In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 317 On the Nature and Existence of God. By RICHARD M. GALE. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Pp. 422 + viii. $44.50 (hardbound). Is there a rational justification for believing that God, as understood by traditional Western theism, exists? Richard M. Gale uses the tools of analytic philosophy to address some aspects of this question. He intentionally avoids any discussion of inductive arguments which (...) would try to show that the existence of God is the " only possible explanation " of some observable feature of the universe, and concentrates instead on arguments which more generally discuss whether or not belief in God is rationally justified (pp. 3, 241). His book is in some ways a response,to philosophers such as William Alston and Alvin Plantinga who have used analytic philosophy in defense of the theistic claim that God exists. Gale offers a more sbptical account of the ability of reason to justify belief in God. He views his work as beneficial to theism, however, in that it may lead believers to adopt a conception of God which is " more adequate " for inspiring worship and obedience than the traditional notion (p. 3). Before considering " theological arguments " in favor of the existence of God, Gale analyses a number of " atheological " arguments against it. The arguments fall into two categories, epistemological and pragmatic. Epistemological arguments are concerned with justifying any claim to knowledge that God does or does not exist. Pragmatic arguments try to show that belief (or disbelief) in the existence of God is justified by the moral benefits that accrue from it. With the exception of the last chapter, the entire book is devoted to epistemological arguments. Gale views his atheological arguments as " thought experiments " which test the internal consistency of the traditional understanding of various divine attributes and so lead us to improve the logical consistency of our understanding of God. When the traditional under· standing of some divine attribute is shown to involve logical incongruities, the theist is invited to go " back to the drawing board and redesign the particular divine attribute that is the focus of the argument " (p. 3). Atheological arguments are presented first so that the redesigned divine attributes can inform the subsequent analysis of theological arguments in favor of God's existence. Gale is willing to redesign a good number of divine attributes on the basis of often familiar and sometimes rather shaky atheological arguments. The traditional understanding of divine omnipotence, for in· stance, is tested in Chapter 1, using Gale's version of the well known 318 BOOK REVIEWS dilemma of whether an omnipotent God could create a stone so heavy that God could not lift it. Since it is necessary that God ls omnipotent and since it is necessary that an omnipotent being can do anything, it is necessary that God can do anything. Thus, " it is necessary that God can create a stone so heavy that God cannot lift it." But if it is necessary that God can create a stone so heavy that God cannot lift it, then it is possible that there is something that God cannot do. So it is not necessary that God can do anything. Thus we come to the contradiction that it is both necessary and not necessary that God can do anything (p. 18). Gale sees that his premise, " it is necessary that God can create a stone so heavy that God cannot lift it," itself involves a self-contradiction and is equivalent to saying that the omnipotent God can act in such a way that the omnipotent God is simultaneously not the omnipotent God (20). What he fails to see is that attributing to God any action that falls short of perfect activity (e.g., immoral action) involves the same self-contradiction. Nor does he seem to realize that self-contradictory statements of this sort are simply nonsensical. Being devoid of meaning, they can tell us nothing about what God can or cannot do, and so in no way require us to restrict or qualify God's omnipotence. Not seeing the senselessness of self-contradictory statements, Gale embarks on a program of reforming or qualifying the traditional notion of divine omnipotence... (shrink)

Baker and Detiénne argue that the results reported in Stone and Wang and Alea et al. should be contextualized within a broader historical and societal perspective that takes into account the co‐evolution of social interaction practices and technology‐mediated collaborative activities.

