Helen Steward argues that determinism is incompatible with agency itself--not only the special human variety of agency, but also powers which can be accorded to animal agents. She offers a distinctive, non-dualistic version of libertarianism, rooted in a conception of what biological forms of organisation might make possible in the way of freedom.

The paper argues that the reconciliation of the Causal Theory of Perception with Disjunctivism requires the rejection of causal particularism – the idea that the ontology of causation is always and everywhere an ontology of particulars (e.g., events). The so-called ‘Humean Principle’ that causes must be distinct from their effects is argued to be a genuine barrier to any purported reconciliation, provided causal particularism is retained; but extensive arguments are provided for the rejection of causal particularism. It is then explained (...) how the reconciliation of the causal theory with disjunctivism can proceed on the basis of an ontology of facts. (shrink)

The reductivist view of war holds that the moral rules of killing in war can be reduced to the moral rules that govern killing between individuals. Noam Zohar objects to reductivism on the grounds that the account of individual self-defence that best supports the rules of war will inadvertently sanction terrorist killings of non-combatants. I argue that even an extended account of self-defence—that is, an account that permits killing at least some innocent people to save one's own life—can support a (...) prohibition on terrorism, provided that it distinguishes between direct and indirect threats. What such an account cannot support is the blanket immunity of non-combatants to defensive killing. If a non-combatant is morally responsible for indirectly threatening in an unjust war, she can be liable to defensive killing. However, this gives us reason to revise our account of permissible killing in war, rather than to reject the reductivist account. (shrink)

The practice of nursing involves ongoing interactions between nurses' and clients' lived bodies. Despite this, several scholars have suggested that the “lived body” (Merleau‐Ponty, 1962) has not been given its due place in nursing practice, education or research (Draper, J Adv Nurs, 70, 2014, 2235). With the advent of electronic health records and increased use of technology, face‐to‐face assessment and embodied understanding of clients' lived bodies may be on the decline. Furthermore, staffing levels may not afford the time nurses need (...) to be as “present” with their clients in embodied ways. The failure to attend to the lived body may contribute to missed opportunities for care and decreased quality of life for both clients and healthcare practitioners. In this paper, we undertake an analysis of selected aspects of the work of Maurice Merleau‐Ponty. The aim is to advance understanding of the affordances this work may offer to enhancing client–nurse interactions within the practice of nursing. Merleau‐Ponty's notions of embodiment, intersubjectivity and intercorporeality as articulated in his seminal texts The Phenomenology of Perception (New York, NY: Routledge, 2012) and The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968) are examined. These three constructs are discussed as they relate to the lived body in client–nurse interactions in nursing practice and education. Finally, implications of how attention to “the lived body” could shape interactions and have the potential to foster increased quality of life of clients and nurses are considered. (shrink)

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 uses philosopher Miranda Fricker’s work on epistemic injustice to shed light on the legal concept of the fiduciary, alongside demonstrating the wider contribution Fricker’s work can make to business ethics. Fiduciary, from the Latin fīdūcia, meaning “trust,” plays a fundamental role in all financial and business organisations: it acts as a moral safeguard of the relationship between trustee and beneficiary. The article focuses on the ethics of the fiduciary, but from a unique historical perspective, referring back to the (...) original formulation of the fiduciary within a familial context to investigate presuppositions regarding agential capabilities, whilst also paying attention to the power mechanism embedded in the trustee–beneficiary relationship. Using Fricker’s theory of pre-emptive testimonial injustice, the analysis elucidates the impact of cumulative beneficiary silencing in contemporary contexts, and the article uncovers ethical issues of an epistemological kind at the core of the fiduciary—of epistemic injustice. (shrink)

