We wish to extend the concepts in Ray and Cooper’s (2024) article entitled “The Bioethics of Environmental Injustice: Ethical, Legal, and Clinical Implications of Unhealthy Environments” to palliat...

Events in 2020 have sparked a reimagination of how both individuals and institutions should consider race, power, health, and marginalization in society. In a response to these developments, we exa...

Often a physician’s first introduction to a patient is not a physical encounter but a review of their chart. A glaring “violence risk” flag in an Electronic Medical Record (EMR) is often noticeable...

Substance use disorder (SUD) care among women in the sex trade poses multiple ethical challenges. We propose a framework with three lenses—autonomy, power, and place—that can inform and help improve more ethical clinical care for people who trade sex seeking SUD treatment. A relational perspective on autonomy, an analysis of power relations in the clinic, and a geographical analysis can inform how we create space for people with experience in the sex trade in substance use treatment facilities and beyond. We (...) conclude with some practical applications of this framework, all while integrating a composite clinical vignette throughout our analysis. This analysis addresses a clinical and ethical gap in ways to provide better care for women in the sex trade, an understudied and chronically marginalized population deserving of care that meets them where they are. (shrink)

The events of 2020 have shaken the core of bioethics in a way that we hope will pave a new and equitable, though perhaps uncomfortable, path forward. We would like to thank those who responded to o...

In their target article, Zamina Mithani, Jane Cooper, and J. Wesley Boyd make a compelling case for the importance of “counter storytelling” in bioethics. They obse...

Précis for a book symposium, with contributions from Meg Wallace, Louis deRosset, and Chris Tillman and Joshua Spencer.

Here the philosopher and physicist David Z Albert argues, among other things, that the difference between past and future can be understood as a mechanical phenomenon of nature and that quantum mechanics makes it impossible to present the entirety of what can be said about the world as a narrative of “befores” and “afters.”.

Kierkegaard's pseudonym Johannes Climacus famously defines faith as a risky “venture” that requires “holding fast” to “objective uncertainty.” Yet puzzlingly, he emphasizes that faith requires resolute conviction and certainty. Moreover, Climacus claims that all beliefs about contingent propositions about the external world “exclude doubt” and “nullify uncertainty,” but also that uncertainty is “continually present” in these very same beliefs. This paper argues that these apparent contradictions can be resolved by interpreting Climacus as a belief‐credence dualist. That is, Climacus holds that (...) beliefs and credences (i.e., degrees of belief) are two irreducibly distinct types of mental states. Beliefs are resolutions that close inquiry, thereby excluding doubt and reflecting subjective certainty by disregarding the possibility of error. Credences, by contrast, reflect assessments of evidential probabilities, thereby encoding a recognition of “objective uncertainty” by acknowledging the possibility of error. In addition to solving a vexing interpretive puzzle and showing how Kierkegaard anticipates contemporary views about the nature of belief and credence, this paper demonstrates that Kierkegaard developed a sophisticated account of the nature of belief, doubt, and certainty that merits serious philosophical consideration. (shrink)

According to principles of modal security, evidence undermines a belief only when it calls into question certain purportedly important modal connections between one’s beliefs and the truth (e.g., safety or sensitivity). Justin Clarke-Doane and Dan Baras have advanced such principles with the aim of blocking evolutionary moral debunking arguments. We examine a variety of different principles of modal security, showing that some of these are too strong, failing to accommodate clear cases of undermining, while others are too weak, failing to (...) do their advertised work of blocking evolutionary moral debunking arguments. If there is a security principle that slips between the horns of this dilemma—one that is both viable and debunker-blocking—it remains to be formulated. (shrink)

According to the thesis of doxastic wronging, our beliefs can non-derivatively wrong others. A recent criticism of this view claims that proponents of the doxastic wronging thesis have no principled grounds for denying that credences can likewise non-derivatively wrong, so they must countenance pervasive conflicts between morality and epistemic rationality. This paper defends the thesis of doxastic wronging from this objection by arguing that belief bears distinctive relationships to inquiry and blame that can explain why beliefs, but not credences, can (...) non-derivatively wrong. First, forming a belief (but not updating one’s credence) closes inquiry, and suspending judgment (but not updating one’s credence) opens inquiry. Consequently, beliefs can distinctively wrong others by prematurely closing inquiry or inappropriately opening inquiry. Second, beliefs (but not credences) can constitute blame. Unfittingly blaming someone can wrong them, and hence beliefs which constitute unfitting blame can distinctively wrong. In addition to defending the claim that only beliefs can non-derivatively wrong, this paper gestures towards an ethics of belief which attends to the relationship between belief and attitudes such as inquiry, faith, trust, and blame. (shrink)

