The rapid rise of generative AI, including LLMs, has prompted a great deal of concern, both within and beyond academia. One of these concerns is that generative models embed, reproduce, and therein potentially perpetuate all manner of bias. The present study offers an alternative perspective: exploring the potential of LLMs to detect bias in human generated text. Our target is genetic essentialism in obesity discourse in Australian print media. We develop and deploy an LLM-based classification model to evaluate a large (...) sample of relevant articles (n=26,163). We show that our model detects genetic essentialist biases as reliably as human experts; and find that, while genes figure less prominently in popular discussions of obesity than previous work might suggest, when genetic information is invoked, it is often presented in a biased way. Implications for future work are discussed. (shrink)

© 2015, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.Genetic studies have identified single nucleotide polymorphisms associated with the risk of prostate cancer. It remains unclear whether such genetic variants are associated with disease aggressiveness. The NCI-SPORE Genetics Working Group retrospectively collected clinicopathologic information and genotype data for 36 SNPs which at the time had been validated to be associated with PC risk from 25,674 cases with PC. Cases were grouped according to race, Gleason score and aggressiveness. Statistical analyses were used to compare the frequency (...) of the SNPs between different disease cohorts. After adjusting for multiple testing, only PC-risk SNP rs2735839 was significantly and inversely associated with aggressive and high-grade disease in European men. Similar associations with aggressive and high-grade disease were documented in African-American subjects. The G allele of rs2735839 was associated with disease aggressiveness even at low PSA levels in both European and African-American men. Our results provide further support that a PC-risk SNP rs2735839 near the KLK3 gene on chromosome 19q13 may be associated with aggressive and high-grade PC. Future prospectively designed, case-case GWAS are needed to identify additional SNPs associated with PC aggressiveness. (shrink)

The famous 1893 Chicago World’s Fair celebrated the dawn of corporate capitalism and a new Machine Age with an exhibit of the world’s largest engine. Yet the noise was so great, visitors ran out of the Machinery Hall to retreat to the peace and quiet of the Japanese pavilion’s Buddhist temples and lotus ponds. Thus began over a century of the West’s turn toward an Asian aesthetic as an antidote to modern technology. From the turn-of-the-century Columbian Exhibition to the latest (...) Zen-inspired designs of Apple, Inc., R. John Williams charts the history of our embrace of Eastern ideals of beauty to counter our fear of the rise of modern technological systems. In a dazzling work of synthesis, Williams examines Asian influences on book design and department store marketing, the commercial fiction of Jack London, the poetic technique of Ezra Pound, the popularity of Charlie Chan movies, the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, and the design of the latest high-tech gadgets. Williams demonstrates how, rather than retreating from modernity, writers, artists, and inventors turned to traditional Eastern technê as a therapeutic means of living with—but never abandoning—Western technology. (shrink)

The crucial premise of the standard argument for two-boxing in Newcomb's problem, a causal dominance principle, is false. We present some counterexamples. We then offer a metaethical explanation for why the counterexamples arise. Our explanation reveals a new and superior argument for two-boxing, one that eschews the causal dominance principle in favor of a principle linking rational choice to guidance and actual value maximization.

Expressivists explain the expression relation which obtains between sincere moral assertion and the conative or affective attitude thereby expressed by appeal to the relation which obtains between sincere assertion and belief. In fact, they often explicitly take the relation between moral assertion and their favored conative or affective attitude to be exactly the same as the relation between assertion and the belief thereby expressed. If this is correct, then we can use the identity of the expression relation in the two (...) cases to test the expressivist account as a descriptive or hermeneutic account of moral discourse. I formulate one such test, drawing on a standard explanation of Moore's paradox. I show that if expressivism is correct as a descriptive account of moral discourse, then we should expect versions of Moore's paradox where we explicitly deny that we possess certain affective or conative attitudes. I then argue that the constructions that mirror Moore's paradox are not incoherent. It follows that expressivism is either incorrect as a hermeneutic account of moral discourse or that the expression relation which holds between sincere moral assertion and affective or conative attitudes is not identical to the relation which holds between sincere non-moral assertion and belief. A number of objections are canvassed and rejected. (shrink)

