Education should be a continuous process from birth to death. It is essentially a process leading to reconciliation of the human and divine elements in the constitution of a human being. Right relationship between God and man, spirit and matter, the whole and the part, should be a prime objective of educational techniques.

Following extensive examination of published and unpublished materials, we provide a history of the use of dexamethasone in pregnant women at risk of carrying a female fetus affected by congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH). This intervention has been aimed at preventing development of ambiguous genitalia, the urogenital sinus, tomboyism, and lesbianism. We map out ethical problems in this history, including: misleading promotion to physicians and CAH-affected families; de facto experimentation without the necessary protections of approved research; troubling parallels to the history (...) of prenatal use of diethylstilbestrol (DES); and the use of medicine and public monies to attempt prevention of benign behavioral sex variations. Critical attention is directed at recent investigations by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Office of Human Research Protections (OHRP); we argue that the weak and unsupported conclusions of these investigations indicate major gaps in the systems meant to protect subjects of high-risk medical research. (shrink)

This article situates the analysis of fair-trade consumption in the context of debates about civic activism and political participation. It argues that fair-trade consumption should be understood as a political phenomenon, which, through the mediating action of organizations and campaigns, makes claims on states, corporations, and institutions. This argument is made by way of a case study of Traidcraft, a key player in the fair-trade movement in the United Kingdom. The study focuses on how Traidcraft approaches and enrolls its supporters.

Legal ethics theory focuses on the moral problem of lawyers pursuing morally suspect (but lawful) ends and using morally suspect (but lawful) means. It considers possible justifications for lawyers' conduct arising from moral or political philosophy, and how those justifications may require shifts in the lawyer's role. This paper argues that legal ethics theory needs to expand its focus to consider other ethical aspects of the lawyer's role and, in particular, the extent to which being a lawyer can complicate, or (...) contribute to, the accomplishment of a meaningful life. Meaning—defined by Susan Wolf as 'loving something (or a number of things) worth of love, and being able to engage with it (or them) in a positive way'—will be affected in positive and negative ways by the moral dimensions of the lawyer's role, but also by broader aspects of legal practice. The paper further argues that legal ethics theory needs to be more sensitive to contextual variations in legal practice. The ethical challenges and opportunities of legal practice, both its meaning and its morality, are contextually specific in ways legal ethics theory has not sufficiently accounted for. The paper discusses how meaning and context can be included in analysis of the ethics of a lawyer's life. (shrink)

Domestic violence is a serious issue, and the costs for business of failing to address the impacts of domestic violence in the workplace are high. New technologies and economic shifts towards services sector industries are fast dissolving the boundaries between the workplace and the home in many national labor markets. Moreover, companies are now expected to meet higher standards of behavior in fulfilling their responsibilities to employees and wider society. These developments present challenges for ethical reasoning about the limits of (...) employer responsibility in relation to domestic violence. While a number of possible approaches have something to contribute, this paper argues that feminist theories provide the most useful framework for ethical reasoning about the issues domestic violence raises for business organizations. The practical value of such reasoning is then illustrated by applying the organizing framework developed by Yuan et al. to examine how recurring domestic violence-related initiatives can be integrated as routine practices in firm operations. The paper thus provides a structured qualitative study of theory and practice for dealing with the impacts of domestic violence in the workplace. (shrink)

Three major trends in American health policy are intersecting in a fascinating way. First, managed care has grown to become the most dominant form of health-care delivery, leading to reductions in health-care costs as insurers are able to influence health-care providers with financial incentives. Second, the present growth of managed care has slowed, almost to a standstill, largely on account of consumers questioning what effects these financial incentives are having on the care of patients — questioning that has been expressed (...) in particular through lawsuits against managed care companies.Third, we are experiencing a renewed interest in the existence of medical error and how it may be reduced as a result of the Institute of Medicine’s report, To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System. The most important aspect of this renaissance in error reduction has been its emphasis on health care as a system that can be made better through system-oriented change. The most frustrating aspect is that the IOM did not endorse change in malpractice liability, which consistently puts the impetus for reducing medical error on the individual provider rather than the system as a whole. (shrink)

