Obstetric ultrasound has become a significant tool in obstetric practice, however, it has been argued that its increasing use may have adverse implications for women’s reproductive freedom. This study aimed to explore Australian obstetricians’ experiences and views of the use of obstetric ultrasound both in relation to clinical management of complicated pregnancy, and in situations where maternal and fetal health interests conflict.

I argue that a gendered division of labor is often the result of choices by women that count as fully voluntary because they are an expression of preferences and commitments that reflect women's understanding of their own good. Since liberalism has a commitment to respecting fully voluntary choices, it has a commitment to respecting these gendered choices. I suggest that justified political action may require that we fail to respect some people's considered choices.

Ann Whittle offers a fresh approach to questions about whether our actions are free and whether we are morally responsible for them. She argues that the answers to these questions depend on the contexts in which we make claims about our abilities and our control over our actions.

The essence of religion was once widely thought to be a unique form of experience that could not be explained in neurological, psychological, or sociological terms. In recent decades scholars have questioned the privileging of the idea of religious experience in the study of religion, an approach that effectively isolated the study of religion from the social and natural sciences. Religious Experience Reconsidered lays out a framework for research into religious phenomena that reclaims experience as a central concept while bridging (...) the divide between religious studies and the sciences. Ann Taves shifts the focus from "religious experience," conceived as a fixed and stable thing, to an examination of the processes by which people attribute meaning to their experiences. She proposes a new approach that unites the study of religion with fields as diverse as neuroscience, anthropology, sociology, and psychology to better understand how these processes are incorporated into the broader cultural formations we think of as religious or spiritual. Taves addresses a series of key questions: how can we set up studies without obscuring contestations over meaning and value? What is the relationship between experience and consciousness? How can research into consciousness help us access and interpret the experiences of others? Why do people individually or collectively explain their experiences in religious terms? How can we set up studies that allow us to compare experiences across times and cultures? Religious Experience Reconsidered demonstrates how methods from the sciences can be combined with those from the humanities to advance a naturalistic understanding of the experiences that people deem religious. (shrink)

AI has numerous applications and in various fields, including the military domain. The increase in the degree of autonomy in some decision-making systems leads to discussions on the possible future use of lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS). A central issue in these discussions is the assignment of moral responsibility for some AI-based outcomes. Several authors claim that the high autonomous capability of such systems leads to a so-called “responsibility gap.” In recent years, there has been a surge in philosophical literature (...) around the concept of responsibility gaps and different solutions have been devised to close or bridge these gaps. In order to move forward in the research around LAWS and the problem of responsibility, it is important to increase our understanding of the different perspectives and discussions in this debate. This paper attempts to do so by disentangling the various arguments and providing a critical overview. After giving a brief outline of the state of the technology of LAWS, I will review the debates over responsibility gaps using three differentiators: those who believe in the existence of responsibility gaps versus those who do not, those who hold that responsibility gaps constitute a new moral problem versus those who argue they do not, and those who claim that solutions can be successful as opposed to those who believe that it is an unsolvable problem. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis essay explores the phenomenology of hunger in reference to work by Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Simone de Beauvoir. Considering the wealth of references to hunger in phenomenological literature, very little has been written that acknowledges the importance of hunger in French existential phenomenology in particular. With reference to work by the above authors, this essay examines how hunger alters one’s basic experience of space and time, no less one’s sense of social belonging. Phenomenology illuminates dimensions of the human (...) experience of hunger that remain veiled in other discourses, and it is vital that efforts to understand hunger engage the profound narratives of disorientation, illness and shame that come to the fore in this body of work. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Wild LoveCynthia Willett’s Biosocial Eros EthicsAnn V. MurphyI’ll frame my comments in honor of Cynthia Willett’s work in light of two recent anecdotes:Anecdote I: It happened that one evening as I was reading Willett’s most recent monograph Interspecies Ethics—in particular the chapter on animals’ capacity for laughter and humor—my wonderful (if somewhat insubordinate) Airedale terrier, Nora Mae Murphy, heard me laughing, trotted into the living room, jumped on the (...) couch, looked at me with concern, stared down at the book in my hand, then placed her paw on my arm as if to check my pulse, eyes wide and ears slicked back. Nora is used to me reading philosophy at night; but she is not used to me laughing loudly while doing so. Clearly, she was curious. I smiled in recognition of what Nora’s behavior had enabled me to realize: I don’t often laugh when I read philosophy, not like I did that night while reading Willett’s work.Anecdote II: Cindy came out to New Mexico last spring to give the keynote address at our department’s annual graduate student conference. The afternoon she arrived, a few graduate students had arranged to take her on a hike in a nature preserve, a beautiful tract of land alongside the Rio Grande, which winds through Albuquerque. The next day, two of [End Page 50] the graduate students were in my office and I asked how the hike went. The students looked at each other, shuffled a bit, and stared at the floor until one announced, “Well, we kind of got locked in the preserve.” Me: “You got locked in the nature preserve?” “Yep, but it all worked out okay. She was cool with it,” one student reported. The other added: “Yeah, she’s pretty wild.”That conversation happened months before I was asked to speak on and to Willett’s work, but that conversation, that compliment, that word—“wild”—came to mind many times as I was preparing these comments in her honor. And I mean “wild” in the best sense: as rowdy and irreverent and joyful. There is a wildness to Willett’s texts in their performative aspect, one that marks them as singular. Bucking certain philosophical tendencies to overindulge a metaphorics of war and violence, Willett’s own work evinces an entirely different philosophical orientation, one that takes love, and more specifically eros, as its bedrock. The wildness of Willett’s ethical philosophy comes into play in the truly variable scenes in which Willett locates eros and its promise. It’s a wild kind of love that informs Willett’s ethics, one that refuses domestication, refuses to be hemmed in by the borders between species, refuses to be fixed. The scope that Willett assigns eros is broad, countering the tendency to reduce it to the sexualized and sentimental contexts in which it is often placed.1At the heart of Willett’s deliberations across her four monographs and many articles is an abiding concern with, and celebration of, eros as a site of social, political, and ethical promise. A preoccupation with eros is evident in her work from the very beginning. In her first monograph, Maternal Ethics and Other Slave Moralities (1995), Willett frames her project in reference to Audre Lorde’s claim (in Lorde’s essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”) that European American culture has perpetuated an understanding of power that parses the erotic from the spiritual and political and as a consequence has “suppressed the deepest source of power and knowledge in our lives” (Lorde 1984, 55, cited in Willett 1995, 7). This first book suggests new conceptions of freedom and ethical subjectivity based on social eroticism, a project furthered in her second monograph The Soul of Justice: Social Bonds and Racial Hubris (2001), where hubris is understood with and against the Greeks as an assault on this primary sociality. “In response to the Greeks we might say that the person is born, not of honor, but of love. Sociality, or social eros, and not honor is the origin and the goal of the person and the positive core of freedom... (shrink)