We present a Kripke model for Girard's Linear Logic (without exponentials) in a conservative fashion where the logical functors beyond the basic lattice operations may be added one by one without recourse to such things as negation. You can either have some logical functors or not as you choose. Commutatively and associatively are isolated in such a way that the base Kripke model is a model for noncommutative, nonassociative Linear Logic. We also extend the logic by adding a coimplication operator, (...) similar to Curry's subtraction operator, which is resituated with Linear Logic's contensor product. And we can add contraction to get nondistributive Relevance Logic. The model rests heavily on Urquhart's representation of nondistributive lattices and also on Dunn's Gaggle Theory. Indeed, the paper may be viewed as an investigation into nondistributive Gaggle Theory restricted to binary operations. The valuations on the Kripke model are three valued: true, false, and indifferent. The lattice representation theorem of Urquhart has the nice feature of yielding Priestley's representation theorem for distributive lattices if the original lattice happens to be distributive. Hence the representation is consistent with Stone's representation of distributive and Boolean lattices, and our semantics is consistent with the Lemmon-Scott representation of modal algebras and the Routley-Meyer semantics for Relevance Logic. (shrink)

Essences have been assigned important but controversial explanatory roles in philosophical, scientific, and social theorizing. Is it possible for the same organism to be first a caterpillar and then a butterfly? Is it impossible for a human being to transform into an insect like Gregor Samsa does in Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis? Is it impossible for Lot’s wife to survive being turned into a pillar of salt? Traditionally, essences (or natures) have been thought to help answer such central questions about (...) existence, identity, persistence, and modality. These questions are not only of great philosophical interest, they also are of great interest to society at large. This Handbook surveys the state of the art on essence. Core issues about essence are discussed in 33 chapters, all of them written exclusively for this volume by leading experts. (shrink)

Recent Work on Intrinsic Value brings together for the first time many of the most important and influential writings on the topic of intrinsic value to have appeared in the last half-century. During this period, inquiry into the nature of intrinsic value has intensified to such an extent that at the moment it is one of the hottest topics in the field of theoretical ethics. The contributions to this volume have been selected in such a way that all of the (...) fundamental questions concerning the nature of intrinsic value are treated in depth and from a variety of viewpoints. These questions include how to understand the concept of intrinsic value, what sorts of things can have intrinsic value, and how to compute intrinsic value. The editors have added an introduction that ties these questions together and places the contributions in context, and they have also provided an extensive bibliography. The result is a comprehensive, balanced, and detailed picture of current thinking about intrinsic value, one that provides an indispensable backdrop against which future writings on the topic may be assessed. (shrink)

Are there any universal entities? Or is the world populated only by particular things? The problem of universals is one of the most fascinating and enduring topics in the history of metaphysics, with roots in ancient and medieval philosophy. This collection of new essays provides an innovative overview of the contemporary debate on universals. Rather than focusing exclusively on the traditional opposition between realism and nominalism, the contributors explore the complexity of the debate and illustrate a broad range of positions (...) within both the realist and the nominalist camps. Realism is viewed through the lens of the distinction between constituent and relational ontologies, while nominalism is reconstructed in light of the controversy over the notion of trope. The result is a fresh picture of contemporary metaphysics, in which traditional strategies of dealing with the problem of universals are both reaffirmed and called into question. (shrink)

New pedagogical visions and technological developments have brought argumentation to the fore of educational practice. Whereas students previously 'learned to 'argue', they now 'argue to learn': collaborative argumentation-based learning has become a popular and valuable pedagogical technique, across a variety of tasks and disciplines. Researchers have explored the conditions under which arguing to learn is successful, have described some of its learning potentials and have developed Internet-based tools to support such learning. However, the further advancement of this field presently faces (...) several problems, which the present book addresses. Three dimensions of analysis - historical, theoretical and empirical - are integrated throughout the book. Given the nature of its object of study - dialogue, interaction, argumentation, learning and teaching - the book is resolutely multidisciplinary, drawing on research on learning in educational and psychological sciences, as well as on philosophical and linguistic theories of dialogue and argumentation. (shrink)

