The United States Supreme Court, in its decision Ferguson v. City of Charleston,ruled that to conduct drug tests on pregnant women in public hospitals and to share that information with the police without obtaining a search warrant amounted to a violation of the women's constitutional rights under the Fourth Amendment. Set within the political context of public policy designed to monitor the activities of pregnant women and the ongoing incidence of prosecutions for ‘foetal abuse’,this note shows how the Supreme Court’s (...) decision, while on the one hand vindicating the rights of pregnant women to be free from unlawful searches upon their person, does not definitively determine the important question of the extent to which the state may regulate women’s behaviour during pregnancy. (shrink)
Personal narratives can let us in on aspects of reality which we have not experienced for ourselves, and are thus important sources for philosophical reflection. Yet a venerable tradition in mainstream philosophy has little room for arguments which rely on personal narrative, on the grounds that narratives are particular and testimonial, whereas philosophical arguments should be systematic and transparent. I argue that narrative arguments are an important form of philosophical argument. Their testimonial aspects witness to novel facets of reality, but (...) their argumentative aspects help us to understand those facets for ourselves. My argument takes the form of a case study of the exemplary narrative argument penned by Rachel Moran, a former prostitute who uses her experiences to argue that prostitution amounts to sexual abuse. We’ll see that narrative arguments can enjoy expository Advantages over analytic ones. (shrink)
Beginning with Rachel Carson’s small book, The Sense of Wonder, I explore the moral significance of a sense of wonder—the propensity to respond with delight, awe, or yearning to what is beautiful and mysterious in the natural world when it unexpectedly reveals itself. An antidote to the view that the elements of the natural world are commodities to be disdained or destroyed, a sense of wonder leads us to celebrate and honor the more-than-human world, to care for it, to (...) protect its thriving. If this is so, then a sense of wonder may be a virtue, perhaps a keystone virtue in our time of reckless destruction, a source of decency and hope and restraint. (shrink)
Hume's Morality: Feeling and Fabrication 1 is a most useful and agreeable book. It contains a wealth of analysis, argument, and insight about many of the most central elements of the moral theory of one of the greatest moral philosophers in human history: David Hume. The book is well-conceived, well-argued, stimulating, informative, clear, precise, thorough, balanced, nuanced, and ingenious, while evincing—especially in its concluding chapter, when considering possible extensions of Hume's theory—a certain subtle but pleasing "warmth in the cause of (...) virtue." As Hume would be the first to recognize, these traits of the book are indications of the personal merit of its author: Rachel Cohon. Indeed, if Cleanthes. (shrink)
I am going to begin today by bringing together one of the themes of Carol Voeller’s remarks with one of the criticisms raised by Rachel Cohon, because I see them as related, and want to address them together. Voeller argues that the moral law is constitutive of our nature as rational agents. To put it in her own words, “to be the kind of object it is, is for a thing to be under, or constituted by, the laws which (...) are its nature. For Kant, laws are constitutive principles … in something very close to an Aristotelian sense: for Kant, laws are proper to objects1 much as form is to object, for Aristotle.” Voeller believes that the moral law defines the kind of cause that we are, and we are under the moral law because we are that kind of cause. Since the defining quality of a rational agent is that a rational agent acts on its representation - I prefer to say conception - of a law, Voeller thinks the question for Kant is whether we can find a law which just is the law for causes that act on their representations of laws. As she puts it, “The problem, for Kant, is whether there is a law of a cause that acts on norms - on reflection, on its representation of a law. If there is, then the constitutive principle of that cause will be the law normative for it in reflection.” Now Voeller appears to think that I will disagree with this strategy for grounding the moral law, because she sees me as giving an anti-metaphysical or ametaphysical account of Kant’s ethics, in contrast to Kant’s own. But so far, I don’t.. (shrink)
À une époque de grande exposition des corps, de totale libération et d'incitation à « réformer » au moyen d'innombrables procédés amplement annoncés par les médias - chirurgies plastiques, inoculation de différents produits qui, pour la plupart, n'ont même pas été soumis à des analyses attestant leur sécurité -, le livre O corpo feminino em debate dirigé par Maria Izilda Santos de Matos et Rachel Soihet est sans aucun doute bien opportun. En effet, il présente un ample panorama des (...) rep.. (shrink)
I summarize and evaluate the aims of the collection From Individual to Collective Intentionality: New Essays edited by Sara Rachel Chant, Frank Hindriks and Gerhard Preyer in the context of the on-going debate about collective intentionality and group agency. I then consider the individual essays contained therein, both from the perspective of how they advance the collection’s goals and the coherence of their individual arguments.
