States began passing legislation mandating the collection of genetic material from certain convicted offenders in 1988. By 1998, all 50 states had passed laws allowing DNA databases for convicted sexual offenders, and some states collected DNA from all those convicted of a felony. A survey of 416 persons in Maryland revealed wide support for the inclusion of convicted violent offenders (89%) in DNA databases, in sync with most states’ policies. Between two thirds and three quarters of respondents also supported expanding (...) DNA databases to include those suspected of a violent offense, any convicted felon, as well as all convicted offenders, minor and major. Support for collecting the DNA of those suspected of any crime and for all newborns was considerably less (44% to 45%). Although a comprehensive database is most effective for solving and deterring crimes, vigorously enforced protections against abuse of this technology must be in place. (shrink)

Web scraping involves using computer programs for automated extraction and organization of data from the Web for the purpose of further data analysis and use. It is frequently used by commercial companies, but also has become a valuable tool in epidemiological research and public health planning. In this paper, we explore ethical issues in a project that “scrapes” public websites of U.S. county jails as part of an effort to develop a comprehensive database to enhance HIV surveillance and improve continuity (...) of care for incarcerated populations. We argue that the well-known framework of Emanuel et al. provides only partial ethical guidance for the activities we describe, which lie at a complex intersection of public health research and public health practice. We suggest some ethical considerations from the ethics of public health practice to help fill gaps in this relatively unexplored area. (shrink)

Physicians anecdotally report inquiring about incarcerated patients’ crimes and their length of sentence, which has potential implications for the quality of care these patients receive. However, there is minimal research on how a physician’s awareness of their patient’s crimes/length of sentence impacts physician behaviours and attitudes. We performed regression modelling on a 27-question survey to analyse physician attitudes and behaviours towards incarcerated patients. We found that, although most physicians did not usually try to learn of their patients’ crimes, they often (...) became aware of them. We observed associations between awareness of a patient’s crime and poor physician disposition towards their patients and between physicians’ poor dispositions and lower reported quality of care. These associations suggest that awareness of a patient’s crime may reduce quality of care by negatively impacting physicians’ dispositions towards their patients. Future quantitative and qualitative studies, for example, involving physician interviews and direct patient outcome assessments, are needed to confirm these findings and further uncover and address hurdles incarcerated patients face in seeking medical care. (shrink)

Kaplan and Craver claim that all explanations in neuroscience appeal to mechanisms. They extend this view to the use of mathematical models in neuroscience and propose a constraint such models must meet in order to be explanatory. I analyze a mathematical model used to provide explanations in dynamical systems neuroscience and indicate how this explanation cannot be accommodated by the mechanist framework. I argue that this explanation is well characterized by Batterman’s account of minimal model explanations and that it demonstrates (...) how relationships between explanatory models in neuroscience and the systems they represent is more complex than has been appreciated. (shrink)

This article examines the multiple realizability thesis within a causal framework. The beginnings of this framework are found in Elliott Sober’s “Multiple Realizability Argument against Reduction,”...

This article discusses the new reproductive technology of egg freezing in the context of existing literature on gender, medicalization, and infertility. What is unique about this technology is its use by women who are not currently infertile but who may anticipate a future diagnosis. This circumstance gives rise to a new ontological category of “anticipated infertility.” The author draws on participant observation and a qualitative analysis of scientific, mainstream, and marketing literature to identify and compare the representation of two different (...) candidates for egg freezing: women with cancer and healthy young women. Although both populations experience anticipated infertility, their dichotomous portrayals as appropriate candidates are demonstrative of gender norms linking women to motherhood. Egg freezing is a concise illustration of how the medicalization of women’s bodies and bodily processes masks a host of cultural anxieties about aging, illness, reproduction, and risk. (shrink)

Causal selection has to do with the distinction we make between background conditions and “the” true cause or causes of some outcome of interest. A longstanding consensus in philosophy views causal selection as lacking any objective rationale and as guided, instead, by arbitrary, pragmatic, and non-scientific considerations. I argue against this position in the context of causal selection for disease traits. In this domain, causes are selected on the basis of the type of causal control they exhibit over a disease (...) of interest. My analysis clarifies the principled rationale that guides this selection and how it involves both pragmatic and objective considerations, which have been overlooked in the extant literature. (shrink)

Organizational leaders face environmental challenges and pressures that put them under ethical risk. Navigating this ethical risk is demanding given the dynamics of contemporary organizations. Traditional models of ethical decision-making (EDM) are an inadequate framework for understanding how leaders respond to ethical dilemmas under conditions of uncertainty and equivocality. Sensemaking models more accurately illustrate leader EDM and account for individual, social, and environmental constraints. Using the sensemaking approach as a foundation, previous EDM models are revised and extended to comprise a (...) conceptual model of leader EDM. Moreover, the underlying factors in the model are highlighted—constraints and strategies. Four trainable, compensatory strategies (emotion regulation, self-reflection, forecasting, and information integration) are proposed and described that aid leaders in navigating ethical dilemmas in organizations. Empirical examinations demonstrate that tactical application of the strategies may aid leaders in making sense of complex and ambiguous ethical dilemmas and promote ethical behavior. Compensatory tactics such as these should be central to organizational ethics initiatives at the leader level. (shrink)

Re-reading the special issue (SI)’s articles as a collection—over two years since the call for papers—the interconnected themes of anti-nostalgia and first-person narrative as a thinking device (Ha...

