The feminist in academe, says Paula Bennett, is like Procne married to Tereus, "inextricably wedded to the sources of her harm." An ethical justification of academic feminism can be found, not in cooperation and affiliation, but in the strategies currently necessary to ensure curricular and cultural diversity. Historically contextualized and strategically politicized, this ethic is founded on the claim that universities are places where we may all learn to know what is other than ourselves.

Sarah McGrath has recently defended a disagreement-based argument for skepticism about moral knowledge. If sound, the argument shows that our beliefs about controversial moral issues do not amount to knowledge. In this paper, I argue that McGrath fails to establish her skeptical conclusion. I defend two main claims. First, the key premise of McGrath’s argument is inadequately supported. Second, there is good reason to think that this premise is false.

Some ethicists assert that there is a consensus that maximising medical outcomes takes precedence as a principle of resource allocation in emergency triage of absolutely scarce resources. But the nature of the current severe acute respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus 2 pandemic and the history of debate about balancing equity and efficiency in resource allocation do not support this assertion. I distinguish a number of concerns with justice and balancing considerations that should play a role in critical care triage policy, focusing on (...) discrimination and on fundamental egalitarian and social justice concerns. (shrink)

How fragile is our knowledge of morality, compared to other kinds of knowledge? Does knowledge of the difference between right and wrong fundamentally differ from knowledge of other kinds? Sarah McGrath offers new answers to these questions as she explores the possibilities, sources and characteristic vulnerabilities of moral knowledge.

Are the small and indolent cancers found in abundance in cancer screening normal variations, risk factors, or disease? Naturalists in philosophy of medicine turn to pathophysiological findings to decide such questions objectively. To understand the role of pathophysiological findings in disease definition, we must understand how they mislead in diagnostic reasoning. Participants on all sides of the definition of disease debate attempt to secure objectivity via reductionism. These reductivist routes to objectivity are inconsistent with the Bayesian nature of clinical reasoning; (...) when they appeal to the sciences, they are inconsistent with what philosophy of biology tells us about its natural kinds. Proposals that we narrow the scope of our claims in the disease definition debates are useful, but paradigms can still distort our reasoning in particular cases, even when we are self-conscious about their status. (shrink)

Epistemologists often claim that in addition to belief and disbelief there is a third, neutral, doxastic attitude. Various terms are used: ‘suspending judgment’, ‘withholding’, ‘agnosticism’. It is also common to claim that the factors relevant to the justification of these attitudes are epistemic in the narrow sense of being factors that bear on the strength or weakness of one’s epistemic position with respect to the target proposition. This paper addresses two challenges to such traditionalism about doxastic attitudes. The first concerns (...) the relevance of non-epistemic factors we might call "future-comparative" – e.g., that you’ll have more decisive evidence on whether p tomorrow – to the justification of suspending judgment. The second, from Jane Friedman, is to explain the point of the neutral attitude without appealing to inquiry and thus taking goal-related factors, which are not epistemic, such as the value of the goal or the prospects for finding means to achieve it, to bear on the justification of the neutral attitude. My defense of traditionalism relies on distinguishing three ways of being neutral on a question: agnosticism, inquiry and suspension of judgment. Traditionalism is saved because, of these, agnosticism alone is a genuine doxastic attitude. (shrink)

While much of the debate around the practice of normothermic regional perfusion (NRP) is focused on the potential violation of the dead donor rule (DDR), another concern is whether allowing this pr...

