Whether to treat autism as exculpatory in any given circumstance appears to be influenced both by models of autism and by theories of moral responsibility. This article looks at one particular combination of theories: autism as theory of mind challenges and moral responsibility as requiring appropriate experience of the reactive attitudes. In pursuing this particular combination of ideas, we do not intend to endorse them. Our goal is, instead, to explore the implications of this combination of especially prominent ideas about (...) autism and about moral responsibility. These implications can be quite serious and practical for autists and those who interact directly with autists, as well as for broader communities as they attend to the fair, compassionate, and respectful treatment of increasing numbers of autistic adults. We find that these theories point to a limited range of situations in which autists should not be blamed for transgressive actions for which neurotypical individuals should be blamed. We build on what others have written on these issues by bringing in a recent cognitive model of the role theory of mind plays in empathy, by discussing the social implications of the theoretical findings, and by raising questions about the compatibility of reactive attitude theories of moral responsibility with the neurodiversity approach to autism. (shrink)

As a neurodevelopmental condition that affects cognitive functioning, autism has been used as a test case for theories of moral responsibility. Most of the relevant literature focuses on autism’s impact on theory of mind and empathy. Here I examine aspects of autism related to executive function. I apply an account of how we might fail to be reasons responsive to argue that autism can increase the frequency of excuses for transgressive behavior, but will rarely make anyone completely exempt from moral (...) responsibility in general. On this account, although excuses may apply more often to autists than to others, the excuses that apply to autists are just the same excuses that can apply to anyone. (shrink)

This paper examines two questions. The first is what it would mean for schools to be communities. This question is pursued by examining four metaphors for community: families, congregations, guilds, and democratic polities. Three models of school communities are then sketched. The second question is whether schools that are communities are inherently illiberal. The paper distinguishes between a liberal interpretation of schools as communities, where schools are viewed as limited-purpose free associations, and a communitarian interpretation where community and polity are (...) not adequately distinguished. I argue that, within a framework of liberal pluralism, schools can be communities without being illiberal. (shrink)

Abraham Flexner delivered his eponymous report 100 years ago. The Report had an immediate and profound impact on medical education in North America that resonated for several decades afterwards. Its impact was less immediate in the United Kingdom, but over time the major principles have been assimilated (GMC 1993). However, which—if any—of these principles are still relevant today? No doubt there will be debate about this, but in my view, Flexner's principle of academic and scientific excellence as one of the (...) most fundamental underpinnings of medical education is even more relevant today than it was in 1910. To illustrate this, I shall highlight two aspects of current medical education in the United Kingdom: the .. (shrink)

Agricultural research raises fundamental ethical and value questions going beyond those in other fields both because of its public funding and because its results have significant impacts on habitats and other species. Questions about the sustainability of modern agriculture, which are shared with other sectors, require us to examine alternative visions and structures. These can be seen to range from status quo preserving ideologies to change-oriented utopias. It is argued that at the national level current ideologies—which include positivistic approaches and (...) belief in the neutrality of technology—mask real structural and policy choices as well as their ethical and value implications. At the international level, the export of fossil-fuel based modes of agriculture to the developing countries raises additional structural, policy, value, and ethical issues. (shrink)

By appealing to Paul Ricoeur’s view of interpretation as the dialectical process of understanding through explanation, Kenneth A. Reynhout contributes to the growing field of religion and science by developing an alternative understanding of interdisciplinary theology that is fundamentally hermeneutical.

I argue that a certain initially appealing Fregean conception of our shared semantic competence in our shared language cannot be made good. In particular, I show that we must reject two fundamental Fregean principles‐what I call Frege's Adequacy Condition and what I call Frege's Cognitive Constraint on Reference Determination. Frege's adequacy condition says that in an adequate semantic theory, sentence meanings must have the same fineness of grain as attitude contents. The Cognitive Constraint on Reference Determination says that in an (...) adequate semantic theory mechanisms of reference determination will fix routes of epistemic access to referents and will mediate one‐sided recognition judgments about referents. I argue against Frege's adequacy condition that if meanings are sliced as finely as it requires there will be too many meanings to go around. I argue against the cognitive constraint on reference determination that even in an adequate theory of reference, mechanisms of reference determination must be sharply distinguished from routes of epistemic access. If so, we have little reason to expect an adequate theory of reference determination to directly illuminate Frege's cognitive puzzles or be sufficient to explain the basis of our one‐sided recognition judgments. (shrink)