What is the phenomenology of hope? A common view is that hope has a generally positive and pleasant affective tone. This rosy depiction, however, has recently been challenged. Certain hopes, it has been objected, are such that they are either entirely negative in valence or neutral in tone. In this paper, I argue that this challenge has only limited success. In particular, I show that it only applies to one sense of hope but leaves another sense—one that is implicitly but (...) widely employed in the hope literature—untouched. Moreover, I argue that hope construed in this latter sense is inherently positively valenced. The paper concludes by discussing some of the implications of this defense of hope's positive phenomenology, including the ontological question of whether hope is an emotion. (shrink)

It has recently been argued that hope is polysemous in that it sometimes refers to hoping and other times to being hopeful. That it has these two distinct senses is reflected in the observation that a person can hope for an outcome without being hopeful that it will occur. Below, I offer a new argument for this distinction. My strategy is to show that accepting this distinction yields a rich account of two distinct ways in which hope can be lost, (...) ways that map onto the two senses of hope: A person can lose hope either by ceasing to hope for an outcome (hopelessness) or by ceasing to be hopeful that it will obtain (despair). Thinking about these negative attitudes in these two ways, I contend, is explanatorily rich and fruitfully reveals how they differ in phenomenology, behavioral differences, and the ways in which a person can escape them. (shrink)

Open-mindedness is generally regarded as an intellectual virtue because its exercise reliably leads to truth. However, some theorists have argued that open-mindedness’s truth-conduciveness is highly contingent, pointing out that it is either not truth-conducive at all under certain scenarios or no better than dogmatism or credulity in others. Given such shaky ties to truth, it would appear that the status of open-mindedness as an intellectual virtue is in jeopardy. In this paper, I propose to defend open-mindedness against these challenges. In (...) particular, I show that the challenges are ill-founded because they misconstrue the nature of open-mindedness and fail to consider the requisite conditions of its application. With a proper understanding of open-mindedness and of its requirements, it is clear that recourse to it is indeed truth-conducive. (shrink)

Domestic violence and abuse (DVA) are at last coming to be recognised as serious global public health problems. Nevertheless, many women with personal histories of DVA decline to disclose them to healthcare practitioners. In the health sciences, recent empirical work has identified many factors that impede DVA disclosure, known as barriers to disclosure. Drawing on recent work in social epistemology on testimonial silencing, we might wonder why so many people withhold their testimony and whether there is some kind of epistemic (...) injustice afoot here. In this paper, I offer some philosophical reflections on DVA disclosure in clinical contexts and the associated barriers to disclosure. I argue that women with personal histories of DVA are vulnerable to a certain form of testimonial injustice in clinical contexts, namely, testimonial smothering, and that this may help to explain why they withhold that testimony. It is my contention that this can help explain the low rates of DVA disclosure by patients to healthcare practitioners. (shrink)

The “looks” of things are frequently invoked (a) to account for the epistemic status of perceptual beliefs and (b) to distinguish perceptual from inferential beliefs. ‘Looks’ for these purposes is normally understood in terms of a perceptual experience and its phenomenal character. Here I argue that there is also a nonexperiential sense of ‘looks’—one that relates to cognitive architecture, rather than phenomenology—and that this nonexperiential sense can do the work of (a) and (b).

