Games and simulations--from quantitative modeling to immersive, experiential scenarios--as methods for engagement within futures studies have a substantial history. In recent years, there has been a surge of projects using a wide array of tools. As practitioners and researchers have gravitated toward more playful approaches, there is a need to review and evaluate such approaches. This chapter provides an introduction to gaming and simulations as anticipatory processes. Offering a snapshot of contemporary projects from around the world, this chapter utilizes a (...) range of voices and perspectives on gaming and simulations to explore how such tools and methods use the future. (shrink)

In this article, I examine stigmatizing and especially patronizing attitudes towards others’ depression that people who are well-intentioned produce. The strategy of the article is to consider the social experience of depression through two separate subfields of philosophy: epistemic injustice and phenomenology. The solution that I propose is a phenomenological account of empathy. The empathetic attitude that I argue for involves actively listening to the depressed individual and taking their depression testimony as direct evidence. The article has been written both (...) for those who seek to better support neurodiverse people in their lives and for depressives (and other neurodivergents) themselves in order to provide them with a better account for advocating for themselves against social stigma. (shrink)

The traditional Bayesian qualitative account of evidential support (TB) takes assertions of the form 'E evidentially supports H' to affirm the existence of a two-place relation of evidential support between E and H. The analysans given for this relation is $C(H,E) =_{def} Pr(H\arrowvertE) \models Pr(H)$ . Now it is well known that when a hypothesis H entails evidence E, not only is it the case that C(H,E), but it is also the case that C(H&X,E) for any arbitrary X. There is (...) a widespread feeling that this is a problematic result for TB. Indeed, there are a number of cases in which many feel it is false to assert 'E evidentially supports H&X', despite H entailing E. This is known, by those who share that feeling, as the 'tacking problem' for Bayesian confirmation theory. After outlining a generalization of the problem, I argue that the Bayesian response has so far been unsatisfactory. I then argue the following: (i) There exists, either instead of, or in addition to, a two-place relation of confirmation, a three-place, 'contrastive' relation of confirmation, holding between an item of evidence E and two competing hypotheses H₁ and H₂. (ii) The correct analysans of the relation is a particular probabilistic inequality, abbreviated C(H₁, H₂, E). (iii) Those who take the putative counterexamples to TB discussed to indeed be counterexamples are interpreting the relevant utterances as implicitly contrastive, contrasting the relevant hypothesis H₁ with a particular competitor H₂. (iv) The probabilistic structure of these cases is such that ∼C(H₁, H₂, E). This solves my generalization of the tacking problem. I then conclude with some thoughts about the relationship between the traditional Bayesian account of evidential support and my proposed account of the three-place relation of confirmation. (shrink)

Crispin Wright’s discussion of the notion of ‘transmission-failure’ promises to have important philosophical ramifications, both in epistemology and beyond. This paper offers a precise, formal characterisation of the concept within a Bayesian framework. The interpretation given avoids the serious shortcomings of a recent alternative proposal due to Samir Okasha.

A survey of the recent literature suggests that physicians should engage religious patients on religious grounds when the patient cites religious considerations for a medical decision. We offer two arguments that physicians ought to avoid engaging patients in this manner. The first is the Public Reason Argument. We explain why physicians are relevantly akin to public officials. This suggests that it is not the physician’s proper role to engage in religious deliberation. This is because the public character of a physician’s (...) role binds him/her to public reason, which precludes the use of religious considerations. The second argument is the Fiduciary Argument. We show that the patient-physician relationship is a fiduciary relationship, which suggests that the patient has the clinical expectation that physicians limit themselves to medical considerations. Since engaging in religious deliberations lies outside this set of considerations, such engagement undermines trust and therefore damages the patient-physician relationship. (shrink)

Diverse and dynamic societies face a problem of social control. Institutions of social control, of which the police are a part, are a necessary part of just and legitimate governance. But in our non-ideal world they are also responsible for injustices of their own. This project raises questions of political philosophy as they apply to the professional police agency. It begins by constructing an inchoate, but mainstream view about just policing, legalism, according to which police power is justified by the (...) criminal code, and just policing is just the faithful enforcement of law. This view is undermined by the practical realities of policing, which involves widespread and unavoidable police discretion. It then develops an account of just and legitimate police discretion, including principles of proportionality, liberal neutrality, and democratic responsiveness. This sheds lights on controversial police tactics, order maintenance initiatives, and community policing strategies. This account also informs the just institutional arrangement of police powers, informing ongoing debates about police reform and abolition. (shrink)