Definitions of health and disease are of more than theoretical interest. Understanding what it means to be healthy has implications for choices in medical treatment, for ethically sound informed consent, and for accurate assessment of policies or programs. This deeper understanding can help us create more effective public policy for health and medicine. It is notable that such contentious legal initiatives as the Americans with Disability Act and the Patients' Bill of Rights fail to define adequately the medical terms on (...) which their effectiveness depends. In Ethics and the Metaphysics of Medicine, Kenneth Richman develops an "embedded instrumentalist" theory of health and applies it to practical problems in health care and medicine, addressing topics that range from the philosophy of science to knee surgery."Embedded instrumentalist" theories hold that health is a match between one's goals and one's ability to reach those goals, and that the relevant goals may vary from individual to individual. This captures the normative implications of the term health while avoiding problematic relativism. Richman's embedded instrumentalism differs from other theories of health in drawing a distinction between the health of individuals as biological organisms and the health of individuals as moral agents. This distinction illuminates many difficulties in patient-provider communication and helps us understand conflicts between promoting health and promoting ethically permissible behavior. After exploring, expanding, and defending this theory in the first part of the book, Richman examines its ethical implications, discussing such concerns as the connection between medical beneficence and respect for autonomy, patient-provider communication, living wills, and clinical education. (shrink)

The Eurozone crisis has triggered profound political and economic changes across the debtor member states. This article shows how the crisis and the imposition of austerity policies by the Troika have forced Spain to pursue internal devaluation as a means of economic adjustment through the reduction of real wages, increased pressure for liberalizing labor market institutions, and given Spain’s conservative government the opportunity and cover to pursue radical neoliberal labor law reforms. Spain’s 2012 labor law reforms went well beyond external (...) demands. The crisis and the Troika’s policy demands generated mass unemployment, devastated Spain’s Socialist Party, and created the enabling conditions for economic reforms. But domestic partisan considerations led the conservative People’s Party to commandeer the crisis to weaken unions as the electoral and organizational base of the center-left opposition. The PP channeled reform into an attack on labor that decisively shifted power to employers. As organized labor relations were reduced to concession bargaining, real wages have plummeted for the vast majority of Spaniards, even as mass unemployment and economic stagnation persist. Analysis suggests the emergence of a winner-take-all economy that will have lasting consequences for the Eurozone and the European Union. (shrink)

In the article Privacy and Health Practices in the Digital Age, the authors describe current privacy challenges for digital health data and review the theoretical framework on privacy in the contex...

Firms may find competitive adjustment difficult because they are hamstrung by rigid labor market rules. However, such difficulties may also be caused by conflicts between strategic choices in the management of human capital and the opportunities and limitations created by a given regulatory framework. This latter possibility has been almost totally ignored in the debate regarding the urgency and content of labor market reforms in countries whose labor market institutions have been labeled as “rigid” by international experts. This article uses (...) the results of qualitative interviews with Spanish employers to suggest that strategic choices may be far more important in determining the consequences of labor market institutions than is generally recognized. I show that these choices are often the result of beliefs about how labor market institutions should work. These findings suggest that supposedly “neutral” calls for greater efficiency in labor market institutions are really arguments about the relative appropriateness of different expectations regarding how firms should pursue adjustment, expectations that are directly related both to the relative balance of power between employers and workers and to the structure of their relationship. In other words, the phrase “politics of labor market reform” should be understood to refer not only to the political consequences of reforms but also to the inherently political nature of the reforms themselves. (shrink)

This paper responds to Goodwin Liu's argument in Volume II of this Journal that a pedagogy must be supported by an appropriate theory of knowledge, and that the epistemology which best supports the service-learning pedagogy is anti-foundational pragmatism. The author shows that Liu's characterization of the pragmatist model of knowledge does not avoid the dualism which he sees as a fault of the traditional epistemology. After suggesting a remedy to this, the author then extends Liu's argument by indicating the limits (...) to what the appropriately modified epistemological support will sanction. These limits are shown to be more restrictive than Liu suggests. The result is an improved philosophical justification of the service-learning pedagogy and some suggestions for evaluating proposed curriculum. (shrink)

This paper discusses the role of religious speech in the public square and the common school. It argues for more openness to political theology than many liberals are willing to grant and for an educational strategy of engagement over one of avoidance. The paper argues that the exclusion of religious debate from the public square has dysfunctional consequences. It discusses Rawls’s more recent views on public reason and claims that, while they are not altogether adequate, they are consistent with engagement. (...) The outcome of these arguments is applied to three ‘hot button’ issues in US education: creationism, an issue of gay rights, and teaching the Bible in schools. (shrink)