Phenomenology has been described as a “non-argumentocentric” way of doing philosophy, reflecting that the philosophical focus is on generating adequate descriptions of experience. But it should not be described as an argument-free zone, regardless of whether this is intended as a descriptive claim about the work of the “usual suspects” or a normative claim about how phenomenology ought to be properly practiced. If phenomenology is always at least partly in the business of arguments, then it is worth giving further attention (...) to the role and form of phenomenological argumentation, how it interacts with its more strictly descriptive component, and the status of phenomenological claims regarding conditions for various kinds of experience. I contend that different versions of phenomenological reasoning encroach upon argument forms that are commonly thought to be antithetical to phenomenology, notably abductive reasoning, understood in terms of its role in both hypothesis generation and in terms of justification. This paper identifies two main steps to making this case. The first step takes seriously the consequences of the intrinsically dialectical aspect of phenomenology in intersection with other modes of philosophy, the natural attitude, and non-philosophy. The second step focuses on transcendental reflection and arguments about the conditions/structures they contain. Together, these two steps aim to rescue phenomenology from the objection that it has an “ostrich epistemology” with regard to the ostensible purity of description, the intuition of essences, or the “conditions” ascertained through transcendental reflection. (shrink)

This paper develops a view on which: (a) all fundamental facts are absolute, (b) some facts do not supervene on the fundamental facts, and (c) only relative facts fail to supervene on the fundamental facts.

Much of the intuitive appeal of evidentialism results from conflating two importantly different conceptions of evidence. This is most clear in the case of perceptual justification, where experience is able to provide evidence in one sense of the term, although not in the sense that the evidentialist requires. I argue this, in part, by relying on a reading of the Sellarsian dilemma that differs from the version standardly encountered in contemporary epistemology, one that is aimed initially at the epistemology of (...) introspection but which generalizes to theories of perceptual justification as well. (shrink)

Some well-known metaphysical arguments against relativism rest on the claim that relativity somehow must be accompanied by relationality. I argue otherwise, and trace the consequences for some prominent disputes between relativists and absolutists.

In this article, we present evidence of a bidirectional coupling between moral concern and the attribution of properties and states that are associated with experience (e.g., conscious awareness, feelings). This coupling is also shown to be stronger with experience than for the attribution of properties and states more closely associated with agency (e.g., free will, thoughts). We report the results of four studies. In the first two studies, we vary the description of the mental capacities of a creature, and assess (...) the effects of these manipulations on moral concern. The third and fourth studies examine the effects of variations in moral concern on attributions of mindedness. Results from the first two studies indicate that moral concern depends primarily on the attribution of experience, rather than the attribution of agency. The results of the latter two studies demonstrate that moral concern increases attributions of mindedness, and that this effect is stronger for attributions of experience than for attributions of agency. (shrink)

To what extent are cognitive capacities, especially perceptual capacities, informationally encapsulated and to what extent are they cognitively penetrable? And why does this matter? Two reasons we care about encapsulation/penetrability are: (a) encapsulation is sometimes held to be definitional of modularity, and (b) penetrability has epistemological implications independent of modularity. I argue that modularity does not require encapsulation; that modularity may have epistemological implications independently of encapsulation; and that the epistemological implications of the cognitive penetrability of perception are messier than (...) is sometimes thought. (shrink)

As neither a classical naturalist nor a non-naturalist, Merleau-Ponty appears to be a moderate or liberal naturalist. But can a phenomenologist really be a naturalist, even a liberal one? A lot hinges on how we tease this out, both as to whether it is plausible to claim Merleau-Ponty as a liberal naturalist (I argue it is), and as to whether it is an attractive and coherent position. Indeed, despite its important challenges to orthodox naturalism, there are arguably two traps to (...) avoid. If it becomes too liberal, we get: dualism or an ontological pluralism that is difficult to distinguish from a constructivism; or, in seeking to sidestep that metaphysical dilemma, there is sometimes an insistence on an overly neat methodological separation between description/understanding and explanation that is belied in practice (both scientific and philosophical). It is doubtful that such positions can legitimately claim to be naturalist in orientation, liberal or not. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy avoids these traps, however, and it is thus a useful resource for contemporary work trying to navigate between scientific naturalism and non-naturalism. (shrink)