This is a book in feminist theory and social and political philosophy. Many of the chapters are versions of earlier papers published as journal articles and as book chapters. It presents a multi-systems theory of social domination, discussing three main ones: economic class, gender and (social) race. It presents a maerialist feminist theory of gender and sexuality and discusses lesbian identity as well as issues of motherhood.

This paper examines the three US national security strategies released by Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama since 9/11. These national security strategies are required presidential statements describing US plans for national security. The authors analyze Bush’s two and Obama’s one post-9/11 national security strategies and evaluate the argumentative framework of imperial righteousness in the documents. The rhetoric of American imperial righteousness contains four themes: national security, the nature of the enemy, freedom and democracy, and American morality. While there (...) are some differences between the documents, the authors argue that Bush and Obama both promoted the idea of imperial righteousness in their plans for American national security. Moreover, the four themes of imperial righteousness worked together effectively to advance America’s interests in world affairs. (shrink)

It is one of Jacques Derrida’s later texts, Le Toucher—Jean-Luc Nancy , wherein one finds his most sustained commentary on the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. I argue that Derrida’s criticisms of Merleau-Ponty in this text conceal a significant proximity between his own elaboration of sensibility and that of Merleau-Ponty. Their respective accounts of sensibility are similar in two respects. Firstly, for them both, sensibility is born of a parsing of the self in a hiatus or interval that disrupts the movement (...) of auto-affection. The self can only be known as such through this exposure to alterity. Secondly, this exposure and opening is in no way normative for either thinker, which is to say that their accounts of sensibility are similar not only in structure but also insofar as sensibility for them both is a non-normative opening to ethics; it is an elaboration of embodiment that provokes the question of response but no definitive or prescriptive answer. Hence the structure of sensibility begs the question of ethics, and the problem of response, but can provide little by way of a normative ethics. (shrink)

The classroom community of inquiry aims at helping children make better judgments. If we can show that emotions are judgments or appraisals, it follows that they are educable. Such education of the emotions optimally should take place within the environment of communal inquiry with its focus on respect for persons, dialogue, concept formation, critical, creative and caring thinking. Children need help learning to identify their emotions, detecting assumptions upon which they lie and justifying these emotions to themselves and to others. (...) Such work involves helping children to be sensitive to the salient aspects of individual situations, developing a consciousness of criteria and the ideals from which these criteria ensue, and fostering a disposition to be willing to self correct when we discover through inquiry that our emotions are based on unwarranted beliefs. (shrink)

Prior studies have advanced our knowledge of the individual determinants of corporate philanthropy; however, little empirical research has been conducted on how these determinants combine to influence giving. In this study, the authors develop and test an integrated model of the relationship between firm resources and corporate philanthropy as mediated by managerial discretion and managerial values. In addition, the authors offer organizational slack as an alternative measure of organizational resources. As predicted, the results show that firm resources have a positive (...) effect on corporate philanthropy. This effect is fully mediated by managerial discretion and partially mediated by managerial values. (shrink)