1. Overview -/- 1.1 Main Divisions When, if ever, is it morally permissible to end the life of a human embryo or fetus, and why? As regards the first of these questions, there are extreme anti-abortion views, according to which abortion is prima facie seriously wrong from conception onwards – or at least shortly thereafter; there are extreme permissibility views, according to which abortion is always permissible in itself; and there are moderate views, according to which abortion is sometimes permissible, (...) and sometimes not. -/- Moderate views appeal to a variety of considerations in support of the view that abortion is sometimes justified, but these fall into four main categories. First, there are cases where the developing human is seriously defective in some way – perhaps such that it will not have a life that is worth living. Secondly, there are cases where continuation of pregnancy would involve serious risks to the life or health of the woman. Thirdly, there are moderate positions according to which the developing human initially does not have serious moral status, or a right to life, but acquires such status at some point before birth. Finally, it is often held that abortion is justified in the case of rape. -/- With the exception of the last consideration, moderate views assume that the moral status of the developing human is crucial with respect to the permissibility of abortion. Moreover, this is a natural assumption that was shared by all sides until the publication in 1971 of Judith Jarvis Thomson’s article “A Defense of Abortion,” in which she argued that abortion is permissible even if one assumes, for the sake of argument, that human embryos and fetuses have a right to life. Thus we have one of the great divides in the philosophical discussion of abortion: Is the moral status of the developing human generally decisive with regard to the moral permissibility of abortion or not? -/- 1.2 The Moral Status of the Developing Human: Thomson and Boonin Thomson’s article evoked many critical responses, along with some defenses, which I have described elsewhere (2013; “Thomson’s Attempt to Defend Abortion in General”). Crucial, however, is David Boonin’s defense (2003), which contains responses to all of the important objections directed against the attempt to show that one can defend abortion while granting that human embryos and fetuses have a right to life fully on a par with that of normal adult human beings. -/- Boonin’s impressive efforts notwithstanding, I do not think that this way of defending an extreme permissibility view is successful. The crucial issue is whether it is morally permissible intentionally to bring into existence an entity with a right to life in a situation where one knows that it will not survive without one’s assistance, and then to refrain from providing that assistance. An especially forceful way of arguing that this is not permissible is found in an article by Richard Langer (1993, 351-2), who argues that if this were permissible, it would follow not only that abortion was justified, but also that it is permissible to allow one’s children to die, some years after birth, simply because one no longer wishes to care for them. -/- 1.3 Moderate Views Moderate positions on abortion raise a number of issues that, for reasons of space, I cannot address here. Some of these depend on the issue of the moral status of the developing human, and defending a moderate view requires showing that both extreme anti-abortion and extreme moral permissibility views concerning the moral status of humans before birth are incorrect. I have argued elsewhere (1983, 285-302, and 2009, 59-63) that the prospects of doing this are not promising. -/- As regards permissibility in the case of rape, everything depends upon whether, as Thomson contends (1971), there is no obligation to be a good Samaritan, rather than merely a minimally decent one, and so no obligation for a woman to remain pregnant to save the life of a being that she was not responsible for bringing into existence. Finally, on the one hand, in cases where the woman will die if an abortion is not performed, virtually all moral philosophers, with the exception of those who embrace the moral view advanced by the Catholic Church in encyclicals by Pope Pius XI (1930) and Pope Paul VI (1968), agree that abortion is morally permissible, while, on the other hand, if the situation is one where there is only some risk that the woman will die if an abortion is not performed, or where the threat is not to the woman’s life, but only to her health, then the situation does seem clear-cut if one assumes that the embryo or fetus has a right to life. -/- 1.4 Extreme Anti-Abortion Views Very different arguments are offered for the view that abortion is in itself never permissible. First of all, in popular discussions, appeal is frequently made to the mere fact of membership in the biologically defined species Homo sapiens, but among those who are philosophically knowledgeable, this line of argument is almost invariably rejected, for reasons that I have set out elsewhere (Tooley, 2009, 21-35). -/- Secondly, appeal is also made to the idea that humans have immaterial minds, or souls – for example, by Stephen Schwartz (1990), J. P. Moreland and Scott B. Rae (2000), Norman Ford (2002), and Francis J. Beckwith, (2005). The postulation of immaterial minds or souls is, however, open to strong objections, since there is excellent evidence that human psychological powers have their categorical bases in neural structures, rather than in an immaterial substance (Tooley, 2009, 15-19). In addition, the postulation of an immaterial soul, conceived of along Thomistic lines, is on a collision course with biology, since such an immaterial soul is held to govern a human’s life processes and biological development. -/- Thirdly, there is the ‘substantial identity’ argument, advanced for example by Patrick Lee (2004), and which claims that an entity possesses a right to life by virtue of the type of substance it is. This view is exposed to a number of strong objections, however, among them the fact that it leads to the unacceptable consequence that a human that has suffered upper brain death still has a right to life (Tooley, 2009, 51-9). -/- The upshot is that most philosophers do not find any of the preceding three lines of argument for an extreme anti-abortion position promising. The focus, accordingly, has been elsewhere – namely, on arguments claiming that human embryos and fetuses have serious moral status, or a right to life, because they have the potentiality for developing those psychological capacities – for thought, self-consciousness, rationality, and so on – that seem clearly relevant to a being’s moral status. -/- In what follows, then, I shall confine my discussion to what seems to me the most crucial issue bearing upon the moral status of abortion, namely, that between, on the one hand, a potentiality account of moral status, and, on the other, the type of approach most commonly appealed to in support of an extreme permissibility position on abortion, namely, a personhood account of the right to life. -/- One of the earliest defenders of the view that potentialities give something a right to life was Jim Stone in his article, “Why Potentiality Matters,” where Stone argues for the conclusion, “we have a prima facie duty not to deprive them of the conscious goods which it is their nature to realize” (1987, 821). Stone’s discussion, however, attracted much less attention than an article published two years later by Don Marquis, entitled “Why Abortion is Immoral.” The latter is one of the most interesting articles on abortion, as well as one of the most discussed––and deservedly so. In what follows, then, I shall focus upon it. -/- My discussion is organized as follows. In section 2, I summarize Marquis’s account of the wrongness of killing. Then, in section 3, I set out an alternative account, one in which the concept of a neo-Lockean person is central. Sections 4, 5, and 6 are then devoted to criticisms of Marquis’s approach, all of which also support the alternative, rights-based, neo-Lockean personhood account. (shrink)

