The essay presents Giorgio Agamben’s theory of the paradigm in the first chapter of The Signature of All Things. On Method in order to better understand the well-known use of references to and qoutations from literature in philosophical reasoning and theory. Agamben’s uncommented reference to two short stanzas from Wallace Stevens’ poem “Description without Place”, which he consider the best definition of a paradigmatic ontology, is briefly commented. A gathering of three ‘literary singularities’ from Friedrich Hölderlin/Sophocles, James Joyce, and Samuel (...) Beckett in a suggested paradigm on time is presented as an example of a solely literary way of philosophical thinking. (shrink)

THE WORK OF ART AS COUNTER-VALUE: ASGER JORN'S CRITIQUE OF MARX'S ECONOMISK VALUE-THINKING IN CAPITALAs one of the rather significant and influential Modernist and Avant-garde artists of the 20th century Asger Jorn is internationally well-known and admired. Lesser known – or lesser accepted in the reception of his work – is the fact that his many critical writings on art, philosophy, and politics as well as his archives and political activism are integrated and important parts of his entire artwork. For (...) the first time in the reception of Jorn’s critical thinking the essay examines his Situationist criticism of Marx’ concepts of value, as outlined in the commodity analysis in Capital vol. 1, by regarding it a crucial example of his understanding of counter value as the only or most prominent quality of the artwork as such. (shrink)

Limiting intensive care is paid increasing attention. In the echoing call for physicians’ ethical self‐restriction, it is easily overlooked, however, that ethics needs a critical epistemological analysis before it can suffice as an emergency brake to futile treatment. This analysis is provided by the present essay. The authors suggest that the difficulties of resolving moral dilemmas related to limiting intensive care may just be due to the unclarified epistemological status of moral claims. Even if normative ethics cannot prescribe right decisions, (...) but only draw conclusions from defined premises, the premises may or may not be true. Their intertwined descriptive and normative evidence is endorsed in an academic and political discourse. There will necessarily be various demands for rationality in prudent decisions between physicians, their patients and society. These demands are formulated dialogically through critical questions and justified answers. A good argument is the convincing one that, finally and ideally, leads to the absence of open objections. Thus, in the end the rightness of a given decision does not depend on axiomatic moral principles, but is comparative and conditional, as it is given in an omnilateral argument. Neither is it the democratic process of shared decision making that we should evaluate, but rather the argumentative state itself, when we judge the morality of health politics and clinical practice. (shrink)

_English summary_ This article investigates the impact of moral statistics on suicide in Denmark in the 19. century. Championed as a new European social science, moral statistics was able to reveal statistical regularity on social and moral issues – such as suicide. Statistics proved, firstly, that Denmark experienced one of the highest suicide rates in Europe. Secondly, as demonstrated in 1846 by the Danish physician C. J. Kayser, statistics uncovered that suicides over time occurred regularly in the case of frequency, (...) gender distribution, method of self-killing etc.. This new knowledge encouraged Danish statisticians and physicians to look for societal causes rather than the former theological focus on individual sin. The statistical representations of suicide paved the way for two different interpretations of suicide in the second half of the 19. century, one of which linked suicide rates to the evils of modernisation and secularisation of society, emphasizing drunkenness, alcoholism, and moral decline as causes of suicide. Another, less prevalent, explanation stressed the social and economic inequality of industrialisation as the cause of rising suicide rates. ‘The moral explanation’ prevailed and the official statistical reports as well as newspaper articles was clearly affected by the idea that the rising suicide rates of the 19. century reflected an attack on core values of bourgeois society; moral, sobriety and religion. This way suicide statistics was embedded in a broader social representation reflecting a fear of breakdown of traditional values in modern society. (shrink)