Fictionalism is supposed to be motivated, at least in part, by its ability to undermine our ordinary grounds for believing in numbers and other contested entities. Eklund argues that a weaker and less controversial view, which he calls indifferentism, can do the job just as effectively. I will show that whether he’s right about this depends upon how we think about “our ordinary grounds”. If we think about our ordinary grounds as consisting in what people are pre-theoretically inclined to say (...) or believe, then he is exactly right. But if we think about our ordinary grounds as consisting in how things seem, then (contra Eklund) fictionalism does outperform indifferentism. (shrink)

Kat Williams and Scott R. Stroud’s essay is about televised debates, but it is also about the value of television in a democracy. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman argues that television is devoid of serious content, that it is superficial. But while the debates contain superficialities, they also reveal substantive issues about the candidates, the electorate, and the state of our democracy.

The book combines philosophical depth with a wide and deep discussion covering the essential existential challenges humanity is currently experiencing.

This is the first study to compare the philosophical systems of secular scientific philosopher Mario Bunge (1919-2020), and Moroccan Islamic philosopher Taha Abd al-Rahman (b.1945). In their efforts to establish the philosophical underpinnings of an ideal modernity these two great thinkers speak to the same elements of the human condition, despite their opposing secular and religious worldviews. While the differences between Bunge’s critical-realist epistemology and materialist ontology on the one hand, and Taha’s spiritualist ontology and revelational-mystical epistemology on the other, (...) are fundamental, there is remarkable common ground between their scientific and Islamic versions of humanism. Both call for an ethics of prosperity combined with social justice, and both criticize postmodernism and religious conservatism. The aspiration of this book is to serve as a model for future dialogue between holders of Western and Islamic worldviews, in mutual pursuit of modernity’s best-case scenario. (shrink)

The Covid‐19 pandemic highlighted the need to examine public trust in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) vaccine approval process and the role of political influence in the FDA's decisions. Ensuring that the FDA is itself trustworthy is important for justifying public trust in its actions, like vaccine approvals, thereby promoting public health. We propose five conditions of trustworthiness that the FDA should meet when it reviews vaccines, even during emergencies: consistency with rules, proper expert or political decision‐makers, proper (...) decision‐making and noninterference, connection to public preference, and transparency of both reasons and procedures. The five conditions provide a road map of procedural and substantive requirements, which the FDA has variably implemented, focused on ensuring appropriate influence of political interests. While being a trustworthy agency cannot guarantee the public's trust, implementing these conditions builds a groundwork for public trust. (shrink)

When we oppose or disagree with something important, do we ever really do it dispassionately? Isn't setting the world to rights or condemning a political opponent always done with a hint of relish, or at least enthusiasm? This book's challenging essays explore the modes in which that transgressive pleasure of political 'jouissance' operates. In this collection, the authors seek out jouissance in the battle against patriarchy, in social revolts, in the age of mechanical surveillance, in the necrosociety of neoliberalism, or (...) the proliferation of conspiracy theories. Drawing on Lacan's insistence that jouissance is intrinsically political by its nature, we can understand how readily psychoanalytic ideas can be put to use across the geopolitical spectrum. (shrink)

Collected interviews of philosophers of 20th century, chiefly about the modern philosophy and its theories.

Research on sleep loss and vigilance both focus on declines in cognitive performance, but theoretical accounts have developed largely in parallel in these two areas. In addition, computational instantiations of theoretical accounts are rare. The current work uses computational modeling to explore whether the same mechanisms can account for the effects of both sleep loss and time on task on performance. A classic task used in the sleep deprivation literature, the Psychomotor Vigilance Test, was extended from the typical 10-min duration (...) to 35 min, to make the task similar in duration to traditional vigilance tasks. A computational cognitive model demonstrated that the effects of time on task in the PVT were equivalent to those observed with sleep loss. Subsequently, the same mechanisms were applied to a more traditional vigilance task—the Mackworth Clock Task—providing a good fit to existing data. This supports the hypothesis that these different types of fatigue may produce functionally equivalent declines in performance. (shrink)