In his paper ‘Has the Ontological Argument Been Refuted?’, 97–110) William F. Vallicella argues that my attempt to show that the Ontological Argument begs the question is unsuccessful. 1 I believe he is wrong about this, but before endeavouring to vindicate my position I must first make clear what precisely is the point at issue between us. The Ontological Argument is not a single argument, but a family of arguments. Newly devised formulations of the argument are frequently put forward by (...) philosophers in an effort to avoid difficulties that have been pointed out in previous versions. As a consequence there is no possibility of a conclusive proof that every form of the argument embodies the same fallacy. Nevertheless, one can, I believe, prove that all the standard versions of the argument embody a certain fallacy and that, given the nature of the argument, it is therefore unlikely that the argument can be formulated in such a way as to avoid this difficulty. What I tried to show in my paper is that the six best-known versions of the argument all beg the question and that they do so at the same point in the argument, namely when it is asserted that it is possible that an absolutely perfect being exists. It is difficult to see how an ontological argument could be formulated without including this claim as one of its premises, since the distinguishing badge of the argument is the inference from the possibility of an absolutely perfect being to its actuality. It must be unlikely then, if my criticism of these six versions is correct, that there is any way of formulating the argument that avoids this fallacy. (shrink)

Theism, according to David O'Connor, has in recent centuries been on trial for its life, the charge being that the existence of so much evil in the world is incompatible with belief in a benevolent creator. But this trial, he claims is incapable of producing a reasoned verdict.

Schelling has been exploited for a variety of psychoanalytical projects, from Marquard’s revision of Freud, to various readings of Jung, to Žižek’s interpretation of Lacan. What we have not seen is an elaboration of the psycho-therapeutical implications of Schelling’s metaphysics on its own terms. What we find when we read Schelling as metapsychologist is a nonpathologizing theory of dissociation. Like anything that lives, the psyche dissociates for the sake of growth. The law of productive dissociation is the source of psyche’s (...) adaptive power and an explanation of the structure of its illnesses. (shrink)

Systems of universal health coverage may aspire to provide care based on need and not ability to pay; the complexities of this aspiration call for normative analysis. This special issue arises in the wake of a judicial inquiry into preferential access in the Canadian province of Alberta, the Vertes Commission. I describe this inquiry and set out a taxonomy of forms of differential and preferential access. Papers in this special issue focus on the conceptual specification of health system boundaries and (...) on the normative questions raised by complex models of funding and delivery of care, where patients, providers, and services cross system boundaries. (shrink)

PurposeSocial exclusion as a result of gender, race, and class inequality is perhaps one of the most pressing challenges associated with the development of a diverse information technology workforce. Women remain under represented in the IT workforce and college majors that prepare students for IT careers. Research on the under representation of women in IT typically assumes women to be homogeneous in nature, something that blinds the research to variation that exists among women. This paper aims to address these issues.Design/methodology/approachThe (...) paper challenges the assumption of heterogeneity by investigating how the intersection of gender, race, and class identities shape the experiences of Black female IT workers and learners in the USA.FindingsThe results of this meta‐analysis offer new ways of theorizing that provide nuanced understanding of social exclusion and varied emancipatory practices in reaction to shared group exposure to oppression.Originality/valueThis study on the under‐representation of women as IT workers and learners in the USA considers race and class as equally important factors for understanding variation among women. In addition, this paper provides rich insights into the experiences of Black women, a group that is largely absent from the research on gender and IT. (shrink)

The interrogation of Meletus in the Apology at 24c4–28al is not infrequently seen as a typical case of all that is intellectually and artistically dissatisfying in Plato's practice of the genre of philosophical dialogue: not only are we presented with a philosopher who makes some claim to being committed to setting a particularly stringent standard for honesty in argumentation making sophistical arguments, but we are presented also with a cardboard interlocutor who is forced by the hand of Plato to acquiesce (...) to those arguments in a fashion that is completely dissatisfying to the reader. The best anyone seems to do to save Plato from these charges of artistic incompetence and intellectual dishonesty is to appeal to such a level of historical accuracy for the text that the stupidity of Meletus' responses can be attributed to the stupidity of Meletus himself, or to point out features of the political and legal situation that might prevent Meletus from answering the questions by drawing on his true motivation—which is presumably more coherent. Taylor says of this passage: The humour of the situation is that the prosecutor cannot venture to say what he means by either of his charges without betraying the fact that, owing to the ‘amnesty’, the matters complained of are outside of the competency of the court… Hence, when Meletus is pressed to explain what he means, he has to take refuge in puerile nonsense. (shrink)

