In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Epistemology of Protest by José MedinaShannon Brick (bio)Review of José Medina, The Epistemology of Protest ( Oxford University Press, 2023)José Medina's previous book, The Epistemology of Resistance (2012), examined epistemic practices as forms of political resistance. His latest book, The Epistemology of Protest, takes up an obviously political action and examines it as a distinctly epistemic phenomenon. He argues that from an epistemic perspective, protest does much (...) more than convey knowledge, and it is more than an action from which new knowledge might emerge. Instead, protest is a group action by which new forms of epistemic and communicative agency are brought into being. It is a kind of group action, moreover, with respect to which all people shoulder obligations—to listen and, sometimes, to join. Medina's account seeks to clarify the relationship between protesting and silencing, while accommodating a plurality of forms of protest. Various aspects of the account shed light on how silencing might be resisted, both from the perspective of the protesters and of members of the non-protesting public who take their obligations to listen seriously.The Epistemology of Protest has two parts. The first, "Protest as a Matrix of Communicative Resistance," (17) establishes in broad strokes the key aspects of Medina's account of protest. This part will be of primary interest to applied philosophers of language, and those interested in the normative questions raised by protest. The second, "Forging Communicative Solidarity and Re-Making the Polis: Changing Ourselves and Changing the World through Protest," (133) takes up in greater detail the four communicative dimensions of protests that are sketched in the first part of the book: the expression of dissent, as well as the testimonial, evaluative, and prescriptive dimensions of protest. Foregrounded throughout these chapters are the political struggles of actual communities, especially the radical (and often uncivil) protests of liberation movements. The rich discussions of these struggles will be of particular interest to social philosophers and those working on applied speech act theory, as well activists and the public more generally. [End Page E-1]The Epistemology of Protest opens by motivating a basic normative claim: all people have a duty to listen to protest and, in certain circumstances, a defeasible prima facie duty to protest. The latter aspect of this claim—that, in certain circumstances, we have a duty to protest—is situated within the context of the broader, imperfect duty to resist injustice (Medina 2023, 28; see also Delmas 2018). However, joining a protest is not just one way of discharging our imperfect duty to resist injustice, but a way of discharging the duty that all citizens ought to exercise whenever conditions of "social uprising against injustice" (22) obtain—when there is a real opportunity for a growing mass movement to achieve social change. Importantly, this is not a duty that has its roots in our political associations, but one that extends beyond the bounds of even the nation state (a position defended in Chapter Two by way of Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous assertion, in his "Letter from Birmingham Jail," that "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." (King 1963/1990, 5, as cited in Medina 2023, 72).Central to Medina's argument for this claim is that some especially grave sorts of injustice produce not just material harms but, as per Richard Pildes and Richard Niemi, "expressive harms." (1993, 485). These are harms that occur when people are marked as inferior or subordinate, and that—like all injustices—tend to become socially invisible and inaudible, especially for those whom they benefit. Unless one interrupts the generation of these harms by protesting, one becomes complicit in their production. Hence, our duty of justice cannot be discharged simply by refraining from actively participating in the unjust practices that produce expressive harms.This discussion around expressive harms implies that our protest-duties are much stronger than the basic normative claim suggests. If a failure to protest amounts to complicity, why do we only shoulder a prima facie duty to protest when conditions of social uprising obtain? Siding with Candice Delmas (2018), Medina suggests that we cannot all be expected to devote ourselves entirely to... (shrink)

ABSTRACT: This essay applies an ethical analysis of the Jewish religious rite of hatafat dam brit to the ongoing debate on child genital cutting. Recent scholarship on the ethical and legal status of "de minimis" or "symbolic" involuntary genital cutting practices features disagreement over what, if anything, grounds their wrongfulness given that they are (relatively) physically superficial. Hatafat dam brit ("the drawing of covenantal blood") is even less physically intrusive than the most minor of the other practices commonly debated (e.g., (...) "ritual nicking" of the vulva) yet still, as I will show, elicits moral concern—including from within the practicing religious community. As a type of genital cutting ritual that does not, in fact, modify the body, hatafat dam brit challenges those on both sides of the debate to clarify the basis for their moral objection or approval. I argue that debates about involuntary genital cutting of minors should focus on the ethics of these practices considered as (sexually) embodied interpersonal interactions, rather than as body modifications. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: This article analyzes the meaning of solidarity for bioethics and healthcare. Drawing on the anthropology of embodiment, it argues that solidarity arises upon relations of care for our vulnerable bodies and transforms it into our common democratic project. Its main focus is, therefore, not on distribution, which is the purpose of justice, but on the recognition and democratic inclusion of persons who—due to the vulnerable condition of their bodies—are still deprived of full participation in the public sphere. By reorienting (...) caring relationships around the horizontal axis, solidarity obliges us to treat a person who is cared for not only as a passive recipient of healthcare goods, but as a fellow citizen and a partner in the process of care. It is argued that the model of narrative citizenship, by establishing discursive equality between a patient and a physician, can contribute to greater inclusion of vulnerable individuals into our societies. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: Efficiency is often overlooked as an ethical value and seen as ethically relevant chiefly when it conflicts with other values, such as equality. This article argues that efficiency is a rich and philosophically interesting concept deserving of independent normative examination. Drawing on a detailed healthcare case study, we argue that making assessments of efficiency involves value-laden, deliberative judgments about how to characterize the functioning of human systems. Personal and emotional resources and ends are crucial to system functioning but are (...) often discounted in favor of a relatively narrow set of financial inputs and institutional or procedural outputs. Judgments about efficiency tend to advantage (or disadvantage) different parties, depending on the resources and ends considered. Different constructions of efficiency can therefore promote or neglect the perspectives and interests of differently placed actors. Models of efficiency do not merely embody contestable ethical standpoints but—put to use—can unwittingly reify and reproduce them. