A vaccine for hepatitis B became available in the UK from 1982, but it did not solve the public health dilemmas presented by the disease. In the decade that followed, epidemiologically important groups such as intravenous drug users and gay men were not targetted, while the groups of health workers at the centre of policy concern received little vaccine. This paper draws on models of diffusion, the pattern of the disease, and previous policies on screening, to explain the restricted vaccine (...) policy which was a field for contention through the 1980s and into the 1990s. (shrink)

Delusions play a fundamental role in the history of psychology, philosophy and culture, dividing not only the mad from the sane but reason from unreason. Yet the very nature and extent of delusions are poorly understood. What are delusions? How do they differ from everyday errors or mistaken beliefs? Are they scientific categories? In this superb, panoramic investigation of delusion Jennifer Radden explores these questions and more, unravelling a fascinating story that ranges from Descartes’s demon to famous first-hand accounts (...) of delusion, such as Daniel Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. Radden places delusion in both a clinical and cultural context and explores a fascinating range of themes: delusions as both individually and collectively held, including the phenomenon of folies á deux ; spiritual and religious delusions, in particular what distinguishes normal religious belief from delusions with religious themes; how we assess those suffering from delusion from a moral standpoint; and how we are to interpret violent actions when they are the result of delusional thinking. As well as more common delusions, such as those of grandeur, she also discusses some of the most interesting and perplexing forms of clinical delusion, such as Cotard and Capgras. (shrink)

The view that lying is morally worse than merely misleading is a very natural one, which has had many prominent defenders. Nonetheless, here I will argue that it is misguided: holding all else fixed, acts of mere misleading are not morally preferable to acts of lying, and successful lying is not morally worse than merely deliberately misleading. In fact, except in certain very special contexts, I will suggest that – when faced with a felt need to deceive – we might (...) as well just go ahead and lie. (shrink)

Augustine famously claimed that the virtues of pagan Rome were nothing more than splendid vices. This critique reinvented itself as a suspicion of acquired virtue as such, and true Christian virtue has, ever since, been set against a false, hypocritical virtue alleged merely to conceal pride. _Putting On Virtue_ reveals how a distrust of learned and habituated virtue shaped both early modern Christian moral reflection and secular forms of ethical thought. Jennifer Herdt develops her claims through an argument of (...) broad historical sweep, which brings together the Aristotelian tradition as taken up by Thomas Aquinas with the early modern thinkers who shaped modern liberalism. In chapters on Luther, Bunyan, the Jansenists, Mandeville, Hume, Rousseau, and Kant, she argues that efforts to make a radical distinction between true Christian virtue and its tainted imitations actually created an autonomous natural ethics separate from Christianity. This secular value system valorized pride and authenticity, while rendering graced human agency less meaningful. Ultimately, _Putting On Virtue_ traces a path from suspicion of virtue to its secular inversion, from confession of dependence to assertion of independence. (shrink)

While the role of discourse connectives has long been acknowledged in argumentative frameworks, these approaches often take a coarse-grained approach to connectives, treating them as a unified group having similar effects on argumentation. Based on an empirical study of the straw man fallacy, we argue that a more fine-grained approach is needed to explain the role of each connective and illustrate their specificities. We first present an original corpus study detailing the main features of four causal connectives in French that (...) speakers routinely use to attribute meaning to another speaker, which is a key element of straw man fallacies. We then assess the influence of each of these connectives in a series of controlled experiments. Our results indicate each connective has different effects for the persuasiveness of straw man fallacies, and that these effects can be explained by differences in their semantic profile, as evidenced in our corpus study. Taken together, our results demonstrate that connectives are important for argumentation but should be analyzed individually, and that the study of fallacies should include a fine-grained analysis of the linguistic elements typically used in their formulation. (shrink)

In this book, McMahon argues that a reading of Kant’s body of work in the light of a pragmatist theory of meaning and language leads one to put community reception ahead of individual reception in the order of aesthetic relations. A core premise of the book is that neo-pragmatism draws attention to an otherwise overlooked aspect of Kant’s "Critique of Aesthetic Judgment," and this is the conception of community which it sets forth. While offering an interpretation of Kant’s aesthetic theory, (...) the book focuses on the implications of Kant’s third critique for contemporary art. McMahon draws upon Kant and his legacy in pragmatist theories of meaning and language to argue that aesthetic judgment is a version of moral judgment: a way to cultivate attitudes conducive to community, which plays a pivotal role in the evolution of language, meaning, and knowledge. (shrink)