The multi-disciplinary unit Social Responsibility in Action was developed for students with an interest in ethics who were completing undergraduate degrees in Arts, Commerce, Design or Science at an Australian research-intensive university. The academic objectives of this unit were to increase student awareness, knowledge, understanding and critical thinking skills related to various ethical issues. Lecturers from five disciplines collaborated in the design and delivery of SRA, which comprised lectures, tutorials and a research-based project. Anonymous surveys were administered at the start (...) and end of the semester to obtain feedback on student expectations and learning experience, respectively. Data across three student cohorts showed that at the start of semester, 80% of student comments indicated a desire to expand their interest of ethical matters, 59% a desire to gain understanding and knowledge and 59% to gain critical thinking or communication skills. SRA was extremely well received by students, with 98% of respondents indicating that this multi-disciplinary ethics unit had met their expectations. Students also found that the variety of teaching styles, unit content and multi-disciplinary approach stimulated learning. (shrink)

Scientism in medical education distracts educators from focusing on the content of learning; it focuses attention instead on individual achievement and validity in its measurement. I analyze the specific form that scientism takes in medicine and in medical education. The competencies movement attempts to challenge old “scientistic” views of the role of physicians, but in the end it has invited medical educators to focus on validity in the measurement of individual performance for attitudes and skills that medicine resists conceptualizing as (...) objective. Academic medicine should focus its efforts instead on quality and relevance of care. The social accountability movement proposes to shift the focus of academic medicine to the goal of high quality and relevant care in the context of community service and partnership with the institutions that together with medicine create and cope with health and with health deficits. I make the case for this agenda through a discussion of the linked histories of the opioid prescribing crisis and the professionalism movement. (shrink)

Although belief formation is sometimes automatic, there are occasions in which we have the power to put it off, to wait on belief-formation. Waiting in this sense seems assessable by epistemic norms. This paper explores what form such norms might take: the nature and their content. A key question is how these norms relate to epistemic norms on belief-formation: could we have cases in which one ought to believe that p but also ought to wait on forming a belief on (...) whether p? Plausibly not. But if not, how can we explain this impossibility? I suggest that the best resolution is to view the traditional core norms on belief as themselves conditional in a certain sense, one that I think has independent plausibility. The results of this investigation may also tell us something about epistemic norms on suspension, on the assumption, which I defend elsewhere, that suspension is waiting. (shrink)

Lisa A. Eckenwiler, Long-term care, globalization, and justice, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012, reviewed by Lynette Reid.

In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty argues that markets, absent political intervention, tend toward economic divergence and that this has deleterious consequences for democratic ideals of equal voice and meritocracy. His goal is to foster a public conversation about what a society dominated by wealth—which we already beginning to experience as the twenty-first century begins—would look like if we wish to maintain an egalitarian ethos. His work will contribute to and further motivate several discussions in feminist bioethics, namely, (...) on the funding and organization of care labor, reproductive rights, global health, and commodification. (shrink)

Some argue that the concept of medical need is inadequate to inform the design of a universal health care system—particularly an institutional rather than a residual system. They argue that the concept contradicts the idea of comprehensiveness; leads to unsustainable expenditures; is too indeterminate for policy; and supports only a prioritarian distribution. I argue that ‘comprehensive’ understood as ‘including the full continuum of care’ and ‘medically necessary’ understood as ‘prioritized by medical criteria’ are not contradictory, and that UHC is a (...) solution to the problem of sustainability, not its cause. Those who criticize ‘medical need’ for indeterminacy are not transparent about the source of their commitment to their standards of determinacy: they promote standards that are higher than is necessary for legitimate policy, ignoring opportunity costs. Furthermore, the indeterminacy of concepts affects all risk-sharing systems and all systems that rely on medical standard of care. I then argue that the concept of need in itself does not imply a minimal sufficientist standard or a prioritarian distribution; neither does the idea of legitimate public policy dictate that public services be minimalist. The policy choice for a system of health care that is comprehensive and offers as good care as can be achieved when delivered on equal terms and conditions for all is a coherent option. (shrink)