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: Ethics can be envisioned as a process where human beings move from a more passive stance in their moral lives to a more active one, in which the moral aspects of their lives become the basis of a project to best live one's life. Participatory research and methods would appear essential to ethics in this light, yet they remain rather marginally used in bioethics. In this article, I argue that participatory research methods are particularly compelling means of ethical enactments (...) because of their ability—when carried out properly—to help promote self-actualization. Although I cannot review in detail the vast array of participatory research undertaken in management, education, communication, and so on, I pinpoint the advantages of this orientation to research, especially in light of a pragmatist and deliberative form of ethics that aims to help understand and enact human flourishing. These advantages include: (1) the co-understanding and co-reconstruction of problem situations and responses; (2) the importance attributed to meaning and intersubjectivity; (3) mutual learning (moral co-learning); (4) empowerment for effective eudemonistic change; and (5) opening the evaluation of outcomes to human flourishing. I also explain that these attributes of participatory research and methods do not preclude the use of non-participatory methods and approaches in ethics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the mundane activity of eating with or near others became physically hazardous and normatively fraught. Nourishing oneself outside one's home could raise serious risks to one's health and wellbeing, and was suddenly subject to new policies and prohibitions aimed at minimizing harm and liability. The decision to eat out demanded personal calculations of risk and benefit, as well as interpersonal (...) negotiation, sometimes prompting contentious conversations about the realities of disease transmission and our moral responsibilities. For many people, coming to think about eating outside the home as a pressing and significant threat to health and life was a radical shift. Yet, as Michael Gill's Allergic Intimacies: Food, Disability, Desire, and Risk details, the experience of eating meals as risking lethal consequences, demanding active personal risk management (including knowledge and negotiation of laws and policies), and straining important interpersonal relationships, is quite familiar to those living with food allergies. Allergic Intimacies offers a rich and generative exploration of the challenges of living with food allergies in the United States. A disability studies scholar, Gill frames the book as an examination of the "meanings" of food allergy from an intersectional perspective that centers both disability and race (ix). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Green Light Ethics: A Theory of Permissive Consent and its Moral Metaphysics by Hallie LibertoJonathan Ichikawa (bio)Review of Hallie Liberto, Green Light Ethics: A Theory of Permissive Consent and its Moral Metaphysics (Oxford University Press, 2022)Hallie Liberto's Green Light Ethics offers a framework for conceptualizing permissive consent. The book is a philosopher's work of philosophy. Although it touches on non-ideal social realities, especially sexism, it is most centrally (...) a contribution to a quite abstract literature in normative ethics, following in the tradition of scholars like David Owens, Heidi Hurd, Alan Wertheimer, and Tom Dougherty—it may have a few too many Φs and abstractions to be accessible to and comfortable for many people outside the analytic philosophical tradition. The central approach to permission and consent is general—not specific to sexual consent—although some discussions are specific to sex.I have always appreciated and learned from Liberto's work on this topic, and I was excited to read her new book. As I'd hoped, it exhibits fresh and interesting moral and philosophical instincts, and advances plausible and interesting ideas. I did feel, however, that it was sometimes more difficult than one might hope to identify exactly what those ideas are. At key points, I found myself wanting more precision or explanation. I am not the kind of philosopher who shuns abstraction—I value both the concrete/non-ideal and the theoretical/abstract. And I'm not afraid of all those Φs. But as I see it, the point of writing in that mode—the reason it can be worth the cost in accessibility and style—is the ability to express and examine complex ideas with a high degree of precision. As I was reading this book, I found that much of my own intellectual contribution centered around attempts to interpret Liberto's ideas and technicalities before I was in a good position to learn from them. This was a bit of a shame, because there are intriguing ideas in this book, well worthy of consideration. I'll give my own reconstruction of a few of them below, along with some critical engagement.1. domain authorityLiberto posits that there are certain domains over which people hold a special kind of moral authority, which she calls "domain authority" (38). Someone would wrong you if they acted in your domains outside of your normative control. For example, you have domain authority over sexual contact with your body; any actions by others within that domain must [End Page 429] be in accordance with your moral control, or they are violative. Liberto typically uses the following abbreviations to discuss domain authority: S is a person who may or may not be giving P permission to Φ, which is a potential action that P might perform. Φ here is always an action within D, a particular domain of S's moral authority. Since Φ is within D, Φ would wrong S if P Φ'd without S's appropriate authorization.In the case of sexual domain rights, D is S's bodily sexual domain; P would wrong S by performing some act Φ within that domain outside of S's authority. (Φ might be sexually penetrating S, for example.) The framework generalizes. D might be my home, and Φ could stand for potential actions within my home for which any S would need my permission: entering it, say, or drilling a hole in the wall. I'll follow Liberto's use for these abbreviations. Note that Φ will always refer to an act within S's domain D.One of the more distinctive contributions of Liberto's framework is her insistence that subjects retain their domain authority, even as they exercise it to permit action within their domains (42). When S consents to Φ, Liberto says, S does not waive any rights against Φ. If they did, Φ would no longer be part of S's domain of authority D. It is possible to waive rights in this way—this is what happens with property transfers. But Liberto argues that things are quite different for permissive consent (61). If I invite P into my home, or permit P to touch me sexually, they may do so without violating... (shrink)