In this adventurous contribution to the project of combining philosophy and biology to understand the mind, Carolyn Price investigates what it means to say that mental states--like thoughts, wishes, and perceptual experiences--are about things in the natural world. Her insight into this deep philosophical problem offers a novel teleological account of intentional content, grounded in and shaped by a carefully constructed theory of functions. Along the way she defends her view from recent objections to teleological theories and indicates how (...) it might be applied to notable problems in the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

Attention is essential to the life of the mind, a central topic in cognitive science, neuroscience, and psychology. Traditional debates in philosophy stand to benefit from greater understanding of the phenomenon, whether on the nature of the self, the foundation of knowledge, the natural basis of consciousness, or the origins of action and responsibility. This book is at the crossroads of philosophy of mind and cognitive science, offering a new theoretical stance on the concept of attention and how it intersects (...) with other functions of the mind, such as perception, consciousness, and action. It presents attention as directed by a subject, essential for perception, but not consciousness or action. By taking seriously the existence of a subject it stands against current trends in philosophy and cognitive science. This book offers an account of the subject and its role in attention that will both help motivate a subject-centered account and avoid some of the common criticisms regarding its existence. It engages with work by many philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists, including Block, Campbell, Dickie, Husserl, James, Koch, Mack and Rock, Merleau-Ponty, Treisman, and Wu. (shrink)

The authors of these essays--including Judith Butler, Elizabeth Weed, and Rosi Braidotti--shed new light on the relationship of Irigaray to many of the philosophers she has "romanced," from Aristotle to Deleuze.

Harms and risks to groups and third-parties can be significant in the context of research, particularly in data-centric studies involving genomic, artificial intelligence, and/or machine learning technologies. This article explores whether and how United States federal regulations should be adapted to better align with current ethical thinking and protect group interests. Three aspects of the Common Rule deserve attention and reconsideration with respect to group interests: institutional review board (IRB) assessment of the risks/benefits of research; disclosure requirements in the informed (...) consent process; and criteria for waivers of informed consent. In accordance with respect for persons and communities, investigators and IRBs should systematically consider potential group harm when designing and reviewing protocols, respectively. Research participants should be informed about any potential group harm in the consent process. We call for additional public discussion, empirical research, and normative analysis on these issues to determine the right regulatory and policy path forward. (shrink)

Conscience in Reproductive Health Care responds to the growing worldwide trend of health care professionals conscientiously refusing to provide abortions and similar reproductive health services in countries where these services are legal and professionally accepted. Carolyn McLeod argues that conscientious objectors in health care should prioritize the interests of patients in receiving care over their own interest in acting on their conscience. She defends this "prioritizing approach" to conscientious objection over the more popular "compromise approach" without downplaying the importance (...) of health care professionals having a conscience or the moral complexity of their conscientious refusals. McLeod's central argument is that health care professionals who are gatekeepers of services such as abortions are fiduciaries for their patients and for the public they are licensed to serve. As such, they owe a duty of loyalty to these beneficiaries and should give primacy to their beneficiaries' interests in accessing care. This conclusion is informed by what McLeod believes is morally at stake for the main parties to the conflicts generated by conscientious refusals: the objector and the patient. What is at stake, according to McLeod, depends on the relevant socio-political context, but typically includes the objector's integrity and the patient's interest in avoiding harm. (shrink)

Visionary quests to return to the Garden of Eden have shaped Western culture from Columbus' voyages to today's tropical island retreats. Few narratives are so powerful - and, as Carolyn Merchant shows, so misguided and destructive - as the dream of recapturing a lost paradise. A sweeping account of these quixotic endeavors by one of America's leading environmentalists, Reinventing Eden traces the idea of rebuilding the primeval garden from its origins to its latest incarnations in shopping malls, theme parks (...) and gated communities. With eloquence and insight, Merchant shows how the drive to conquer nature and to explore and settle the globe, springs from this utopian pastoral impulse throughout Western history. Time and again, human manipulation of the environment is our downfall: Eden is achieved by fencing off pristine beauty in national parks and wildlife preserves, while leaving the majority of the earth in ruins. Challenging both narratives, Merchant argues that the green veneer of city-park conservation has become a cover for the corruption of the earth and the neglect of its environment. Reinventing Eden is a bold new way to think about the earth that includes green political parties, sustainable development and a partnership between humans and earth that is nothing short of an ecological revolution. (shrink)