The World Health Organization has declared a world pandemic due to COVID-19. In response, most affected countries have enacted measures involving compulsory confinement and restrictions on free movement, which likely influence citizens' lifestyles. This study investigates changes in health risk behaviors with duration of confinement. An online cross-sectional survey served to collect data about the Spanish adult population regarding health behaviors during the first 3 weeks of confinement. A large sample of participants from all Spanish regions completed the survey. Binomial (...) logistic regressions adjusted for socioeconomic characteristics, body mass index, previous HRBs, and confinement context were conducted to investigate associations between the number of weeks confined and a set of six HRBs. When adjusted, we observed significantly lower odds of experiencing a higher number of HRBs than before confinement overall in a time-dependent fashion: OR 0.63; 95% CI: 0.49–0.81 for the second and OR 0.47; 95% CI: 0.36–0.61 for the third week of confinement. These results were equally consistent in all age and gender subgroup analyses. The present study indicates that changes toward a higher number of HRBs than before confinement, as well as the prevalence of each HRB except screen exposure, decreased during the first 3 weeks of COVID-19 confinement, and thus the Spanish adult population may have adapted to the new situational context by gradually improving their health behaviors. (shrink)

BackgroundDecision-making in out-of-hospital cardiac arrest should ideally include clinical and ethical factors. Little is known about the extent of ethical considerations and their influence on prehospital resuscitation. We aimed to determine the transparency in medical records regarding decision-making in prehospital resuscitation with a specific focus on ethically relevant information and consideration in resuscitation providers’ documentation.MethodsThis was a Danish nationwide retrospective observational study of out-of-hospital cardiac arrests from 2016 through 2018. After an initial screening using broadly defined inclusion criteria, two experienced (...) philosophers performed a qualitative content analysis of the included medical records according to a preliminary codebook. We identified ethically relevant content in free-text fields and categorised the information according to Beauchamp and Childress’ four basic bioethical principles: autonomy, non-maleficence, beneficence, and justice. ResultsOf 16,495 medical records, we identified 759 (4.6%) with potentially relevant information; 710 records (4.3%) contained ethically relevant information, whereas 49 did not. In general, the documentation was vague and unclear. We identified four kinds of ethically relevant information: patients’ wishes and perspectives on life; relatives’ wishes and perspectives on patients’ life; healthcare professionals’ opinions and perspectives on resuscitation; and do-not-resuscitate orders. We identified some “best practice” examples that included all perspectives of decision-making. ConclusionsThere is sparse and unclear evidence on ethically relevant information in the medical records documenting resuscitation after out-of-hospital cardiac arrests. However, the “best practice” examples show that providing sufficient documentation of decision-making is, in fact, feasible. To ensure transparency surrounding prehospital decisions in cardiac arrests, we believe that it is necessary to ensure more systematic documentation of decision-making in prehospital resuscitation. (shrink)

In a reply to my recent paper “The Cost of Denying Intrinsic Value in Nature,” Rut Vinterkvist raises an important objection to my claim that environmentalists must ascribe intrinsic value to some natural entities to consistently defend the protectionist views I believe many of them have. To defend this claim, I provided three hypothetical cases, involving threatened natural entities, designed to show that only an intrinsic value of these respective entities could explain a reason to protect them. My claim was (...) that, even in these cases, environmentalists would generally find the natural entities in question protection-worthy. Against this claim, Vinterkvist argues that environmentalists can consistently opt for protection of these entities without ascribing any intrinsic value to them, the idea being that we can argue for protection of the entities on the basis that other people care for them (for whatever reasons, if any). We should protect them, not for their own sake, but for the sake of those who care for them. In this response, I explain why I believe her suggestion—challenging to my argument as it is—does not provide a proper option for environmentalists who want to argue for protection in these and similar cases. (shrink)

Ludwig Klages’ famous essay from 1913 is here translated into Danish for the first time. According to Klages, the planet-wide destruction of nature is a disastrous outcome of a runaway mad civilisation focused on progress. Famously, he finds the root of the madness to be an intricate entanglement of science, technology, capitalism and Christianity. Ultimately, these are all aspects of what he calls Spirit – an alienating and life-disruptive power that tears man away from its original being interwoven with living (...) nature. Its benign adversary, Soul, is characterised by caring for life. This elementary or cosmic love is linked to Soul’s way of recognizing reality through a dynamical flow of sensual pictures. On the other hand, Spirit’s drive to destroy and kill is related to its way of fixating knowledge of the world by means of concepts. Klages diagnoses modern ‘civilisation’ as an era of downfall of the Soul. The devastating events the following summer of 1914 may be seen as a consequence of the bad cultural standing. An anthropological ecology, spirit-dominated and with civilised man’s interest as its core value, is not enough to save nature. Only a deep ecology, where Soul dominates Spirit, can do so, moving the value focus away from man to Earth. (shrink)