This is a book symposium on Why It’s OK to Be a Sports Fan, by Alfred Archer and Jake Wojtowicz, with contributions from Adam Kadlac, Joe Slater, Nathaniel Baron-Schmitt, and Nina Windgätter. The discussion covers a range of topics, including the form of love involved in fandom, the epistemic status of fans, fictionalism, and the role of communities in fandom.

Discussions of the issue of iterated belief revision are commonly accompanied by the presentation of three “concrete” operators: natural, restrained and lexicographic. This raises a natural question: What is so distinctive about these three particular methods? Indeed, the common axiomatic ground for work on iterated revision, the AGM and Darwiche-Pearl postulates, leaves open a whole range of alternative proposals. In this paper, we show that it is satisfaction of an additional principle of “Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives”, inspired by the literature (...) on Social Choice, that unites and sets apart our three “elementary” revision operators. A parallel treatment of iterated belief contraction is also given, yielding a family of elementary contraction operators that includes, besides the well-known “conservative” and “moderate” operators, a new contraction operator that is related to restrained revision. (shrink)

This is a book symposium on Why It’s OK to Be a Sports Fan, by Alfred Archer and Jake Wojtowicz, with contributions from Adam Kadlac, Joe Slater, Nathaniel Baron-Schmitt, and Nina Windgätter. The discussion covers a range of topics, including the form of love involved in fandom, the epistemic status of fans, fictionalism, and the role of communities in fandom.

It is well known that classical, aka ‘sharp’, Bayesian decision theory, which models belief states as single probability functions, faces a number of serious difficulties with respect to its handling of agnosticism. These difficulties have led to the increasing popularity of so-called ‘imprecise’ models of decision-making, which represent belief states as sets of probability functions. In a recent paper, however, Adam Elga has argued in favour of a putative normative principle of sequential choice that he claims to be borne out (...) by the sharp model but not by any promising incarnation of its imprecise counterpart. After first pointing out that Elga has fallen short of establishing that his principle is indeed uniquely borne out by the sharp model, I cast aspersions on its plausibility. I show that a slight weakening of the principle is satisfied by at least one, but interestingly not all, varieties of the imprecise model and point out that Elga has failed to motivate his stronger commitment. (shrink)

Political philosophy often focuses on “major institutions” that make up the “basic structure” of society. These include political, economic, and social institutions. In this paper I argue first that policing plays a substantial role in generating the kinds of inequalities and problems that are concerns of social or structural justice, and therefore that police agencies qualify as a major institution. When we abandon full compliance or similar idealizations, it is clear that policing is not a concern secondary to, e.g., the (...) electoral system or the scheme of property rights in a society. Nor, I argue, does maintaining full compliance or moral character idealizations obviate an active enforcement role. Eliminating that role from an idealized model society requires engaging in a methodologically and substantively unattractive amount of abstraction. The result is that an active enforcement role is at the core of a complete theory of justice rather than something that is significant only “downstream” from more fundamental issues. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Full Collection of Personal NarrativesJake Beery, Neethi Pinto, Marcia King, Laura Wachsmuth, Alisha, Katie L. Gholson, T.S. Moran, Calvin R. Gross, Joanne Alfred, Cindy Bitter, Jenna Bennett, Nadia Khan, Clarice Douille, Kristen Carey Rock, Adrienne Feller Novick, Andrea Eisenberg, Japmehr Sandhu, Katherine Bakke, Heer Hendry, Karan K. Mirpuri, and Katerina V. Liong• Being the Difference• Grieving One More Time• Echoes of Grief: Tales from an Emergency Medicine and Critical (...) Care Nurse• Searching for Peace in Death• “I’d Love to go Off the Grid and Never Come Back”• “A Mother’s Love”• Tiny Person, Big Impact• Night Shift• Cracked Armor• Who Tells the Story• Navigating Hard Situations that Medical School Cannot Prepare You For• The Wish• Break• Five More Minutes• I Saw My Reflection• The Aftermath• Where the Journey Begins• Lessons Learned in Room 208• Joint and Grief Aches• My First Loss: Carrying His Legacy• Grieving the Loss of What Medicine Was Supposed to BeCopyright © 2024 Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