Feminist metaphysics is simultaneously feminist theorizing and metaphysics. Part of feminist metaphysics concerns social ontology and considers such questions as, What is the nature of social kinds, such as genders? Feminist metaphysicians also consider whether gendered perspectives influence metaphysical theorizing; for example, have approaches to the nature of the self or free will been conducted from a masculinist perspective, and would a feminist perspective yield different theories? Some feminist metaphysicians develop metaphysical theories with the aim of furthering certain social goals, (...) such as gender equality. Despite these and other intriguing research projects, feminist metaphysics faces challenges from two flanks: one might argue that "feminist metaphysics" is not metaphysics, or one might argue that it is not feminist. Recently, Elizabeth Barnes has made the case that, since contemporary accounts of the nature of metaphysics focus primarily on the fundamental, they have the problematic implication that feminist metaphysics is not, properly speaking, metaphysics. However, less emphasis has been paid, of late, to the idea that major strands of feminist thought also problematize feminist metaphysics. I will briefly assess the metaphysician's case against feminist metaphysics in Section 2 of this chapter. Then, in Section 3, I will examine in more detail possible feminist concerns over metaphysics. In Section 4, I sketch a different conception of metaphysics that avoids both mainstream and feminist challenges to feminist metaphysics. (shrink)

Book synopsis: The latest volume of the critically acclaimed Library of Living Philosophers series is devoted to the work of analytic philosopher Donald Davidson. Following the standard LLP format, Davidson discusses his life and philosophical development in an intellectual autobiography. This is followed by 31 critical essays by distinguished scholars; Davidson replies to each of these essays. Although Donald Davidson is considered an analytic philosopher, his thought straddles many areas of philosophy. One of his greatest contributions is the development of (...) a philosophical system based on his theory of mind and language, but he has also worked on theory of action, philosophy of language, decision theory, psychology, epistemology, ethics, the concept of truth, and the concept of objectivity. Davidson is a former Carus Lecturer who has held more than twenty distinguished lectureships and research fellowships at universities in this country and abroad, including Queens College, Stanford, Princeton, and the University of Peru. He is currently professor emeritus at UC-Berkeley. (shrink)

In this introduction to the edited volume, we briefly describe some of the current challenges faced by public mental health initiatives, at both the national and global level. We also include several general remarks on interdisciplinary methodology in public mental health ethics, followed by short descriptions of the chapters included in the volume.

Thomson that the mother would not be morally obliged to consent to the surgery. At any rate, if she refused, she would not have killed the foetus. ...

In this paper I examine Grasswick’s theory of trust-building through knowledge-sharing across the scientific–lay divide. I apply this theory to the case of scientific–lay interactions in the development of marine protected areas (MPAs). This case-study not only supports Grasswick’s work, but suggests one friendly amendment to her theory. When it comes to trust-building through knowledge-sharing, the case of MPAs demonstrates that this sharing must be reciprocal.

Over the past half-century, modelling has come to play an increasingly important role in cancer research. These representational tools frame perceptions of malignant disease, guide public health responses, and help determine which interventions are necessary. But what makes a cancer model a model? What authority do they have? What stories do they tell? And how do they shape our understanding of disease and bodies? To shed light on these questions, this article explores the long history of cancer modelling in sub-Saharan (...) Africa: a place where malignant disease has often been imagined as different, and where experimentation and improvisation in cancer research and treatment has been rife. Drawing on archival and ethnographic sources, we examine modelling strategies that health professionals have used to generate information about cancer in Africa from the mid 20th century to the present day. Focusing on three different case studies – anatomical models of Burkitt's lymphoma patients, diagnostic models for Kaposi sarcoma, and statistical models of the African smoking and lung cancer epidemic – we meditate on the multiplicity of models and modelling by identifying the epistemic strands that hold these representations together, as well as what sets them apart. In addition to contributing to discussions of how cancer research has taken shape beyond the Anglo-American realm, our article helps expand and complicate our understandings of what a disease model is. (shrink)