Revenge is a powerful word. It can conjure up the scheming, embittered individual, plotting the downfall of his enemies well beyond reason and morality – or, more seriously, tragic cycles of violence and blood vendettas, spiraling into entrenched civil conflict over generations. Philosophers have argued that the consequences and the moral psychology of revenge mean it is incompatible – even antithetical – to any plausible conception of moral repair. In this paper I challenge that incompatibility by suggesting that, in contexts (...) of unresponsive and imperfect institutional justice, appropriate acts of vengeance may both create accountability and express solidarity, thus contributing to moral repair. Drawing on past work by French (2001) and MacLachlan (2016), as well as two films with feminist avengers as protagonists, Hard Candy (2005) and Promising Young Woman (2021), I sketch an approach to virtuous third-party vengeance as a starting point for broader, more reparative, understandings of legitimate personal interventions after wrongdoing. -/- . (shrink)

Legal positivists typically describe law as ‘thinly’ normative to distinguish it from the ‘thick’ normative force moral norms have; which legal norms may lack. One popular account of thin normativity is social normativity. But a number of scholars have offered accounts of what it is to be a thin norm that are distinct from social normativity. This paper addresses these alternative accounts of what it is to be a thin norm. It also explores whether law counts as necessarily ‘thinly normative’ (...) on these accounts. I argue that some accounts of thin normativity are so generic (‘super-thin’) that they are unable to distinguish between (thin) norms and nonnormative facts and thus collapse into triviality. I also consider more metaphysically demanding accounts of thin normativity, such as the view that everything is a norm that is essentially represented by deontic modals. However, law might fail to meet the demands of these slightly thicker accounts. I thus propose a view of law as consisting in nonnormative facts (diagnostic categories) and suggest sketching accounts of thin normativity as contingent, rather than necessary, features of laws and legal systems. (shrink)

Researching Metaphor in the Ancient Near East. Edited by Marta Pallavidini and Ludovico Portuese. Philippika, vol. 141. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2020. Pp. xxi + 270, illus. €49 (paper).

Background In the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, the biomedical research community’s attempt to focus the attention on fighting COVID-19, led to several challenges within the field of research ethics. However, we know little about the practical relevance of these challenges for Research Ethics Committees. Methods We conducted a qualitative survey across all 52 German RECs on the challenges and potential solutions with reviewing proposals for COVID-19 studies. We de-identified the answers and applied thematic text analysis for the extraction and (...) synthesis of challenges and potential solutions that we grouped under established principles for clinical research ethics. Results We received an overall response rate of 42%. The 22 responding RECs reported that they had assessed a total of 441 study proposals on COVID-19 until 21 April 2020. For the review of these proposals the RECs indicated a broad spectrum of challenges regarding social value, scientific validity, favourable risk–benefit ratio, informed consent, independent review, fair selection of trial participants, and respect for study participants. Mentioned solutions ranged from improved local/national coordination, over guidance on modified consent procedures, to priority setting across clinical studies. Conclusions RECs are facing a broad spectrum of pressing challenges in reviewing COVID-19 studies. Some challenges for consent procedures are well known from research in intensive care settings but are further aggravated by infection measures. Other challenges such as reviewing several clinical studies at the same time that potentially compete for the recruitment of in-house COVID-19 patients are unique to the current situation. For some of the challenges the proposed solutions in our survey could relatively easy be translated into practice. Others need further conceptual and empirical research. Our findings together with the increasing body of literature on COVID-19 research ethics, and further stakeholder engagement should inform the development of hands-on guidance for researchers, funders, RECs, and further oversight bodies. (shrink)

