Inductive reasoning is fundamental to human cognition, yet it remains unclear how we develop this ability and what might influence our inductive choices. We created novel categories in which crucial factors such as domain and category structure were manipulated orthogonally. We trained 403 4–9-year-old children to categorise well-matched natural kind and artefact stimuli with either featural or relational category structure, followed by induction tasks. This wide age range allowed for the first full exploration of the developmental trajectory of inductive reasoning (...) in both domains. We found a gradual transition from perceptual to categorical induction with age. This pattern was stable across domains, but interestingly, children showed a category bias one year later for relational categories. We hypothesise that the ability to use category information in inductive reasoning develops gradually, but is delayed when children need to process and apply more complex category structures. (shrink)

Over the last five decades, philosophers of language have looked into the mechanisms for doing things with words. The same attention has not been devoted to how to undo those things, once they have been done. This paper identifies and examines three strategies to make one’s speech acts undone—namely, Annulment, Retraction, and Amendment. In annulling an act, a speaker brings to light its fatal flaws. Annulment amounts to recognizing an act as null, whereas retraction and amendment amount to making it (...) null. Speakers employ retraction to cancel the deontic updates engendered by a given act. They instead use amendment to adjust its degree of strength. I will argue that annulling, retracting, and amending are second-order speech acts, whose felicity conditions vary with the type of illocution they operate on. Undoing is therefore conceived of as a form of doing. Furthermore, I claim that, in calling off our acts, we undo the conventional or illocutionary effects of our words while leaving intact their past causal or perlocutionary outcomes. (shrink)

Corcoran’s 27 entries in the 1999 second edition of Robert Audi’s Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy [Cambridge: Cambridge UP]. -/- ancestral, axiomatic method, borderline case, categoricity, Church (Alonzo), conditional, convention T, converse (outer and inner), corresponding conditional, degenerate case, domain, De Morgan, ellipsis, laws of thought, limiting case, logical form, logical subject, material adequacy, mathematical analysis, omega, proof by recursion, recursive function theory, scheme, scope, Tarski (Alfred), tautology, universe of discourse. -/- The entire work is available online free at more than (...) one website. Paste the whole URL. http://archive.org/stream/RobertiAudi_The.Cambridge.Dictionary.of.Philosophy/Robert.Audi_The.Cambrid ge.Dictionary.of.Philosophy -/- The 2015 third edition will be available soon. Before you think of buying it read some reviews on Amazon and read reviews of its competition: For example, my review of the 2008 Oxford Companion to Philosophy, History and Philosophy of Logic,29:3,291-292. URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01445340701300429 -/- Some of the entries have already been found to be flawed. For example, Tarski’s expression ‘materially adequate’ was misinterpreted in at least one article and it was misused in another where ‘materially correct’ should have been used. The discussion provides an opportunity to bring more flaws to light. -/- Acknowledgements: Each of these entries was presented at meetings of The Buffalo Logic Dictionary Project sponsored by The Buffalo Logic Colloquium. The members of the colloquium read drafts before the meetings and were generous with corrections, objections, and suggestions. Usually one 90-minute meeting was devoted to one entry although in some cases, for example, “axiomatic method”, took more than one meeting. Moreover, about half of the entries are rewrites of similarly named entries in the 1995 first edition. Besides the help received from people in Buffalo, help from elsewhere was received by email. We gratefully acknowledge the following: José Miguel Sagüillo, John Zeis, Stewart Shapiro, Davis Plache, Joseph Ernst, Richard Hull, Concha Martinez, Laura Arcila, James Gasser, Barry Smith, Randall Dipert, Stanley Ziewacz, Gerald Rising, Leonard Jacuzzo, George Boger, William Demopolous, David Hitchcock, John Dawson, Daniel Halpern, William Lawvere, John Kearns, Ky Herreid, Nicolas Goodman, William Parry, Charles Lambros, Harvey Friedman, George Weaver, Hughes Leblanc, James Munz, Herbert Bohnert, Robert Tragesser, David Levin, Sriram Nambiar, and others. -/- . (shrink)