According to Jamie Whyte, the proper assignment of fulfilment conditions to an agent’s set of desires proceeds in three steps. First, one identifies various desire extinction and behavioural reinforcement conditions to obtain the fulfilment conditions of a certain subset of the agent’s desires. With these fulfilment conditions in hand, one then appeals to a principle connecting desire fulfilment conditions with belief truth conditions to obtain the truth conditions of a number of the agent’s beliefs. Finally, one uses these belief truth (...) conditions to generate, via a third principle, the fulfilment conditions for the remaining desires. There is, however, a very straightforward reason why this strategy cannot yield the required results. (shrink)

In this article, we argue that physicians have normative authority over patients. First we elaborate on the nature of normative authority. We then examine and critique Arthur Isak Applbaum’s view that physicians lack authority over patients. Our argument appeals to four cases that demonstrate physicians’ authority.

Susanne K. Langer contributed an exhaustive account of aesthetics, Feeling and Form, in which she articulated her schema of the virtual and wove together the aesthetic elements of music, visual arts, dance, and literature/theater. This analysis of her work centers on two key concepts within her philosophy: the virtual as the aesthetic effect of the work and the perception of the work through intuition. In this paper, I re-read Langers philosophy through a perspective built on intersections between phenomenology, pragmatism, and (...) post-structuralist theory in order to reveal the relevance of her work to current understandings of how the dancing body produces and conveys meaning. I endeavor to show how her work provides a practical, conceptual system for understanding dance as an a-linguistic form of meaning-making, bodily experience, and knowledge. (shrink)

Stephen Barber _Artaud: The Screaming Body_ London: Creation Books, 1999 ISBN 1840680091 126 pp.

The world passed the halfway point of oil supply in 2005. World demand for oil likely will severely outstrip supply in 2008, leading to increasingly higher oil prices. Consequences are likely to include increasing gasoline prices, rapidly increasing inflation, and subsequently a series of increasingly severe recessions followed by a worldwide economic depression. Consequences may include, particularly in industrialized countries such as the United States, massive unemployment, economic collapse, and chaos.

In a recent article for this journal, Bryan Pilkington makes a number of critical observations about one of our arguments for non-traditional medical conscientious objectors’ duty to refer. Non-traditional conscientious objectors are those professionals who object to indirectly performing actions—like, say, referring to a physician who will perform an abortion. In our response here, we discuss his central objection and clarify our position on the role of value conflicts in non-traditional conscientious objection.

Scholars who engage with texts that were written by George Herbert Mead (e.g., 1925e.g., 1926e.g., 1929e.g., 1932e.g., 1938) in the latter half of the 1920s are faced with the task of comprehending Mead’s interpretation of relativity theory and also understanding why relativity theory was considered by Mead to have such profound implications for his own philosophy. As several scholars of Mead’s work have explained (e.g., Joas 1997; Martin 2007; Rosenthal and Bourgeois 1991), Mead was a realist. Mead opposed psychophysical dualism (...) (Cook 1979) and both the behaviorist and the idealist implications that could follow from such a dualism. He wanted to explain human conduct in terms of the self-determination of human .. (shrink)

How should sport deal with prematurely ended seasons? This question is especially relevant to the current COVID-19 inter- ruption that threatens to leave many leagues without cham- pions. We argue that although there can be no winners, in certain situations there should be champions. Relevant to the current situation, we argue that Liverpool FC—currently with a 22+ point lead—should be crowned champions of the English Premier League. However, things are not as simple as simply handing the championship to whoever was (...) in the lead when a season is prematurely ended. Through analogy with a fictional decathlon competition—and with the understanding that sporting seasons are themselves a type of game—we identify three reasons why leading at the moment of cessation is insufficient to be crowned a victor (of an individual event) or a champion (of a season-long competition): doing so fails to respect some valuable skills, fails to allow for luck to play out in an interesting way that affects competitions, and fails to respect competitive strategies. This discussion can then inform determining what, if any, end-of-season accolades are relevant, such as championships, relegation, or promotion. No team can win in a league that has failed to be completed, but there can still be a champion. (shrink)