Historically left to the margins, the topics of imagination and creativity have gained prominence in philosophy of science, challenging the once dominant distinction between ‘context of discovery’ and ‘context of justification’. The aim of this chapter is to explore imagination and creativity starting from issues within contemporary philosophy of science, making connections to these topics in other domains along the way. It discusses the recent literature on the role of imagination in models and thought experiments, and their comparison with fictions. (...) It then turns to the importance of constraints on imaginings in the scientific domain, as well as whether constraints can hinder creativity. The second part of the paper focuses on the social dimensions of science. It considers imagination and creativity of scientific communities, asks whether the institution of science promotes creativity (and whether we want it to) or if it encourages conservativeness, and ends with a reflection on the politics of imagination and creativity in science. (shrink)

Political theorists imagine a world without government in order to assess the legitimacy of existing states. Some thinkers, such as philosophical anarchists, conclude that in fact no state can be justified. Should theorists of criminal law similarly imagine away the very thing they seek to theorize? Doug Husak has claimed that “the object of criminal theory is to offer suggestions to improve the content of the criminal law … not to abolish it.” But this Essay argues that abolitionist-leaning scholarship reflects (...) several welcome developments in criminal theory: a concern with the state; attention to empirical data and the distinction between normative claims and descriptive ones; recognition of enforcement as an essential element of criminal law; and above all, a demand that criminal law prove itself—a refusal to grant to criminal law a presumption of legitimacy. These theoretical orientations did not appear for the first time in abolitionist scholarship. In fact, all are calling cards of Husak’s own work, and cause to celebrate it. (shrink)

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly relied upon by clinicians for making diagnostic and treatment decisions, playing an important role in imaging, diagnosis, risk analysis, lifestyle monitoring, and health information management. While research has identified biases in healthcare AI systems and proposed technical solutions to address these, we argue that effective solutions require human engagement. Furthermore, there is a lack of research on how to motivate the adoption of these solutions and promote investment in designing AI systems that align with values (...) such as transparency and fairness from the outset. Drawing on insights from psychological theories, we assert the need to understand the values that underlie decisions made by individuals involved in creating and deploying AI systems. We describe how this understanding can be leveraged to increase engagement with de-biasing and fairness-enhancing practices within the AI healthcare industry, ultimately leading to sustained behavioral change via autonomy-supportive communication strategies rooted in motivational and social psychology theories. In developing these pathways to engagement, we consider the norms and needs that govern the AI healthcare domain, and we evaluate incentives for maintaining the status quo against economic, legal, and social incentives for behavior change in line with transparency and fairness values. (shrink)

Since the Moroccan invasion in 1975, official reports on visits to Sahrawi refugee camps by international aid agencies and faith-based groups consistently reflect an overwhelming impression of gender equality in Sahrawi society. As a result, the space of the Sahrawi refugee camps in Algeria and, by external association, Sahrawi society and Western Sahara as a nation-in-exile is constructed as ‘ideal’ (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2010, p. 67). I suggest that the ‘feminist nationalism’ of the Sahrawi nation-in-exile is one that is employed strategically by (...) internal representatives of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Saguia el-Hamra and Río de Oro (POLISARIO), the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) and the National Union of Sahrawi Women (NUSW), and by external actors from international aid agencies and also the colonial Moroccan state. The international attention paid to the active role of certain women in Sahrawi refugee camps makes ‘Other’ Sahrawi invisible, such as children, young women, mothers, men, people of lower socio-economic statuses, (‘liberated’) slave classes and refugees who are not of Sahrawi background. According to Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh (ibid.), it also creates a discourse of ‘good’, ‘ideal’ refugees who are reluctant to complain, in contrast to ‘Other refugees’. This feminisation allows the international community not to take the Sahrawi call for independence seriously and reproduces the myth of Sahrawi refugees as naturally non-violent (read feminine) and therefore ‘ideal’. The myth of non-violence accompanied by claims of Sahrawi secularity is also used to distance Western Sahara from ‘African’, ‘Arab’ and ‘Islamic’, to reaffirm racialised and gendered discourses that associate Islam with terrorism and situate both in the Arab/muslim East. These binaries make invisible the violence that Sahrawis experience as a result of the gendered constructions of both internal and external actors, and silence voices of dissent and frustration with the more than forty years of waiting to return home. (shrink)