Environmentalists care about nature. Often, they reason and act as if they consider nature to be valuable for its own sake, i.e., to have non-instrumental value. Yet, there is a rather widespread reluctance, even among environmentalists, to explicitly ascribe such value to nature. One important explanation of this is probably the thought that it would be mysterious in one way or another if nature possessed such value. In addition, Bryan Norton’s influential convergence hypothesis states that, from a practical point of (...) view, it makes no or little difference whether we ascribe non-instrumental value to nature, given the depth and variety of instrumental value that it possesses. In this paper we provide a counterfactual argument, applying to anyone who genuinely cares about nature, for endorsing non-instrumental value in it. Even if we accept, for the sake of argument, something like the convergence hypothesis, relying on nature’s instrumental value for preservational purposes is risky business for environmentalists. We also briefly consider the mysteriousness-objection to non-instrumental value in nature. We show that with respect to most accounts of non-instrumental value, there is nothing particularly mysterious about nature possessing such value. (shrink)

Researchers have recently provided proof of concept for uterus transplantation, giving rise to a discussion about priority setting. This article analyses whether absolute uterine‐factor infertility (AUFI), the main indication for uterus transplantation, gives rise to a healthcare need and the extent to which such a need places justified claims on public funding in a needs‐based welfare system. It is argued that, regardless of the concept of health to which one subscribes, there is a healthcare need for uterus transplantation in women (...) with AUFI. The provision of alternative ways of addressing this need, such as surrogacy and adoption, reduces its severity. Hence, where such alternatives are publicly funded, uterus transplantation is unlikely to become cost‐effective. However, where surrogacy and adoption are not publicly funded, uterus transplantation should be given a similar priority level to other assisted reproductive technologies. In these circumstances, public funding for uterus transplants may well be justified, particularly in well‐funded healthcare system with relatively generous cost‐effectiveness thresholds. (shrink)

The subject-matter of this essay is the moral status of nature. This subject is dealt with in terms of normative reasons. The main question is if there are direct normative reasons to care for nature in addition to the numerous indirect normative reasons that there are for doing so. Roughly, if there is some such reason, and that reason applies to any moral agent, then nature has direct moral status as I use the phrase. I develop the notions of direct (...) normative reason and direct moral status in detail and identify and discuss the two main types of theory according to which nature has direct moral status: analogy-based nature-considerism and non-analogy-based nature-considerism. I argue for the plausibility of a particular version of the latter, but against the plausibility of any version of the former. The theory that is representative of AN claims that nature has direct moral status in virtue of possessing interests. Proponents of this theory fail to show that nature has interests of the kind that they reasonably want to ascribe to it, and that interests of this kind are morally significant. In contrast to AN, NN comes in a variety of different forms. I elaborate a version of NN according to which there are direct normative reasons to care for nature in virtue of its unique complexity, and its indispensability. I argue that even if these reasons should turn out not to apply to any moral agent, they are still genuine direct normative reasons: there is nothing irrational or misdirected about them. Finally, I show how the question of whether there are direct normative reasons to care for nature is relevant to private and political decision-making concerning nature. This is exemplified with a case from the Swedish mountain region. (shrink)

The subject-matter of this essay is the moral status of nature. This subject is dealt with in terms of normative reasons. The main question is if there are direct normative reasons to care for nature in addition to the numerous indirect normative reasons that there are for doing so. Roughly, if there is some such reason, and that reason applies to any moral agent, then nature has direct moral status as I use the phrase. I develop the notions of direct (...) normative reason and direct moral status in detail and identify and discuss the two main types of theory according to which nature has direct moral status: analogy-based nature-considerism (AN) and non-analogy-based nature-considerism (NN). I argue for the plausibility of a particular version of the latter, but against the plausibility of any version of the former. -/- The theory that is representative of AN claims that nature has direct moral status in virtue of possessing interests. Proponents of this theory fail to show (i) that nature has interests of the kind that they reasonably want to ascribe to it, and (ii) that interests of this kind are morally significant. In contrast to AN, NN comes in a variety of different forms. I elaborate a version of NN according to which there are direct normative reasons to care for nature in virtue of (i) its unique complexity, and (ii) its indispensability (to all moral agents). I argue that even if these reasons should turn out not to apply to any moral agent, they are still genuine direct normative reasons: there is nothing irrational or misdirected about them. -/- Finally, I show how the question of whether there are direct normative reasons to care for nature is relevant to private and political decision-making concerning nature. This is exemplified with a case from the Swedish mountain region. (shrink)

