Global ignorance about Africa continues to sustain inappropriate global interventions to resolve public health crises, often with disastrous consequences. To explain why this continues to happen, I marshal two theorems that predict basic statistical properties, called ‘the doctrinal paradox’ and ‘the discursive dilemma’, which underlie scientific consensus formation and evidence-based decision making on a global scale. These mathematical results illuminate the epistemic and material injustices committed by the protocols of medical research conducted at the highest level of global knowledge production (...) in the service of international humanitarian aid for Africans. These social choice theorems reveal that a global scientific consensus projecting claims and proposing policies about Africa’s disease burden is likely to yield a low degree of reliability, in that the probability of its accuracy is less than chance. The solution to this anomaly is to remove from the global scientific agenda the statistically unrealisable demand of satisfying too many multinational corporate and foreign governments’ priorities as equally entitled to benefit from the knowledge produced to improve Africa’s public health sector. Instead, foreign funding targeted to support medical science and policy in Africa should be directed by those specialists in situ who are most familiar with their own national health challenges and potential solutions, rather than relying upon foreign decision makers to interpret Africa’s emergency public health care needs. Keywords Doctrinal paradox, discursive dilemma, scientific consensus, epistemic trust, global health ethics, group agency. (shrink)

This article documents the increasing participation of poor women in social movements in Latin America, focusing on movements centered around human rights and collective consumption issues, such as the cost of living or the provision of public services. It analyzes the factors that have contributed to the increased participation of poor Latin American women in social movements and why they have chosen the state rather than the workplace as the principal arena of confrontation. Although these movements are undertaken in defense (...) of women's traditional domestic role, collective action appears to be contributing to a greater consciousness of gender subordination among Latin American women and to their greater legitimacy in the public sphere. (shrink)

Moral Foundations research offers rich promise, opening up key questions about how affect and cognition are integrated in moral response, and exploring how different moral discourses may supply meaning and valence to moral experience. Haidt and his colleagues also associate different discourses with different political positions. However I address three problematic areas. First to what extent Haidt has succeeded in transcending the traditional dichotomy of affect and cognition, and created an integrative model of how moral intuitions actually work. Second, the (...) analysis of cultural processes is too limited; moral responses are discursive, contextualized and constructed. Third, the political spectrum is complex and diverse; to be truly useful, the research on Moral Foundations must avoid parochial US political concerns and models. (shrink)

Our contribution in this paper is to highlight the ethical implications of workforce engagement strategies in an age of austerity. Hard or instrumentalist approaches to workforce engagement create the potential for situations where engaged employees are expected to work ever longer and harder with negative outcomes for their well-being. Our study explores these issues in an investigation of the enactment of an engagement strategy within a UK Health charity, where managers and workers face paradoxical demands to raise service quality and (...) cut costs. We integrate insights from engagement, paradox, and ethic of care literatures, to explore these paradoxical demands—illustrating ways in which engagement experiences become infused with tensions when the workforce faces competing requirements to do ‘more with less’ resources. We argue that those targeted by these paradoxical engagement strategies need to be supported and cared for, embedded in an ethic of care that provides explicit workplace resources for helping workers and managers cope with and work through corresponding tensions. Our study points to the critical importance of support from senior and frontline managers for open communications and dialogue practices. (shrink)

In February 2012, the Obama White House endorsed a Privacy Bill of Rights, comprising seven principles. The third, “Respect for Context,” is explained as the expectation that “companies will collect, use, and disclose personal data in ways that are consistent with the context in which consumers provide the data.” One can anticipate the contested interpretations of this principle as parties representing diverse interests vie to make theirs the authoritative one. In the paper I will discuss three possibilities and explain why (...) each does not take us far beyond the status quo, which, regulators in the United States, Europe, and beyond have found problematic. I will argue that contextual integrity offers the best way forward for protecting privacy in a world where information increasingly mediates our significant activities and relationships. Although an important goal is to influence policy, this paper aims less to stipulate explicit rules than to present an underlying justificatory, or normative rationale. Along the way, it will review key ideas in the theory of contextual integrity, its differences from existing approaches, and its harmony with basic intuition about information sharing practices and norms. (shrink)