Buddhism originated and developed in an Indian cultural context that featured many first-person practices for producing and exploring states of consciousness through the systematic training of attention. In contrast, the dominant methods of investigating the mind in Western cognitive science have emphasized third-person observation of the brain and behavior. In this chapter, we explore how these two different projects might prove mutually beneficial. We lay the groundwork for a cross-cultural cognitive science by using one traditional Buddhist model of the mind (...) – that of the five aggregates – as a lens for examining contemporary cognitive science conceptions of consciousness. (shrink)

Aulisio and Arora argue that the moral significance of value imposition explains the moral distinction between traditional conscientious objection and non-traditional conscientious objection. The former objects to directly performing actions, whereas the latter objects to indirectly assisting actions on the grounds that indirectly assisting makes the actor morally complicit. Examples of non-traditional conscientious objection include objections to the duty to refer. Typically, we expect physicians who object to a practice to refer, but the non-traditional conscientious objector physician refuses to refer. (...) Aulisio and Arora argue that physicians have a duty to refer because refusing to do so violates the patient’s values. While we agree with Aulisio and Arora’s conclusions, we argue value imposition cannot adequately explain the moral difference between traditional conscientious objection and non-traditional conscientious objection. Treating autonomy as the freedom to live in accordance with one’s values, as Aulisio and Arora do, is a departure from traditional liberal conceptions of autonomy and consequently fails to explain the moral difference between the two kinds of objection. We outline how a traditional liberal understanding of autonomy would help in this regard, and we make two additional arguments—one that maintains that non-traditional conscientious objection undermines society’s autonomy, and another that maintains that it undermines the physician-patient relationship—to establish why physicians have a duty to refer. (shrink)

This article provides a discussion of the principle of transmission of evidential support across entailment from the perspective of belief revision theory in the AGM tradition. After outlining and briefly defending a small number of basic principles of belief change, which include a number of belief contraction analogues of the Darwiche-Pearl postulates for iterated revision, a proposal is then made concerning the connection between evidential beliefs and belief change policies in rational agents. This proposal is found to be suffcient to (...) establish the truth of a much-discussed intuition regarding transmission failure. (shrink)

Poetry is a process. While people typically refer to poems as textual objects, our experience of poetry is inherently embodied and enacted, meaning that we experience poems as events that we contextualize as gestalt representations. We experience metaphors, too, as processes, which arise from experiential gestalts, that extend gestalt structures and lay the conceptual foundation for our experience of the world. This article argues that, like metaphors, poetic gestalts can be mapped onto other experiences to help people navigate their worlds. (...) While this kind of poetic thought has largely been considered by scholars to have existed only since the emergence of the modern human mind sometime in the last 60,000 years, the author suggests that poetic thought likely arose prior to modern cognition, and may have in fact given rise to it. A crucial aspect of the embodied and enactive approach to poetry outlined in the article is that people’s experience of poetry is fundamentally contextual and emotional. Furthermore, because emotions are a primary source of meaning, our emotional responses to poetry make it a useful tool for extending our own conceptual apparatuses, enhancing emotional intelligence, and for generating shared values. (shrink)

As the ongoing literature on the paradoxes of the Lottery and the Preface reminds us, the nature of the relation between probability and rational acceptability remains far from settled. This article provides a novel perspective on the matter by exploiting a recently noted structural parallel with the problem of judgment aggregation. After offering a number of general desiderata on the relation between finite probability models and sets of accepted sentences in a Boolean sentential language, it is noted that a number (...) of these constraints will be satisfied if and only if acceptable sentences are true under all valuations in a distinguished non-empty set W. Drawing inspiration from distance-based aggregation procedures, various scoring rule based membership conditions for W are discussed and a possible point of contact with ranking theory is considered. The paper closes with various suggestions for further research. (shrink)

Silvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch is a landmark text in Marxist feminism, rethinking capitalism's development from and with the standpoint of women. In this paper, I trace Federici's theory and use of the Marxist concept of primitive accumulation through both Marx and Foucault, the two central interlocutors employed to analyze the perpetuity of violence following the explicit violence of capital's originary privatization. After understanding Federici's reading of the dialectical double helix of violence and compulsion via Marx, and the relation (...) of capital (as Reason and Order) to the body via Foucault, I position Adorno as a backdrop against which to view Federici’s thesis on primitive accumulation. Despite the innumerable theoretical similarities between Adorno and Federici, a close pairing shows what Caliban and the Witch misses in its final pages: a theory of mimesis—mimetic accumulation—that accounts for the dialectic of primitive accumulation's perpetuity. (shrink)

In Seeing Clearly, Nicolas Bommarito brings together Buddhist theory and practice with a deceptively simple sophistication that few have managed in the contemporary era. Meditation teachers have contributed to the self-help section an abundance of guides to Buddhism and meditation, many of them elegantly worded and sometimes simple and practical. Yet many of these works also stumble unwittingly into philosophical problems discussed with great care and complexity in footnoted academic volumes read mostly by a small circle of scholars. Bommarito's accomplishment (...) as a philosopher is evident not only in the clarity of his exposition, but also in what he doesn't say, in the many philosophical blunders he does not fall... (shrink)

Several contemporary philosophers have argued that democracy earns its moral keep in part by rendering political authority compatible with social or relational equality. In a recent article in this journal, Alexander Motchoulski examines these relational egalitarian defenses of democracy, finds the standard approach wanting, and advances an alternative. The standard approach depends on the claim that inequality of political power constitutes status inequality (the ‘constitutive claim’). Motchoulski rejects this claim on the basis of a theory of social status: once you (...) see what social status is, Motchoulski thinks, the constitutive claim is a non-starter. In its place, Motchoulski suggests that relational egalitarians can and should content themselves with a defense of democratic institutions on the basis of a causal-instrumental link between equality of political power and equality of social relations. In this reply, I advance three main claims. First, relational egalitarians have good reason to hope for a defense of the constitutive claim, since that claim is required if relational equality is to vindicate the intrinsic value of democracy. Second, Motchoulski’s argument against the constitutive claim fails, because it depends on conflating one species of social status for the genus as a whole. Finally, I argue that the constitutive claim is trivially true for one kind of status, namely de facto authority, but, since equality of that kind of status is not intrinsically valuable, this does not amount to a defense of the intrinsic value of democracy. (shrink)

Cognitive biases can lead to misinterpretations of human and non-human biology and behavior. The concept of the Umwelt describes phylogenetic contrasts in the sensory realms of different species and has important implications for evolutionary studies of cognition (including biases) and social behavior. It has recently been suggested that the microbiome (the diverse network of microorganisms in a given environment, including those within a host organism such as humans) has an influential role in host behavior and health. In this paper, we (...) discuss the host’s microbiome in relation to cognitive biases and the concept of the Umwelt. Failing to consider the role of host–microbiome (collectively termed a “holobiont”) interactions in a given behavior, may underpin a potentially important cognitive bias – which we refer to as the Holobiont Blindspot. We also suggest that microbially mediated behavioral responses could augment our understanding of the Umwelt. For example, the potential role of the microbiome in perception and action could be an important component of the system that gives rise to the Umwelt. We also discuss whether microbial symbionts could be considered in System 1 thinking – that is, decisions driven by perception, intuition and associative memory. Recognizing Holobiont Blindspots and considering the microbiome as a key factor in the Umwelt and System 1 thinking has the potential to advance studies of cognition. Furthermore, investigating Holobiont Blindspots could have important implications for our understanding of social behaviors and mental health. Indeed, the way we think about how we think may need to be revisited. (shrink)