The subject of this essay is the dependence of evidential relations on background beliefs and assumptions. In Part I, two ways in which the relation between evidence and hypothesis is dependent on such assumptions are discussed and it is shown how in the context of appropriately differing background beliefs what is identifiable as the same state of affairs can be taken as evidence for conflicting hypotheses. The dependence of evidential relations on background beliefs is illustrated by discussions of the Michelson-Morley (...) experiment and the discovery of oxygen. In Part II, Hempel's analysis of confirmation and the contrasting model of theory acceptance provided by philosophers such as Kuhn and Feyerabend are discussed. It is argued that both are inadequate (on different grounds) and the problems addressed by each are shown to be more satisfactorily approached by means of the analysis developed in Part I. In Part III, it is argued that if there are objective criteria for deciding between competing theories, these cannot be simply that one theory has greater evidential support than another. Finally, some further methodological questions arising from the analysis are mentioned. (shrink)

In this article, I discuss the structural domination of whiteness as it intersects with the potential of individual critique and reflexivity. I reflect on my positioning as a white nurse researcher while researching international nurse migration. I draw on two large qualitative studies and one small focus group study to discuss my reactions as a white researcher to evidence of institutional racism in the British health services and my growing awareness of how racism is reproduced in the British nursing profession.

According to the theory of contextual integrity (CI), privacy norms prescribe information flows with reference to five parameters — sender, recipient, subject, information type, and transmission principle. Because privacy is grasped contextually (e.g., health, education, civic life, etc.), the values of these parameters range over contextually meaningful ontologies — of information types (or topics) and actors (subjects, senders, and recipients), in contextually defined capacities. As an alternative to predominant approaches to privacy, which were ineffective against novel information practices enabled by (...) IT, CI was able both to pinpoint sources of disruption and provide grounds for either accepting or rejecting them. Mounting challenges from a burgeoning array of networked, sensor-enabled devices (IoT) and data-ravenous machine learning systems, similar in form though magnified in scope, call for renewed attention to theory. This Article introduces the metaphor of a data (food) chain to capture the nature of these challenges. With motion up the chain, where data of higher order is inferred from lower-order data, the crucial question is whether privacy norms governing lower-order data are sufficient for the inferred higher-order data. While CI has a response to this question, a greater challenge comes from data primitives, such as digital impulses of mouse clicks, motion detectors, and bare GPS coordinates, because they appear to have no meaning. Absent a semantics, they escape CI’s privacy norms entirely. (shrink)

Collectivist accounts of the ethics of war have traditionally dominated just war theory (Kutz 2005; Walzer 1977; Zohar 1993). These state-based accounts have also heavily influenced the parts of international law pertaining to armed conflict. But over the past ten years, reductive individualism has emerged as a powerful rival to this dominant account of the ethics of war. Reductivists believe that the morality of war is reducible to the morality of ordinary life. War is not a special moral sphere with (...) its own special moral rules. Reductivists typically reject a collectivist approach to the morality of war in favor of an individualist view, according to which individuals (rather than states or other collectives) are the proper focus of moral guidance and evaluation. This view holds that the rules governing killing in war are simply the rules governing killing between individuals, most obviously the rules of self-defense and other-defense (Fabre 2009; Frowe 2014; McMahan 2009; Tadros 2014). -/- This chapter defends reductive individualism against the claim that it is unable to sanction wars of national defense that seek to protect non-vital interests. These non-vital interests include political goods such as the defense of sovereignty—that is, of political and territorial integrity. (shrink)

Research on sexual orientation attempts to reduce it to a monocausal phenomenon, whether that be biology (genes, hormones) or social environment (parenting patterns). None of these fully accounts for the diversity of erotic attraction and behavior, and indeed these reductionist strategies either misrepresent many forms of sexual behavior or erase them from our ontology. Understanding is better served by first acknowledging the variety of roles of sexual interaction in human life, rather than treating sex as a single kind of phenomenon.