This essay some first steps toward the naturalization of what I call rational intentionality or alternatively type II intentionality. By rational or type II intentionality, I mean that full combination of rational powers and content-bearing states that is paradigmatically enjoyed by mature intact human beings. The problem I set myself is to determine the extent to which the only currently extant approach to the naturalization of the intentional that has the singular virtue of not being a non-starter can be aggregated (...) up into an account of rational intentionality. I have in mind a broadly defined family of accounts whose main members are the indicator/information-theoretic approach of Dretske (1988), the asymmetric dependence theory of Jerry Fodor (1987, 1990, 1994) and the teleo-semantics of Ruth Millikan (1984, 1993). Somewhat inaccurately, I will call this family of approaches the information-theoretic family. To be sure, there is only a rough family resemblance among the members of the information-theoretic family. Indeed, several intense quarrels divide the members of that family one from another, but the precise outcome of those internecine struggles is not directly relevant to the aims of this essay. ² Taken collectively, the information-theoretic family yields a compelling picture of the place of at least a crude form of intentionality -- what I call frog-like or type I intentionality -- in the natural order. Though frog-like or type I intentionality is, I think, a genuine species of intentionality, it may subsist in the absence of rational powers. It is that species of intentionality enjoyed by irritable creatures who, following Brandom (1994). (shrink)

The primary psychological process leading aggressive children to grow into dysfunctional adults is a defensive mindset, which encompasses a pattern of deviant social information processing steps, including hypervigilance to threat; hostile attributional biases; psychophysiological reactivity, experience of rage and testosterone release (in males); aggressive problem-solving styles; aggressogenic decision-making biases; and deficient behavioral skills. These processes are acquired in childhood and predict adult maladjustment outcomes, including incarceration and premature death. The antecedents of defensive mindset lie in early childhood experiences of trauma (...) and threat. The Fast Track (FT) intervention was designed to improve social competence in aggressive children. A randomized controlled trial demonstrated that FT is effective in preventing externalizing psychopathology; the primary mediating factor is the reduction of defensive mindset processes. This Element concludes with insights that defensive mindset might also explain dysfunction in other realms, including school culture, parenting, marriage, the workplace, intergroup relationships, politics, and international relations. (shrink)

Over the past two decades we have seen dramatic improvements in the efficacy, safety and availibity of antiretroviral therapy (ART). In the USA and Europe, life expectancy in people living with HIV disease approaches that of the HIV-uninfected.1 Even in regions hardest hit by the HIV epidemic, effective HIV therapy has reversed more than a decade of HIV-related decreased survival. Despite these advances in ART, motivations to pursue HIV cure remain strong due to the toxicity, adherence challenges, cost and access (...) to care issues associated with HIV therapy, as well as the persistant stigma associated with having HIV infection. Further and renewed motivation comes from a single case of HIV cure after stem cell transplantation for acute leukaemia. Given the tremendous improvements in ART, it is important to assess how effective and safe an HIV cure would need to be in order to be a viable option compared to ART. We argue that this should be done prior to the availability of a cure to provide realistic goals for researchers and policy makers. One methodology that has been increasingly popular over the past decade is the use of mathematical simulation modelling to assess the clinical impact, cost-effectiveness and clinical role of different treatment strategies in HIV disease, as well as in medicine broadly.2 Such models provide a framework and approach for using the best available data at any point in time, and assessing the potential impact of emerging innovations. Further, unlike individual trials focused on a single endpoint, these models can integrate multiple data sources to project beyond the timeline or outcomes of individual studies and project long-term outcomes in many domains, including virologic, immunologic, clinical and cost.3 Mathematical models have particular value in their ability to assess uncertainty in clinical care. Examples include parameters determined in …. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Orientation Teacher Ethics and the Law The NEA Code of Ethics Teaching with Integrity Citizenship, Civic Norms, and Moral Education Conclusion.