This essay posits the existence of two forms of disavowal: cynical and fetishistic. It explores how cynical disavowal involves maintaining a manipulative distance by obscuring the gap between belief and action, allowing the cynic to disavow their investment in an unattainable object and their knowledge of the Other’s lack. In contrast, fetishistic disavowal acknowledges both the objective reality of things and their subjective appearance to the fetishist. Unlike cynicism, fetishism does not rely on obscuring the gap between belief and action; (...) instead, it recognizes and embraces both aspects. In doing so, the essay highlights significant differences between the manipulative distance of the cynic and the self-awareness of the fetishist. It acknowledges the role of cynicism in maintaining the limits and prohibitions within ideology and authority, through examples of banality, while also emphasizing the unique qualities of fetishistic disavowal. (shrink)

It is regrettably common for theorists to attempt to characterize the Humean dictum that one can’t get an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’ just in broadly logical terms. We here address an important new class of such approaches which appeal to model-theoretic machinery. Our complaint about these recent attempts is that they interfere with substantive debates about the nature of the ethical. This problem, developed in detail for Daniel Singer’s and Gillian Russell and Greg Restall’s accounts of Hume’s dictum, is of (...) a general type arising for the use of model-theoretic structures in cashing out substantive philosophical claims: the question of whether an abstract model-theoretic structure successfully interprets something often involves taking a stand on non-trivial issues surrounding the thing. In the particular case of Hume’s dictum, given reasonable conceptual or metaphysical claims about the ethical, Singer’s and Russell and Restall’s accounts treat obviously ethical claims as descriptive and vice versa. Consequently, their model-theoretic characterizations of Hume’s dictum are not metaethically neutral. This encourages skepticism about whether model-theoretic machinery suffices to provide an illuminating distinction between the ethical and the descriptive. (shrink)

This paper proposes to examine Daniel Cohen’s recent attempt to apply virtues to argumentation theory, with special attention given to his explication of how open-mindedness can be regarded as an argumentational or critical virtue. It is argued that his analysis involves a contentious claim about open-mindedness as an epistemic virtue, which generates a tension for agents who are simultaneously both an arguer and a knower (or who strive to be both). I contend that this tension can be eased or resolved (...) by clarifying the nature of open-mindedness and by construing open-mindedness in terms of its function. Specifically, a willingness to take a novel viewpoint seriously is sufficient for making open-mindedness both an epistemic and a critical virtue. (shrink)

Most philosophers treat ontological dependence and metaphysical dependence as distinct relations. A number of key differences between the two relations are usually cited in support of this claim: ontological dependence's unique connection to existence, differing respective connections to metaphysical necessitation, and a divergence in their formal features. Alongside reshaping some of the examples used to maintain the distinction between the two, I argue that the additional resources offered by the increased attention the notion of grounding has received in recent years (...) potentially offer us a way to unite the two relations, promising the attendant benefits parsimony offers, as a result. (shrink)

Ten years ago there was little talk about adding “professionalism” to the medical curriculum. Educators seemed to believe that professionalism was like the studs of a building—the occupants assume them to be present, supporting and defining the space in which they live or work, but no one talks much about them. Similarly, educators assumed that professional values would just “happen,” as trainees spent years working with mentors and role models, as had presumably been the case in the past. To continue (...) the metaphor, when educators did discuss ethics and values, they tended to focus more on external building codes than on the nature of construction materials. Building codes are designed to ensure the public's safety by establishing procedures and standards. Likewise, the “new” bioethics of autonomy and informed consent that entered the medical curriculum in the 1970s and 1980s was oriented primarily toward protecting human rights by codification. In fact, educators explicitly warned students against acting on their personal or professional values in a misguided way—that is, in the absence of adequate ethical constraints, a type of behavior that came to be labeled, pejoratively, as paternalism. (shrink)