scholarly interest in johannes clauberg's philosophy increased significantly in the twentieth century, and the renaissance continued in the first decade of the twenty-first century. This is mainly due to the 1968 reprint of his Opera Omnia Philosophica,1 and to such events as the colloquium entirely devoted to Clauberg held in Groningen on 15 and 16 December 1995. The ground-breaking papers presented on that occasion, collected by Theo Verbeek in Johannes Clauberg and Cartesian Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century,2 offer a comprehensive (...) overview of Clauberg's thought and supersede the outdated works by Müller,3 Brosch,4 and Weier,5 who tended to interpret Clauberg's philosophy as an... (shrink)

Cultural transformation tends to be described in one of two ways: either with reference to what comes about, is created or emerges in the process of change or with reference to what is destroyed or obscured in that process. Within a performative paradigm, that is, from a perspective which focuses on the manner in which social and cultural reality is constituted or brought about by human activity, theorists have, in recent years, tended to underline the productive aspects of transformation by (...) emphasising the creative thrust of performative processes and events. In so doing, this perspective has tended to overlook the extent to which a certain destructive element may in fact be inherent to such performative processes. Drawing upon a range of historical and contemporary constellations of socio-cultural change and a variety of different types of events and activities, the articles in this volume describe different forms of destruction and their respective role in processes of transformation."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Two laboratories which offered the new career of scientific work to women at the beginning of the twentieth century were the Biometric Laboratory and the Galton Eugenics Laboratory at University College London. The scientific careers of two women, Dr. Alice Lee and Dr. Ethel Elderton , are examined. Intellectual and economic factors involved in the choice of a career in eugenics are described, together with some aspects of the relationship between eugenics and feminism.

What are the moral obligations of participants and bystanders during—and in the wake of –a conflict? How have theoretical understandings of justice, peace and responsibility changed in the face of contemporary realities of war? Drawing on the work of leading scholars in the fields of philosophy, political theory, international law, religious studies and peace studies, the collection significantly advances current literature on war, justice and post-conflict reconciliation. Contributors address some of the most pressing issues of international and civil conflict, including (...) the tension between attributing individual and collective responsibility for the wrongs of war, the trade-offs made between the search for truth and demands for justice, and the conceptual intricacies of coming to understand just what is meant by ‘peace’ and ‘conflict.’ Individual essays also address concrete topics including the international criminal court, reparations, truces, political apologies, truth commissions and criminal trials, with an eye to contemporary examples from conflicts in the Middle East, Africa and North and South America.​. (shrink)

Humans have this extraordinary cognitive ability: They imagine inexistent objects, they treat them as if they were real, and by doing so they make them real. They thus give rise to a shared institutional reality that enables them to cooperate in ways that would be impossible otherwise. In this paper, we would like to revisit the account that HLA Hart gives of the practice of collective acceptance that makes a legal system possible. We try to provide an explanation of what (...) Hart calls the ‘internal point of view’, on the basis of experiments on institutional concepts, drawing on the paradigm known as ‘embodied cognition’. Experts and non-experts in law rated the role of several cognitive dimensions for a list of words referring to two kinds of abstract concepts (institutional and theoretical/scientific) and two kinds of concrete ones (food and artifact). Institutional concepts were distinguished into pure-institutional (e.g., ‘contract’, ‘state’, ‘property’) and meta-institutional (e.g., ‘norm’, ‘duty’, ‘justice’). The results provide an empirical account of how our way of thinking about institutions changes as we acquire expertise in the legal field, thus shading light on the cognitive underpinnings of the ‘internal point of view’. (shrink)

Typically, the imagination in thought experiments has been taken to consist in mental images; we visualize the state of affairs described. A recent alternative from Fiora Salis and Roman Frigg main...