Patient and citizen participation is now regarded as central to the promotion of sustainable health and health care. Involvement efforts create and encounter many diverse ethical challenges that have the potential to enhance or undermine their success. This article examines different expressions of patient and citizen participation and the support health ethics offers. It is contended that despite its prominence and the link between patient empowerment and autonomy, traditional bioethics is insufficient to guide participation efforts. In addition, the turn to (...) a “social paradigm” of ethics in examinations of biotechnologies and public health does not provide an account of values that is commensurable with the pervasive autonomy paradigm. This exacerbates rather than eases tensions for patients and citizens endeavoring to engage with health. Citizen and patient participation must have a significant influence on the way we do health ethics if its potential is to be fulfilled. (shrink)

An outstanding reference source for the wide range of philosophical contributions made by women writing in Europe from about 1560 to 1780. It shows the range of genres and methods used by women writing in these centuries in Europe, thus encouraging an expanded understanding of our historical canon.

Some philosophers have offered structural representations as an alternative to indicator-based representations. Motivating these philosophers is the belief that an indication-based analysis of representation exhibits two fatal inadequacies from which structural representations are spared: such an analysis cannot account for the causal role of representational content and cannot explain how representational content can be made determinate. In fact, we argue, indicator and structural representations are on a par with respect to these two problems. This should not be surprising, we contend, (...) given that the distinction between indicator and structural representations is better conceived as one involving degree rather than kind. (shrink)

Is religious faith consistent with being an intellectually virtuous thinker? In seeking to answer this question, one quickly finds others, each of which has been the focus of recent renewed attention by epistemologists: What is it to be an intellectually virtuous thinker? Must all reasonable belief be grounded in public evidence? Under what circumstances is a person rationally justified in believing something on trust, on the testimony of another, or because of the conclusions drawn by an intellectual authority? Can it (...) be reasonable to hold a belief on a topic over which there is significant, entrenched disagreement among informed inquirers, or should such disagreement lead all parties to modify or suspend their own judgments? Is there anything about faith that exempts it from measurement against such epistemic norms? And if we would so evaluate it, how exactly should we understand the intellectual commitments faith requires? The volume's introduction provides a roadmap of the central issues and controversies as currently discussed by philosophers. In fourteen new essays written to engage nonspecialists as well as philosophers working in religion and epistemology, a diverse and distinguished group of thinkers then consider the place of intellectual virtue in religious faith, exploring one or more of the specific issues noted above. (shrink)

'This original discussion breaks new ground by thoroughly analyzing ethical and aesthetic values, centering on the concept of ecological integrity, that apply intrinsically to nature and that govern our rightful use of the environment. Those who have been waiting for an exciting account of the inherent structure and worth of ecological systems in relation to environmental policy will find it in this book.'-Mark Sagoff, Director of the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, University of Maryland at College Park.

The ambiguity regarding whether a given intervention is perceived as enhancement or as therapy might contribute to the angst that the public expresses with respect to endorsement of enhancement. We set out to develop empirical data that explored this. We used Amazon Mechanical Turk to recruit participants from Canada and the United States. Each individual was randomly assigned to read one vignette describing the use of a pill to enhance one of 12 cognitive, affective or social domains. The vignettes described (...) a situation in which an individual was using a pill to enhance the relevant domain under one of two possible enhancement conditions, one perceived as enhancing above the norm, what most people recognize as a clear case of enhancement, whereas the other perceived as enhancing towards the norm, with the individual using the enhancement having a modest, but subclinical deficit. Participants were asked how comfortable they were with the individual using the enhancement and about the impact the enhancement might have had in the individuals’ success in life. We found that irrespective of the domain to be enhanced, participants felt significantly more comfortable with ETN than with EAN, and they regarded the enhancement intervention as contributing to greater success in life with ETN rather than EAN. These data demonstrate that the therapy enhancement distinction is morally salient to the public, and that this distinction contributes to the angst that people feel when considering the propriety of CAS enhancement. (shrink)