Dealing with ethical issues is a central aspect of many professions. Consequently, ethics is taught to diverse student groups in universities and colleges, alongside philosophy students. In this paper, we address the question of how ethics is best taught to such “non-philosophy” student groups. The standard way of introducing ethics to non-philosophy students is to present them with a set of moral theories. We refer to this approach as the “smorgasbord approach”, due to the impression it is likely to make (...) on non-philosophy students approaching ethics as an academic discipline for the first time. This approach invites the assumption that adopting an ethical position is mainly a matter of choosing from this smorgasbord of different theories. We argue that this approach is problematic for several reasons, both theoretical and practical, and we suggest a methodsbased approach – focusing on methods for moral reasoning – as a more fruitful alternative. The main purpose of this paper is to explain and defend this methods-based approach to teaching ethics to non-philosophy students. In so doing, we also consider and meet some expected objections to this approach. (shrink)

En uppsättning yrkesetiska principer sätter ramar och ger riktlinjer för lärares verksamhet, men ofta är sådana principer i sig själva inte tillräckliga för att ge den vägledning som krävs för att lösa konkreta etiska problem. För det krävs också att läraren besitter färdigheter relevanta för att hantera etiska frågor, i synnerhet en förmåga till etiskt resonerande.

In this paper, we investigate the use of event models for automated planning. Event models are the action defining structures used to define a semantics for dynamic epistemic logic. Using event models, two issues in planning can be addressed: Partial observability of the environment and knowledge. In planning, partial observability gives rise to an uncertainty about the world. For single-agent domains, this uncertainty can come from incomplete knowledge of the starting situation and from the nondeterminism of actions. In multi-agent domains, (...) an additional uncertainty arises from the fact that other agents can act in the world, causing changes that are not instigated by the agent itself. For an agent to successfully construct and execute plans in an uncertain environment, the most widely used formalism in the literature on automated planning is “belief states”: sets of different alternatives for the current state of the world. Epistemic logic is a significantly more expressive and theoretically better founded method for representing knowledge and ignorance about the world. Further, epistemic logic allows for planning according to the knowledge (and iterated knowledge) of other agents, allowing the specification of a more complex class of planning domains, than those simply concerned with simple facts about the world. We show how to model multi-agent planning problems using Kripke-models for representing world states, and event models for representing actions. Our mechanism makes use of slight modifications to these concepts, in order to model the internal view of agents, rather than that of an external observer. We define a type of planning domain called epistemic planning domains, a generalisation of classical planning domains, and show how epistemic planning can successfully deal with partial observability, nondeterminism, knowledge and multiple agents. Finally, we show epistemic planning to be decidable in the single-agent case, but only semi-decidable in the multi-agent case. (shrink)

Background: Severity plays an essential role in healthcare priority setting. Still, severity is an under-theorised concept. One controversy concerns whether severity should be risk- and/or time-sensitive. The aim of this article is to provide a normative analysis of this question. Methods: A reflective equilibrium approach is used, where judgements and arguments concerning severity in preventive situations are related to overall normative judgements and background theories in priority-setting, aiming for consistency. Analysis, discussion, and conclusions: There is an argument for taking the (...) risk of developing a condition into account, and we do this when we consider the risk of dying in the severity assessment. If severity is discounted according to risk, this will ‘dilute’ severity, depending on how well we are able to delineate the population, which is dependent on the current level of knowledge. This will potentially have a more far-reaching effect when considering primary prevention, potentially the de-prioritisation of effective preventive treatments in relation to acute, less-effective treatments. The risk arguments are dependent on which population is being assessed. If we focus on the whole population at risk, with T 0 as the relevant population, this supports the risk argument. If we instead focus on the population of as-yet (at T 0 ) unidentified individuals who will develop the condition at T 1, risk will become irrelevant, and severity will not be risk sensitive. The strongest argument for time-sensitive severity (or for discounting future severity) is the future development of technology. On a short timescale, this will differ between different diagnoses, supporting individualised discounting. On a large timescale, a more general discounting might be acceptable. However, we need to also consider the systemic effects of allowing severity to be risk- and time-sensitive. (shrink)