During the 16-year civil war in Mozambique thousands of children were separated from their families as a direct or indirect result of conflict and displacement. International organizations lent support to a national family tracing and reunification programme coordinated by the government Department for Social Action. Drawing on the findings of an empirical study of the sustainability of substitute family care, this article describes the tensions associated with the involvement of international organizations during the emergency conditions of the war, in post-war (...) rehabilitation and in longer term development. It explores the ethical dimensions of social welfare interventions across borders and continents and concludes by arguing a case for international humanitarian agencies to base their interventions to ?help? separated children on deeper knowledges of the social and political history, and the values, beliefs and normative practices of the populations with whom they work. (shrink)

A violência doméstica contra a mulher é um dos mais graves problemas que a sociedade enfrenta. É uma forma de violência que não conhece fronteiras, nem obedece princípios ou leis. Ocorre diariamente em Moçambique, apesar de existir um quadro constitucional e legal que introduziu vários mecanismos de protecção aos direitos da mulher. É neste contexto que surge o presente trabalho intitulado A violência doméstica praticada contra a mulher em tempos da COVID-19, na cidade de Maputo, o caso do bairro de (...) Xipamanine, que visa compreender a violência doméstica praticada contra a mulher, bem como os seus impactos com o surgimento da pandemia COVID-19. O trabalho é importante na medida em que vai demonstrar que o caso de violência doméstica contra a mulher tem se agravado a cada ano que passa, tendo atingido níveis mais alarmantes com as medidas de combate a COVID-19. Vai dar também a conhecer a sociedade em geral, a mulher e aos infractores principalmente que a integridade física, moral, psicológica, patrimonial e sexual da mulher esta sendo protegida. O objectivo da realização desta pesquisa não só é para fornecer informações acima mencionadas, mas também incentivar as vítimas que denunciem, não fiquem caladas, não se intimidem, de forma que este mal seja combatido. (shrink)

I have been asked to consider two questions: How Christian ‘oughts’ are related to Christian ‘is-es’, and, What does Christianity take flourishing to be? The background to these questions is that Christian ethics have traditionally been taken, both by supporters and opponents, as au ethic of creature-hood, sometimes quite crudely conceived. It is a sketch, but by no means a caricature, of a great deal of standard Christian thinking, to depict it as answering the two questions as follows: God is (...) your Creator: therefore you ought to obey him. The end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him for ever. (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)

In this article, I argue that we need to reconsider some of the stylistic principles that govern writing in analytic philosophy. I suggest that the rules are much more difficult to justify than might be thought at first sight; and may possibly be gendered, given what we know about the reading preferences and writing styles of men and women.

The COVID-19 pandemic crisis has necessitated widespread adaptation of revised treatment regimens for both urgent and routine medical problems in patients with and without COVID-19. Some of these alternative treatments maybe second-best. Treatments that are known to be superior might not be appropriate to deliver during a pandemic when consideration must be given to distributive justice and protection of patients and their medical teams as well the importance given to individual benefit and autonomy. What is required of the doctor discussing (...) these alternative, potentially inferior treatments and seeking consent to proceed? Should doctors share information about unavailable but standard treatment alternatives when seeking consent? There are arguments in defence of non-disclosure; information about unavailable treatments may not aid a patient to weigh up options that are available to them. There might be justified concern about distress for patients who are informed that they are receiving second-best therapies. However, we argue that doctors should tailor information according to the needs of the individual patient. For most patients that will include a nuanced discussion about treatments that would be considered in other times but currently unavailable. That will sometimes be a difficult conversation, and require clinicians to be frank about limited resources and necessary rationing. However, transparency and honesty will usually be the best policy. (shrink)

Nesta pesquisa etnográfica, analisamos a intersecção entre práticas de saúde e de segurança pública dirigida aos homens vítimas de conflitos violentos em dois hospitais de trauma no município de Porto Alegre/Brasil. Parte do campo consistiu em acompanhar as narrativas e as interações entre masculinidades criminalizadas e profissionais da segurança pública. Os operadores conceituais centrais são inspirados nos estudos sobre o dispositivo de segurança, Economia moral e no campo das masculinidades e violência. Para homens marcados como sendo do crime, o sofrimento (...) produzido pelo trauma vivido não é apenas invisibilizado; ele é tomado como sinal de periculosidade. Essa dinâmica rege as relações entre masculinidades envolvidas em conflitos violentos e produz o ressentimento como afeto central. (shrink)