This article reflects on how Agriculture and Human Values has approached women, gender, and agriculture over the years based on a content analysis of the journal. Overall, the journal has a long history of dealing with these issues with increasing interest over time. The predominant research themes in this area are women on farms; gender, agriculture, and environment; and gender, agriculture, and intersectionalities. Feminist political ecology constituted the major theoretical orientation of this scholarship. Two themes in gender scholarship that received (...) scant attention were masculinities and sexualities. Although many articles focused on women and gender over the years, little evidence exists that the findings from this research penetrated the main issues in the journal. Studies in which gender is not the central focus, such as those related to sustainability, work, and supply chains, would benefit from attention to feminist work in these areas. (shrink)

Farm animal welfare is a knowledge domain that can be regarded as a model for new ways of organizing learning and making higher education more responsive to the needs of society. Global concern for animal welfare has resulted in a great demand for knowledge. As a complement to traditional education in farm animal welfare, higher education can be more demand driven and look at a broad range of methods to make knowledge available. The result of an inventory on farm animal (...) welfare, e-learning, learning resources, and open educational resources in three different search engines is presented. A huge amount of information on animal welfare is available on the Internet but many of the providers lock in the knowledge in a traditional course context. Only a few universities develop and disseminate open learning resources within the subject. Higher education institutions are encouraged to develop open educational resources in animal welfare for the benefit of teachers, students, society, and, indirectly, animal welfare. (shrink)

Civil law norms give a considerable space for ethical value judgments. In this respect, the key role is played by the provisions called “general clauses” that refer to extra-juridical value judgments and oblige to take them into account in the process of deciding in civil law cases. The purpose of such clauses is to ensure the necessary flexibility of law and to influence the shaping of proper human relations. In the field of economic activity they are to favour the attitudes (...) of honesty, of mutual trust and of readiness to serve others – the values which constitute a basis for the system of free market competition. A separate question is how to realize these assumptions in the practice of adjudicating which remains the task of courts and tribunals and their case law. (shrink)

Exploring a fifty-mile territory, Linda and Carolyn Dufurrena vividly depict the heart of the West and its fabled ranch culture in a beautiful collaboration of essays and full color images.

One understanding of conscience dominates bioethical discussion about conscience. On this view, to have a conscience is to be compelled to act in accordance with one’s own moral values for the sake of one’s “integrity,” where integrity is understood as inner or psychological unity. Conscience is deemed valuable because it promotes this quality. In this paper, I describe the dominant view, attempt to show that it is flawed, and sketch a positive alternative to it. In my opinion, conscience often fails (...) to promote inner unity (regardless of the degree of inner unity we have in mind); acting with a conscience leaves many people broken rather than unified. A better view about the value of conscience is that having a conscience encourages morally responsible agency. My goal is to prove that this alternative explains better what it means to value conscience in health care and the extent to which we ought to value it. (shrink)

Bertrand Russell boldly declared that all religions were “both untrue and harmful.” His concerns went beyond the historical inaccuracies of particular scriptures; he regarded even the fundamental beliefs, in God or eternal souls, as unfounded and implausible. And the church, he thought, had no final authority over morals, especially with its superstitious taboos. But apart from questioning its tenets, Russell wished to further expose religion as a dangerous social force – one that fostered anti‐intellectual thinking and discriminated against its dissenters. (...) For these reasons and more, he poured scorn on the holy institutions that were part of almost every society. But beneath that scorn, oddly, he had an ardent admiration of religious feelings or sentiments – a seriousness about life and a concern for universal good. But whether he continued to see those feelings as “religious” is a matter of some debate. (shrink)