Various approaches have emerged over the last several decades to meet the challenges and complexities of anticipating and responding to the potential impacts of emerging technologies. Although many of the existing approaches share similarities, they each have shortfalls. This paper takes as the object of its study Anticipatory Ethics for Emerging Technologies (ATE) to technology assessment, given that it was formatted to address many of the privations characterising parallel approaches. The ATE approach, also in practice, presents certain areas for retooling, (...) such as how it characterises levels and objects of analysis. This paper results from the work done with the TechEthos Horizon 2020 project in evaluating the ethical, legal, and social impacts of climate engineering, digital extended reality, and neurotechnologies. To meet the challenges these technology families present, this paper aims to enhance the ATE framework to encompass the variety of human processes and material forms, functions, and applications that comprise the socio-technical systems in which these technologies are embedded. (shrink)

Adherents of the Abrahamic religions have traditionally held that God is morally perfect and unconditionally deserving of devotion, obedience, love, and worship. The Jewish, Christian, and Islamic scriptures tell us that God is compassionate, merciful, and just. As is well-known, however, these same scriptures contain passages that portray God as wrathful, severely punitive, and jealous. Critics furthermore argue that the God of these scriptures commends bigotry, misogyny, and homophobia, condones slavery, and demands the adoption of unjust laws-for example, laws that (...) mandate the death penalty for adultery and rebellion against parents, and laws institutionalizing in various ways the diverse kinds of bigotry and oppression just mentioned. In recent days, these sorts of criticisms of the Hebrew Bible have been raised in new and forceful ways by philosophers, scientists, social commentators, and others. This volume brings together eleven original essays representing the views of both critics and defenders of the character of God as portrayed in these texts. Authors represent the disciplines of philosophy, religion, and Biblical studies. Each essay is accompanied by comments from another author who takes a critical approach to the thesis defended in that essay, along with replies by the essay's author. (shrink)

