Non-lethal weapons have become an increasingly important class of weapons. Creating these armaments requires examination of ethical issues in their research and development processes. Chief a...

Philosophical theories of gender are typically understood as theories of what it is to be a woman, a man, a nonbinary person, and so on. In this paper, I argue that this is a mistake. There’s good reason to suppose that our best philosophical theory of gender might not directly match up to or give the extensions of ordinary gender categories like ‘woman’.

What gender are you? And in virtue of what? These are questions of gender categorization. Such questions are increasingly at the core of many contemporary debat.

Face perception, perhaps the most highly developed visual skill in humans, is mediated by a distributed neural system in humans that is comprised of multiple, bilateral regions. We propose a model for the organization of this system that emphasizes a distinction between the representation of invariant and changeable aspects of faces. The representation of invariant aspects of faces underlies the recognition of individuals, whereas the representation of changeable aspects of faces, such as eye gaze, expression, and lip movement, underlies the (...) perception of information that facilitates social communication. The model is also hierarchical insofar as it is divided into a core system and an extended system. The core system is comprised of occipitotemporal regions in extrastriate visual cortex that mediate the visual analysis of faces. In the core system, the representation of invariant aspects is mediated more by the face-responsive region in the fusiform gyrus, whereas the representation of changeable aspects is mediated more by the face-responsive region in the superior temporal sulcus. The extended system is comprised of regions from neural systems for other cognitive functions that can be recruited to act in concert with the regions in the core system to extract meaning from faces. (shrink)

Social constructionism is often considered a form of anti-realism. But in contemporary feminist philosophy, an increasing number of philosophers defend views that are well-described as both realist and social constructionist. In this paper, I use the work of Sally Haslanger as an example of realist social constructionism. I argue: that Haslanger is best interpreted as defending metaphysical realism about social structures; that this type of metaphysical realism about the social world presents challenges to some popular ways of understanding metaphysical realism.

In this paper, I argue for a new way of characterizing ontological emergence. I appeal to recent discussions in meta-ontology regarding fundamentality and dependence, and show how emergence can be simply and straightforwardly characterized using these notions. I then argue that many of the standard problems for emergence do not apply to this account: given a clearly specified meta-ontological background, emergence becomes much easier to explicate. If my arguments are successful, they show both a helpful way of thinking about emergence (...) and the potential utility of discussions in meta-ontology when applied to first-order metaphysics. (shrink)

In this project I am concerned with the extent to which conceptual engineering happens in domains outside of philosophy, and if so, what that might look like. Specifically, I’ll argue that...

When trust is broken, how should we determine who is at fault? Previous discus- sions of broken trust typically attribute the fault to trusters who place trust foolishly or trustees who act in an untrustworthy manner. These discussions take for granted the ability of the truster and trustee to communicate and understand the boundaries of what is being entrusted, that is, the domain of trust. However, the boundaries of entrusted domains are not always clear to either party which can result (...) in broken trust despite the best efforts of both truster and trustee. In this paper, I argue that deter- mining who to blame when trust is broken is a messy affair in which disagreements over fault regularly arise. I introduce three features of trust domains that take center stage in negotiations regarding who is at fault when trust is broken: scope, rigidity and ordering. (shrink)

Although debates continue, studies of cognition in infancy suggest that knowledge begins to emerge early in life and constitutes part of humans' innate endowment. Early-developing knowledge appears to be both domain-specific and task-specific, it appears to capture fundamental constraints on ecologically important classes of entities in the child's environment, and it appears to remain central to the commonsense knowledge systems of adults.

Much recent literature in metaphysics attempts to answer the question, ‘What is metaphysics?’ In this paper I argue that many of the most influential contemporary answers to this question yield the result that feminist metaphysics is not metaphysics. I further argue this result is problematic.

"The terms do not have to be spelled out, because they have been set not by a meeting of minds of the parties, but by a default baseline defined by corporate, property, and employment law that establishes the legal parameters for the constitution of capitalist firms." p. 2.