For a variety of reasons, it's difficult to determine, with any accuracy, the number of trans and gender nonbinary folks living in the United States.1 Data are difficult to obtain since neither the U.S. Census Bureau nor the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey people's gender identity. But even if they did, responses would likely be unreliable. Many members of these two groups are hesitant to answer such questions for fear of their safety, resulting discrimination, or because they disagree (...) on the definition of what it means to be transgender. It's also difficult to obtain accurate numbers on these groups since most medical forms still rely on a two-sex system of... (shrink)

This paper explores the political potential of digital failure as a refusal to work in service of today’s dataveillance society. Moving beyond criticisms of flawed digital systems, this paper traces the moments of digital failure that seek to break, rather than fix, existing systems. Instead, digital failure is characterized by pesky data that sneaks through the cracks of digital capitalism and dissipates into the unproductive; it supports run-away data prone to misidentifications by digital marketers, coders, and content moderators; and it (...) celebrates data predisposed to “back-talk” with playful irreverence toward those that seek to bring order through normative categorization and moderation. I call these data entropic, fugitive, and queer and explore their mischievous practices through three case studies: the unaccountable data in identity resolution, public shaming of the ImageNet training data, and reading practices of sex worker and influencer, @Charlieshe. Together these case studies articulate the political potential of digital failure as a process of unbecoming the good data subject by pushing past the margins of legibility, knowability, and thinkability, to reveal what is made illegible, unknowable, and unthinkable to data’s seeing eye. As predictive analytics, automated decision-systems, and artificial intelligence take on increasingly central roles in public governance, digital failure reveals how data itself is a flawed concept prone to political abuse and social engineering to protect the interests of the powerful, while keeping those marginalized over-surveilled and underrepresented. (shrink)

Universities and colleges have become hotbeds of scandal. For these institutions to reclaim their respected status, the ethical foundations of higher education must be examined and rebuilt. This book gathers faculty and administrators from some of the most respected schools to examines the current situation and pave the way for change.

In Origins of Objectivity Burge advances a theory of perception according to which perceptions are, themselves, objective representations. The possession of veridicality conditions by perceptual states—roughly, non-propositional analogues of truth-conditions—is central to Burge’s account of how perceptual states differ, empirically and metaphysically, from sensory states. Despite an impressive examination of the relevant empirical literatures, I argue here that Burge has not succeeded in securing a distinction between perception and “mere” sensation.

Damon Tweedy is a psychiatrist, lawyer, and writer. He's also Black. While in his first year as a medical student at Duke University, one of his professors approached him in the classroom and asked why the light bulb in the room hadn't been changed, as requested. Tweedy realized that his professor assumed he was a maintenance worker, not a student. Tweedy never took up this incident with the professor, nor did the professor ever apologize. Tweedy recounts that his best "revenge" (...) would be to excel in the class, which he ultimately did. At the end of the semester, upon learning that Tweedy received the second highest grade of over one hundred students, this professor invited him to work as a research assistant in his... (shrink)

This grounded study investigated the negotiation of authorship by faculty members, graduate student mentors, and their undergraduate protégés in undergraduate research experiences at a private research university in the northeastern United States. Semi-structured interviews using complementary scripts were conducted separately with 42 participants over a 3 year period to probe their knowledge and understanding of responsible authorship and publication practices and learn how faculty and students entered into authorship decision-making intended to lead to the publication of peer-reviewed technical papers. Herein (...) the theoretical model for the negotiation of authorship developed through the analysis of these interviews is reported. The model identifies critical causal and intervening conditions responsible for the coping strategies faculty and students employ, which, in our study, appear to often produce unfortunate consequences for all involved. The undergraduate student researchers and their graduate student mentors interviewed in this study exhibited a limited understanding of authorship and the requirements for authorship in their research groups. The power differential between faculty and students, the students’ limited epistemic development, the busy-ness of the faculty, and the faculty’s failure to prioritize authorship have been identified as key factors inhibiting both undergraduate and graduate students from developing a deeper understanding of responsible authorship and publication practices. Implications for graduate education and undergraduate research are discussed, and strategies for helping all students to develop a deeper understanding of authorship are identified. (shrink)

