Environmental health remains a niche topic in bioethics, despite being a prominent social determinant of health. In this paper we argue that if bioethicists are to take the project of health justice as a serious one, then we have to address environmental injustices and the threats they pose to our bioethics principles, health equity, and clinical care. To do this, we lay out three arguments supporting prioritizing environmental health in bioethics based on bioethics principles including a commitment to vulnerable populations (...) and justice. We also highlight and advocate for environmental law efforts that align with these priorities, focusing specifically on the need for a right to a healthy environment. Our intention is to draw attention to the legal and ethical concepts that underlie the importance of a healthy environment, and urge bioethicists to prioritize both legal and ethical advocacy against environmental injustices in their practice. (shrink)

Some individuals facing dementia contemplate hastening their own death: weighing the possibility of living longer with dementia against the alternative of dying sooner but avoiding the later stages of cognitive and functional impairment. This weighing resonates with an ethical and legal consensus in the United States that individuals can voluntarily choose to forgo life‐sustaining interventions and also that medical professionals can support these choices even when they will result in an earlier death. For these reasons, whether and how a terminally (...) ill individual can choose to control the timing of their death is a topic that cannot be avoided when considering the dementia trajectory. With a focus on the U.S. context, this landscape review considers the status of provisions that would legally permit people facing dementia to hasten death with appropriate support from medical professionals. This review can be used to plan and guide clinical and legal practitioner discussion and policy development concerning evolving questions not fully covered by existing medical decision‐making provisions. (shrink)

This paper explores the role of generics in social cognition. First, we explore the nature and effects of the most common form of generics about social kinds. Second, we discuss the nature and effects of a less common but equally important form of generics about social kinds. Finally, we consider the implications of this discussion for how we ought to use language about the social world.

Recent philosophy of mind has had a mistaken conception of the nature of psychological concepts. It has assumed too much similarity between psychological judgments and those of natural science and has thus overlooked the fact that other people are not just objects whose thoughts we may try to predict and control but fellow creatures with whom we talk and co-operate. In this collection of essays, Jane Heal argues that central to our ability to arrive at views about others' thoughts (...) is not knowledge of some theory of the mind but rather an ability to imagine alternative worlds and how things appear from another person's point of view. She then applies this view to questions of how we represent others' thoughts, the shape of psychological concepts, the nature of rationality and the possibility of first person authority. This book should appeal to students and professionals in philosophy of mind and language. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titled: Introduction Background Central Philosophical Issues in Works on the Passions The Weakness of Reason “Reason Directs and the Affections Execute”19 Hume's Connection to the Earlier Literature Central Philosophical Issues regarding the Passions: Hume's Alternative Analyses Conclusion Notes References and further reading.

For Pleasure argues that aesthetic pleasure and formal experimentalism hold the twinned capacity to maintain a global racial order and also to undo it.

Critical posthumanism as a philosophical, antifascist nonhierarchical imagination for nursing offers a liberatory passageway forward amidst environmental collapse, an epic pandemic, global authoritarianism, extreme health and wealth disparities, over‐reliance on technology and empirics, and unjust societal systems based in whiteness. Drawing upon philosophical and theoretical works from Black and Indigenous scholars, Haraway's idea of the Chthulucene, Deleuze and Guattari's rhizomatic thought, and Kaba's abolitionist organizing among others, we as activist nurse scholars continue the speculative discussion outlined in prior papers. Here (...) we further imagine how we can engage a radical philosophical mission of care for all beings human and non, walking and working alongside the people and communities nurses accompany, connected as we are on this dystopian celestial orb. Discussion is centred on critical analyses of traditional justice framing in nursing, and on the praxis possibilities found within rhizomatic thought, making kin, and just episteme while knitting filaments of nursing theory and history, humming song lyrics from collective memory, and critically dismantling received wisdoms to stumble toward a more emancipatory present future. (shrink)

The cornerstone of contemporary nursing practice is the provision of individualised nursing care. Sustaining and nourishing the stream of research frameworks that inform individualised care are the findings from qualitative research. At the centre of much qualitative research practice, however, is an assumption that experiential understanding can be delivered through a thematisation of meaning which, it will be argued, can lead the researcher to make unsustainable assumptions about the relations of language and meaning‐making to experience. We will show that an (...) uncritical subscription to such assumptions can undermine the researcher's capacity to represent experience at the high level of abstraction consistent with experience itself and to thus inform genuinely individualised care. Instead, using qualia as a touchstone for the possibilities of understanding and representing experience, we trace the ‘designative’ and ‘expressive’ distinction to language in order to raise critical questions concerning both these assumptions and common practices within qualitative research. Following the ‘expressive’ account of language, we foreground in particular the hermeneutic work of Gadamer through which we explore the possibilities for a qualitative research approach that would better seek the mot juste of individual experience and illuminate qualia in order to better inform genuinely individualised care. (shrink)