This article is a study of formulaic passages in the Sanskrit Avadanasataka. Alongside a preliminary discussion of work on oral studies within Buddhism, and some recourse to wider oral studies on Indian texts, the focus of this article is a two-part study of formulae and constituents of formulae. The first part of the article details formulaic sections from the Avadanasataka, from short formulae about wealthy merchants to lengthy counterparts that detail the consequences of a Buddha's smile. The second part looks (...) in detail at constituents of the formulaic passages. The passages are constructed around semantic lists, which either constitute the whole formulaic phrase or passages, or can be identified as the building blocks for the passages. To my knowledge this is the first study of semantic list-based formulae in a Sanskrit text. (shrink)

Nurses and physicians may experience ethical conflict when there is a difference between their own values, their professional values or the values of their organization. The distribution of limited health care resources can be a major source of ethical conflict. Relatively few studies have examined nurses' and physicians' ethical conflict with organizations. This study examined the research question ‘What are the organizational ethical conflicts that hospital nurses and physicians experience in their practice?’ We interviewed 34 registered nurses, 10 nurse managers, (...) and 31 physicians as part of a larger study, and asked them to describe their ethical conflicts with organizations. Through content analysis, we identified themes of nurses' and physicians' ethical conflict with organizations and compared the themes for nurses with those for physicians. (shrink)

In France a difference has been established between cultural popularization and cultural democracy. The former is aimed at spreading works of art in as large a way as possible; the latter emphasizes the participation of the public. From there, we argue that moving from cultural popularization towards cultural democracy can lead to a shift in responsibilities from professionals towards the general public. With reference to the theoretical background of reception, appropriation and participation, we lead a participant observation on three different (...) fields in order to understand what facilitates and what constrains this shift. This leads us to stress the importance of developing an adequate organizational framework. (shrink)

Alice Crary is a moral and social philosopher who has written widely on issues in metaethics, moral psychology and normative ethics, philosophy and feminism, critical animal studies, critical disability studies, critical philosophy of race, philosophy and literature, and Critical Theory. She has written on philosophers such as John L. Austin, Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, John McDowell, Iris Murdoch and Ludwig Wittgenstein. This is the first of two parts of the interview with Crary conducted in a single exchange in the (...) first weeks of January 2022, where she discusses ordinary language philosophy and feminism, Wittgenstein’s conception of mind and its relation to feminist ethics, the link between Wittgenstein and Critical Theory, and her own views about efforts to bring about social and political transformations. The second part on “Wittgenstein and Critical Theory” is published in the regular volume 11 of NWR. (shrink)

As obstetric medicine has become more sophisticated, so Caesarean section (CS) has become safer. It is now seen as equally safe or, in some circumstances, safer than vaginal birth. Under the new National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) guidelines on CS that were published in November 2011, requests for CS are to be given more weight. Women requesting CS can no longer be seen as compromising their control over birth. Rather, they are merely exercising their power, with the new guidelines (...) offering them an increasing role in the decision-making process regarding how they give birth. However, these new guidelines also present new problems, bringing the rights of patients and obstetricians into conflict. In order to mediate these tensions, a virtue-based approach to obstetric ethics is needed as a supplement to the rule- and right-based guidance provided by NICE. (shrink)

Drawing on two long-term ethnographic fieldworks with social entrepreneurs, this article starts to uncover the multilayered nature of the motivations underlying the creation of social enterprises. We investigate the following research question: what types of self-oriented motivations might drive social entrepreneurs? Departing from previous research and popular opinion, which foregrounds the primacy of prosocial intentions, we show the critical role played by self-oriented motives. To explain this finding, we advance three analytical categories of self-oriented motives—entrepreneurial lifestyle, repurposing expertise, and solving (...) a social or environmental puzzle. We then illuminate these categories through the illustrative examples of six social entrepreneurs. Based on our findings, we contend that creating a social enterprise can also be the unintended consequence of adopting entrepreneurial behavior, leading to the creation of a venture guided by these three types of self-oriented motivations. Finally, we consider the implications of this study for the field of social entrepreneurship. (shrink)