Modality is standardly thought to come in two varieties: de dicto and de re. De re modality concerns the attribution of modal features to things or individuals, and enshrines a commitment to Aristotelian essentialism. This chapter considers how David Lewis's conception of de re modality fits into his overall metaphysics. The hypothesis is that the driving force behind his metaphysics in general, and his adherence to counterpart theory in particular, is the distinctly Humean thought that necessary connections between distinct existences (...) are literally unintelligible. Lewis's appeal to counterpart theory in his account of truthmakers is explicitly aimed at delivering a truthmaker principle that eschews necessary connections. Lewis's attitude towards several well‐rehearsed debates in contemporary ontology and the reasons underlying that attitude closely mirror Hume's incendiary verdict on "divinity and school metaphysics." Finally, de re modality is connected with his adherence to the doctrine of "Humean supervenience". (shrink)

This is a review of William Hasker's 'The Emergent Self' (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001).

This chapter is a study on Luce Irigaray’s engagement with Martin Heidegger’s approach to language. Although language is central to both thinkers, rather than privileging language in terms of the poëtic event of being, the arising of something out of itself, Irigaray reveals how language is privileged in terms of its promise of dialogue between two who are different. This difference provides for a limit to what can be known or recognized, as well as for a creative potentiality that is (...) directed towards the future. (shrink)

The essay analyses the hermeneutics of civilizational dialogue and identifies four basic principles, or requirements: recognition of the equality of the “lifeworlds;” awareness of the “dialectics” of cultural self-comprehension; acknowledgement of formal “metanorms” such as the principle of mutuality; and transcending the circle of “civilizational self-affirmation.” On the basis of these criteria, the essay investigates how politics will have to be reshaped – domestically, regionally and globally – to enable a genuine dialogue of cultures and civilizations that can also serve (...) as a cornerstone of peaceful coexistence among states. Addressing today’s multicultural reality and its impact on the traditional nation-state, the essay underlines the importance of intercultural openness and “civilizational curiosity” – instead of “civilizational nostalgia” – and suggests a redefinition of “co-existence” in the sense of active mutual engagement. The paper further undertakes a critical assessment of the role of “dialogue” as a fashionable decorum of international politics and questions the instrumentalization of the civilizational paradigm in the context of international politics. (shrink)

Adil Ahmad Haque argues that civilians who contribute to unjust lethal threats in war, but who do not directly participate in the war, are not liable to defensive killing. His argument rests on two central claims: first, that the extent of a person’s liability to defensive harm in virtue of contributing to an unjust threat is limited to the cost that she is initially required to bear in order to avoid contributing, and, second, that civilians need not bear lethal costs (...) in order to avoid indirectly contributing to unjust lethal threats. I argue that Haque’s defence of each claim fails. (shrink)

Many states make use of personal identity numbers to govern people living in their territory and jurisdiction, but only a few rely on an all-purpose PIN used throughout the public and private sectors. This article examines the all-purpose PIN in Finland as a political technology that brings people to the sphere of public welfare services and subjects them to governance by public authorities and expert institutions. Drawing on documentary materials and interviews, it unpacks the history and uses of the PIN (...) as an elementary building block of the Nordic welfare state, and its emerging uses in the post-welfare data economy. The article suggests that, although the PIN is capable of individualizing, identifying, and addressing individuals, its most important and widely embraced feature is the extent to which it enables interoperability among public authorities, private businesses, and their data repositories. Interoperability, together with advances in computing and information technology, has made the PIN a facilitator of public administration, state knowledge production, and everyday life. More recently, in the post-welfare data economy, interoperability has rendered the PIN a national asset in all the Nordic countries, providing a great advantage to biomedical research, innovation business, and healthcare. (shrink)

: This paper interprets Descartes's use of the Scholastic doctrine of divine concurrence in light of contemporaneous sources, and argues against two prevailing occasionalist interpretations. On the first occasionalist reading God's concurrence or cooperation with natural causes is always mediate (i.e., concurrence reduces to God's continual recreation of substances). The second reading restricts God's immediate concurrence to his co-action with minds. This paper shows that Descartes's metaphysical commitments do not necessitate either form of occasionalism, and that he is more plausibly (...) and charitably read as appropriating elements of Scholastic views on concurrence to bridge the gap between his metaphysics and physics. (shrink)