Recent developments toward a more holistic biology do not eliminate reductionism and determinism, but they do suggest more complex forms of them, in which there are multiple, interacting influences, as there are in complex or chaotic systems. Though there is a place in biology for both systemic and atomistic modes of explanation, for those with a theological perspective the shift to complex explanations in biology is often welcome. It suggests a more subtle view of divine action in which God's purposes (...) are affected through engagement with the complex systems of creation rather than by discrete interventions. It also invites us to connect the biological interdependence with the interdependence in the nature and purposes of God, and it is consonant with a mystical vision of the unity of all things. (shrink)

Bovine tuberculosis is the most economically important animal health policy issue in Britain. The problem of what to do about badgers has plagued successive governments since a dead badger was discovered with bovine TB in 1971. Successive Labour governments oversaw the Randomised Badger Culling Trial from 1998 to 2006. Despite the RBCT recommendation against culling, the 2010–2015 Coalition government implemented pilot badger culls. This paper provides an account of the evolution of bovine TB and badger control policy, focusing on the (...) 1997–2010 Labour, the 2010–2015 Coalition and the 2015-present Conservative governments. Interviews with bovine TB policy stakeholders supplement discussion of the development of bovine TB policy. The paper discusses the science and politics of bovine TB policy, in which there are different badger control policies in Westminster, Welsh and Scottish governments. Badger control is a highly polarised issue, and the Coalition and Conservative governments have been heavily criticised for a culling policy opposed by the independent scientific community. Recent governments have defended badger culling on the basis of veterinary advice and experience in countries such as New Zealand. The paper concludes with two key recommendations to inform controversial animal health and welfare policy issues such as bovine TB. First, mandatory Animal Welfare Impact Assessment provides objective data on the impacts of policy options on cows and badgers. Second, robust ethical analysis, conducted by independent experts using established moral frameworks, should be applied to animal health and welfare issues for the benefit of decision makers. (shrink)

Problematic perceptions about race damage our society. These attitudes can seem impossible to overcome, but philosophers Dr Jennifer Mensch, at Western Sydney University in Australia, and Dr Michael Olson, at Marquette University in the US, beg to differ. They are compiling a collection of 18th-century philosophical and scientific texts that helped shape the way people saw race across the Western world, and were used to justify colonisation. They believe that by exposing these historical roots of racism, opportunities to improve (...) societal attitudes to race will become easier to identify. -/- This article was produced by Futurum Careers, a free online resource and magazine aimed at encouraging 14-19-year-olds worldwide to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, maths and medicine (STEM), and social sciences, humanities and the arts for people and the economy (SHAPE). (shrink)

Although scholarship in philosophy of action has grown in recent years, there has been little work explicitly dealing with the role of time in agency, a role with great significance for the study of action. As the articles in this collection demonstrate, virtually every fundamental issue in the philosophy of action involves considerations of time. The four sections of this volume address the metaphysics of action, diachronic practical rationality, the relation between deliberation and action, and the phenomenology of agency, providing (...) an overview of the central developments in each area with an emphasis on the role of temporality. Including contributions by established, rising, and new voices in the field, _Time and the Philosophy of Action _brings analytic work in philosophy of action together with contributions from continental philosophy and cognitive science to elaborate the central thesis that agency not only develops in time but is shaped by it at every level. (shrink)

We highlight connections between accessible categories and abstract elementary classes , and provide a dictionary for translating properties and results between the two contexts. We also illustrate a few applications of purely category-theoretic methods to the study of AECs, with model-theoretically novel results. In particular, the category-theoretic approach yields two surprising consequences: a structure theorem for categorical AECs, and a partial stability spectrum for weakly tame AECs.