Moorean constructions are famously odd: it is infelicitous to deny that you believe what you claim to be true. But what about claiming that p, only to immediately put into question your evidence in support of p? In this paper, we identify and analyse a class of quasi-Moorean constructions, which we label counterevidentials. Although odd, counterevidentials can be accommodated as felicitous attempts to mitigate one’s claim right after making it. We explore how counterevidentials differ from lexicalised mitigation operators, parentheticals, and (...) anaphoric mitigation devices, and consider some cognate non-assertoric constructions. We conclude by exploring the implications of our analysis for theorising about linguistic responsibility, assertion, and lying. (shrink)

An integrated statement is made concerning the semantic status of nodes in a propositional semantic network, claiming that such nodes represent only intensions. Within the network, the only reference to extensionality is via a mechanism to assert that two intensions have the same extension in same world. This framework is employed in three application problems to illustrate the nature of its solutions.The formalism used here utilizes only assertional information and no structural, or definitional, information. This restriction corresponds to many of (...) the psychologically motivated network models. Some of the psychological implications of network processes called node merging and node splitting are discussed. Additionally, it is pointed out that both our networks and the psychologically based networks are prone to memory confusions about knowing unless augmented by domain‐specific inference processes, or by structural information. (shrink)

The debate over the propriety of cognitive enhancement evokes both enthusiasm and worry. To gain further insight into the reasons that people may have for endorsing or eschewing pharmacological enhancement, we used empirical tools to explore public attitudes towards PE of twelve cognitive, affective, and social domains. Participants from Canada and the United States were recruited using Mechanical Turk and were randomly assigned to read one vignette that described an individual who uses a pill to enhance a single domain. After (...) reading the vignette, participants were asked how comfortable they were with the individual using the enhancement. People were significantly more comfortable when they read about enhancement of certain CAS domains than others. We found a modest negative correlation between comfort level and the degree to which the PE was perceived as changing core features of the person. We also found a modest correlation between comfort level and the degree to which the PE was perceived as improving success in life. Finally, using a sequential mixed method technique, we found that participants who felt uncomfortable about PE use overwhelmingly focused on a lack of need and, to a lesser degree, expressed concerns about safety; those who felt comfortable about PE use most frequently mentioned the safety of the pill and its ability to provide a positive outcome. The data provide novel insights into public enthusiasms and concerns over the use of PE. (shrink)

This paper sets out to unpack the pragmatic structure of refusal—its illocutionary nature, success conditions, and normative effects. I argue that our ordinary concept of refusal captures a whole family of illocutions, comprising acts such as rejecting, declining, and the like, which share the property of being ‘negative second-turn illocutions’. Only _proper refusals_ (i.e. negative replies to permission requests), I submit, require speaker authority. I construe the ‘refusal family’ as a subclass of the directives-commissives intersection. After defending my view against (...) a number of potential objections, I highlight how a theoretically grounded analysis of refusal is not only of intrinsic value, but may also have significant moral and legal implications. (shrink)

Context: I extend the enactive account of loving in romantic relationships that I developed with Hanne De Jaegher to the love of nature. Problem: I challenge a universal conceptualization of love of nature that does not account for the differences that are inherent to nature. As an alternative, I offer a situated account of loving a place as participatory sense-making. However, a question arises: How is it possible to communicate with the other-than-human? Method: I use panpsychist and enactive conceptual tools (...) to better define this situated approach to the love of nature and to reply to the research question. In particular, I focus on Mathews’s “becoming native” and the generative tensions that unfold in a dialectic of encounter when a common language is not shared. Results: The fundamental difference experienced in encountering the other-than-human is generative for building up the human-Earth connection if we let each other be listened to. I describe the ethical dimension that permeates this type of “enactive listening” at the core of a situated account of love of nature. Implications: Love of nature is of paramount importance in our current climate crisis characterized by environmental anxiety, despair, and anger. A situated love of nature emphasizes the importance of community-based local interventions to preserve the Earth. Love, thus understood as a fundamental moral and political power, is a catalyst for environmental activism. Constructivist content: My article links to participatory sense-making as defined by De Jaegher and Di Paolo, and De Jaegher’s loving epistemology. It offers a broader understanding of participatory sense-making that includes the other-than-human. It also introduces the new concept of “enactive listening.”. (shrink)