In their excellent monograph, Crimes, Harms and Wrongs, Andrew Simester and Andreas von Hirsch argue for an account of legitimate criminalisation based on wrongfulness, the Harm Principle and the Offence Principle, while they reject an independent anti-paternalism principle. To put it at its simplest my aim in the present paper is to examine the relationship between ‘the harms’ and ‘the wrongs’ of the authors’ title. I begin by comparing the authors’ version of the Harm and Offence Principle with some other (...) influential accounts. After examining the role wrongfulness plays in their work, I ask what there is left for their Harm and Offence Principles to do. In the light of the understanding and foundations of the Harm and Offence Principles proposed by the authors, I suggest that the answer is little or nothing. The wrongfulness constraint the authors place on their Offence Principle comes close to swallowing it up entirely. Furthermore the part of their Offence Principle that is not thus swallowed by wrongfulness leaves the account with a commitment that is probably best dropped. As far as their Harm Principle is concerned I suggest that the authors’ account of ‘harm’ is so broad that it lacks the resources to distinguish harm-based reasons from wrongfulness- or immorality-based reasons in any principled way. Among other things, I ask in this context, first, whether one can be harmed as one’s character deteriorates and, secondly, whether one is harmed by virtue of the serious wrong one does to another. What really drives the authors’ account of legitimate criminalisation, I believe, is wrongfulness together with an important, amorphous set of potential defeating conditions. They themselves accept such a picture so far as paternalism is concerned. I conclude that their account, which I think has considerable force, would lose little of any significance were their Harm and Offence Principles simply excised. More generally I suspect that a strong role for wrongfulness in an account of legitimate criminalisation is likely to put into serious question the plausibility of an independent principled role for harm and offence. (shrink)

Psychiatrists working with war veterans have, in recent years, constructed ‘moral injury’ as a separate manifestation of war trauma that is distinct from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. This paper argues that for moral degradation to occur, it necessarily involves one’s commissions or omissions that transgresses one’s personal morality, and hence, distinguishes sufferers of moral injury from PTSD sufferers who were witnesses to traumatic and morally abhorrent events. To this end, it clarifies how some of the situations surrounding moral injury are misunderstood, (...) by discussing the process of moral reasoning in the context of moral dilemmas, dirty hands, and moral blind alleys. Finally, it concludes that when we conceptualise moral injury as being caused by one’s commissions and omissions in moral dilemmas, we find that shame and guilt are situation-appropriate responses with a role to play in what ethics mean. (shrink)

En el presente ensayo se analiza la crítica que hace Aristóteles a la teoría de las ideas de Platón; comenzaremos por saber cómo y por qué Aristóteles critica la teoría de las ideas, después nos enfocaremos en el libro de la Metafísica de Aristóteles, de donde obtendremos las críticas que hace a esta teoría y, para finalizar, veremos qué respuestas da Aristóteles a varios de los problemas que existen en la teoría de las ideas de Platón. Al final llegaremos a (...) unas conclusiones muy interesantes, porque notaremos que Aristóteles no estaba en contra de su maestro, sólo quería perfeccionar varias de sus ideas en su búsqueda de la verdad.¿Cómo y por qué Aristóteles. (shrink)

Children and pregnant women are often excluded from clinical research. This has resulted in a paucity of evidence on how medicines work for fetuses, neonates, infants, and adolescents. It also raises bioethics, scientific, and public health concerns. For over half a century, doctors have prescribed medicines to children largely on the basis of how they work in adults, despite children’s varied physiologies and differences in how their bodies absorb and metabolize drugs. Regulations and legislation have led to an increase in (...) the number of pediatric studies and to better drug labeling. However, children at all stages of their lives often remain “therapeutic orphans” owing to insufficient evidence about how medicines work for them. (shrink)

In this article, we examine how white working-class women reimagine gender in the face of social and economic changes that have undermined their ability to perform normative femininity. As blue-collar jobs have disappeared, scholars have posited that white working-class men and women have become increasingly isolated, disconnected from institutions, and hopeless about the future, leading to a culture of despair. Although past literature has examined how working-class white men cope with the inability to perform masculinity through wage-earning and family authority, (...) gender has been undertheorized in these discussions, treating working-class women’s and men’s despair interchangeably. Drawing on 37 in-depth interviews conducted in a former coal-mining town in northeastern Pennsylvania, we identify three overarching strategies that women deploy in their life histories to cope with disruption: embracing pain as an opportunity for self-growth; dispelling shame and striving for equality; and enduring suffering. These strategies allow women to feel hopeful and worthy as they confront enormous challenges, whether starting over following relationship dissolution, learning to be independent from men, or simply surviving hardship for the sake of their children. We explore the implications for recreating gender identity in each strategy and question how different strategies might serve to protect women from, or alternatively solidify, sentiments of despair. (shrink)

Volume 52, Issue 2, February 2020, Page 217-219.