This chapter explores the relationship between a person’s liability to defensive harm and the necessity of harming her. Internalist accounts of liability hold that one can be liable only to harms that are necessary for averting a threat. Externalist accounts of liability hold that necessity is not internal to liability. The chapter proposes and defends proportionate-means externalism. This view holds that one can be liable to more than the least harmful means of averting a threat, but it also recognizes that (...) only instrumental harms can count as defensive. As such, only these harms should be sanctioned by an account of liability to defensive harm. In cases involving culpable attackers, seemingly ineffective harms can actually count as a means of defending the victim’s moral standing. This observation should inform our understanding of a culpable attacker’s liability and her right to counterdefense. (shrink)

Although there has been significant academic interest in the complex relationship between gender and migration, the relevant literature often focuses on women as victims of trafficking, sexism and racism in the host and sending societies. This article discusses instead the question of gender and migration as an open field of contestation within which transitory and incomplete identities are performed. Based on a series of focus group discussions with Albanian women working in the domestic sector in Athens, the article documents the (...) emergence of a discourse of `becoming masculine' while performing typically `feminine tasks'. Drawing from Judith Butler's theoretical challenge to subject formation, the analysis traces the development of gender relations within discourse. While Albanian women are doubly disadvantaged in the mind—body relationship, they gradually come to perform roles that redefine the space of domesticity where the limits between men/women, private/public and migrants/nationals lie. (shrink)

This article uses a 36-million word corpus of news reporting on Hurricane Katrina in the United States to explore how computer-based methods can help researchers to investigate the construction of newsworthiness. It makes use of Bednarek and Caple’s discursive approach to the analysis of news values, and is both exploratory and evaluative in nature. One aim is to test and evaluate the integration of corpus techniques in applying discursive news values analysis. We employ and evaluate corpus techniques that have not (...) been tested previously in relation to the large-scale analysis of news values. These techniques include tagged lemma frequencies, collocation, key part-of-speech tags and key semantic tags. A secondary aim is to gain insights into how a specific happening – Hurricane Katrina – was linguistically constructed as newsworthy in major American news media outlets, thus also making a contribution to ecolinguistics. (shrink)

This paper argues that the position on free will which is defended in ‘Freedom: An Impossible Reality’ is not, as Tallis claims, a compatibilist view, but actually a version of libertarianism. While endorsing many aspects of that libertarian view itself, the paper raises questions about how one of the central arguments for Tallis’s view is supposed to work, and queries whether it really follows from the fact that we need to stand apart from nature in a certain sense, in order (...) to develop the kind of abstract knowledge that is constituted by the body of scientific law, that our own actions are not mere manifestations of what Tallis calls the ‘habits of nature’. It is also suggested that while a strong case can be made for many varieties of human exceptionalism, Tallis’s view of animal behaviour may be too simple and that there are examples of animal agency which cannot be explained merely by the associative learning which appears to be the highest grade of animal cognition that Tallis countenances. (shrink)

Problems with clinical research that create conflicts between doctors' therapeutic and research obligations may be fueled by a rigid view of science as determiner of truth, a heavy reliance on statistics, and certain features of randomized clinical trials. I suggest some creative, feminist approaches to such research and explore ways to provide choice for patients and to use values in directing both therapy and science - to enhance the effectiveness of each.

This paper charts the history of the Rockefeller Foundation’s participation in the collection and long-term preservation of genetic diversity in crop plants from the 1940s through the 1970s. In the decades following the launch of its agricultural program in Mexico in 1943, the Rockefeller Foundation figured prominently in the creation of world collections of key economic crops. Through the efforts of its administrators and staff, the foundation subsequently parlayed this experience into a leadership role in international efforts to conserve so-called (...) plant genetic resources. Previous accounts of the Rockefeller Foundation’s interventions in international agricultural development have focused on the outcomes prioritized by foundation staff and administrators as they launched assistance programs and especially their characterization of the peoples and “problems” they encountered abroad. This paper highlights instead how foundation administrators and staff responded to a newly emergent international agricultural concern—the loss of crop genetic diversity. Charting the foundation’s responses to this concern, which developed only after agricultural modernization had begun and was understood to be produced by the successes of the foundation’s own agricultural assistance programs, allows for greater interrogation of how the foundation understood and projected its central position in international agricultural research activities by the 1970s. (shrink)