Relaxed realists hold that there are deep differences between moral truths and the truths studied by the empirical sciences, but they deny that these differences raise troubling metaphysical or epistemological questions about moral truths. On this view, although features such as causal inefficacy, perceptual inaccessibility, and failure to figure in the best explanations of our empirical beliefs would raise pressing skeptical concerns were they claimed to characterize some aspect of physical reality, the same is not true when it comes to (...) the moral domain. This chapter raises some doubts about this general picture of morality and some prominent ways of defending it. First, it takes up a comparison that is frequently invoked by relaxed realists, and one on which they often place a great deal of weight: a comparison between irreducibly normative properties and truths on the one hand, and mathematical properties and truths on the other. It argues that this comparison is much less favorable to the relaxed realist’s cause than is often thought. It then offers an extended critique of a particularly vigorous and sustained presentation of relaxed realism: that offered by Ronald Dworkin in Justice for Hedgehogs. (shrink)

In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty argues that markets, absent political intervention, tend toward economic divergence and that this has deleterious consequences for democratic ideals of equal voice and meritocracy. His goal is to foster a public conversation about what a society dominated by wealth—which we already beginning to experience as the twenty-first century begins—would look like if we wish to maintain an egalitarian ethos. His work will contribute to and further motivate several discussions in feminist bioethics, namely, (...) on the funding and organization of care labor, reproductive rights, global health, and commodification. (shrink)

In this chapter, we follow Edward Craig?s advice: ask what the concept of knowledge does for us and use our findings as clues about its application conditions. What a concept does for us is a matter of what we can do with it, and what we do with concepts is deploy them in thought and language. So, we will examine the purposes we have in attributing knowledge. This chapter examines two such purposes, agent evaluation and informant-suggestion, and brings the results (...) to bear on an important debate about the application conditions of the concept of knowledge?the debate between contextualists and their rivals. (shrink)

Some omissions seem to be causes. For example, suppose Barry promises to water Alice’s plant, doesn’t water it, and that the plant then dries up and dies. Barry’s not watering the plant – his omitting to water the plant – caused its death. But there is reason to believe that if omissions are ever causes, then there is far more causation by omission than we ordinarily think. In other words, there is reason to think the following thesis true.

The sixteenth-century Reformation remains a fascinating and exciting area of study. The revised edition of this distinguished volume explores the intellectual origins of the Reformation and examines the importance of ideas in the shaping of history. Provides an updated and expanded version of the original, highly-acclaimed edition. Explores the complex intellectual roots of the Reformation, offering a sustained engagement with the ideas of humanism and scholasticism. Demonstrates how the intellectual origins of the Reformation were heterogeneous, and examines the implications of (...) this for our understanding of the Reformation as a whole. Offers a defence of the entire enterprise of intellectual history, and a reaffirmation of the importance of ideas to the development of history. Written by Alister E. McGrath, one of today’s best-known Christian writers. (shrink)

This book offers an interdisciplinary approach to concepts of the self associated with the development of humanism in England, and to strategies for both inclusion and exclusion in structuring the early modern nation state. It addresses writings about rhetoric and behavior from 1495–1660, beginning with Erasmus’ work on sermo or the conversational rhetoric between friends, which considers the reader as an ‘absent audience’, and following the transference of this stance to a politics whose broadening democratic constituency needed a legitimate structure (...) for governance-at-a-distance. Unusually, the book brings together the impact on behavior of these new concepts about rhetoric, with the growth of the publishing industry, and the emergence of capitalism and of modern medicine. It explores the effects on the formation of the ‘subject’ and political legitimation of the early liberal nation state. It also lays new ground for scholarship concerned with what is left out of both selfhood and politics by that state, studying examples of a parallel development of the ‘self’ defined by friendship not only from educated male writers, but also from women writers and writers concerned with socially ‘middling’ and laboring people and the poor. (shrink)