Ever since environmental ethics began to emerge as an academic discipline in the early 70’s, critical voices have been raised against what by many has been considered its project, namely to establish the direct moral importance of some non-human, non-sentient, non-conscious natural entities. We can distinguish between two main lines of this critique; one that is practical, or pragmatic (claiming that there are pragmatic reasons – given certain practical, “environmentalist” goals – to avoid this project), and one that is theoretical. (...) Here I am interested in the latter, theoretical critique. This critique has appeared in many different forms, but all versions that I know of suffer from one of three flaws: (1) They apply only to some versions (not the most plausible ones) of the environmental ethics project (or they do not apply to any actual version of it); (2) they are not critiques against this project specifically, but against any normative ethical view (i.e. any view according to which there are moral reasons to do (or refrain from doing) this or that); (3) they simply beg the question against those who defend some version of this project. Among the critiques that suffer from (1) we find, e.g., allegations of misanthropy and “ecofascism” (or more generally, various critiques according to which the environmental ethics project has unacceptable normative implications). Among those that suffer from (2) we find, e.g., the critiques according to which the very notion of intrinsic value is untenable and ought to be abandoned. And among those that suffer from (3) we find, e.g., the critique according to which the central notion of moral importance is not intrinsic value, but moral standing (which is supposed to pertain only to sentient creatures). I give examples of each of these critiques and explain why they fail. My conclusion is that it is very doubtful that a successful critique of the environmental ethics project can be formulated, and that each environmental ethical theory, therefore, should be judged on its own merits. (shrink)