We have previously found that attention to internal somatic sensations during a heart beat perception task increases the misperception of external touch on a somatic signal detection task , during which healthy participants erroneously report feeling near-threshold vibrations presented to their fingertip in the absence of a stimulus. However, it has been suggested that mindful interoceptive attention should result in more accurate somatic perception, due to its non-evaluative and controlled nature. To investigate this possibility, 62 participants completed the SSDT before (...) and after a period of brief body-scan mindfulness meditation training, or a control intervention . The meditation intervention reduced tactile misperception and increased sensitivity during the SSDT. This finding suggests that the perceptual effects of interoceptive attention depend on its particular nature, and raises the possibility that body-scan meditation could reduce the misperception of physical symptoms in individuals with medically unexplained symptoms. (shrink)

Health ethics can justify the use of vaccination mandates. However, policies that pressurize parents to vaccinate their children can undermine traditional clinical ethics standards. The aim of this paper is to argue that the ethical impact of vaccination mandates can only be determined in the context of the clinical encounter. Public debate on the topic tends to be general in nature and, as a result, issues that require clarification to help sustain the trust of service users are underexamined. In addition, (...) ethical debates are hampered by a toxic dichotomy in the public sphere between those who claim a move away from parental choice is necessarily a serious ethical violation; and others who neglect serious consideration of ethical issues. This predicament permits flawed ethical claims to be made, and to remain unchallenged. Despite this, ethical concerns – including those relating to trust and individual freedom – are fundamental to sustaining confidence in vaccination. This has recently been highlighted by the Covid-19 pandemic which made accessing childhood vaccinations harder, leading to a further decline in uptake. The pandemic has also revealed the strength of public feeling towards infection control measures that restrict peoples’ freedoms. In this paper I argue that to minimize the ethical disruption associated with the use of vaccination mandates, it is essential to focus more attention on their impact in the clinic and to accurately identify the drivers of such tensions. (shrink)

Xenotransplantation - the transfer of living tissue between species - has long been heralded as a potential solution to the severe organ shortage crisis experienced by the United Kingdom and other 'developed' nations. However, the significant risks which accompany this biotechnology led the United Kingdom to adopt a cautious approach to its regulation, with the establishment of a non-departmental public body - UKXIRA - to oversee the development of this technology on a national basis. In December 2006 UKXIRA was quietly (...) disbanded and replaced with revised guidance, which entrusts the regulation of xenotransplantation largely to research ethics committees. In this article we seek to problematize this new regulatory framework, arguing that specialist expertise and national oversight are necessary components of an adequate regulatory framework for a biotechnology which poses new orders of risk, challenges the adequacy of traditional understandings of autonomy and consent, and raises significant animal welfare concerns. We argue for a more considered and holistic approach, based on adequate consultation, to regulating biotechnological developments in the United Kingdom. (shrink)

We examined how information from multiple communication channels can inform social norms about local food purchasing. The concept of social exposure was used as a guide. Social exposure articulates how information in social, symbolic, and physical environments contributes to normative perceptions. Data was collected from a sample in Wisconsin. Results indicated that information from communication channels representing symbolic, social, and physical environments all contributed to normative perceptions. We also found that for individuals who frequent farmers’ markets, information from some communication (...) channels was relatively less strongly associated with injunctive norms. It may be that when first-hand, experiential information is available to inform norms, individuals rely less on information available through other communication channels. Future work might further explore how farmers’ markets foster information sharing in communities, as such information may contribute to normative perceptions. (shrink)

Meta-governance is Earth system governance for dealing with the global commons. This article develops a whole network approach to meta-governance to explore the potential for collective action for sustainable development by a loosely coupled network of networks. Networked corporate social responsibility governance has emerged around corporate sustainability and responsibility in the first years of the 21st century. Growing agreements and interactions among CSR initiatives suggest the development, structure, and governance of networked CSR governance as a network that can analytically be (...) viewed as a whole and as a platform for learning about systemic change. Using the evolution of CSR initiatives from about 1990 to 2014, the authors differentiate four developmental stages: independent and fragmented multistakeholder networks as CSR governance, collaborative CSR governance, networked CSR governance, and integrated networked CSR governance. The authors then present a framework to analyze networked CSR governance as a whole network experimenting with meta-governance. (shrink)