Though emotion conveys memory benefits, it does not enhance memory equally for all aspects of an experience, nor for all types of emotional events. In this review, I outline the behavioral evidence for arousal's focal enhancements of memory and describe the neural processes that may support those focal enhancements. I also present behavioral evidence to suggest that these focal enhancements occur more often for negative experiences than for positive ones. This result appears to arise because of valence-dependent effects on the (...) neural processes recruited during episodic encoding and retrieval, with negative affect associated with increased engagement of sensory processes, and positive affect leading to enhanced recruitment of conceptual processes. (shrink)

Testimony is indispensable in the sciences. To deny the propriety of relying on it engenders an untenable scepticism. But this leaves open the issue of what exactly confers a scientist’s epistemic right to rely upon the word of her colleagues. Some authors have suggested a recipient of testimony enjoys an epistemic entitlement to trust the word of another as such, not requiring evidence of her trustworthiness, so long as there is not evidence of her untrustworthiness. I argue that, whether or (...) not such an on-no-evidence entitlement to believe what one is told exists, it shrinks to irrelevance in the explanation of the basis on which scientists take each other’s word in the scientific community. This is so, since a normally knowledgeable adult hearer is typically awash with relevant evidence, direct and circumstantial, for and against, concerning a teller’s trustworthiness, and this swamps any alleged entitlement to believe in the absence of such evidence. There need not be personal knowledge of the teller, since social role and topic provide evidence regarding trustworthiness. I also discuss the individuation of ‘testimony’ as an epistemic kind. I suggest that we should not attempt to define a category with sharp boundaries, but instead characterise a paradigm case—one person telling another something in face-to-face personal communication—and then notice other cases which both resemble and diverge from this in epistemically relevant features—lectures, media broadcasts, personal letters, personal diaries, etc.Author Keywords: Testimony; Justification; Knowledge; Individualism; Communication. (shrink)

In a recent publication, I argued that there is a conceptual difference between artificial womb (AW) technology, capable of facilitating gestation ex utero, and neonatal intensive care, providing incubation to neonates born prematurely. One of the reasons I provided for this distinction was that the subjects of each process are different entities. The subject of the process of gestation ex utero is a unique human entity: a ‘gestateling’, rather than a fetus or a newborn preterm neonate. Nick Colgrove wrote a (...) response to my paper, claiming that my distinction between the subject of an AW and a newborn (in intensive care) was false. He claims that I have not accounted for the proper definition of ‘birth’ and that gestatelings are not a distinct product of human reproduction. Further, Colgrove posits that even if I can successfully distinguish gestatelings from preterms, such a distinction is morally irrelevant because the entities would have the same moral status. In this paper, I address the three challenges raised and defend the claim that gestatelings are unique entities. Moreover, I argue that moral status should not be considered ipso facto determinative in the debate about AWs. (shrink)

Advances in neuroscience might make it possible to develop techniques for directly altering offenders’ brains, in order to make offenders more responsible and law-abiding. The idea of using such techniques within the criminal justice system can seem intuitively troubling, even if they were more effective in preventing crime than traditional methods of rehabilitation. One standard argument against this use of brain interventions is that it would undermine the individual’s free will. This paper maintains that ‘free will’ (at least, as that (...) notion is understood by those who adopt the influential compatibilist approach) is an inadequate basis for explaining what is problematic about some direct brain interventions. This paper then defends an alternative way of objecting to certain kinds of direct brain interventions, focusing on the relationship between the offender and the state rather than the notion of free will. It opposes the use of interventions which aim to enhance ‘virtue responsibility’ (by instilling particular values about what is right and wrong), arguing that this would objectify offenders. In contrast, it argues that it may be acceptable to use direct brain interventions to enhance ‘capacity responsibility’ (i.e. to strengthen the abilities necessary for the exercise of responsible agency, such as self-control). Finally it considers how to distinguish these different kinds of responsibility enhancement. (shrink)