When behaviors assemble into combinations, then synergies have a central role in the discovery of productive patterns of behavior. In our view—what we call the Synergy Emergence Principle (SEP)—synergies are dynamic attractors, drawing interactions toward greater returns as they happen, in the moment. This Principle offers an alternative to the two conventionally acknowledged routes to discovery: directed problem solving, involving forethought and planning; and the complete randomness of trial and error. Natural selection has a role in the process, in humans (...) favoring the maintenance and improvement of certain key underlying capabilities, such as prosocial helping and episodic foresight, but selection is not required for discovery by synergy (which occurs too rapidly for selection anyway). Here we discuss the consequences of the SEP for the evolution in humans of key synergies such as tool usage and interactions that reward cooperation, show how discovery by synergy and the selection of synergy-supporting abilities formed a positive feedback loop, and show how synergies can combine, forming clusters and packages that are the core of institutions and cultures. Finally, clusters and packages represent an intermediate level of organization above the individual and below whole society, with consequences for our understanding of the major transitions in evolution. (shrink)

Probability theory promises to deliver an exact and unified foundation for inquiry in epistemology and philosophy of science. But philosophy of religion is also fertile ground for the application of probabilistic thinking. This volume presents original contributions from twelve contemporary researchers, both established and emerging, to offer a representative sample of the work currently being carried out in this potentially rich field of inquiry. Grouped into five parts, the chapters span a broad range of traditional issues in religious epistemology. The (...) first three parts discuss the evidential impact of various considerations that have been brought to bear on the question of the existence of God. These include witness reports of the occurrence of miraculous events, the existence of complex biological adaptations, the apparent 'fine-tuning' for life of various physical constants and the existence of seemingly unnecessary evil. The fourth part addresses a number of issues raised by Pascal's famous pragmatic argument for theistic belief. A final part offers probabilistic perspectives on the rationality of faith and the epistemic significance of religious disagreement. (shrink)

In a recent article, Douven and Williamson offer both (i) a rebuttal of various recent suggested sufficient conditions for rational acceptability and (ii) an alleged ‘generalization’ of this rebuttal, which, they claim, tells against a much broader class of potential suggestions. However, not only is the result mentioned in (ii) not a generalization of the findings referred to in (i), but in contrast to the latter, it fails to have the probative force advertised. Their paper does however, if unwittingly, bring (...) us a step closer to a precise characterization of an important class of rationally unacceptable propositions—the class of lottery propositions for equiprobable lotteries. This helps pave the way to the construction of a genuinely lottery-paradox-proof alternative to the suggestions criticized in (i). (shrink)

After a number of decades of research into the dynamics of rational belief, the belief revision theory community remains split on the appropriate handling of sequences of changes in view, the issue of so-called iterated revision. It has long been suggested that the matter is at least partly settled by facts pertaining to the results of various single revisions of one’s initial state of belief. Recent work has pushed this thesis further, offering various strong principles that ultimately result in a (...) wholesale reduction of iterated to one-shot revision. The present paper offers grounds to hold that these principles should be significantly weakened and that the reductionist thesis should ultimately be rejected. Furthermore, the considerations provided suggest a close connection between the logic of iterated belief change and the logic of evidential relevance. (shrink)

It appears to have gone unnoticed in the literature that Pollock's widely endorsed analysis of evidential defeat entails a remarkably strong symmetry principle, according to which, for any three propositions D, E and H, if both E and D provide a reason to believe H, then D is a defeater for E's support for H if and only if, in turn, E is a defeater for D's support for H. After illustrating the counterintuitiveness of this constraint, a simple, more suitable, (...) alternative to the Pollockian account is offered. (shrink)

I outline four competing probabilistic accounts of contrastive evidential support and consider various considerations that might help arbitrate between these. The upshot of the discussion is that the so-called 'Law of Likelihood' is to be preferred to any of the alternatives considered.