We do things in time. Philosophy of action can capture this phenomenon in at least two ways. On one hand, it might focus on the way that temporal preferences and long-term temporal horizons affect the rationality of decisions in the present (see, e.g., Parfit 1984; Rawls 1971). Such work may focus on the way we discount the distant future, for example, or prioritize the future over the past. Approaches of this kind treat time as, in a sense, something external to (...) agency; it sets various constraints on what we may rationally intend, for example. But if temporal considerations can constrain agency, it follows that they can also structure it internally, and if they can do so, it seems likely that this is possible because agency is already temporally structured. This volume focuses on the way that agency is temporally structured from within, such that time is an ineliminable constituent of agency. (shrink)

Bovine tuberculosis is an important animal health policy issue in Britain, which impacts farmers, the public, domestic farmed cattle and the wild badger population. The Westminster government’s badger culling policy in England, which began in 2013, has caused considerable controversy. This is in part because the Independent Scientific Group advised against culling, based on the Randomised Badger Culling Trial. Those opposed to badger culling support more stringent cattle-based measures and the vaccination of badgers. This paper argues for ethical analysis of (...) public policy options which impact sentient species. It provides a summary Animal Welfare Impact Assessment of a do-nothing approach, badger culling, and badger vaccination. A utilitarian analysis is then applied to these policy options considering human wellbeing and animal welfare. The analysis compares a badger culling policy that achieves a 19% reduction in bovine TB incidence, a badger vaccination model achieving a 12.5% reduction, and a do-nothing approach. Policy options are assessed over 9 years and a longer timeframe, and uncertainty is considered. The analysis finds that non-culling approaches, particularly badger vaccination, result in greater total utility, compared to badger culling. Badger culling causes 30% reduction in the badger population in England as well as substantial harms due to the culling process. Culling is opposed by public opinion and is associated with considerable risks and uncertainty. In contrast, non-culling approaches, such as cattle-based measures and badger vaccination, are supported by public opinion and are not associated with such risks. (shrink)

Bovine tuberculosis is the most important animal health and welfare policy issue in Britain. Badgers are a wildlife reservoir of disease, although the eight-year Independent Scientific Group Randomised Badger Culling Trial concluded with a recommendation against culling. The report advised government that bovine TB could be controlled, and ultimately eradicated, by cattle-based measures alone. Despite the ISG recommendation against culling, the farming and veterinary industries continued to lobby government for a badger cull. The 2005–2010 Labour government followed the ISG advice (...) and decided against a cull. The 2010–2015 Coalition and the 2015-present Conservative governments have followed a badger culling policy. This paper investigates whether a virtuous government would cull badgers. It provides an overview of virtue theory in the context of government animal health and welfare policy. Bovine TB and badger control policy options are then analysed in the context of the virtues of justice, wisdom, integrity, loyalty, curiosity, trust, empathy, compassion and aesthetics. Justice is the first virtue of government, and badger culling is seriously problematic from a virtue perspective given that five badgers are culled per cow that avoids slaughter as a result. Analysis based on other virtues strongly suggests that government should not cull badgers. The paper concludes that a virtuous government would not cull badgers as part of policy to control bovine TB in cattle. (shrink)

Corporate governance guidelines are a mechanism that a firm can enact which should reduce agency costs and better align the interests of boards and the suppliers of capital. This study examines stock price reactions primarily attributable to institutional investors occurring when corporations announce the enactment of corporate governance guidelines. A final sample of 77 firms was derived from the first announcement of corporate governance guidelines exclusive to the SEC-EDGAR database. The results indicate that good governance does matter. Firms that announced (...) the enactment of corporate governance guidelines experienced increased stock prices following the announcements. There was an immediate (days 1–4) reaction for firms that provided all or part of the guidelines’ substance; a delayed (days 8–10) reaction occurred for those firms that only referenced the guidelines’ enactment. Additionally, firms with either a potentially greater following or that had a previous history of acrimonious relations with stakeholders were rewarded by the announcement of the enactment of guidelines. (shrink)