In the last two decades few topics in philosophy of science have received as much attention as mechanistic explanation. A significant motivation for these accounts is that scientists frequently use the term “mechanism” in their explanations of biological phenomena. While scientists appeal to a variety of causal concepts in their explanations, many philosophers argue or assume that all of these concepts are well understood with the single notion of mechanism. This reveals a significant problem with mainstream mechanistic accounts– although philosophers (...) use the term “mechanism” interchangeably with other causal concepts, this is not something that scientists always do. This paper analyses two causal concepts in biology–the notions of “mechanism” and “pathway”–and how they figure in biological explanation. I argue that these concepts have unique features, that they are associated with distinct strategies of causal investigation, and that they figure in importantly different types of explanation. (shrink)

By applying classical and contemporary insights of the phenomenological tradition to key findings within the literature on stereotype threat, this paper considers the embodied effects of everyday exposure to racism and makes a contribution to the growing field of applied phenomenology. In what follows, the paper asks how a phenomenological perspective can both contribute to and enrich discussions of ST in psychology. In answering these questions, the paper uses evidence from social psychology as well as first personal testimonies from members (...) of marginalized groups to argue that subjectively experienced racial oppression is embodied and thus has effects on selfhood that are harmful. More specifically, it makes the case that what are most often considered to be temporary or context-based consequences of ST are in fact more wide reaching and harmful than assumed in that the harms that result from suffering ST become a part of one’s identity, and thus a background lens through which one experiences the world. (shrink)

Slurring language has had a lot of recent interest, but the focus has been almost exclusively on racial slurs. Gendered pejoratives, on the other hand—terms like “slut,” “bitch,” or “sissy”—do not fit into existing accounts of slurring terms, as these accounts require the existence of neutral correlates, which, I argue, these gendered pejoratives lack. Rather than showing that these terms are not slurs, I argue that this challenges the assumption that slurs must have neutral correlates, and so that a new (...) approach to thinking about the meaning of slurring terms is required. (shrink)

The role of emotions in mental life is the subject of longstanding controversy, spanning the history of ethics, moral psychology, and educational theory. This paper defends an account of love’s cognitive power. My starting point is Plato’s dialogue, the Symposium, in which we find the surprising claim that love aims at engendering moral virtue. I argue that this understanding affords love a crucial place in educational curricula, as engaging the emotions can motivate both cognitive achievement and moral development. I first (...) outline the state of the challenge between dominant rival theories regarding emotions in learning. Next, I demonstrate how Platonic virtue ethics offers the most tenable prospect for an education of reason and emotion. Third, I sketch three practical ways educators might constructively engage emotions in the classroom. I conclude that love’s virtue is its peerless power to motivate the creative and lateral thinking which leads to moral development. (shrink)

This paper explores the use of video news releases (VNRs) without source disclosure from legal and ethical perspectives. In light of current regulatory debates regarding VNRs, the paper first examines whether journalists' use of corporate VNRs without source disclosure violates FCC regulations. It then questions the ethics of using such VNRs by examining the current code of ethics for both the public relations practitioners creating VNRs and the news organizations airing them. The paper uses the ethical construct of transparency to (...) further examine the ethics of VNR production and exhibition without source disclosure. It finds that regardless of whether the use of VNRs without source disclosure violates current sponsorship rules, the use of such VNRs not only violates codes of ethics but also transparency, which includes values such as accountability, credibility, trust, respect, truth and honesty, reason, freedom, dignity, and duty. (shrink)

À peu près tout le monde a déjà fait l’expérience intuitive de l’authenticité, d’un moment qui semble révéler une lueur de sa véritable identité. Pourtant, en posant l’existence d’un «vrai moi», l’idée d’authenticité pose des défis métaphysiques qui mettent en lumière les complexités de l’individualité. J’avance que pour être bien examinée, l’authenticité exige une structure essentialiste qui tend à s’appliquer à l’identité personnelle. J’examine ensuite les trois types d’approches les plus influents dans les discussions philosophiques modernes contre cette position : (...) le romantisme et ses héritiers contemporains, l’existentialisme tardif et les conceptions de la vertu. Cette analyse met en doute la possibilité de générer une conception philosophique complète de l’authenticité. (shrink)

In what ways and to what extent should cultural background be taken into consideration in response to legal problems? The first book-length study of the topic, The Cultural Defense provides a comprehensive overview of the debate surrounding the admissibility of cultural evidence in the courtroom. Documenting an extraordinary range of cases in which individuals have attempted to invoke a cultural defense, this book provides an in-depth look at the complexities of invoking cultural agreements in the diverse bodies of law under (...) which the cases fall. Cases considered include homicide and rape prosecutions, child abuse cases, drug use cases, the treatment of animals, and custody battles. Disputing current practices, Renteln contends that the cultural defense should, in both criminal and civil matters, be given formal recognition. (shrink)