Emotions ( pathè) such as anger, fear, shame, and envy, but also pity, wonder, love and friendship have long been underestimated in Plato’s philosophy. The aim of Emotions in Plato is to provide a consistent account of the role of emotions in Plato’s psychology, epistemology, ethics and political theory. The volume focuses on three main issues: taxonomy of emotions, their epistemic status, and their relevance for the ethical and political theory and practice. This volume, which is the first edited volume (...) entirely dedicated to emotions in Plato’s philosophy, shows how Plato, in many aspects, was positively interested in these affective states in order to support the rule of reason. (shrink)

Through case studies that highlight the type of information that is seldom reported in the news, Faces of Environmental Racism exposes the type and magnitude of environmental racism, both domestic and international. The essays explore the justice of current environmental practices, asking such questions as whether cost-benefit analysis is an appropriate analytic technique and whether there are alternate routes to sustainable development in the South.

In order to move towards an Ethic of Accounting, one must start by defining the function and role of the accountant. This in turn depends to a great extent on the identity of the client or whatever party the Accountant owes his loyal agency to. The issue is one of cardinal importance, and it is perceived as such by the accountants themselves. Loeb for instance says that the client-identity issue is overriding importance now, and will become even more crucial in (...) the immediate years ahead. The question of what constitutes ethical behaviour on the part of the accountant will depend then upon the relation within which such ethical behaviour will have to be deployed.The main question raised in this paper will therefore be, is the accountant primarily engaged by one client (whether an individual or a corporation) to act as their agent, deal with their problems by loyally advancing their interests to the best of his professional competence, although within the limits imposed by law and morality? Or is the public sector to be considered the principal target of the accountant's resolute professionalism and unswerving loyalty? (shrink)

There has been an ongoing debate about the best approach in environmental ethics. Bryan Norton believes that “weak anthropocentrism” will yield the best results for public policy, and that it is the most defensible position. In contrast, I have argued that an ecocentric, holistic position is required to deal with the urgent environmental problems that face us, and that position is complemented by the ecosystem approach and complex systems theory. I have called this approach “the ethics of integrity,” and in (...) this paper I show why this perspective suggests better solutions to difficult cases, for which “weak anthropocentrism” fails to provide an answer. (shrink)

Through case studies that highlight the type of information that is seldom reported in the news, Faces of Environmental Racism exposes the type and magnitude of environmental racism, both domestic and international. The essays explore the justice of current environmental practices, asking such questions as whether cost-benefit analysis is an appropriate analytic technique and whether there are alternate routes to sustainable development in the South.

This paper discusses the widespread use of "trolley problems" in the ethics classroom from a critical perspective. After tracing the enormous popularity of ‘trolleyology’ in recent moral philosophy, differentiating various functions these hypotheticals are supposed to fulfill in ethical discourse and carving out the underlying conception of normative ethics as a quasi-scientific enterprise, I examine how they are constructed and how they affect their recipient. Against this background, I argue that despite their popularity, the use of trolley problems in the (...) ethics classroom turns out to be questionable for a number of reasons, most of which have already been advanced in the philosophical debate but hardly been reflected upon in the didactic context. Finally, I argue that the deconstruction of trolleyesque scenarios would be a good educational use of them. When it comes to using cases for didactic purposes, I suggest we give trolley problems a rest and develop more realistic scenarios. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that the intentionality at play in skilled performance is not only inherently normative but also inherently affective. We take a radically embodied approach to the mind in which we conceive of cognitive agents as sensorimotor systems moved to maintain their biological and sociocultural identity, whose perception is direct and occurs in terms of affordances. Within this framework, we define skilled performance as the enactment of action and perception patterns in which the agent is intentionally oriented (...) towards specific features in the environment. We propose that skillful intentionality is guided by normative constraints involving the material and social conditions of the agent but is ultimately determined by the intrinsic purpose of maintaining the agent’s identity, and skilled intentionality is inherently affective because it is a specific occurrence arising from a general sense of care to maintain one’s identity which is realized by orienting oneself towards the right aspects of the environment in the right way. Skilled performance thus requires agents to establish a normative and affective intentionality towards aspects of their material environment. We show that, since sociocultural practices shape human identities, sociocultural practices play a crucial role in shaping human intentionality of skilled performance both in their normative and affective dimensions. Maintaining a human identity, we argue, amounts to routinely carrying out activities that form a historical pattern which is shared with and recognized by others. (shrink)