In this article, we advance the perspective that distinct emotions amplify different moral judgments, based on the emotion’s core appraisals. This theorizing yields four insights into the way emotions shape moral judgment. We submit that there are two kinds of specificity in the impact of emotion upon moral judgment: domain specificity and emotion specificity. We further contend that the unique embodied aspects of an emotion, such as nonverbal expressions and physiological responses, contribute to an emotion’s impact on moral judgment. Finally, (...) emotions play a key role in determining which issues acquire moral significance in a society over time, in a process known as moralization (Rozin, 1999). The implications of these four observations for future research on emotion and morality are discussed. (shrink)

Much stalking consists in behavior which would normally be permissible; indeed, many stalking behaviors are protected liberties. How, then, does the stalker wrong the victim? I consider and reject different answers as failing to identify the essential wrong of stalking: stalking perpetuates gender oppression; it threatens or coerces, disrespects autonomy, or violates privacy. I argue that the stalker forces a personal relationship on the target and that our interest in being able to refuse such relationships is strong enough to ground (...) a right. It is a benefit if my account changes the standards of which intimacy-seeking behaviors we consider permissible. (shrink)

Medical interventions such as methadone treatment for drug addicts or “chemical castration” for sex offenders have been used in several jurisdictions alongside or as an alternative to traditional punishments, such as incarceration. As our understanding of the biological basis for human behaviour develops, our criminal justice system may make increasing use of such medical techniques and may become less reliant on incarceration. Academic debate on this topic has largely focused on whether offenders can validly consent to medical interventions, given the (...) coercive environment of the criminal justice system. Both sides in this debate share the assumption that administering medical interventions to offenders without their valid consent would be unethical. Recently, Thomas Douglas has mounted a formidable challenge to this “consent requirement”. Essentially, his argument rests on a comparison between prison and medical interventions. Douglas asks: if the state is entitled to impose a prison sentence on a criminal without the criminal’s consent, why is consent required for the imposition of a medical intervention? The most obvious way of defending the consent requirement against Douglas’s challenge appeals to the fact that incarceration merely interferes with the right to free movement, but medical interventions interfere with the right to bodily integrity. This argument rests on what Douglas calls the “robustness claim”—the claim that the right to bodily integrity is more robust than the right to freedom of movement. In other words, the right to freedom of movement loses its protective force in a wider range of circumstances than the right to bodily integrity. Douglas’s article seeks to undermine the robustness claim, by arguing that neither case-based intuitions, nor theoretical considerations support this claim. In this article, I will attempt to raise some doubts about Douglas’s challenge to the consent requirement and the robustness claim. (shrink)

This essay addresses various moral objections to polyamory and argues that none succeeds. Brake also argues that in some respects polyamory can be superior to monogamy given that polyamorists often endorse ideals such as radical honesty, non-possessiveness, and rejection of jealousy. Moreover, Brake argues that the effects of polyamory in a society in which it is widespread can be very beneficial.

We can freely cross disciplinary boundaries, as well as the line between theory and practice, and allow practices to cast their light back on the theory and show us its deficiencies. In short, this approach reorients some much-discussed issues of professional, business, and military ethics and reveals them as variations on one deeply rooted theme. The author does not treat current institutions as final and unalterable. If these arrangements frustrate moral evaluation, she finds that an argument for change. To make (...) intelligent changes, however, we need a clear view of the reasoning that makes them seem natural and inevitable. That is what this book attempts to do. In the process, the author also reexamines the concept of "person." Not all cultures put so much stress on the idea as Western - and particularly American - cultures do. If we wish to keep this emphasis, then here is another argument for change. (shrink)