In Canada, laws and policies consistently reject the commodification of human organs and tissues, and Canadian practice is consistent with international standards in this regard. Until the Assisted Human Reproduction Act of 2004, gamete donation in Canada was an exception: Canadians could pay and be paid open market rates for gametes for use in in vitro fertilization. As sections of the AHR Act forbidding payment for gametes and permitting only reimbursement of receipted expenses gradually came into effect in 2005, Canada (...) did away with this anomaly. Medical practice and legal prohibitions in assisted human reproduction are now consistent with other areas of medicine where tissues and organs are taken from one person to benefit others: Altruistic donation, rather than selling and buying, will be the norm. (shrink)

Reflecting on Smith (2021) in this issue, this commentary extends our consideration of issues in carceral health and questions the dehumanizing language we sometimes use—including in public health and public health ethics—to talk about persons held in incarceration. Even the language we use for the carceral system itself (such as ‘criminal justice system’) is fraught: it casts a laudatory light on the system and papers over its role in compounding racial health inequities and in sustaining colonialism. A host of issues (...) call out for ethical analysis, using lenses that can encompass the tensions and contradictions experienced by people within the system who deliver healthcare and those within the system trying to access that care. Beyond access to health care (promotion, prevention, treatment and palliation), the societal commitment to dealing with social issues by depriving people of many key social determinants of health is at the heart of many of these tensions and contradictions. (shrink)

Temkin asks how we should distribute resources between the social determinants of health and health care; Sreenivasan argues that if our goal is fair opportunity, funding universal health coverage is the wrong policy. He argues that social equality in health has not improved under UHC and concludes that fair opportunity would be better served by using the resources to address the SDOH instead. His criticism applies more broadly than he claims: it applies to any argument for UHC based on health (...) equity. However, neither his strong causal conclusion nor his stark policy proposal is justified. I review methodological challenges for establishing the relative causal contributions of health care and social policy, concluding that we may never have a robust causal account to support a consequentialist choice. Fortunately, we may not need to answer the allocation question as a dichotomy. Given what Sen calls the multidimensional nature of health equity and the role of UHC in cost containment, UHC may not be a threat to health equity. I also argue against Sreenivasan's claim that the data he discusses should not trouble sufficientists and prioritarians. The worst-off are not simply lagging in improvement; rather, their health status is stagnating or worsening. (shrink)

Verweij and Dawson claim that population health has a distributive dimension; Coggon argues that this presupposes a normative commitment to equity in the very definition of population health, which should, rather, be neutral. I describe possible sources of the distributive view, several of which do not presuppose egalitarian commitments. Two relate to the nature of health as a property of individuals ; two relate to the epistemology and pragmatics of public and population health. A fifth source of the distributive view (...) is a critical stance on the concept of population health; I contrast this with Coggon’s account of the public as a shared political imaginary. None of these views is ‘neutral’: they exhibit several different kinds of normativity and quasi-normativity, but this is not problematic. I argue that the critical stance appropriately distinguishes and relates social justice and public health. (shrink)

Humankind has always been fascinated by the glories of the universe, whether in its microscopic detail or its vast extent. From time immemorial this has posed questions about origins, purpose and design. This work takes as its starting point the observable order of the universe and the ways in which the natural sciences point to a discoverable God. In it, Alister McGrath provides a guided tour to many forms of the search for meaning in the universe. The author refers (...) to the great variety of searchers, from Ancient Greece to modern day, and explores their method with insight. Many widely accepted ideas are scrutinized and dilemmas of certainty and doubt are addressed and explained. (shrink)