Affective self-transformation premised on empathy has been understood within feminist and anti-racist literatures as central to achieving social justice. Through juxtaposing debates about empathy within feminist and anti-racist theory with rhetorics of empathy in international development, and particularly writing about ‘immersions’, this article explores how the workings of empathy might be reconceptualised when relations of postcoloniality and neoliberalism are placed in the foreground. I argue that in the neoliberal economy in which the international aid apparatus operates, empathetic self-transformation can become (...) commodified in ways that fix unequal affective subjects. Empathy may function here less to produce more intersubjective relations and ways of knowing than it does to augment the moral and affective capacities of development professionals. Yet, I suggest, it is in the ambivalences, tensions and contradictions of both emotion and neoliberalism that spaces for thinking and feeling transnational encounters differently might be cultivated. (shrink)

In this paper, I interrogate an ethical obligation to participate in genomics research on the basis of solidarity. I explore two different ways in which solidarity is used to motivate participation in genomics research: as an appeal to participate in genomic research because it cultivates solidarity and as an appeal to participate in genomic research because it expresses solidarity. I critique those appeals and draw lessons from them for how we ought to understand solidarity. The working definition of solidarity that (...) I defend is that solidarity involves recognizing another creature, person, or persons as, like ourselves, vulnerable to injustice and entails acting in ways that contribute to creating, reforming, and participating in institutions that are aimed at enhancing their flourishing. I argue that participating in genomics research is not an expression of solidarity. Participation in research may be praiseworthy, a “good thing to do,” but actually cultivating and expressing solidarity requires much more of us. (shrink)

Debate has raged in Canada recently over whether in vitro fertilization should be funded through public health insurance. Such a move would require that the provinces classify IVF as a medically necessary service. In this paper, I defend the position I have taken publicly—especially in Ontario, my own province—that IVF is not medically necessary. I contend that, by funding IVF on grounds of medical necessity, governments like Ontario's violate their commitments to equality and fairness, and cause harm. They do the (...) last by suggesting that the lives of people who forgo procreation, and perhaps have children in other ways, will be stunted. (shrink)

Introduction:Can nature be controlled?. Autonomous nature -- Greco-Roman concepts of nature -- Christianity and nature -- Nature personified : Renaissance ideas of nature -- Controlling nature. Vexing nature : Francis Bacon and the origins of experimentation -- Natural law : Spinoza on natura naturans and natura naturata -- Laws of nature :Lleibniz and Newton -- Epilogue : rambunctious nature in the twenty-first century.

Re-thinking the political workings of habit and habituation, this article suggests, is vital to understanding the logics and possibilities of social change today. Any endeavour to explore habit’s affirmative potential, however, must confront its legacies as a colonialist, imperialist and capitalist technology. As a means to explore what it is that differentiates contemporary neoliberal modes of governing through habit from more critical approaches, this article compares contemporary ‘nudge’ theory and policy, as espoused by the behavioural economist Richard Thaler and the (...) legal scholar Cass Sunstein, with the pragmatist philosophies of habit offered by John Dewey, William James and Shannon Sullivan. While nudge advocates focus on how policy-makers and corporate leaders can intervene in the ‘choice architectures’ that surround us to outsmart or bypass problematic human tendencies, I argue, pragmatist philosophers appreciate the necessity of collective efforts to develop new and flexible forms of habituation in order to engender more enduring and democratic forms of social transformation. (shrink)

The power of new medical technologies, the cultural authority of physicians, and the gendered power dynamics of many patient-physician relationships can all inhibit women's reproductive freedom. Often these factors interfere with women's ability to trust themselves to choose and act in ways that are consistent with their own goals and values. In this book Carolyn McLeod introduces to the reproductive ethics literature the idea that in reproductive health care women's self-trust can be undermined in ways that threaten their autonomy. (...) Understanding the importance of self-trust for autonomy, McLeod argues, is crucial to understanding the limits on women's reproductive freedom. -/- McLeod brings feminist insights in philosophical moral psychology to reproductive ethics, and to health-care ethics more broadly. She identifies the social environments in which self-trust is formed and encouraged. She also shows how women's experiences of reproductive health care can enrich our understanding of self-trust and autonomy as philosophical concepts. The book's theoretical components are grounded in women's concrete experiences. The cases discussed, which involve miscarriage, infertility treatment, and prenatal diagnosis, show that what many women feel toward themselves in reproductive contexts is analogous to what we feel toward others when we trust or distrust them. -/- McLeod also discusses what health-care providers can do to minimize the barriers to women's self-trust in reproductive health care, and why they have a duty to do so as part of their larger duty to respect patient autonomy. (shrink)