Lauren Freeman and Heather Stewart (2024) have written a richly researched and argued, while also highly engaging and accessible, book with Microaggressions in Medicine. They argue for why microaggressions are best understood on a harm-based account and situate this view within timely examples from a range of healthcare experiences. In their view, focusing on the harms produced by microaggressions shifts the locus of concern from the agent committing a microaggression to the agent receiving it, and it enables an attribution of (...) a microaggression regardless of an agent's intent or even awareness.Freeman and Stewart leave the reader with an expanded understanding of what microaggressions are and how they function.... Read More. (shrink)

This paper raises three concerns regarding self-ownership rhetoric to describe autonomy within healthcare in general and reproductive justice in specific. First, private property and the notion of “ownership” embedded in “self-ownership,” rely on and replicate historical injustices related to the initial acquisition of property. Second, not all individuals are recognized as selves with equal access to self-ownership. Third, self-ownership only justifies negative liberties. To fully protect healthcare access and reproductive care in specific, we must also be able to make claims (...) on others to respect, protect, and fulfill our positive rights. As much as nondomination remains an urgent demand for reproductive rights, it does not go far enough to ensure reproductive justice. (shrink)

This paper distinguishes between definiteness and determinacy. Definiteness is seen as a morphological category which, in English, marks a uniqueness presupposition, while determinacy consists in denoting an individual. Definite descriptions are argued to be fundamentally predicative, presupposing uniqueness but not existence, and to acquire existential import through general type-shifting operations that apply not only to definites, but also indefinites and possessives. Through these shifts, argumental definite descriptions may become either determinate or indeterminate. The latter option is observed in examples like (...) ‘Anna didn’t give the only invited talk at the conference’, which, on its indeterminate reading, implies that there is nothing in the extension of ‘only invited talk at the conference’. The paper also offers a resolution of the issue of whether possessives are inherently indefinite or definite, suggesting that, like indefinites, they do not mark definiteness lexically, but like definites, they typically yield determinate readings due to a general preference for the shifting operation that produces them. (shrink)

In 2017 and 2019, two research teams claimed ‘proof of principle’ for artificial womb technology (AWT). AWT has long been a subject of speculation in bioethical literature, with broad consensus that it is a welcome development. Despite this, little attention is afforded to more immediate ethical problems in the development of AWT, particularly as an alternative to neonatal intensive care. To start this conversation, I consider whether experimental AWT is innovative treatment or medical research. The research–treatment distinction, pervasive in regulation (...) worldwide, is intended to isolate research activities and subject them to a greater degree of oversight. I argue that there is a tendency in the literature to conceptualize AWT for partial ectogenesis as innovative treatment. However, there are sufficiently serious ethical concerns with experimental AWT that mean that it must not be first used on humans on the basis that it is a ‘beneficial treatment’. First, I outline the prospects for translation of AWT animal studies into treatment for human preterms. Second, I challenge the conceptualizations of experimental AWT as innovative treatment. It must be considered medical research to reflect the investigatory nature of the process and guarantee sufficient protections for subjects. Identifying that AWT is research is crucial in formulating further ethico‐legal questions regarding the experimental use of AWT. Third, I demonstrate that clinical trials will be a necessary part of the clinical translation of AWT because of requirements laid out by regulators. I consider the justification for clinical trials and highlight some of the crucial ethical questions about the conditions under which they should proceed. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Gareth Evans’ famous proof of the impossibility of de re indeterminate identity fails on a counterpart-theoretic interpretation of the determinacy operators. I attempt to motivate a counterpart-theoretic reading of the determinacy operators and then show that, understood counterpart-theoretically, Evans’ argument is straightforwardly invalid.

The concept of vulnerability is widely used in bioethics, particularly in research ethics and public health ethics. The traditional approach construes vulnerability as inherent in individuals or the groups to which they belong and views vulnerability as requiring special protections. Florencia Luna and other bioethicists continue to challenge traditional ways of conceptualizing and applying the term. Luna began proposing a layered approach to this concept and recently extended this proposal to offer two new concepts to analyze the concept of vulnerability, (...) namely understanding external conditions that trigger vulnerability and layers of vulnerability with cascading effects. Luna's conception of vulnerability is useful, which we demonstrate by applying her layered view and the new analyses in multiple contexts. We begin by outlining Luna's view and we use vignettes from healthcare involving transgender patients, the care of patients in psychiatric contexts, and research involving prisoners to illustrate how each part of Luna's concept elucidates important moral issues. (shrink)

This volume is part two of a two-volume set. It may be purchased separately or in conjunction with volume one. Vol. II: From the St. Louis Hegelians through C. I. Lewis. and G. H. Mead.