This paper draws on the philosophies of Maurice Merleau‐Ponty and Hannah Arendt in order to explore the nature of free action. Part one outlines three familiar ways in which we often understand the nature of freedom. Part two argues that these common understandings of freedom are rooted in impoverished conceptions of time and subjectivity. Part three engages with Arendt’s conception of natality alongside Merleau‐Ponty’s conception of expression in order to argue that the freely acting self draws in improvisational manners on (...) the resources of a shared past in order to open unprecedented spaces of meaning for the future, and in so doing at once discovers and institutes herself as the self that she is. Part four draws on an example of anti‐oppressive political action in order to argue that free action not only has the power to inaugurate new spaces of shared meaning for the future, but also to change the sens of the shared past. By the same token, free action is vulnerable in its ontological status and ethical meanings to the events and judgments of the future. Part five argues with both Merleau‐Ponty and Arendt that ethical‐political actors can do no better than to cultivate a political virtù while facing up to the inherently transgressive dimensions of free action in a shared historical world. (shrink)

Environmental ethicists have frequently criticized ancient Greek philosophy as anti-environmental for a view of philosophy that is counterproductive to environmental ethics and a view of the world that puts nature at the disposal of people. This provocative collection of original essays reexamines the views of nature and ecology found in the thought of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and Plotinus. Recognizing that these thinkers were not confronted with the environmental degradation that threatens contemporary philosophers, the contributors to this book find that (...) the Greeks nevertheless provide an excellent foundation for a sound theory of environmentalism. (shrink)

In recent years, discussion around memory modification interventions has gained attention. However, discussion around the use of memory interventions in the criminal justice system has been mostly absent. In this paper we start by highlighting the importance memory has for human well-being and personal identity, as well as its role within the criminal forensic setting; in particular, for claiming and accepting legal responsibility, for moral learning, and for retribution. We provide examples of memory interventions that are currently available for medical (...) purposes, but that in the future could be used in the forensic setting to modify criminal offenders’ memories. In this section we contrast the cases of dampening and enhancing memories of criminal offenders. We then present from a pragmatic approach some pressing ethical issues associated with these types of memory interventions. The paper ends up highlighting how these pragmatic considerations can help establish ethically justified criteria regarding the possibility of interventions aimed at modifying criminal offenders’ memories. (shrink)

This paper presents the contribution of the pragmatic sociology of critical capacities to the understanding of environmental conflicts. In the field of 'environmental valuation', nowadays colonised by economics, the approach of plural modes (or 'regimes') of engagement provides a sociological understanding of the unequal power of conflicting 'languages of valuation'. This frame entails a shift from 'values' to 'modes of valuation', and links modes of valuation to modes of practical engagement and coordination with the surrounding environment. Different social sources of (...) incommensurability are thus detected and reframed as critical tension within and among modes of human coordination with the environment. (shrink)

Background: Psychiatric interventions are a contested area in medicine, not only because of their history of abuses, but also because their therapeutic goal is to affect emotions, thoughts, beliefs...