John Earman and John Norton have argued that substantivalism leads to a radical form of indeterminism within local spacetime theories. I compare their argument to more traditional arguments typical in the Relationist/Substantivalist dispute and show that they all fail for the same reason. All these arguments ascribe to the substantivalist a particular way of talking about possibility. I argue that the substantivalist is not committed to the modal claims required for the arguments to have any force, and show that this (...) naturally leads to an alteration in the way determinism is characterized for local spacetime theories. (shrink)

It will be a valuable resource for practitioners in health and welfare as well as students in health and social science disciplines."--BOOK JACKET.

Attention is the basis of our free will, allowing us to direct our minds as we choose. Technology poses a threat to this individual agency, writes Carolyn Dicey Jennings, but may also yield new rewards. Social media harnesses our attention for incentives that aren’t our own, sublimating it into the interests of the group. We are trading our individual power for collective power, and we need to understand the risks and benefits of doing this.

Things: In Touch with the Past explores the value of artifacts that have survived from the past and that can be said to "embody" their histories. Such genuine or "real" things afford a particular kind of aesthetic experience-an encounter with the past-despite the fact that genuineness is not a perceptually detectable property.

Marriage, in fiction even more than in life, has been the woman's adventure, the object of her quest, her journey's end. Contemporary fiction modulates the formula in one respect: the abandonment of marriage replaces the achievement of it. While it is obvious what these fictional women detest in marriage, it is not always clear what they desire. How, indeed, might clarity be expected about an institution whose success depends so much upon woman's failure at autonomy? So the women split: Kinflicks, (...) Small Changes, The Women's Room, Loose Ends, The Oracle—these are merely representative of a long list. What is new in these books is that we are seeing marriage at all—seeing it, moreover, from a woman's point of view. "What about Norm?" the narrator asks in The Women's Room; "Who is he, this shadow man, this figurehead husband?"1 In fact, who Norm is, who all the husbands are, is clear: those who need someone to take care of their domestic, cooking, cleaning, sexual, breeding needs while they are out attending to civilization and their own appreciation of life. Even the least intelligent husbands realize that a change in marriage profound enough to satisfy the fleeing wives would profoundly alter the foundation of that conservative community, the family. Freud had urged women not to interfere with man in his pursuit of civilization; and this is the way it is, the way men want it to be. · 1. Marilyn French, The Women's Room , p. 193. Carolyn G. Heilbrun, professor of English at Columbia University, is the author of, among other works, Toward a Recognition of Androgyny. Her book, Reinventing Womanhood, includes parts of this present essay. (shrink)

abstract: This article reflects Carolyn Chen's remarks at the Buddhist-Christian Studies panel on her book, Getting Saved in America: Taiwanese Immigration and Religious Conversion (Princeton, 2008) at the 2022 American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting in Denver, Colorado. The article embeds the book's study of Taiwanese immigrant conversions to evangelical Christianity and Buddhism within larger patterns of migration, religious community, and ethnic formation in American history.

Let Carolyn Jane Bohler inspire you to consider a wide range of images of God in order to refine how you imagine God to have and use power, and how God wills ...