Having an agreed-upon definition of character education would be useful for both researchers and practitioners in the field. However, even experts in character education disagree on how they would define it. We attempted to achieve greater conceptual clarity on this issue through a prototype analysis in which the features perceived as most central to character education were identified. In Study 1 (N = 77), we asked character education experts to enumerate features of character education. Based on these lists, we identified (...) 30 features. In Study 2 (N = 101), experts assessed which features were central to character education through a categorization task. In Study 3 (N = 166), we assessed the extent of centrality using scalar items. We conclude by offering practical advice for the development of future character education studies and programs rooted in what is deemed central to such programs. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that popular explanatory frameworks in perceptual psychology suggest the truth of color realism. I focus on perceptual judgments and their evidential basis: namely perceptual representation. I first draw a distinction between two sorts of normativities with respect to which we can evaluate representational capacities and systems: biological and psychological normativities. The former is defined in terms of evolutionary fitness, and the latter in terms of representational accuracy. Generally, representational systems achieve psychological and biological success hand (...) in hand, but in special circumstances, a representational system can be such that it serves the organism best while not generally furnishing the organism with accurate representations. I argue in this essay that an explanation how and why our ancestors developed color vision that cleaves its biological success conditions from its psychological success conditions cannot be given unless we are prepared to say the same about the visual perception of distance and other geometrical features of the world. Moreover, it is difficult to see how the anti-realist could begin to specify psychological success conditions for color representations. Hence, we ought to accept the biological utility of color vision as evidence that it is typically representationally successful, and regard our perceptual judgments about color as generally true. (shrink)

The seriousness of the risk that healthcare workers faced during SARS, and their response of service in the face of this risk, brings to light unrealistic assumptions about duty and risk that informed the debate on duty to care in the early years of HIV/AIDS. Duty to care is not based upon particular virtues of the health professions, but arises from social reflection on what response to an epidemic would be consistent with our values and our needs, recognizing our shared (...) vulnerability to disease and death. Such reflection underwrites a strong duty of care, but one not to be borne solely by the altruism and heroism of individual healthcare workers. (shrink)

Critiques of Knowing explores what happens to science and computing when we think of them as texts. Lynette Hunter elegantly weaves together such vast areas of thought as rhetoric, politics, AI, computing, feminism, science studies, aesthetics and epistemology. This book shows us that what we need is a radical shake-up of approaches to the arts if the critiques of science and computing are to come to any fruition.

This paper examines the prospects of a prima facie attractive response to Fantl and McGrath’s argument for pragmatic encroachment. The response concedes that if one knows a proposition to be true then that proposition is warranted enough for one to have it as a reason for action. But it denies pragmatic encroachment, insofar as it denies that whether one knows a proposition to be true can vary with the practical stakes, holding fixed strength of warrant. This paper explores two (...) ways to allow knowledge-reason links without pragmatic encroachment, both of which appeal to defeat. The first appeals to defeaters of reasons. If you know the bank is open tomorrow, what you know is available as a reason, but it may be defeated by considerations concerning the stakes. The second appeals to defeaters which do not defeat reasons but which nonetheless do something similar: they make the action recommended by those reasons vicious. In a high stakes case performing the “risky” action would be vicious even if it is justified in the sense of being supported by undefeated reasons. What is defeated is a virtue-based epistemic status rather than reasons or justification. I argue that neither proposal halts the march from a knowledge-reason link to pragmatic encroachment. (shrink)

The VIA Classification of Character Strengths and Virtue has received substantial attention since its inception as a model of 24 dimensions of positive human functioning, but less so as a potential contributor to a psychological science on the nature of virtue. The current paper presents an overview of how this classification could serve to advance the science of virtue. Specifically, we summarize previous research on the dimensional versus categorical characterization of virtue, and on the identification of cardinal virtues. We give (...) particular attention to the three-dimensional model of cardinal virtues that includes moral, self-regulatory, and intellectual domains. We also discuss the possibility that these three clusters be treated as fundamental elements of a virtue model, meaning that they clearly and directly contribute to both individual and communal flourishing across various cultures. This discussion includes a summary of previous speculations about the evolution of adaptations underlying the human capacity for using behavioral repertoires associated with the three virtues, as well as discussing ways in which they simultaneously enhance community and individual, in the last case focusing particularly on evidence concerning mating potential. We then discuss the relationship between the evolutionary perspective on virtues and Aristotle’s concept of the reciprocity of the virtues. Finally, we provide speculations about the nature of practical wisdom. While accepting the potential value of future revisions to the VIA model, that model even under its current conditions has the potential to generate a number of intriguing and testable hypotheses about the nature of virtue. (shrink)