Besides the task of conveying information, methods and skills to their pupils, teachers are also expected to mediate certain basic values. In this paper we are interested in the educational task of mediating such values in societies imbued with individualist values and attitudes. As a background we use the results from the recurring "World Values Survey" (WVS) which maps the evaluative profile of citizens in about 80 different countries worldwide. The results from WVS reveal that Swedes in general stand out (...) as remarkably individualist with respect to their reported value judgements. Hence, Sweden constitutes our example of an individualist society, i.e., a society whose members to a large extent share an individualist evaluative profile. One important feature of such an individualist evaluative profile is a tendency to regard questions of value as largely a private matter and to downplay the importance of ethics in general. Against this background we investigated the evaluative outlook of 134 Swedish teacher students, using questions from WVS as a point of departure. The results indicate that these students do not differ to any significant degree from the Swedish population in general as regards their evaluative outlook, and yet they are supposed to mediate both individualist and social basic values in their coming profession. The purpose of this paper is to make visible and problematize the tension between an individualist evaluative profile and the educational task of mediating a set of basic values. This tension, it is argued, poses special challenges for teachers and the teacher education in societies on the individualist side of the scale. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Embodying Contagion: The Viropolitics of Horror and Desire in Contemporary Discourse ed. by Sandra Becker, Megen de Bruin-Molé, and Sara PolakLars SchmeinkSandra Becker, Megen de Bruin-Molé, and Sara Polak, editors. Embodying Contagion: The Viropolitics of Horror and Desire in Contemporary Discourse. Bangor, Wales: The University of Wales Press, 2021. PB, p. 288, ISBN 978-1-78683-690-8, GBP 45,-There is a trend in current humanities writing to point out its relation (...) to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, curious on the one hand as we normally do not address the day-to-day of our contemporary moment in time quite as immediately, reasonably needing a few years to position our thinking against the fickleness of the Zeitgeist. But, on the other hand, the pandemic has had such a profound impact on all the work we have been doing that it seems impossible not to mention—from projects cancelled or changed due to travel restrictions and lockdowns or to issues becoming so much more (or sometime less) important as our academic as well as social priorities shift. Embodying Contagion, a volume of collected essays, was already in the process of editorial work when the pandemic struck; in fact, it was already in the final round of edits (xiii). But how would you edit a collection on contagion narratives and not address the big one unfolding right then and there? So, in a way this volume is made even more timely because of its peculiar moment of publication, as the ongoing health crisis of COVID-19 is entering its next stage, and somehow the essays needed to position themselves against this historical backdrop—this, the experience of living through a contagion narrative, is then interwoven into the volume like a thread. [End Page 515]In terms of its original premise, the volume has not lost its pertinence; if anything, it is heightened. In a nutshell, the volume takes up the mantle from Priscilla Wald, who had coined the term "outbreak narrative" and expands it to the idea of "contagion" (1–2), discussing the "viropolitics of horror and desire" (2) linked to these contagions as metaphors and images to cope with social realities. As the editors attest, the fascination with contagion in our culture is omnipresent—more so after COVID-19—and can be read to determine our bodies as posthuman, existing "as shifting and sharing ecosystems rather than isolated and inviolate objects, contemporary culture unveils a seemingly endless series of new ways to be, to behave and to belong alongside other bodies" (3). Contagion narratives reveal our relational existence—through them, "we negotiate the boundaries between bodies that are welcome, bodies that must be confined or silenced, and bodies that must be eradicated" (4). It is this negotiation that is framed as key cultural work in the volume and that the ten essays interrogate—why do we use contagion to explore our relational selves, to each other and to our surroundings?In terms of structure, the essays are divided into two main parts with five essays each, framed by a preface from the inspirational Priscilla Wald, an introduction laying out the idea of the volume, and a centrally important epilogue that addresses the current pandemic and its impacts as a contagion narrative specifically. In her preface, Wald is adamant in sounding the alarm, or better yet sounding out a profound "I told you so" as she discusses how "woefully underprepared" (xvii) we were for the pandemic and how ignored contagions are politically—making clear in the process that the cultural work of these narratives is more pressing to recognize: "As these stories titillate us, they shape experience: who, what and where a culture locates its threats, its definitions of 'us' and 'them,' its response to other cultures and to the planet" (xvii).The first part of the volume, then, addresses "the role of epidemic fantasies in theory and reality" (4), meaning that news reporting, policy measures, or social media take up metaphors and imagery of contagion, generating meaning around these narratives. Consequently, in terms of its interdisciplinary approach, the chapters in this part of the volume are closely related to sociology and communication studies, as... (shrink)

Wenn es um „den Kapitalismus“ geht, regieren schnell die Gefühle. Die Philosophen Sabine Döring und Lars Neth appellieren an die Vernunft. -/- Interview: Wolf Lotter.

Der Ubergang von der Ideenwelt des Veda zu derjenigen der Upanisaden wird in der Regel als Beginn der indischen Philosophie angesehen. Lars Gohler zeigt in seiner Monographie zur fruhen Philosophie in Indien, dass es neben den Upanisaden hingegen noch eine weitere Traditionslinie in der Entstehung der indischen Philosophie gegeben hat: Sie fuhrt von der Opferritualistik des Veda zu der ihr nachfolgenden Ritualwissenschaft und Hermeneutik der Mimamsa. Ein Grossteil der Begriffe der indischen Philosophie, die ursprunglich aus dem Bereich der Opferritualistik (...) stammen, wurden in der Mimamsa von ihrem engeren rituellen Gebrauch gelost und erhielten eine philosophische Dimension. Ebenso haben die Diskurslogik, Sprachphilosophie und Hermeneutik der Mimamsa in methodischer Hinsicht wichtige Ausgangspunkte fur die klassische Philosophie Indiens dargestellt. Gohler beleuchtet in seiner Studie detailliert diese weitgehend unbekannte Traditionslinie und zeigt ihren entscheidenden Einfluss auf die Entwicklung der indischen Philosophie auf. (shrink)