Cet article montre ce que la cooccurrence peut nous apprendre sur la monosémie et comment on peut exploiter l’analyse des cooccurrences de deuxième ordre pour quantifier l’analyse sémantique. Les analyses sont conduites sur un corpus technique (1,7 million d’occurrences) relevant du domaine spécialisé des machines-outils pour l’usinage des métaux. Dans cet article, nous expliquons la méthodologie adoptée pour déterminer le degré de monosémie d’un mot technique à partir de l’analyse du recoupement de ses cooccurrences de deuxième ordre. Dans le but (...) d’affiner les résultats de la mesure de recoupement, nous procédons également à quelques expérimentations qui vont au-delà du simple repérage statistique des cooccurrences et qui font varier différents paramètres, tels que la fenêtre d’observation, le seuil de significativité et la forme graphique ou le lemme des cooccurrences de premier et deuxième ordre. Finalement, nous abordons l’importance de l’intégration des étiquettes morphosyntaxiques dans l’analyse des cooccurrences. (shrink)

In our time of increasing reliance on digital media the history of the book has a special role to play in studying the codex form and the persistence of old media alongside the growth of new ones. As a contribution to recent work on the continued use of manuscript in the handpress era, I focus on some examples of manuscripts copied from printed books in the Rylands Library and discuss the motivations for making them. Some of these manuscripts were luxury (...) items signalling wealth and prestige, others were made for practical reasons – to own a copy of a book that was hard to buy, or a copy that could be customized in the process of copying. The act of copying itself was also considered to have devotional and/or pedagogical value. (shrink)

Dispositional compatibilists argue that a proper understanding of our abilities vindicates both compatibilism and the principle of Alternate Possibilities (the claim that the ability to do otherwise is required for freedom and moral responsibility). In this paper, I argue that this is mistaken. Both analyses of dispositions and abilities should distinguish between local and global dispositions or abilities. Once this distinction is in place, we see that neither thesis is established by an analysis of abilities.

Northern researchers and service providers espousing modernist theories of development in order to understand and aid countries and peoples of the South ignore their own non-universal starting points of knowledge and their own vested interests. Universal ethics are rejected in favor of situated ethics, while a modified empowerment development model for aiding women in the South based on poststructuralism requires building a bridge identity politics to promote participatory democracy and challenge Northern power knowledges.

Fair competition law and public health law talk past each other when discussing pharmaceutical pricing and distribution. The former cannot agree on the relevant definition of consumer welfare. The latter does not fully comprehend the highly complex but inherently collective nature of pharmaceutical drug acquisition in the United States. This essay proposes to inject public health discourse into this debate to enrich it, focus it, and render it more accessible to those who must live by its outcome.

What does it take for a scientific model to represent? Scientific models have received a great deal of attention in recent philosophical literature. Following Morgan and Morrison’s account of “Models as Mediators”, analysis of how models represent has changed from questioning what properties of models can be said to correlate with the world to asking how models are used to relate to an intended target-system. This turn to a practice-oriented approach of understanding models was a response to a general philosophical (...) problem that attends the empirical application of scientific representations such as models. This problem is twofold. Models, on the one hand, are often said to make false claims about the world.. (shrink)

Examines how violence has been conceptually and rhetorically put to use in continental social theory.

BackgroundClinical ethics consultations can be complex interventions, involving multiple methods, stakeholders, and competing ethical values. Despite longstanding calls for rigorous evaluation in the field, progress has been limited. The Medical Research Council proposed guidelines for evaluating the effectiveness of complex interventions. The evaluation of CEC may benefit from application of the MRC framework to advance the transparency and methodological rigor of this field. A first step is to understand the outcomes measured in evaluations of CEC in healthcare settings. ObjectiveThe primary (...) objective of this review was to identify and map the outcomes reported in primary studies of CEC. The secondary objective was to provide a comprehensive overview of CEC structures, processes, and roles to enhance understanding and to inform standardization.MethodsWe searched electronic databases to identify primary studies of CEC involving patients, substitute decision-makers and/or family members, clinicians, healthcare staff and leaders. Outcomes were mapped across five conceptual domains as identified a priori based on our clinical ethics experience and preliminary literature searches and revised based on our emerging interpretation of the data. These domains included personal factors, process factors, clinical factors, quality, and resource factors. ResultsForty-eight studies were included in the review. Studies were highly heterogeneous and varied considerably regarding format and process of ethical intervention, credentials of interventionist, population of study, outcomes reported, and measures employed. In addition, few studies used validated measurement tools. The top three outcome domains that studies reported on were quality, process factors, and clinical factors. The majority of studies examined multiple outcome domains. All five outcome domains were multidimensional and included a variety of subthemes.ConclusionsThis scoping review represents the initial phase of mapping the outcomes reported in primary studies of CEC and identifying gaps in the evidence. The confirmed lack of standardization represents a hindrance to the provision of high quality intervention and CEC scientific progress. Insights gained can inform the development of a core outcome set to standardize outcome measures in CEC evaluation research and enable scientifically rigorous efficacy trials of CEC. (shrink)

'The church in danger' : latitudinarians, Socinians, and Hobbists -- Animal spirits and living fibres -- Mortalists and materialists -- Journalism, exile, and clandestinity -- Mid-eighteenth-century materialism -- Epilogue : some consequences.