Software-intensive systems are ubiquitous in the industrialized world. The reliability of software has implications for how we understand scientific knowledge produced using software-intensive systems and for our understanding of the ethical and political status of technology. The reliability of a software system is largely determined by the distribution of errors and by the consequences of those errors in the usage of that system. We select a taxonomy of software error types from the literature on empirically observed software errors and compare (...) that taxonomy to Giuseppe Primiero’s Minds and Machines 24: 249–273, (2014) taxonomy of error in information systems. Because Primiero’s taxonomy is articulated in terms of a coherent, explicit model of computation and is more fine-grained than the empirical taxonomy we select, we might expect Primiero’s taxonomy to provide insights into how to reduce the frequency of software error better than the empirical taxonomy. Whether using one software error taxonomy can help to reduce the frequency of software errors better than another taxonomy is ultimately an empirical question. (shrink)

In this short paper, I present a philosophical account of intellectual grandstanding. In section 2, I identify a putative case of intellectual grandstanding. In section 3, I introduce Tosi and Warmke’s account of moral grandstanding (Tosi & Warmke 2016, 2020). In section 4, I highlight some of the similarities and differences between intellectual and moral grandstanding. In section 5, I conclude by proposing some further lines of inquiry.

Covid-19 presents itself as a strange catastrophe. It has neither destroyed the planet nor has it erased humanity… but it has, in many ways, served to upend and alter what was previously considered ‘normal.’ As a result, what is perhaps the most notable characteristic of the Covid catastrophe is the very way it endures. Beyond any notion of catastrophic shock, the Covid catastrophe continues, indeed, it lingers in daily news cycles, changes to working environments and restrictions on travel. It is (...) an enduring presence, from which any determination of its ‘end’ is either nullified by an unending stream of Covid reports, or worse, ignored altogether. On this basis alone, is it even possible to discern an ‘end’ to Covid? (shrink)

In this paper, we will introduce a novel argument (the “Region Argument”) that objects do not have frame-independent shapes in special relativity. The Region Argument lacks vulnerabilities present in David Chalmers' argument for that conclusion based on length contraction. We then examine how views on persistence interact with the Region Argument. We argue that this argument and standard four-dimensionalist assumptions entail that nothing in a relativistic world has any shape, not even stages or the regions occupied by them. We also (...) argue that endurantists have viable ways of preserving shape despite the Region Argument. The upshot of these arguments is that contrary to conventional wisdom, considerations about shape in relativity support endurantism rather than four-dimensionalism. We conclude by examining the implications of our discussion for the debate over Edenic shapes, noting that endurantists have a satisfying response to skeptical arguments about Edenic shapes similar to the one they have against the Region Argument. (shrink)

Using Brehm's (1999) intensity of emotion paradigm, we investigated whether basic positive or negative affect operates like a motivational state. We focused on one of the most basic affects, the sensory affect experienced when eating food. Participants tasted a delicious chocolate truffle (Study 1) or some bitter chocolate (Study 2) and were exposed to either a weak, moderately strong, or a very strong reason for feeling an opposing-valence affect or to no reason. In line with the predictions, the affect that (...) participants reported in response to chocolate functioned like a motivational state as its intensity was a cubic function of the importance of the reason for feeling an opposing affect. We discussed the implications of these findings for the conceptualisation of affect and consider several applications for food advertising and consumer rating research. (shrink)

In recent years, a considerable amount of interest has arisen in the topic of existential inertia (henceforth EIT) and its relation to the natural theology of Thomas Aquinas. While contemporary Thomists have engaged with proponents of EIT, strangely enough, no literature has focused on Aquinas’s own response to the objection(s) from an EIT-like position. The intention of this article is to (1) lay out the basic thrust of EIT and then (2) articulate how Aquinas’s own metaphysical commitments dissolve the problems (...) that EIT raises. After formulating an argument based on Aqunias’s own texts and paying attention to the metaphysical commitments it involves, I then level three objections and respond to them. (shrink)