Statistical power is often a concern for clustered randomized control trials (RCTs) due to variance inflation from design effects and the high cost of adding study clusters (such as hospitals, schools, or communities). While covariate pre-specification can improve power for estimating regression-adjusted average treatment effects (ATEs), further precision gains can be achieved through covariate selection once primary outcomes have been collected. This article uses design-based methods underlying clustered RCTs to develop Lasso methods for the post-hoc selection of covariates for ATE (...) estimation that avoids a lack of transparency and model overfitting. Our focus is on two-stage estimators: in the first stage, Lasso estimation is conducted using data on cluster-level averages or sums, and in the second stage, standard ATE estimators are adjusted for covariates using the first-stage Lasso results. We discuss l 1 {l}_{1} consistency of the estimated Lasso coefficients, asymptotic normality of the ATE estimators, and design-based variance estimation. The nonparametric approach applies to continuous, binary, and discrete outcomes. We present simulation results and demonstrate the method using data from a federally funded clustered RCT testing the effects of school-based programs promoting behavioral health. (shrink)

This chapter describes the development of a workshop series focused on helping students develop research lab ethics guidelines. The workshop was developed through a National Science Foundation-funded project that situates ethics education within the research environment. Students in four departments at a private research university were recruited to join a Student Ethics Committee that collaboratively developed context-specific codes-of-ethics-based guidelines for their departments. These bottom-up developed guidelines were revised in an iterative process, including feedback from faculty, other graduate students, and the (...) original Student Ethics Committee. The goal of the workshops was to promote the cultivation of an ethical culture in experimental laboratories by integrating research stakeholders in a bottom-up approach to developing context-specific guidelines and to identify factors that students consider relevant to the ethical conduct of research. After describing the workshop series, this chapter presents a qualitative content analysis of the guidelines. The guidelines developed by the Student Ethics Committees reflect the current culture of experimental labs in these departments and the ethical issues that students think are important. The content of these guidelines and the ethical issues the students focused on contrast in some key ways with what ethical issues faculty who head research groups saw as paramount. The chapter describes the first two iterations of the ethics education workshop module, a qualitative analysis of the first draft of these guidelines, and finally reflects on future work in this area of in situ ethics education. (shrink)

This collection reconsiders the notion of life and conceptualizes those forms of life which have been excluded from modern philosophy, such as post-Anthropocene life, the life of non-human animals and the life of inorganic objects"-- Provided by publisher.

In Turkey, where the philosophy of religion is still a relatively new academic field, there are different approaches regarding the fundamental principles that should guide its development. It has been claimed that to conduct a Muslim philosophy of religion, it is necessary to stay away from the concepts that are the product of the intellectual pursuit of Western thought. This claim, which is put forward by Hasan Er, is justified by the thought that some of the basic concepts that emerged (...) in the philosophy of religion in the West are a product of the West’s confrontation with the Christian medieval thought, and therefore, they do not comply with the basic Islamic principles. The judgment that the philosophy of religion in the West arose based on Christianity seems acceptable. From this point of view, since the belief system of Christianity is very different from Islam, it has been argued that the concepts used in the philosophy of religion in the West should not be associated with Islam. Three concepts are especially claimed to be avoided here. These are deism, atheism, and theism. This claim triggers an important debate in philosophy of religion. This is whether there can be a philosophy of religion specific to a particular religion. In this study, the claims briefly described above will be discussed. While doing this, the claims put forward will be subjected to an analytical evaluation. As a result, it will be discussed that the concepts should be considered not only with the meanings they first appeared but also with the meanings they acquired in the process. On the other hand, if it is not possible to make a Muslim philosophy of religion with Western concepts, then it will be taken into consideration that it is necessary to ask “How Muslim is the philosophy of religion?”. (shrink)

In his paper, ‘The Aroma of Coffee’, H. O. Mounce wants to expose what he takes to be a deep prejudice in philosophy, one which is at work in our culture more generally. Philosophers are reluctant to admit that there is anything which passes beyond human understanding. Of course, they are quite ready to admit that there are plenty of things that they fail to understand but this they would say simply happens to be the case. It does not mean (...) that what they fail to understand is something which is beyond human understanding. Thus even when they fail to understand something, that ‘something’ remains, in principle, within the reach of their understanding. For Mounce this prejudice flies in the face of what is platitudinously obvious: that there is much that passes beyond human understanding. (shrink)