In ‘Ethics of sharing medical knowledge with the community: is the physician responsible for medical outreach during a pandemic?’ Strous and Karni note that the revised physician’s pledge in the World Medical Association Declaration of Geneva obligates individual physicians to share medical knowledge, which they interpret to mean a requirement to share knowledge publicly and through outreach. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, Strous and Karni defend a form of medical paternalism insofar as the individual physician must reach out (...) to communities who may not want, or know to seek out, medical advice, for reasons of public health and health equity. Strous and Karni offer a novel defence of why physicians ought to intervene even in insular communities, and they offer suggestions for how this could be done in culturally sensitive ways. Yet their view rests on an unfounded interpretation of the Geneva Declaration language. More problematically, their paper confuses shared and collective responsibility, misattributing the scope of individual physician obligations in potentially harmful ways. In response, this reply delineates between shared and collective responsibility, and suggests that to defend the obligation of medical outreach Strous and Karni propose, it is better conceptualised as a collective responsibility of the medical profession, rather than a shared responsibility of individual physicians. This interpretation rejects paternalism on the part of individual providers in favour of a more sensitive and collaborative practice of knowledge sharing between physicians and communities, and in the service of collective responsibility. (shrink)

Concerns about children's ability to fully comprehend and evaluate advertising messages has stimulated substantial research and heated debate among scholars, business leaders, consumer advocates, and public policy makers for more than three decades. During that time, some very fundamental questions about the fairness of marketing to children have been raised, yet many remain unresolved today. With the emergence of increasingly sophisticated advertising media, promotional offers and creative appeals in recent years, new issues have also developed. This paper provides a basis (...) for further examination of some the key questions in this area, and suggests how children's advertising research can be employed to illuminate them. (shrink)

I offer an account of what trust is, and of what epistemic self-trust consists in. I identify five distinct arguments extracted from Chapter 2 of Zagzebski's Epistemic Authority for the rationality and epistemic legitimacy of epistemic self-trust. I take issue with the general account of human rational self-regulation on which one of her arguments rests. Zagzebski maintains that this consists in restoring harmony in the psyche by eliminating conflict and so ending. I argue that epistemic rationality is distinct from psychic (...) mechanisms aimed at eliminating dissonance, and these two sometimes pull in opposed directions. (shrink)

A growing number of theorists have launched an epistemic challenge against retributive punishment. This challenge involves the core claim that it is wrong (intentionally) to inflict serious harm on someone unless the moral argument for doing so has been established to a high standard of credibility. Proponents of this challenge typically argue that retributivism fails to meet the required epistemic standard, because retributivism relies on a contentious conception of free will, about whose existence we cannot be sufficiently certain. However, the (...) scope of the epistemic challenge should not be limited to doubts about free will or retributivism. In this article, I argue that the epistemic challenge should be expanded beyond the original focus on justifications of punishment. By “expanding the epistemic challenge” I mean demanding that other purported justifications for serious (intentional) harm be held to a high standard of credibility. To provide a focus for the argument, I will concentrate on the “Public Health Quarantine Model” defended by Gregg Caruso, but my arguments have wider implications beyond this model. A growing number of “abolitionist” theorists believe that punishment is wrong in principle. If retributive punishment, or punishment in general, were abandoned, we would need to ask, “how else should we respond to crime?”. My arguments suggest that all such abolitionists will have to face the same epistemic standard as penal theorists if they wish to replace punishment with the intentional imposition of non-punitive severe coercive measures. (shrink)