English translation by Kneller and Losonsky of Klaus Reich, Die Vollständigkeit der Kantischen Urteilstafel -/- "This classic of Kant scholarship, whose first edition appeared in 1932, deals with one of the most controversial and difficult topics in the Critique of Pure Reason: Kant's table of judgments and their connection to the table of categories. Kant's attempt to derive the latter from the former is called the "Metaphysical Deduction," and it paves the way for the Transcendental Deduction that is universally recognized (...) as the heart of the Critique." "Many commentators have passed over the Metaphysical Deduction in silence, as if embarrassed by Kant's fatuity, and his critics are almost unanimous in finding its premise ungrounded, its argument incorrect, and its conclusion false. At the heart of the failure of the Metaphysical Deduction, it is alleged, is Kant's inability to justify the table of the forms of judgment. Critics argue that Kant simply took these forms of judgment from the logic textbooks of his day and doctored them so as to yield the required categories. Such objections were current even in Kant's time; they were repeated by Hegel, and are commonplaces of Kant criticism today." "This book is the fullest and most systematic evaluation ever made of the Metaphysical Deduction. Reich argues that its principal conclusion is correct even though Kant failed to establish it in the Metaphysical Deduction proper, and he defends the conclusion by using Kant material far removed from the text of the Metaphysical Deduction, notes by Kant that only became available in the 1920's and that remain even now untranslated into English. With the publication of this translation for English-speaking Kant scholars, a neglected and impugned part of the Critique of Pure Reason can finally receive the attention it deserves."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved. (shrink)

In the past decade, numerous ethical frameworks have been developed to support public health decision‐making in challenging areas. Before the COVID‐19 pandemic began, members of the authorship team were involved in research programmes, in which the development of ethical frameworks was planned, to guide (a) the use of new technologies for emerging infectious disease surveillance; and (b) the allocation of scarce supplies of pandemic influenza vaccine. However, as the pandemic evolved, significant practical challenges emerged that led to our questioning the (...) value of these frameworks. We now believe that a normative instrument, such as a framework, cannot adequately or reliably provide the ethical guidance that needs to be incorporated into public health decision‐making during natural disasters or infectious disease emergencies. Recently it has been suggested that there are potentially more dynamic, flexible, and effective ways to navigate decisions involving complex considerations entailed in policies and practices during a public health emergency. In this paper, we first outline the key functions of a public health ethics framework, before describing why we believe it would not be fit for purpose during a crisis. We end by considering whether proposed alternative methods to promote ethical public health decision‐making goals have the potential to meet these objectives. (shrink)

A century ago, John Dewey remarked that when home changes radically, school must change as well. With home, family, and gender roles dramatically altered in recent years, we are faced with a difficult problem: in the lives of more and more American children, no one is home. The Schoolhome proposes a solution. Drawing selectively from reform movements of the past and relating them to the unique needs of today's parents and children, Jane Martin presents a philosophy of education that (...) is responsive to America's changed and changing realities. As more and more parents enter the workforce, the historic role of the domestic sphere in the education and development of children is drastically reduced. Consequently, Martin advocates removing the barriers between the school and the home--making school a metaphorical "home," a safe and nuturant environment that provides children with the experience of affection and connection otherwise missing or inconsistent in their lives. In this proposition, the traditional schoolhouse where children are drilled in the three Rs is transformed into a "schoolhome" where learning is animated by an ethic of social awareness. At a time when many school reformers are calling for a return to basics and lobbying for skills education and quick-fix initiatives, Martin urges us to reconsider the distinctive legacies of Dewey and Montessori and to conceive of a school that integrates the values of the home with those of social responsibility. With cultural diversity and gender equality among its explicit goals, the schoolhome expands upon Dewey's edict to educate the "whole child," seeking instead to educate all children in the culture's whole heritage. Martin eloquently challenges reformers to reclaim the founding fathers' vision of the nation as a domestic realm, and to imagine a learning environment whose curriculum and classroom practice reflect not merely an economic but a moral investment in the future of our children. More than a summons to action, this remarkable book is a call to rethink the assumptions we bring to the educational enterprise, and so, to act wisely. (shrink)

