condition, which is insufficiently characterized in the current literature. Although we explore several promising ways to further characterize this condition, we ultimately conclude that more work needs to be done. Consequently, because this systematicity condition is under-specified, the Hornsby-Langton account of silencing is incomplete. (shrink)

We examined whether variations in contextual diversity, spacing, and retrieval practice influenced how well adults learned new words from reading experience. Eye movements were recorded as adults read novel words embedded in sentences. In the learning phase, unfamiliar words were presented either in the same sentence repeated four times (same context) or in four different sentences (diverse context). Spacing was manipulated by presenting the sentences under distributed or non‐distributed practice. After learning, half of the participants were asked to retrieve the (...) new words, and half had an extra exposure to the new words. Although words experienced in diverse contexts were acquired more slowly during learning, they enjoyed a greater benefit of learning at immediate posttest. Distributed practice also slowed learning, but no benefit was observed at posttest. Although participants who had an extra exposure showed the greatest learning benefit overall, learning also benefited from retrieval opportunity, when words were experienced in diverse contexts. These findings demonstrate that variation in the content and structure of the learning environment impacts on word learning via reading. (shrink)

This commentary analyzes the extent to which the incommensurability problem can be resolved through the proposed alternative method of integrative experiment design. We suggest that, although one aspect of incommensurability is successfully addressed (dimensional incommensurability), the proposed design space method does not yet alleviate another major source of discontinuity, which we call conceptual incommensurability.

Increasingly, scholarship on moral injury is expanding to include non‐military personnel, and considers a violation of bodily integrity—for example, of civilian women who are targeted for sexual violence in warfare—as a particularly egregious harm. Moral injury discourse also extends beyond the individual to the social context in which moral injury arises, its relational effects, and its utterly devastating impact on personhood, an impact frequently characterized as a “soul wound.” The intersection of genocidal rape—both as an individual and a group harm—with (...) religion, as facilitating moral injury and restorative “soul repair,” exemplifies these trends. Although moral injury research rarely addresses the detrimental influences of religion or references the “soul” with precision, the discourse of moral injury does provide an opportunity for exploring the relationship between personhood and agency from the perspectives of those who inflict and are subjected to harm. (shrink)

We often say one thing and mean another. This kind of indirection (concerning the content conveyed) is both ubiquitous and widely recognized. Other forms of indirection, however, are less common and less discussed. For example, we can sometimes address one person with the primary intention of being overheard by someone else. And, sometimes speakers say something simply in order to make it possible for someone else to say that they said it. Politicians generating sounds bites for the media are an (...) example of this kind of indirection. In this paper, I will explore—via a series of fictionalized examples—these less discussed forms of indirection and consider how such forms of indirection can be duplicitous and misleading. (shrink)

The proportion of the world’s population living in urban areas is increasing rapidly, with the vast majority of this growth in developing countries. As growing populations in urban areas demand greater food supplies, coupled with a rise in rural to urban migration and the need to create livelihood options, there has been an increase in urban agriculture worldwide. Urban agriculture is commonly discussed as a sustainable solution for dealing with gaps in the local food system, and proponents often highlight the (...) many social, environmental, and economic benefits. We argue that the sustainability of urban agriculture should not be assumed. There is a need for research to take a bottom-up approach, exploring the influence that city-level conditions have on livelihood decisions by farmers and how this shapes the practice of urban agriculture. This paper uses a case study for an in-depth look at urban agriculture in Delhi, India to understand from the farmers’ perspective how urban agriculture is practiced and what factors influence farmers’ livelihood decisions. Using a team-based, multi-method Rapid Assessment Process, data were collected through preliminary key informant interviews, field observations, semi-structured interviews with urban farmers, and geographic information systems mapping. This research provides an in-depth description of market-oriented urban agriculture in a developing country, explores how farmers’ livelihood decisions are embedded in the urban context, and discusses the potential of urban agriculture as a sustainable city-system. (shrink)

Chemical visualizations and models are special kinds of situated, inductive arguments. In this paper, I examine several historical case studies—an archive of images from museums, special collections, and popular magazines—as examples of emergent practices of physical modeling as theoretical play which became the basis for molecular biology and structural chemistry. Specifically, I trace a legacy of visualization tools that starts with Archibald Scott Cooper and Friedrich Kekulé in the late 1800s, crystallizes as material manipulatives in Kekulé’s student Jacobus Henricus Van’t (...) Hoff and his folded paper “toys,” is legitimized in the California lab of Linus Pauling, and is glorified in the popular imaginary with James Watson and Francis Crick’s model of DNA. My tracing then follows several threads into contemporary modeling practices. I ultimately argue that modeling play, originally outside of the boundary of deductive, positivist science, is now an accepted mode of inductive reasoning in these related chemical fields. (shrink)