We glide easily from thought and talk about worldly objects to thought and talk about the contents of our beliefs about such worldly objects all the time. Smith ask Jones about the whereabouts of their pet cat and on the basis of Jones’s assertion that the cat is on the mat, Smith comes to believe that the cat is on the mat. Black in turn may ascribe to Smith the belief that the cat is on the mat. Such transitions from (...) thought and talk about worldly objects to thought and talk about states of mind are so familiar to us as to seem second nature. But there is a long-standing philosophical tradition, originating with Frege, but endorsed by philosophers with otherwise varying philosophical outlooks, which makes the very possibility of such transitions puzzling. That tradition assumes that in making at least certain attitude ascriptions – so-called de dicto or “notionally sensitive” ascriptions -- speakers refer to, describe, quantify over, or somehow pragmatically implicate the notions, representations, or modes of presentations that plausibly figure as constituents of our mental contents -- either to the exclusion of the worldly objects themselves or in addition to those objects. Such attitude ascriptions are widely taken to be the primary or unmarked case of an attitude ascription. But it is seldom acknowledged that twin facts that on this approach worldly objects will relate to the representational items that supposedly serve as ingredients of thought content in a one-many fashion and there is no automatic way “back-up” from worldly objects to modes of presentation thereof together generate a mystery about how possibly we are able execute transitions from thought and talk about worldly objects to thought and talk about representational states of mind. It is argued in this essay that the way around this mystery is to see that de re, rather than de dicto ascriptions are the unmarked form of attitude ascription and that our representations of mental contents are parasitic on our representations of worldly objects. That is, we talk about the contents of our states of mind not by adverting, in the first instance, to talk about peculiarly mental or representational entities like notions or modes of presentations, but primarily by talking about worldly entities themselves. That is, to attribute to another the belief that the cat is on the mat, one need not refer to modes of presentations, or their ilk, of said cat or said mat, but only to the relevant cat and the relevant mat. (shrink)

Kenneth Strike’s essay on pluralism, personal identity, and freedom of conscience, takes up the concept of identity, and contrasts cultural and religious pluralism. He argues that the issues of affiliational obligation and recognition are often different in these two types of pluralism, and that religious groups are often asking for something very different from cultural groups. Strike makes a case for a more fluid conception of the idea of identity and against its essentialist form; he holds, e.g. that some (...) of his affiliations are stronger than others and more tied to his sense of a larger self, but it is questionable, he argues, whether any of these affiliations could not be re-evaluated without loss of the larger idea of the self. Strike does allow that members of groups more oppressed than his might certainly rally around the attributes that they hold in common, and he is sympathetic to this strategic function of identity. Nevertheless, he wants to hold onto the individualized and phenomenological conception of identity: identity is whatever the agent feels it to be. (shrink)

In the ‘Justice Cascade’, Kathryn Sikkink argues that “foreign prosecutions and international tribunals can be cost-effective alternatives to military intervention.” Yet, the successes of the Special Court for Sierra Leone—in prosecuting former Liberian President Charles Taylor and in imposing accountability on the leaders of all armed groups regardless of political alignment—were dependent on a commitment by Western powers and international and regional organizations to a military victory against the rebels in Sierra Leone and coercive regime change in Liberia. The lesson (...) that should be drawn from this case—which parallels that of other international tribunals set up during ongoing violence—is that the prospects for international criminal justice during civil wars are dependent on the political strategies adopted by outsiders to address the conflict and that taking criminal accountability seriously requires an interventionist rather than a consent-based approach to conflict resolution. (shrink)

This paper discusses the role of religious speech in the public square and the common school. It argues for more openness to political theology than many liberals are willing to grant and for an educational strategy of engagement over one of avoidance. The paper argues that the exclusion of religious debate from the public square has dysfunctional consequences. It discusses Rawls’s more recent views on public reason and claims that, while they are not altogether adequate, they are consistent with engagement. (...) The outcome of these arguments is applied to three ‘hot button’ issues in US education: creationism, an issue of gay rights, and teaching the Bible in schools. (shrink)

This paper examines two questions. The first is what it would mean for schools to be communities. This question is pursued by examining four metaphors for community: families, congregations, guilds, and democratic polities. Three models of school communities are then sketched. The second question is whether schools that are communities are inherently illiberal. The paper distinguishes between a liberal interpretation of schools as communities, where schools are viewed as limited-purpose free associations, and a communitarian interpretation where community and polity are (...) not adequately distinguished. I argue that, within a framework of liberal pluralism, schools can be communities without being illiberal. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Abstract What is Conceptual Relativism? The Kantian Roots of Conceptual Relativism Epistemology or Metaphysics? Conceptual Relativism and Truth The Scheme and Content Relativized? Davidson Against the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme Empirical Sources: Conceptual Relativism in Linguistics and Psychology References.