As the living scriptural heritage of more than a billion people, the Qur'an speaks with a powerful voice. Just as other scriptural religions, Islam has produced a long tradition of interpretation for its holy book. Nevertheless, efforts to introduce the Qur'an and its intellectual heritage to English-speaking audiences have been hampered by the lack of available resources. The Cambridge Companion to the Qur'an seeks to remedy that situation. In a discerning summation of the field, Jane McAuliffe brings together an (...) international team of scholars to explain its complexities. Comprising fourteen chapters, each devoted to a topic of central importance, the book is rich in historical, linguistic and literary detail, while also reflecting the influence of other disciplines. For both the university student and the general reader, The Cambridge Companion to the Qur'an provides a fascinating entrée to a text that has shaped the lives of millions for centuries. (shrink)

Informed by Critical Race Theory, this quantitative study supports civic educators in understanding the role of classroom climate and racial identity in students’ civic engagement during a statewide middle school civics mandate (n = 4707). Findings reveal that students of color experience higher civic engagement and lower civic attitude scores than white-identifying peers, after controlling for school, classroom, and affluence indicators. Students’ perception of whiteness (or perhaps majority status) appeared to correlate with positive civic knowledge and civic attitude, but relative (...) civic inaction. These findings suggest differences in civic outcomes as early as middle school between white-identifying students and students of color. Such differences offer implications for civic education interventions that address not only effective instruction, but civic inequities, students’ perceived agency, and curricular content. (shrink)

References to strength of mind, a character trait implying “the prevalence of the calm passions above the violent”, occur in a number of important discussions of motivation in the Treatise and the Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals. Nevertheless, Hume says surprisingly little about what strength of mind is, or how it is achieved. This paper argues that Hume’s theory of the passions can provide an interesting and defensible account of strength of mind. The paper concludes with a brief comparison (...) of Humean strength of mind with autonomy. (shrink)

Over the past three decades, research on the social dimensions of emotions has grown exponentially, particularly in the area of "emotion management." In this project, we will attempt to add to this body of research by studying the social aspects of labeling or "instantiating" feelings. The data for the project come from televised red-carpet interviews conducted with celebrities immediately prior to awards ceremonies. By focusing on the generic aspects of the emotional claims-making put forth by interviewers and interviewees, we demonstrate (...) how the labeling of emotions is an interpretive, interactive task. (shrink)

The recently revised Common Rule requires that donors of biospecimens for research be informed if their specimens might be used for commercial profit. The Common Rule, however, does not apply to sharing or selling de-identified biospecimens that are “leftover” from clinical uses. As a result, many medical researchers remain uncertain of their legal and ethical obligations when a commercial entity expresses interest in these specimens.

This book explores the persistence of Pythagorean ideas in theoretical physics. It shows that the Pythagorean position is both philosophically deep and scientifically interesting. However, it does not endorse pure Pythagoreanism; rather, it defends the thesis that mind and mathematical structure are the grounds of reality. The book begins by examining Wigner's paper on the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences. It argues that, whilst many issues surrounding the applicability of mathematics disappear upon examination, there are some core (...) issues to do with the effectiveness of mathematics in fundamental physics which remain. The core issues are the existence of the laws of nature and our minds ability to fathom them, the use of formal mathematics in discovering things about the quantum world, the fact that deep mathematics is needed to describe fundamental physics, and the asymptotic nature of the quest for knowledge. These issues are the focus of the book. The author seeks to explain them within a metaphysical framework that takes mind and mathematical structure as its fundamental principles. The framework - called quantum monadology - combines ideas from Leibnizian monadology, set theory, and consistent histories quantum theory. (shrink)

The Real Food Challenge is a national student movement in the United States that aims to shift $1 billion—roughly 20%—of college and university food budgets across the country towards local, ecologically sound, fair, and humane food sources—what they call “real” food—by 2020. The University of Vermont was the fifth university in the U.S. to sign the Real Food Campus Commitment, pledging to shift at least 20% of its own food budget towards “real” food by 2020. In order to examine student (...) preference for “real” food on the UVM campus, we analyzed a survey of 904 undergraduate students that used contingent valuation to evaluate students’ willingness-to-pay for the “real” attribute. We found that a majority of students are willing to pay a positive premium for “real” food. Furthermore, we found that student characteristics and attitudes significantly influence WTP. Specifically, gender, residency, college, and attitudes about price and origin of food are significant predictors of WTP. (shrink)