Many approaches to addressing labour injustices—shortfalls from minimally decent wages and working conditions— focus on how governments should orient themselves toward other states in which such phenomena take place, or to the firms that are involved with such practices. But of course the question of how to regard such labour practices must also be faced by individuals, and individual consumers of the goods that are produced through these practices in particular. Consumers have become increasingly aware of their connections to complex (...) global production processes that often involve such injustice. For example, activist campaigns have exposed wrongful harm in factories producing clothes, shoes and mobile phones and farms producing coffee, tea and cocoa. These campaigns have promoted the message to ordinary people that by becoming connected to unjust labour practices through their purchasing behaviour, they acquire special additional moral responsibilities to contribute to reforming such practices, or to address the hardships suffered by the victims of the wrongdoing that result from them. The moral significance of the responsibilities of individual consumers has not, however, received much analytical scrutiny. Why should we believe that there are such responsibilities? And if there are such responsibilities, what are their grounds? How stringent are the responsibilities triggered by such connections? Finally, what are the implications of such responsibilities—the courses of action that they prescribe or proscribe? The activists who assert special ethical responsibilities for consumers have promoted many particular courses of action, but have seldom articulated the grounds of these responsibilities or explained why they should be taken to be stringent. And moral and political theorists have not devoted much focussed attention to this issue. For the consumer who is concerned to act in a morally permissible way, this presents a troubling practical challenge regarding the goods they may (or may not) purchase, and the moral relevance of their consumption choices more generally. While we cannot address all of these pressing questions in this chapter, we try to make some headway with them by discussing two general approaches to the question of how individuals should conceive of their responsibilities with respect to such practices, taking as our starting point the recent work of the late Iris Marion Young—the most sustained treatment of this topic by a prominent political theorist. In a series of influential articles and a posthumously published book, Young articulated an approach to conceiving of individual responsibilities to address labour injustices—the social connection model—at home and abroad. She also argued that an alternative model—the liability model—which she claimed had dominated discourse on this topic, suffered from very serious flaws. In a critical vein, we will argue that Young’s arguments against the liability model are not convincing, and that the alternative she proposes is itself vulnerable to some damaging objections. We also find, however, that the liability model would need to be extended in various ways to provide an adequate account of individual responsibility to address shortfalls from minimally decent wages and working conditions, and we begin the task of sketching an extended framework. (shrink)

Although primary source work is a major component of undergraduate history degrees in many countries, the topic of how best to support this work has been relatively unexplored. This article addresses the pedagogical support of primary source work by reviewing relevant literature to identify the challenges undergraduates face in interpreting sources, and examining how in two courses carefully articulated course design and supportive teaching activities assisted students to meet these challenges. This fine-grained examination of the courses is framed within a (...) socio-cultural account of learning. The findings show how a skilful drawing of students into the interpretive/discursive practices of source analysis was associated with an epistemological reframing of historical knowledge and dialogical forms of teaching that helped the students to take forward a dialectical engagement with sources. The benefits of an ‘integrated’ approach to source work that fosters students’ affective and intellectual engagement with historical interpretive practices are highlighted. (shrink)

This article explores the idea that there is a spectrum of individuals who feel compelled to dwell in the past, either due to psychological or social conditions. I analyze both conditions respectively by critically examining two cases: post-traumatic stress disorder and racialized oppression. I propose that individuals with PTSD can feel psychologically compelled to dwell in the past in a dually negative sense: the individual lives in the past but also broods on it, causing them to feel “stuck” in the (...) past. This kind of “dwelling” can cause individuals to suffer disruptions to their sense of self and intersubjectivity. After exploring the psychological case of dwelling in the past, I explore the social sense in which individuals can dwell in the past due to oppressive social structures by examining the case of racialized oppression. The case of racialization is philosophically stimulating because of its intersubjective dimensions—it subverts the idea that dwelling in the past is simply a psychological phenomenon by capturing that others can help or hinder us with maintaining a sense of self and future-directed intentionality. By putting the phenomenological work of Al-Saji into conversation with recent phenomenological research on incarceration, I propose that racialization can be similarly disruptive to one’s sense of self and intersubjectivity. The proposed account is suggestive that traumatic and oppressive experiences may amplify and compound each other in ways not yet well elucidated in the literature. If this account is taken to be persuasive, it is indicative that both psychological and social conditions mediate one’s temporality and well-being. (shrink)