The structure of police agencies, especially how the boundaries of their authority are drawn, is a crucial element of their legitimacy. Poorly drawn boundaries encourage unjustified police power and illegitimate police agencies. Claiming that realized political entities in developed democracies are illegitimate is fraught, in part because the difference between legitimate and illegitimate political power can be subtle in practice. To overcome this difficulty, I propose thinking in terms of “legitimacy-risk profiles.” I develop a way of determining a measure of (...) risk to legitimacy associated with various kinds of police power and agency structure. I then use it to explore the institutional boundaries recommended by the legitimacy-risk profiles of different kinds of policing. The result is a normative framework for thinking about political legitimacy at the realized—that is, not the fundamental and idealized—level. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Being the DifferenceJake BeeryThat day started just like many others. It was a cold, wet day in March spent anxiously answering and reviewing hundreds of USMLE STEP 2 practice questions for my exam just a week away. Except that Sunday would be something different. Looking for any excuse to take a break from my personal mental marathon, I picked up a call from my dad. He had just spent (...) the past six weeks wheeling my mom to near-daily appointments at the Mayo Clinic for treatment of her metastatic ocular melanoma. But now, with them back home, I had hoped for a short reprieve in the story of her cancer journey—for me, and for all of us. Instead, I listened to him explain how, less than 24 hours after coming home, my mom would be entering a hospice house in our hometown. Unable to control symptoms by themselves, my parents made the choice they felt would be best.Left with more questions than answers, a day later I found myself on a red-eye flight touching down on a snowy Minnesota runway. Inside waiting was the rest of my family, whose happiness to see me was unmistakably weighted down by similar hours of lost sleep. Together we shared as much time as we could with my mom, grateful she was able to meaningfully communicate when most other tasks proved unbearable. And that would be how she passed, surrounded by her closest family. Gone was my mom, my best friend, and the one person who I felt truly knew what it meant for me to be in medical school.The days that followed flowed in a melancholic blur. While I felt I knew so much about the time before hospice through talking with my mom and reading too many Kaplan-Meier curves, I was lost in the reality of losing a loved one for the first time. But as support poured in, time seemed to ease up. A close family friend who worked with grieving families as part of their profession told me, "In times like these, people will say things that seem strange. That's okay. Just try to listen to how much they care." And listen I did, savoring the minutes-long escape of listening to stories of a life well lived. Each time doing so, I felt the pull from the unknown to a place of unfortunate familiarity. Without much reference to how life feels after the loss of a parent, I cautiously stepped forward to face the rest of life's chores thrown at me.First came the rescheduling of STEP 2, reworking my study schedule, and yet more practice questions. And with it came my first struggles. While prior to flying home I could answer and review over 150 questions on a good day, I found myself unable to complete more than a single 40-question block. Every ophthalmology, oncology, and critical-care question transported me from the realm of abstract patients back to the beige waiting room of the hospice house. Gone was the joy of memorizing medical minutia. Originally, studying filled me with a sense of pride, furthering my dream of becoming a physician just like my mom had unintentionally inspired me to be. But now I didn't feel any of that. I despised every minute spent with my laptop open. But knowing the weight of board exams on a medical trainee's life, I pushed on. Outside of UWorld questions, I tried to make my world as normal as it once had been. I went on runs, got cappuccinos, and sat with my best friends. I did all the non-urgent things that still felt so important. And while I still [End Page 70] desperately missed my mom, multiple-choice questions gradually got easier, and the second chapter of my medical school career came to an uneventful close in a stuffy suburban testing center. And with it came my return to the wards.As a now 4th year medical student, I was set to begin a month-long rotation on the inpatient palliative care consult team at a busy, tertiary care medical center. As usual, the first day... (shrink)

In a recent article for this journal, Morten Magelssen argues that the right to conscientious objection in healthcare is grounded in the moral integrity of healthcare professionals, a good for both professionals and society. In this paper, I argue that there is no right to conscientious objection in healthcare, at least as Magelssen conceives of it. Magelssen’s conception of the right to conscientious objection is too expansive in nature. Although I will assume that there is a right to conscientious objection, (...) it does not extend to objections that are purely religious in nature.[i][1] Thus, this right is considerably more restricted than Magelssen thinks. In making my case, I draw on John Rawls’s later work in arguing for the claim that conscientious objection based on purely religious considerations fails to benefit society in the appropriate way. [1]: #fn-1. (shrink)

In the eighth book of Lucan'sBellum Ciuile, Pompey sends the Galatian king Deiotarus into the distant East to seek an alliance with Parthia, the vast empire beyond the Euphrates ruled by the Arsacid dynasty. His instructions to Deiotarus begin with these lines (8.211–14):‘quando’ ait ‘Emathiis amissus cladibus orbis,qua Romanus erat, superest, fidissime regum,Eoam temptare fidempopulosque bibentisEuphraten et adhuc securum a Caesare Tigrim.’.