According to mainstream philosophical views causal explanation in biology and neuroscience is mechanistic. As the term ‘mechanism’ gets regular use in these fields it is unsurprising that philosophers consider it important to scientific explanation. What is surprising is that they consider it the only causal term of importance. This paper provides an analysis of a new causal concept—it examines the cascade concept in science and the causal structure it refers to. I argue that this concept is importantly different from the (...) notion of mechanism and that this difference matters for our understanding of causation and explanation in science. (shrink)

As the cesarean rate rises in the United States, it is sometimes hailed as a move toward increased safety or increased autonomy. But the industrialization of birth may have consequences which actually decrease women’s autonomy and strip choices away.

John Nolt offers a helpful, albeit rough quantitative analysis of the harmfulness of the average American's greenhouse gas emissions. By examining the lifetime contributions of the average American...

This paper aims to explore disciplinary variation in valuation practices by comparing the way research groups accumulate credibility across four epistemic cultures. Our analysis is based on case studies of four high-performing research groups representing very different epistemic cultures in humanities, social sciences, geosciences and mathematics. In each case we interviewed about ten researchers, analyzed relevant documents and observed a couple of meetings. In all four cases we found a cyclical process of accumulating credibility. At the same time, we found (...) significant differences in the manifestation of the six main resources that are part of the cycle, the mechanisms of conversion between these resources, the overall structure and the average speed of the credibility cycle. The different ways in which the groups use data and produce arguments affect the whole cycle of accumulating credibility. In some cultures, journal publications are the main source of recognition, but in others one can earn significant amounts of recognition for conference contributions or service to the academic community. Moreover, the collaboration practices in the respective fields strongly influence the connection between arguments and publications. In cultures where teams of researchers collaboratively produce arguments, it is more strongly embedded in the process of writing publications. We conclude that the credibility cycle can only be used as an analytical tool to explain the behavior of researchers or research groups when taking differences across epistemic cultures into account. (shrink)

Two decades ago, in 1994, in the context of the 4th EU Framework Programme, ELSA was introduced as a label for developing and funding research into the ethical, legal and social aspects of emerging sciences and technologies. Currently, particularly in the context of EU funding initiatives such as Horizon2020, a new label has been forged, namely Responsible Research and Innovation. What is implied in this metonymy, this semantic shift? What is so new about RRI in comparison to ELSA? First of (...) all, for both labels, the signifier was introduced in a top-down manner, well before the concept that was signified by it had acquired a clear and stable profile. In other words, the signifier preceded the research strategies actually covered by these labels. Moreover, the newness of RRI does not reside in its interactive and anticipatory orientation, as is suggested by authors who introduced the term, but rather in its emphases on social-economic impacts. (shrink)

In this paper, I identify a form of epistemic insensitivity that occurs when someone fails to make proper use of the epistemic tools at their disposal in order to bring their beliefs in line with epistemically relevant evidence that is available to them. I call this kind of insensitivity agential insensitivity because it stems from the epistemic behavior of an individual agent. Agential insensitivity can manifest as a failure to either attend to relevant and available evidence, or appropriately interpret evidence (...) that is attended to. The concept of agential insensitivity allows us to conceptualize the kind of not-knowing involved in forms of ignorance that are cultivated and maintained by individual agents, especially when this ignorance is enabled or encouraged by social structures. I use the skepticism about racial disparities in policing practices that is displayed by many white Americans as a lens for exploring this connection. Understanding agential insensitivity thus provides insight into both social and epistemic phenomena. (shrink)

A fundamental goal of research in neuroscience is to uncover the causal structure of the brain. This focus on causation makes sense, because causal information can provide explanations of brain function and identify reliable targets with which to understand cognitive function and prevent or change neurological conditions and psychiatric disorders. In this research, one of the most frequently used causal concepts is ‘mechanism’ — this is seen in the literature and language of the field, in grant and funding inquiries that (...) specify what research is supported, and in journal guidelines on which contributions are considered for publication. In these contexts, mechanisms are commonly tied to expressions of the main aims of the field and cited as the ‘fundamental’, ‘foundational’ and/or ‘basic’ unit for understanding the brain. Despite its common usage and perceived importance, mechanism is used in different ways that are rarely distinguished. Given that this concept is defined in different ways throughout the field — and that there is often no clarification of which definition is intended — there remains a marked ambiguity about the fundamental goals, orientation and principles of the field. Here we provide an overview of causation and mechanism from the perspectives of neuroscience and philosophy of science, in order to address these challenges. (shrink)