Political Loneliness: Modern Liberal Subjects in Hiding examines the loneliness that remains at work in modern life even as we find ourselves increasingly interconnected. While much has been said about this experience in the main currents of continental philosophy, this book opens new paths within this discourse by developing the problem of loneliness in a political register. The central claim of this book is that neoliberal subjectivity has rendered us lonely. Drawing especially on the work of Hannah Arendt, the author (...) suggests that the political structures we have inherited from the liberal tradition—such as the anonymity of the vote and the right to pursue one’s private self-interest as far as possible—have left us hidden from one another, unable to appear as members of a common world. The author further argues that it is precisely this experience of political loneliness that renders citizens in liberal and allegedly open societies desperate to belonging and willing, in turn, to surrender to delusional fellowships like totalitarianism. By developing the problem of loneliness in a political register, this book offers a framework for interpreting the rise of totalitarianism at the beginning of the twentieth century, no less than the ascendance of right-wing populism in Western liberal democracies today. It thus makes an important contribution to debates in current continental philosophy, liberal political theory, and critical theory regarding issues of alienation, political life, and community in the present age. (shrink)

The sounds that result from our movement and that mark the outcome of our actions typically convey useful information concerning the state of our body and its movement, as well as providing pertinent information about the stimuli with which we are interacting. Here we review the rapidly growing literature investigating the influence of non-veridical auditory cues (i.e., inaccurate in terms of their context, timing, and/or spectral distribution) on multisensory body and action perception, and on motor behavior. Inaccurate auditory cues provide (...) a unique opportunity to study cross-modal processes: the ability to detect the impact of each sense when they provide a slightly different message is greater. Additionally, given that similar cross-modal processes likely occur regardless of the accuracy or inaccuracy of sensory input, studying incongruent interactions are likely to also help us predict interactions between congruent inputs. The available research convincingly demonstrates that perceptions of the body, of movement, and of surface contact features (e.g., roughness) are influenced by the addition of non-veridical auditory cues. Moreover, auditory cues impact both motor behavior and emotional valence, the latter showing that sounds that are highly incongruent with the performed movement induce feelings of unpleasantness (perhaps associated with lower processing fluency). Such findings are relevant to the design of auditory cues associated with product interaction, and the use of auditory cues in sport performance and therapeutic situations given the impact on motor behavior. (shrink)

If it's not good for something, then it's good for nothing. The Director of the Centre for Business and Professional Ethics at the University of Leeds continues her examination of basic terms frequently used in business ethics.

‘The virtuous life need not be seen as a life in which every moment has to be justified in relation to some overridingly urgent quest.’.

How are Christians to understand God’s grace for individuals in the midst of severe trauma, particularly in light of a global epidemic of sexual violence against so many women and children? How does the call to witness to the good news of Christ’s love translate into specific obligations that respond to the needs of sexual abuse survivors? The purpose of this article is to explore these questions in the context of Karl Rahner’s theology of grace. When seeking to understand God’s (...) gracious presence in the midst of sexual violation, it is particularly helpful to explore Rahner’s insight that God’s grace is mediated through acts of neighbour-love both within and beyond Christian communities. Such insight into the social mediation of grace has exciting potential to transform perceptions of what is at stake in loving our neighbour and the forms that neighbour-love can take, mobilising Christians for greater social justice in the service of God. (shrink)

Let T be an infinite pseudo-tree. In [2], we showed that the cellularity of the pseudo-tree algebra Treealg(T) was the maximum of four cardinals cT, lT, ϕT, and μT: roughly, cT is the "tallness" of T; lT is the "width" of T; ϕ is the number of "points of finite branching" in T; and μ is the number of "sections of no branching" in T. Here we ask: which inequalities among these four cardinals may be satisfied, in some sense, by (...) a pseudo-tree? We show that the possible inequalities among cT, lT, ϕT, and μT attained by pseudo-trees T are closely related to the existence of generalized Suslin trees. (shrink)

We argue that theory-of-mind understanding has developed to facilitate joint thinking and planning, defined as the creation of new mental objects that could not have been created by one mind. Three components of this ability are proposed: the mental architecture indexed by false belief understanding, domain-specific knowledge, and the prioritization of the joint mind over the individual mind.

Questions regarding the nature of moral judgment loom large in moral philosophy. Perhaps the most basic of these questions asks how, exactly, moral judgments and moral rules are to be defined; what features distinguish them from other sorts of rules and judgments? A related question concerns the extent to which emotion and reason guide moral judgment. Are moral judgments made mainly on the basis of reason, or are they primarily the products of emotion? As an example of the former view, (...) Kant held all moral requirements to be derived from a principle of rationality (the categorical imperative). As an example of the latter, Hume famously claimed that reason is “the slave of the passions” and that moral judgments stem from the moral emotions. When addressing these issues, philosophers have largely relied on the traditional tools of philosophical analysis, along with introspection, anecdotal evidence and armchair speculation. In recent years, however, a rich body experimental psychology has emerged which, in the view of a growing number of philosophers, casts important new light on these venerable questions. Our aim, in this chapter, is to illustrate how empirical methods can help move traditional philosophical debates forward in interesting and important ways. Since space does not permit an exhaustive survey of the relevant experimental work, we will focus on a few of the most compelling examples. (shrink)