The use of genome-wide association studies in medical research and the increased ability to share data give a new twist to some of the perennial ethical issues associated with genomic research. GWAS create particular challenges because they produce fine, detailed, genotype information at high resolution, and the results of more focused studies can potentially be used to determine genetic variation for a wide range of conditions and traits. The information from a GWA scan is derived from DNA that is a (...) powerful personal identifier, and can provide information not just on the individual, but also on the individual's relatives, related groups, and populations. Furthermore, it creates large amounts of individual-specific digital information that is easy to share across international borders. This paper provides an overview of some of the key ethical issues around GWAS: consent, feedback of results, privacy, and the governance of research. Many of the questions that lie ahead of us in terms of the next generation sequencing methods will have been foreshadowed by GWAS and the debates around ethical and policy issues that these have created. (shrink)

The United Kingdom’s approach to encouraging environmentally positive behaviour has been three-pronged, through voluntarism, incentives and regulation, and the balance between the approaches has fluctuated over time. Whilst financial incentives and regulatory approaches have been effective in achieving some environmental management behavioural change amongst farmers, ultimately these can be viewed as transient drivers without long-term sustainability. Increasingly, there is interest in ‘nudging’ managers towards voluntary environmentally friendly actions. This approach requires a good understanding of farmers’ willingness and ability to take (...) up environmental activities and the influences on farmer behavioural change. The paper aims to provide insights from 60 qualitative farmer interviews undertaken for a research project into farmers’ willingness and ability to undertake environmental management, particularly focusing on social psychological insights. Furthermore, it explores farmers’ level of engagement with advice and support networks that foster a genuine interest, responsibility and a sense of personal and social norm to sustain high quality environmental outcomes. Two conceptual frameworks are presented for usefully exploring the complex set of inter-relationships that can influence farmers’ willingness to undertake environmental management practices. The research findings show how an in-depth understanding of farmer’s willingness and ability to adopt environmental management practices and their existing level of engagement with advice and support are necessary to develop appropriate engagement approaches to achieve sustained and durable environmental management. (shrink)

The concept of vulnerability is deployed in bioethics to, amongst other things, identify and remedy harms to participants in research, yet although nonhuman animals in experimentation seem intuitively to be vulnerable, this concept and its attendant protections are rarely applied to research animals. I want to argue, however, that this concept is applicable to nonhuman animals and that a new taxonomy of vulnerability developed in the context of human bioethics can be applied to research animals. This taxonomy does useful explanatory (...) work, helping to pinpoint the limitations of the 3Rs/welfare approach currently adopted in the context of animal experimentation. On this account, the 3Rs/welfare approach fails to deliver for nonhuman animals in experimentation because it effectively addresses only one element of their vulnerability (inherent) and paradoxically through the institution of Animal Ethics Committees intended to protect experimental animals in fact generates new vulnerabilities that exacerbate their already precarious situation. (shrink)

In this paper I offer an analysis, reconstruction and defense of Locke's account of personal identity. I begin with a detailed analysis of Locke's use of the term 'conscious' in its historical context. This term, which plays a central role in Locke's theory, had senses in the seventeenth century which it does not have today. In the light of this analysis, an interpretation of continuity of consciousness as the ancestral of memory is given. It is argued that this interpretation of (...) Locke's theory of personal identity does not involve an ontological commitment to immaterial substances, and Locke is defended against the historically important criticisms of Butler and Reid. In the conclusion I suggest that the account of the individuation of persons implicit in Locke's discussion of personal identity is similar to the account of contextual individuation given by Hintikka. (shrink)

Using an approach developed in the context of human bioethics, we argue that chimpanzees in research can be regarded as vulnerable subjects. This vulnerability is primarily due to communication barriers and situational factors—confinement and dependency—that make chimpanzees particularly susceptible to risks of harm and exploitation in experimental settings. In human research, individuals who are deemed vulnerable are accorded special protections. Using conceptual and moral resources developed in the context of research with vulnerable humans, we show how chimpanzees warrant additional safeguards (...) against harm and exploitation paralleling those for human subjects. These safeguards should include empowering third parties to act as surrogate decision makers for chimpanzees, ensuring participant “assent,” and avoiding recruitment of animal subjects based merely on convenience. (shrink)

Terence Penelhum has written extensively about the role of the idea of the self in Hume's account of the emotional and moral life of persons. Penelhum fails to notice, however, a change that takes place in the way that the idea of the self functions in Hume's account of the passions as that account evolved after the Treatise. This paper charts part of that evolution, and reflects on its significance for Hume's moral psychology.