An investigation of some of the most contentious debates of our time, Galileo's Middle Finger describes Alice Dreger's experiences on the front lines of scientific controversy, where for two decades she has worked as an advocate for victims of unethical research while also defending the right of scientists to pursue challenging research into human identities. Dreger's own attempts to reconcile academic freedom with the pursuit of justice grew out of her research into the treatment of people born intersex (formerly (...) called hermaphrodites). The shocking history of surgical mutilation and ethical abuses conducted in the name of "normalizing" intersex children moved her to become a patient rights' activist. By bringing evidence to physicians and the public, she helped change the medical system. But even as she worked to correct these injustices, Dreger began to witness how some fellow liberal activists, motivated by identity politics, were employing lies and personal attacks to silence scientists whose data revealed inconvenient truths. Troubled, she traveled around the country digging up sources and interviewing the targets of these politically motivated campaigns. Among the subjects she covers in the book are the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, falsely accused in a bestselling book of committing genocide against a South American tribe; the psychologist Michael Bailey, accused of abusing transgender women; and the evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson, accused of fomenting rightwing ideas about human nature. Galileo's Middle Finger describes Dreger's long and harrowing journey back and forth between the two camps for which she felt equal empathy: social justice warriors and researchers determined to put truth before politics. (shrink)

The paper addresses the work of Ukrainian artist Maria Kulikovska, who resorts to military equipment as artistic materials and to destruction as an artistic method. In the first section, I contextualize Kulikovska’s performative sculpture within art history, claiming that it can be regarded as Destruction Art. In the second section, I turn to Catherine Malabou’s concept of “destructive plasticity” as a philosophical tool of an aesthetics of war, which offers a sound theoretical framework to further understand the implications of Kulikovska’s (...) artistic activity. In the third section, I focus on the main material adopted by Kulikovska, ballistic soap, showing how the artist materially deconstructs inherited dichotomies that keep informing our understanding of wars. By considering the artistic practice of a feminist artist (M. Kulikovska) through the lens of feminist scholarship (K. Stiles, C. Malabou, J. Butler), the paper investigates the relations between war and the arts from a situated perspective. (shrink)

Machine intelligence already helps medical staff with a number of tasks. Ethical decision-making, however, has not been handed over to computers. In this proof-of-concept study, we show how an algorithm based on Beauchamp and Childress’ prima-facie principles could be employed to advise on a range of moral dilemma situations that occur in medical institutions. We explain why we chose fuzzy cognitive maps to set up the advisory system and how we utilized machine learning to train it. We report on the (...) difficult task of operationalizing the principles of beneficence, non-maleficence and patient autonomy, and describe how we selected suitable input parameters that we extracted from a training dataset of clinical cases. The first performance results are promising, but an algorithmic approach to ethics also comes with several weaknesses and limitations. Should one really entrust the sensitive domain of clinical ethics to machine intelligence? (shrink)

Stanley Cavell is widely regarded as a major philosophical figure, and he is generally recognized to have devoted a great deal of his writing to ethical themes. Nevertheless, it is not an exaggeration to say that his work has not for the most part been received within Anglo-American analytic ethics. There is an impressively large body of commentary on Cavell’s contribution to moral philosophy, but most of it gets generated and discussed outside analytic circles. Paul Guyer’s remarks here on the (...) major strand of Cavell’s ethical thought that Cavell places under the heading of “moral perfectionism” are for this reason very welcome.1 Guyer’s main thesis is that Cavell’s perfectionist posture is more Kantian than.. (shrink)