Lecture Notes On Eric Schmid's "Prospectus to a Homotopic Metatheory of Language" Presented at the Book Release Event at Triest Gallery (NYC) on January 19, 2024 -/- Prospectus to a Homotopic Metatheory of Language by Eric Schmid proposes that mathematics does not involve the discovery of a synthetic a priori. In other words, mathematics is not a stable transcendent object of knowledge. Instead, Schmid defines math as a language that depends on an infinitely large network topology of inferences. Importantly, this (...) metatheory can be applied not just to the disciplinary specific languages of computer & natural science, but also ordinary & public languages. Mathematics is not the discovery of transcendent concepts, but a dynamic evolving language of inquiry. (shrink)

In his 2011 book Justice for Hedgehogs, Ronald Dworkin makes a case for the view that genuine values cannot conflict and, moreover, that they are necessarily mutually supportive. I argue that by prioritizing coherence over the conceptual authenticity of values, Dworkin’s ‘interpretivist’ view risks neglecting what we care about in these values. I first determine Dworkin’s position on the monism/pluralism debate and identify the scope of his argument, arguing that despite his self-declared monism, he is in fact a pluralist, but (...) unusual in denying conflict between plural values. I then set out the structure of his interpretive theory of value relations and present a case of value conflict which I think interpretivism cannot deal with. Following this I argue that there are structural reasons why cases like this are liable to occur and suggest that interpretivism will frequently fail to properly reflect people’s moral commitments because reinterpretation of values has the side effect of excluding important moral commitments from our conceptions of values. While, as Dworkin argues, there are no brute moral facts concerning values, moral psychology constrains the range of acceptable conceptions of values. Given the shortcomings of interpretivism I conclude that we should acknowledge that values may conflict. (shrink)

Drawing on respective ideas from within both liberal political philosophy and Frankfurt School critical theory, this paper seeks to examine claims about autonomy and empowerment made on behalf of educational policies such as teacher-led codeswitching; a policy that seeks to empower students from racially marginalised groups by facilitating their proficiency in the language and cultural expressions of societally dominant groups. I set out to evaluate such claims by first sketching two competing formulations of autonomy; namely, liberal autonomy concomitant to political (...) power, and autonomy that arises out of the practice of critical self-reflection. I proceed by testing codeswitching within each formulation to reveal how – in this case – these two conceptualisations of autonomy are educationally incompatible with each other. I conclude by suggesting that educational interventions such as codeswitching may ultimately be complicit in the longer term processes of racialisation and marginalisation that they seek to diminish, not only because they carry the potential to damage minority students’ self-integrity, but also because they limit possibilities for both majority and minority students to engage in dialectical encounters that may open avenues to new principles of social and political organisation. (shrink)

I show that the model-theoretic meaning that can be read off the natural deduction rules for disjunction fails to have certain desirable properties. I use this result to argue against a modest form of inferentialism which uses natural deduction rules to fix model-theoretic truth-conditions for logical connectives.

The purpose of this article is twofold. First, it explores and shows ways in which one important view of racism parallels the Christian doctrine of original sin. Second, it argues that this comparison helps to close the gap between the two main strands of Christian thinking about original sin. Philosophers and theologians are often asked to decide between Augustinian or Irenaean theories of original sin. An epistemology of ignorance, especially as applied in discussions of racism, helps us to see how (...) this dichotomy may be short‐sighted. For virtually no one, in an epistemology of ignorance, matures into being a racist. Nevertheless, as Charles W. Mills famously argues, the epistemology of ignorance he terms the Racial Contract has a historical inception, namely, the period around the beginning of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. I close the article by discussing whether a model of original sin similar to an epistemology of racist ignorance might satisfy the dogmatic constraints of the Catholic tradition. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question of whether Medicaid is in fact a high-cost program after adjusting for the health of the people it covers. We compare and simulate annual per capita medical spending for lower-income people (families with incomes under 200% of poverty) covered for a full year by either Medicaid or private insurance. We first show that low-income privately insured enrollees and Medicaid enrollees have very different socioeconomic and health characteristics. We then present simulated comparisons based on multivariate statistical (...) models that estimate the effects of private and Medicaid coverage on the likelihood of using services, and the level of expenditures, given any use, holding constant demographic, economic, and health status characteristics. The simulations demonstrate that if people with Medicaid coverage—with their health status, disability, and chronic conditions—were given private coverage, they would cost considerably more than they do today. Conversely, if the privately insured were given Medicaid coverage, spending would be lower. We find no evidence that spending differences between Medicaid and private coverage for low-income people are due to lower service use by Medicaid beneficiaries. We conclude that most of the difference in expenditures is due to differences in provider payment rates. (shrink)