ABSTRACT Against empiricist and rationalist prejudices concerning the nature of issues related to “mental health,” this article offers a phenomenological account of identity as developed in a meaningful system with the environment or world. Drawing on the work of Merleau-Ponty and Dewey, I argue that behavioral and emotional health and illness must be understood in terms of the plasticity or rigidity, respectively, of the individual's responses in the face of new and threatening environmental demands. However, individual plasticity and rigidity are (...) not given qualities of the individual but are themselves developed in healthy or unhealthy interpersonal environments. I discuss three cases of emotional and behavioral trouble in order to explore the manner in which unhealthy self-environment systems can undermine individuals' powers of adaptability and growth. (shrink)

Recent work in animal ethics has advanced principles that are too individualistic to be compatible with a holistic environmental ethic such as the land ethic proposed by Aldo Leopold. J. Baird Callicott, on the other hand, has attempted to reconcile the two ethics by suggesting that sympathy, natural among humanity, as he claims on Humean grounds, does not necessarily terminate at the species barrier. His argument shows minimally that it is not necessary that we abandon ecological ethics in order to (...) view nonhuman animals as morally considerable. I argue instead that it is not sympathy, but hostility/indifference that manifests the reality of life in wild nature, and as such forms a better basis for an all-encompassing ethic. If one accepts that the factual realm suggests the limits of norms and establishes the background and context of normative judgments in this context (as Holmes Roiston, III, for instance, does), then a different line of argument can be developed. I argue that intraspecies and interspecies ethics ought to be different for us because behavior in the wild is different within and without a species. Further, I argue that hostility/indifference coupled with respect form the basis of an approach which embraces a holistic environmental ethic as weil as one concemed with nonhuman animals. (shrink)

Within the evidence-based medicine construct, clinical expertise is acknowledged to be both derived from primary experience and necessary for optimal medical practice. Primary experience in medical practice, however, remains undervalued. Clinicians’ primary experience tends to be dismissed by EBM as unsystematic or anecdotal, a source of bias rather than knowledge, never serving as the “best” evidence to support a clinical decision. The position that clinical expertise is necessary but that primary experience is untrustworthy in clinical decision-making is epistemically incoherent. Here (...) we argue for the value and utility of knowledge gained from primary experience for the practice of medicine. Primary experience provides knowledge necessary to diagnose, treat, and assess response in individual patients. Hierarchies of evidence, when advanced as guides for clinical decisions, mistake the relationship between propositional and experiential knowledge. We argue that primary experience represents a kind of medical knowledge distinct from the propositional knowledge produced by clinical research, both of which are crucial to determining the best diagnosis and course of action for particular patients. (shrink)

The human brain is in great part what it is because of the functional and structural properties of the 100 billion interconnected neurons that form it. These make it the body’s most complex organ, and the one we most associate with concepts of selfhood and identity. The assumption held by many supporters of human enhancement, transhumanism, and technological posthumanity seems to be that the human brain can be continuously improved, as if it were another one of our machines. In this (...) paper, I focus on some of the ethical issues that we should keep in mind when thinking about memory enhancement interventions. I start with an overview of one of the most precious capacities of the brain, namely memory. Then I analyze the different kinds of memory interventions that exist or are under research. Finally, I point out the issues that we should not forget when we consider enhancing our memories. In this regard, my argument is not against memory enhancement interventions; rather, it concentrates on the need to “keep in mind” what kind of enhancements we want. We should consider whether we want the kind of “enhancements” that will end up making us lose synapse connections, or the kind that promote more use of them. (shrink)

This paper discusses the widespread use of "trolley problems" in the ethics classroom from a critical perspective. After tracing the enormous popularity of ‘trolleyology’ in recent moral philosophy, differentiating various functions these hypotheticals are supposed to fulfill in ethical discourse and carving out the underlying conception of normative ethics as a quasi-scientific enterprise, I examine how they are constructed and how they affect their recipient. Against this background, I argue that despite their popularity, the use of trolley problems in the (...) ethics classroom turns out to be questionable for a number of reasons, most of which have already been advanced in the philosophical debate but hardly been reflected upon in the didactic context. Finally, I argue that the deconstruction of trolleyesque scenarios would be a good educational use of them. When it comes to using cases for didactic purposes, I suggest we give trolley problems a rest and develop more realistic scenarios. (shrink)