To increase donations of nutritious food, Ontario introduced a tax credit for farmers who donate agricultural products to food banks in 2013. This research seeks to investigate the role of Ontario’s Food Donation Tax Credit for Farmers in addressing both food loss and waste and food insecurity through a case study of fresh produce rescue in Windsor-Essex, Ontario. This research also documents the challenges associated with rescuing fresh produce from farms, as well as alternatives to donating. Interviews with food banks, (...) producers and key informants revealed that perceptions of the tax credit, and the credit’s ability to address FLW and food insecurity, contrasted greatly with the initial perceptions of the policymakers who created the tax credit. In particular, the legislators did not anticipate the logistical challenges associated with incentivizing this type of donation, nor the limitations of a donation-based intervention to provide food insecure Ontarians with access to fresh, nutritious food. (shrink)

Changes in government policy over the last two decades have seen the traditional goals of criminal justice, namely prosecution and punishment, being replaced by an emphasis on prevention, fear reduction, security and harm reduction. During this time domestic abuse has gained a place on the political agenda, which has resulted in legislative initiatives in the form of civil protection orders across the U.K. which primarily focus on prevention but have also more recently begun to rely on the traditional criminal justice (...) responses should they fail to prevent further abuse. Drawing on international evaluations and a recent study conducted in Scotland (the Scottish study), the article examines whether legislation in the form of civil protection orders has the effect of curtailing the actions of abusers and if not, what occurs when the traditional criminal justice response comes into play. The strengths of civil protection orders and some explanations for the weaknesses of these orders are considered alongside the question of whether there is any value in women continuing to engage with the law in response to domestic abuse. (shrink)

A commentary on “What's Not Being Shared in Shared Decision‐Making?” from the July‐August 2013 issue.

We are less optimistic than Madole & Harden that family-based genome-wide association studies (GWASs) will lead to significant second-generation causal knowledge. Despite bearing some similarities, family-based GWASs and randomised controlled trials (RCTs) are not identical. Most RCTs assess a relatively homogenous causal stimulus as a treatment, whereas GWASs assess highly heterogeneous causal stimuli. Thus, GWAS results will not translate so easily into second-generation causal knowledge.

The recent financial crisis and Great Recession have been compared to other historical moments during which significant shifts in regimes of market governance have occurred. Here, we engage with the pieces that follow in this special section of Politics & Society as we consider three dimensions along which global market governance might be transformed in the direction of greater democracy. First, given that problems of market governance often extend across national boundaries, enhanced intergovernmental coordination could play a key role in (...) promoting the public interest. Second, broader country representation would help to ensure that the interests of different national publics are more fully addressed. Third, wider social participation would expand the definition of the public interest at both the national and global levels, allowing a range of social groups to enhance the quality of their representation by governments and IGOs, and to engage more directly in the project of market governance. (shrink)

This article investigates dilemmas in the archiving and sharing of qualitative data in educational research, critically engaging with practices and debates from across the social sciences. Ethical, epistemological and methodological challenges are examined in reference to open access agendas, the politics of knowledge production, and transformations in research practices in the era of data management. We first consider practical and interpretive decisions in archiving qualitative data, then map current policy and regulatory frameworks governing research data management, taking Australia as a (...) case-study. We argue that governance and protocols for data sharing have not attended sufficiently to the distinctive ethical and methodological dimensions and knowledge claims of qualitative research. Instead, approaches associated with quantitative data are extrapolated in ways which construct an imaginary of decontextualised data, abstracted from the conditions of its production. We further argue for more critical attention to the double-edged affordances and ambivalent effects of data sharing and openness and to how data archives are imagined, constructed and curated. This includes greater acknowledgement of the affective and temporal dynamics involved in data archiving, understanding them as practices of (re)invention that also curate ‘archives for the future’ and help to foster an historicising imaginary in educational research. (shrink)

A textbook anthology of important works of political thought revealing the development of ideas from the 12th to the 15th centuries. It includes new translations of both well-known and ignored writers, and an introductory overview.

The specialist field of intellectual disability nursing has been subjected to a number of changes since the move towards deinstitutionalisation from the 1970s. Government policies sought to change the nature of the disability workforce from what was labelled as a medicalised approach, towards a more socially oriented model of support. Decades on however, many nurses who specialise in the care of people with intellectual disability are still employed. In Australia, the advent of the National Disability Insurance Scheme offers an apt (...) moment to reflect upon these decades of specialised nursing care as the context of this nursing care will continue to evolve. A review of the published literature was conducted to explore what has shaped the field in the past and how this might inform the future of this speciality area under new policy and service contexts. People with intellectual disability have specific health and support needs that require a specialised workforce. Specialist nurses continue to be needed for people with intellectual disability. (shrink)