Educational Theory, Volume 71, Issue 4, Page 455-473, August 2021.

This present article examines an argument in Aquinas’s De potentia, q. 3, a. 9, in which Aquinas argues that the human soul must be created by God. After introducing the relevance of the problem and discussing the state of the literature, I lay out Aquinas’s argument and defend it by appealing to his broader metaphysical commitments. I then turn to two difficulties raised in the literature by B.C. Bazan and Lawrence Joseph Kaiser. Bazan argues that Aquinas’s claim that the human (...) soul must be created by God leads to internal inconsistencies within Aquinas’s metaphysical system. While not explicitly criticizing Aquinas, Kaiser’s account of the eduction of forms from matter also raises a few problems for the consistency of Aquinas’s claim. In response to Bazan and Kaiser, I argue that a firm grasp of Aquinas’s semantics dissolves the criticisms. (shrink)

In his story entitled "Toenails," the surgeon Richard Selzer (1982) warns readers that total immersion in medicine is wrongheaded. Rather, to ensure their own health, doctors should discover other passions that permit them periodically to disconnect from medical practice. Selzer's surgeon character devotes his Wednesday afternoons to the public library, where he joins "a subculture of elderly men and women who gather … to read or sleep beneath the world's newspapers" (p. 69). Among these often eccentric personages is Neckerchief, an (...) arthritic man in his 80s who suffers from severe foot pain. His toenails, never trimmed because of his inability to reach them, have grown so long that they curve beneath his toes and .. (shrink)

Hope helps alleviate suffering. In the case of terminal illness, recent experience in palliative medicine has taught physicians that hope is durable and often thrives even in the face of imminent death. In this article, I examine the perspectives of philosophers, theologians, psychologists, clinicians, neuroscientists, and poets, and provide a series of observations, connections, and gestures about hope, particularly about what I call “deep hope.” I end with some proposals about how such hope can be sustained and enhanced at the (...) end of life. Studies of terminally ill patients have revealed clusters of personal and situational factors associated with enhancement or suppression of hope at the end of life. Interpersonal connectedness, attainable goals, spiritual beliefs and practices, personal attributes of determination, courage, and serenity, lightheartedness, uplifting memories, and affirmation of personal worth enhance hope, while uncontrollable pain and discomfort, abandonment and isolation, and devaluation of personhood suppress hope. I suggest that most of these factors can be modulated by good medical care, utilizing basic interpersonal techniques that demonstrate kindness, humanity, and respect. (shrink)

I am skeptical of our ability to predict, or even forecast, the future—of human rights or any other important social practice. Nonetheless, an understanding of the paths that have brought us to where we are today can facilitate thinking about the future. Thus, I approach the topic by examining the reshaping of international ideas and practices of state sovereignty and human rights since the end of World War II. I argue that in the initial decades after the war, international society (...) constructed an absolutist conception of exclusive territorial jurisdiction that was fundamentally antagonistic to international human rights. At the same time, though, human rights were for the first time included among the fundamental norms of international society. And over the past two decades, dominant understandings of sovereignty have become less absolutist and more human rights–friendly, a trend that I suggest is likely to continue to develop, modestly, in the coming years. (shrink)

In “The Bioethics of Environmental Injustice: Ethical, Legal, and Clinical Implications of Unhealthy Environments,” Keisha Ray and Jane Fallis Cooper argue that one aspect of environmental health h...