Intuitively, an object is something that coheres internally and is largely independent of its environment. But what is the environment? Viewed at one scale, it surrounds and separates objects and differentiates them. Viewed at another scale, it is itself a collection of objects surrounded by environment. At all scales, we describe the world in terms of objects in an environment. I examine the nature of the environment and its role in mediating the object-subject relation. This dedicated analysis of the environment (...) provides a new perspective on the notion of objectivity. (shrink)

This paper draws on insights from Jacques Rancière's writing on politics and aesthetics to offer new perspectives on debates in education and the arts. The paper addresses three debates in turn; the place of contemporary art in schools and gallery education, the role of art in democratic education and the blurring of boundaries between participatory art and community education. I argue that Rancière's work helps to illuminate some essentialist assumptions behind dichotomous arguments about contemporary art in the classroom—both over-hyped claims (...) about its value, and exaggerated fears about its threat to educational values alike. On democratic education I argue that his work highlights the importance of the aesthetic dimensions of democratic learning and, on art and community education, I issue caution against readings of Rancière's work that frame his contribution as a ‘rehabilitation‘ of the aesthetic. Although each debate is tackled discretely, the paper advances the overall argument that attention to equality in Rancière's work—both aesthetic and political—is vital when applying his philosophy to debates that occupy the boundaries of education, politics and art. (shrink)

This paper is about the relationship between actuality and potentiality. Two paradigms are considered: Leibnizian possible worlds, which is rooted in classical physics; and the consistent histories quantum theory of Griffiths, Gell-Mann, Hartle, and Omnès. I explore an interesting connection between these two paradigms. The analysis goes beyond a comparison of classical and quantum physics to consider how modern physics might be integrated into a more comprehensive view of the world, in the spirit of Leibniz’s own philosophy.

It is argued that mathematics is unreasonably effective in fundamental physics, that this is genuinely mysterious, and that it is best explained by a version of Pythagorean metaphysics. It is shown how this can be reconciled with the fact that mathematics is not always effective in real world applications. The thesis is that physical structure approaches isomorphism with a highly symmetric mathematical structure at very high energy levels, such as would have existed in the early universe. As the universe cooled, (...) its underlying symmetry was broken in a sequence of stages. At each stage, more forces and particles were differentiated, leading to the complexity of the observed world. Remnant structure makes mathematics effective in some real world applications, but not all. (shrink)

The Current Legal Problems lecture series and annual volume was established around sixty years ago at the Faculty of Laws, University College London and has long been recognized as a major reference point for legal scholarship. The continuing strength of Current Legal Problems is its representation of a broad range of legal scholarship opinion, theory, methodology, and subject matter, with an emphasis upon contemporary developments of law. Contributions to the 61st volume in the series include an analysis of war as (...) crime by Professor Gerry Simpson, an assessment of the problems in building a realistic climate change regime by Professor Daniel Cole, and an exploration of the problems of character evidence by Dr Mike Redmayne. (shrink)

How does Jung model his psychology on Plato's philosophy? The Platonic Jung looks at similarities between the two, particularly in the structure of the cosmos and psyche and in the nature of the self. The book reunites philosophy and psychology and expresses the message these men imparted-the soul is the true self and worth finding.

As philosophers throughout the ages have asked: What is justice? What is truth? What is art? What is law? In _Education Reconfigured_, the internationally acclaimed philosopher of education, Jane Roland Martin, now asks: What is education? In answer, she puts forward a unified theory that casts education in a brand new light. Martin’s "theory of education as encounter" places culture alongside the individual at the heart of the educational process, thus responding to the call John Dewey made over a (...) century ago for an enlarged outlook on education. Look through her theory’s lens and you can see that education takes place not only in school but at home, on the street, in the mall—everywhere and all the time. Look through that lens and you can see that education does not always spell improvement; rather, it can be for the better or the worse. Indeed, you can see that education is inevitably a maker and shaper of both individuals and cultures. Above all, Martin’s new educational paradigm reveals that education is too important to be left solely to the professionals; that it is one of the great forces in human society and, as such, deserves the attention and demands the vigilance of every thoughtful person. (shrink)

Innovative surgery raises four kinds of ethical challenges: potential harms to patients; compromised informed consent; unfair allocation of healthcare resources; and conflicts of interest. Lack of adequate data on innovations and lack of regulatory oversight contribute to these ethical challenges. In this paper these issues and the extent to which problems may be resolved by better evidence-gathering and more comprehensive regulation are explored. It is suggested that some ethical issues will be more resistant to resolution than others, owing to special (...) features of both surgery and innovation. (shrink)