Shadow Philosophy: Plato’s Cave and Cinema is an accessible and exciting new contribution to film-philosophy, which shows that to take film seriously is also to engage with the fundamental questions of philosophy. Nathan Andersen brings Stanley Kubrick’s film A Clockwork Orange into philosophical conversation with Plato’s Republic , comparing their contributions to themes such as the nature of experience and meaning, the character of justice, the contrast between appearance and reality, the importance of art, and the impact of images. (...) At the heart of the book is a novel account of the analogy between Plato’s allegory of the cave and cinema, developed in conjunction with a provocative interpretation of the most powerful image from A Clockwork Orange , in which the lead character is strapped to a chair and forced to watch violent films. Key features of the book include: a comprehensive bibliography of suggested readings on Plato, on film, on philosophy, and on the philosophy of film a list of suggested films that can be explored following the approach in this book, including brief descriptions of each film, and suggestions regarding its philosophical implications a summary of Plato’s Republic , book by book, highlighting both dramatic context and subject matter. Offering a close reading of the controversial classic film A Clockwork Orange , and an introductory account of the central themes of the philosophical classic The Republic , this book will be of interest to both scholars and students of philosophy and film, as well as to readers of Plato and fans of Stanley Kubrick. (shrink)

The doctrine of the moral equality of combatants holds that combatants on either side of a war have equal moral status, even if one side is fighting a just war while the other is not. This chapter examines arguments that have been offered for and against this doctrine, including the collectivist position famously articulated by Walzer and McMahan’s influential individualist critique. We also explore collectivist positions that have rejected the moral equality doctrine and arguments that some individualists have offered in (...) its favor. We defend a non-categorical version of the moral equality doctrine, according to which combatants on either side of a just war sometimes (but not always) have equal moral status. On our view, some degree of culpability is necessary for liability, and non-culpable combatants may therefore sometimes remain non-liable even when they fight for an unjust cause. (shrink)

A speed-accuracy trade-off (SAT) in behavioural decisions is known to occur in a wide range of vertebrate and invertebrate taxa. Accurate decisions often take longer for a given condition, while fast decisions can be inaccurate in some tasks. Speed-accuracy tactics are known to vary consistently among individuals, and show a degree of flexibility during colour discrimination tasks in bees. Such individual flexibility in speed-accuracy tactics is likely to be advantageous for animals exposed to fluctuating environments, such as changes in predation (...) threat. We therefore test whether individual speed-accuracy tactics are fixed or flexible under different levels of predation threat in a model invertebrate, the bumblebee Bombus terrestris. The flexibility of speed-accuracy tactics in a foraging context was tested in the laboratory using a ‘meadow’ of artificial flowers harbouring ‘robotic’ crab spider predators. We found that while the ranking of bees along the speed and accuracy continuums was consistent across two levels of predation threat, there was some flexibility in the tactics used by individual bees – most bees became less accurate at colour discrimination when exposed to predation threat when flower types were rewarding. The relationship between decision speed and accuracy was influenced by predator detectability and the risk associated with making incorrect choices during the colour discrimination task. Predator crypsis resulted in a breakdown in the relationship between speed and accuracy, especially when making an incorrect floral choice incurred a distasteful quinine punishment. No single speed-accuracy tactic was found to be optimal in terms of foraging efficiency under either predation threat situation. However, bees that made faster decisions achieved higher nectar collection rates in predator free situations, while accurate bees achieved higher foraging rates under predation threat. Our findings show that while individual bees remain relatively consistent in terms of whether they place greater emphasis on speed or accuracy under predation threat, they can respond flexibly to the additional time costs of detecting predators. (shrink)

Standard tools used in societal risk management such as probabilistic risk analysis or cost–benefit analysis typically define risks in terms of only probabilities and consequences and assume a utilitarian approach to ethics that aims to maximize expected utility. The philosopher Carl F. Cranor has argued against this view by devising a list of plausible aspects of the acceptability of risks that points towards a non-consequentialist ethical theory of societal risk management. This paper revisits Cranor’s list to argue that the alternative (...) ethical theory responsibility-catering prioritarianism can accommodate the aspects identified by Cranor and that the elements in the list can be used to inform the details of how to view risks within this theory. An approach towards operationalizing the theory is proposed based on a prioritarian social welfare function that operates on responsibility-adjusted utilities. A responsibility-catering prioritarian ethical approach towards managing risks is a promising alternative to standard tools such as cost–benefit analysis. (shrink)