Regret is a slippery phenomenon. Fundamental questions about its fittingness conditions and functions have yet to be settled. Here, I offer a diagnosis of regret’s slippery character. Extending a suggestion made by Daniel Kahneman, I argue that regret comes in a range of emotional flavours, distinguished in the first instance by their phenomenology. While regret has received some attention from philosophers, its varied phenomenology has not been investigated. Yet the varied phenomenology of regret is significant: it reflects further variations in (...) its cognitive and motivational effects. As a result, I argue, different flavours of regret have different fittingness conditions and contribute to our lives in different ways. In Section I, I offer a preliminary sketch of regret and introduce the questions that drive my discussion. In Section II, I introduce regret’s different flavours. In Section III, I investigate their contrasting cognitive and motivational effects, with a view to determining their functions. In Section IV, I investigate what this implies concerning regret’s fittingness conditions—and, in particular, what constitutes a regrettable action. (shrink)

At the 2022 Central American Philosophical Association meeting, there was an Author-Meets-Critics session on Carolyn McLeod’s book, Conscience in Reproductive Health Care: Prioritizing Patient Interests. The event was organized and chaired by Heather Stewart and sponsored by the APA Committee on the Status of Women and Kate Norlock, chair of that committee. There were four speakers, including McLeod and three “critics”: Javiera Perez Gomez, Alison Reinheld, and Jennifer Parks, who were all generous enough to provide McLeod with their comments (...) beforehand. The sessions occurred over Zoom even though some speakers were present in person at the conference. McLeod kicked things off by providing a summary of her book, which was then followed by critical comments by the critics in the order in which they’re named above. McLeod responded to their remarks and then Stewart led a Q&A session with our small but lively and intelligent audience. The content of what was said has been reproduced here. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to show that the standard notion of informed choice is unacceptable and must be replaced. To do so, I examine Foucault's analysis of people in contemporary society, drawing attention to the ways power relations act upon us, and to the possibility of resistance. I show how feminist moral theory can be enriched by Foucault's analysis. Applying this new understanding of people and moral theory to an analysis of informed choice, I claim that the standard (...) notion of informed choice is unacceptable, in part because it relies on a false conception of people. Its “necessary” features—intention, understanding, and absence of controlling influences—are much more difficult, if not impossible, to obtain than proponents of the standard notion believe. I end by offering direction for creating a new, Foucault-inspired, feminist theory of informed choice. (shrink)

I illustrate a challenge to a view that is a response to the Hole Argument. The view, sophisticated substantivalism, has been claimed to be the received view. While sophisticated substantivalism has many defenders, there is a fundamental tension in the view that has not received the attention it deserves. Anyone who defends or endorses sophisticated substantivalism, should acknowledge this challenge, and should either show why it is not serious or explain how to respond to it.

The Australian Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety acknowledged understaffing and substandard care in residential aged care and home care services, and recommendations were made that that the Australian Government should promote assistive technology within aged care. Robotic care assistants can provide care and companionship for the elderly—both in their own homes and within health and aged care institutions. Although more research is required into their use, studies indicate benefits, including enabling the elderly to live independently at home, (...) assistance with medication and monitoring of safety. Nevertheless, there are inherent ethical challenges in the use of robots as carers, including loss of privacy, unwarranted restrictions on autonomy, lack of dignity, deception, and the exacerbation of loneliness. Ethics by design can counter these issues in development of robotics and clinical ethics committees have been put forward as a way of dealing with the ethical use of robotic care in healthcare institutions. In this paper I outline the ethical challenges of robotic care assistants and how these may be mediated in their design and use. (shrink)

Primary care presents distressful moral problems for nurse practitioners (NPs) who report frustration, powerlessness, changing jobs and leaving advanced practice. The purpose of this grounded theory study was to describe the process NPs use to manage moral problems common to primary care. Twenty-three NPs were interviewed, commenting on hypothetical situations depicting ethical issues common to primary care. Coding was conducted using a constant comparative method. A theory of maintaining moral integrity emerged consisting of the phases of encountering conflict, drawing a (...) line, finding a way without crossing the line, and evaluating actions. The NPs varied in their awareness and the discord encountered in conflict, and in clarity, flexibility and justification of the line drawn. A critical juncture occurred when NPs evaluated how well integrity had been maintained. Some experienced no distress while others experienced self-doubt, regret, outrage and frustration at external constraints, and attempted to reconcile through avoiding, convincing themselves, and compensating. (shrink)