Dans cet ouvrage tiré d'une thèse soutenue à l'université de Toronto, Rachel Sauvé aborde la question de la femme auteur et de la place des femmes dans l'institution littéraire par un biais original : elle y étudie un ensemble de préfaces allographes (c'est-à-dire écrites par quelqu'un d'autre que l'auteur) à des œuvres littéraires du XIXe siècle. Établi de façon très systématique, le corpus de deux cent dix préfaces (dont cent soixante et onze à des œuvres de femmes) allant de (...) 1803 à .. (shrink)
In contrast to "the land ethic," Rachel Carson's Under the Sea-Wind suggests a trans-ecotonal sea ethic, which understands human's perception as inhibited by ecotones, such as shorelines and the ocean surface, and suggests four foundational concepts: 1.) Humans are not fully adapted to life in the oceans. 2.) Humans need to understand the scale and complexity of ocean ecosystems. 3.) Humans disrupt ocean ecosystems by overharvesting their productivity, and modifying ecosystem processes and linkages, such as migrations. 4.) Human imagination (...) and rational scientific investigation can traverse the ecotones, allowing us to more fully value ocean life and processes. (shrink)
In contrast to "the land ethic," Rachel Carson's Under the Sea-Wind suggests a trans-ecotonal sea ethic, which understands human's perception as inhibited by ecotones, such as shorelines and the ocean surface, and suggests four foundational concepts: 1.) Humans are not fully adapted to life in the oceans. 2.) Humans need to understand the scale and complexity of ocean ecosystems. 3.) Humans disrupt ocean ecosystems by overharvesting their productivity, and modifying ecosystem processes and linkages, such as migrations. 4.) Human imagination (...) and rational scientific investigation can traverse the ecotones, allowing us to more fully value ocean life and processes. (shrink)
This essay argues for reading Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring as a work of love that calls for an environmental politics of desire rather than self-preservation narrowly construed. I make this argument by reading Silent Spring in conjunction with the extant love letters of Carson and Dorothy Freeman, where they depict their love as a wondrous multispecies achievement constituted through encounters with birds. I argue that their example reveals that love need be neither worldless nor heteronormative, but may be a (...) world-disclosing practice that leads individuals to live, and desire to live, differently. Reading Silent Spring through the lens of these letters, I argue that it calls us to see the threat insecticides pose not only to “mere life” but also to pleasurable lives of wonder and love. I build on Silent Spring to argue for an alternative politics of survival in the face of climate change: one that foregrounds the connections between inter-human affects and a vibrant multispecies world, between intimate and public feelings, and calls for preservation of a multispecies world through and on behalf of human pleasure. (shrink)
‘An honest religious thinker’, Wittgenstein remarked, ‘is like a tightrope walker. He almost looks as though he were walking on nothing but air. His support is the slenderest imaginable. And yet it really is possible to walk on it’.
This article draws attention to the origins, forms, and implications of “toxic discourse” as a genre central to the understanding of the public sphere in business in society. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring is used as a pivotal cultural document establishing “toxic discourse” as an ongoing form of moral narrative rooted in the rationality of counterpublics. Toxic discourse is framed within a center/periphery model in which toxic discourse gains salience in periods of economic dislocation and uncertainty. In these periods, toxic (...) discourse draws together those on the periphery or counterpublics who otherwise would not unite in their opposition to the center. The article critically examines how stakeholder theory, despite making sense of the public sphere for agents of organizations, glosses counterpublics and relegates toxic discourse, as evident in the “Occupy Movement,” to the ephemeral role of temporary, disruptive protest groups with very little of substance to communicate. (shrink)
: In contrast to "the land ethic," Rachel Carson's Under the Sea-Wind suggests a trans-ecotonal sea ethic, which understands human's perception as inhibited by ecotones, such as shorelines and the ocean surface, and suggests four foundational concepts: 1.) Humans are not fully adapted to life in the oceans. 2.) Humans need to understand the scale and complexity of ocean ecosystems. 3.) Humans disrupt ocean ecosystems by over-harvesting their productivity, and modifying ecosystem processes and linkages, such as migrations. 4.) Human (...) imagination and rational scientific investigation can traverse the ecotones, allowing us to more fully value ocean life and processes. (shrink)