Comparative research assessing metacognition in nonhuman animals contributes to the question of what form introspection could take in humans, non-humans, and other possibly conscious systems. We briefly review some major findings in comparative metacognition research, including some discoveries in areas looking at self-regulation and self-control. We discuss what data exist to address the three conditions for introspection defined by Kammerer and Frankish (this issue) in their target article. We suggest that two of three conditions are met by existing data from (...) non-human primates, and that the third condition may be more difficult, but perhaps not impossible, to assess. We argue that a comparative and developmental approach to this question of how to define and measure introspection is a productive avenue to make progress in this area. (shrink)

We introduce a family of rank functions and related notions of total transcendence for Galois types in abstract elementary classes. We focus, in particular, on abstract elementary classes satisfying the condition known as tameness, where the connections between stability and total transcendence are most evident. As a byproduct, we obtain a partial upward stability transfer result for tame abstract elementary classes stable in a cardinal $\lambda$ satisfying $\lambda^{\aleph_{0}}\gt \lambda$, a substantial generalization of a result of Baldwin, Kueker, and VanDieren.

Bovine tuberculosis is an important and controversial animal health policy issue in England, which impacts humans, cattle and badgers. The government policy of badger culling has led to widespread opposition, in part due to the conclusions of a large field trial recommending against culling, and in part because badgers are a cherished wildlife species. Animal rights theorists argue that sentient nonhumans should be accorded fundamental rights against killing and suffering. In bovine TB policy, however, pro-culling actors claim that badgers must (...) be culled to avoid the slaughter of cattle. The first part of the paper compares AR theories of Regan, Francione, Cochrane, Garner and Donaldson and Kymlicka in the context of wildlife species. The second part of the paper applies these AR theories to bovine TB and badger control. AR theories are applied to badger control policy options of do nothing, badger culling, and badger vaccination. We conclude that AR theories are strongly opposed to badger culling. In general, culling is prohibited due to a badger’s right to life and its rights against suffering. The AR theories support a do-nothing, i.e. non-culling, non-vaccination approach to badger control. In the case of the AR theories of Regan and Francione, this is based on abolitionist positions with respect to farming. For Cochrane, Garner, and Donaldson and Kymlicka, the do-nothing policy option is preferred because badger vaccination causes a degree of suffering which generally is not for the individual’s benefit. (shrink)

Gene drives are selfish genetic elements that use a variety of mechanisms to ensure they are transmitted to subsequent generations at greater than expected frequencies. Synthetic gene drives based on the clustered regularly interspersed palindromic repeats genome editing system have been proposed as a way to alter the genetic characteristics of natural populations of organisms relevant to the goals of public health, conservation, and agriculture. Here, we review the principles and potential applications of CRISPR drives, as well as means proposed (...) to prevent their uncontrolled spread. We also focus on recent work suggesting that factors such as natural genetic variation and inbreeding may represent substantial impediments to the propagation of CRISPR drives. CRISPR-based synthetic selfish genetic elements, or gene drives, have been proposed as a means by which to genetically alter natural populations to address issues in agriculture, conservation, and public health. We describe key concepts of CRISPR gene drives and limitations that must be addressed before their use in the wild. (shrink)

For International Relations scholars, discussions of globalization inevitably turn to questions of sovereignty. How much control does a country have over its borders, people and economy? Where does that authority come from? _Sovereign Lives_ explores these changes through reading of humanitarian intervention, human rights discourses, securitization, refugees, the fragmentation of identities and the practices of development.