A ‘good enough’ nurse: supporting patients in a fertility unitIn this paper, I discuss the findings of an ethnographic study of a fertility unit. I suggest that caring as ‘emotional awareness’ and ‘non‐caring’ as ‘emotional distance’ may be forms of nursing akin to Fabricius’s (1991) arguments around the ‘good enough’ nurse. This paper critiques caring theories and contributes to the debates over the nature of caring in nursing. I discuss the implications raised for nurses if patients want a practical approach (...) to caring and do not expect an emotionally intimate relationship from nurses. (shrink)

Volume 16, Issue 5, November 2019, Page 522-530.

Distinguished feminist philosophers consider the future of their field and chart its political and ethical course in this forward-looking volume. Engaging with themes such as the historical trajectory of feminist phenomenology, ways of perceiving and making sense of the contemporary world, and the feminist body in health and ethics, these essays affirm the base of the discipline as well as open new theoretical spaces for work that bridges bioethics, social identity, physical ability, and the very nature and boundaries of the (...) female body. Entanglements with thinkers such as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir, and Arendt are evident and reveal new directions for productive philosophical work. Grounded in the richness of the feminist philosophical tradition, this work represents a significant opening to the possible futures of feminist phenomenological research. (shrink)

Why might alternative taxonomies be needed in contemporary life, and how might the notion of categorisation or anti-categorisation be thought speculatively? This essay considers some of the ways that life and matter have been historically divided and segmented and asks how this might be rendered mobile, offering new divisions and definitions for those who exist outside hegemonic segments or scales.

Frank Balfour was regarded by his colleagues as one of the greatest biologists of his day and Charles Darwin’s successor, yet the young aristocrat died in a climbing accident before his thirty-first birthday. Reactions to his death reveal much about the image of science and scientists in late-Victorian Britain. In this paper I examine the development of the Cambridge school of animal morphology, headed by Balfour, and the interdependence of his research reputation and his charisma. Contemporaries praised his gentlemanly qualities, (...) making his aristocratic background a part of his scientific character. Yet his reputation for good judgement and his abilities as a leader were severely tested when it began to emerge that the accident that killed Balfour and his guide might have been prevented. Nonetheless, the image of Balfour that emerges from his obituaries is that of a noble hero and outstanding scientist, who lived on in the memories of all who knew him. (shrink)

The invisibility of nursing work has been discussed in the international literature but not in relation to learning clinical skills. Evans and Guile's (Practice‐based education: Perspectives and strategies, Rotterdam: Sense, 2012) theory of recontextualisation is used to explore the ways in which invisible or unplanned and unrecognised learning takes place as newly qualified nurses learn to delegate to and supervise the work of the healthcare assistant. In the British context, delegation and supervision are thought of as skills which are learnt (...) “on the job.” We suggest that learning “on‐the‐job” is the invisible construction of knowledge in clinical practice and that delegation is a particularly telling area of nursing practice which illustrates invisible learning. Using an ethnographic case study approach in three hospital sites in England from 2011 to 2014, we undertook participant observation, interviews with newly qualified nurses, ward managers and healthcare assistants. We discuss the invisible ways newly qualified nurses learn in the practice environment and present the invisible steps to learning which encompass the embodied, affective and social, as much as the cognitive components to learning. We argue that there is a need for greater understanding of the “invisible learning” which occurs as newly qualified nurses learn to delegate and supervise. (shrink)

Practice-centric and theory-centric approaches in philosophy of science are described and contrasted. The contrast is developed through an examination of their different treatments of the underdetermination problem. The practice-centric approach is illustrated by a summary of comparative research on approaches in the biology of behavior. The practice-centric approach is defended against charges that it encourages skepticism regarding the sciences.