Older and newer forms of vulnerability are manifesting themselves today, denouncing a suffering which is both material and existential, individual and societal. It is particularly evident within urban contexts and amplified by the crumbling of collective belonging and the increasing scarcity of places of participation where responsibility and the commitment to building one’s own personal biography are increasingly delegated to each individual, both materially and symbolically. Two separate pedagogical studies will explore some processes of signification of the experiences connected to (...) new poverty, emphasizing the risks of simplification and normativity identified in some of the current interpretations in the common sense, such as the problematic proximity which these are in danger of sharing with the interpretative premises that shape the same local educational services dedicated to new poverty itself. (shrink)

Prolonged solitary confinement has become a widespread and standard practice in U.S. prisons—even though it consistently drives healthy prisoners insane, makes the mentally ill sicker, and, according to the testimony of prisoners, threatens to reduce life to a living death. In this profoundly important and original book, Lisa Guenther examines the death-in-life experience of solitary confinement in America from the early nineteenth century to today’s supermax prisons. Documenting how solitary confinement undermines prisoners’ sense of identity and their ability to (...) understand the world, Guenther demonstrates the real effects of forcibly isolating a person for weeks, months, or years. -/- Drawing on the testimony of prisoners and the work of philosophers and social activists from Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty to Frantz Fanon and Angela Davis, the author defines solitary confinement as a kind of social death. It argues that isolation exposes the relational structure of being by showing what happens when that structure is abused—when prisoners are deprived of the concrete relations with others on which our existence as sense-making creatures depends. Solitary confinement is beyond a form of racial or political violence; it is an assault on being. (shrink)

Lisa Tessman's Burdened Virtues is a deeply original and provocative work that engages questions central to feminist theory and practice, from the perspective of Aristotelian ethics. Focused primarily on selves who endure and resist oppression, she addresses the ways in which devastating conditions confronted by these selves both limit and burden their moral goodness, and affect their possibilities of flourishing. She describes two different forms of "moral trouble" prevalent under oppression. The first is that the oppressed self may be (...) morally damaged, prevented from developing or exercising some of the virtues; the second is that the very conditions of oppression require the oppressed to develop a set of virtues that carry a moral cost to those who practice them--traits that Tessman refers to as "burdened virtues." These virtues have the unusual feature of being disjoined from their bearer's own well being. Tessman's work focuses on issues that have been missed by many feminist moral theories, and her use of the virtue ethics framework brings feminist concerns more closely into contact with mainstream ethical theory. This book will appeal to feminist theorists in philosophy and women's studies, but also more broadly, ethicists and social theorists. (shrink)

Questions about the relevance and value of various liberal concepts are at the heart of important debates among feminist philosophers and social theorists. Although many feminists invoke concepts such as rights, equality, autonomy, and freedom in arguments for liberation, some attempt to avoid them, noting that they can also reinforce and perpetuate oppressive social structures. In Challenging Liberalism Schwartzman explores the reasons why concepts such as rights and equality can sometimes reinforce oppression. She argues that certain forms of abstraction and (...) individualism are central to liberal methodology and that these give rise to a number of problems. Drawing on the work of feminist moral, political, and legal theorists, she constructs an approach that employs these concepts, while viewing them from within a critique of social relations of power. (shrink)

It is often said that the institutions of criminal justice ought or—perhaps more often—ought not to rehabilitate criminal offenders. But the term ‘criminal rehabilitation’ is often used without being explicitly defined, and in ways that are consistent with widely divergent conceptions. In this paper, we present a taxonomy that distinguishes, and explains the relationships between, different conceptions of criminal rehabilitation. Our taxonomy distinguishes conceptions of criminal rehabilitation on the basis of the aims or ends of the putatively rehabilitative measure, and (...) the means that may be used to achieve the intended end. We also explore some of the implications of each conception, some of the payoffs of a taxonomy of the kind we offer, and some areas for future work. (shrink)

Clinical delusions are difficult to investigate in the laboratory because they co-occur with other symptoms and with intellectual impairment. Partly for these reasons, researchers have recently begun to use hypnosis with neurologically intact people in order to model clinical delusions. In this paper we describe striking analogies between the behavior of patients with a clinical delusion of mirrored self misidentification, and the behavior of highly hypnotizable subjects who receive a hypnotic suggestion to see a stranger when they look in the (...) mirror. Based on these analogies, we argue that the use of hypnosis is a reliable method to investigate the surface features of clinical delusions. But to what extent can hypnosis successfully recreate delusions? Can it also contribute to a better understanding of delusion formation? Although clinical delusions and hypnotically induced beliefs are different in etiology, some analogies can be identified in the underlying processes that characterise them, based on the two-factor theory of delusion formation. (shrink)

Critical congenital heart disease screening is rapidly becoming the standard of care in the United States after being added to the Recommended Uniform Screening Panel in 2011. Newborn screens typically do not require affirmative parental consent. In fact, most states allow parents to exempt their baby from receiving the required screen on the basis of religious or personally held beliefs. There are many ethical considerations implicated with allowing parents to exempt their child from newborn screening for CCHD. Considerations include the (...) treatment of religious exemptions in our current legal system, as well as medical and ethical principles in relation to the rights of infants. Although there are significant benefits to screening newborns for CCHD, when a parent refuses for religious or personal beliefs, in the case of CCHD screening, the parental decision should stand. (shrink)

Philosophers have been long interested in delusional beliefs and in whether, by reporting and endorsing such beliefs, deluded subjects violate norms of rationality (Campbell 1999; Davies & Coltheart 2002; Gerrans 2001; Stone & Young 1997; Broome 2004; Bortolotti 2005). So far they have focused on identifying the relation between intentionality and rationality in order to gain a better understanding of both ordinary and delusional beliefs. In this paper Matthew Broome and I aim at drawing attention to the extent to which (...) deluded subjects are committed to the content of their delusional beliefs, that is, to whether they can be regarded as authors of their beliefs (Moran 2001). We consider several levels of commitment one can have to a reported belief, delusional or otherwise, and we distinguish between _ownership_ and _authorship_ of beliefs (Gallagher 2000). After examining some examples of belief authoring (or lack thereof) in psychopathology, we argue that there is no straight-forward and unitary answer to the question whether deluded subjects author their beliefs. Nevertheless, introducing the notion of authorship in the debate can significantly contribute to the philosophical literature on the rationality of delusions and can also have important implications for diagnosis and therapy in psychiatry. (shrink)

A growing body of research demonstrates the relevance of character strengths for flourishing in general, but also for important outcomes across different life domains. Studies have also shown that there are differences in the extent to which character strengths are applied, that is, perceived as relevant and shown in behavior in a given context, between work and private life, but they have not considered other life domains. This study aims to close this gap by examining the life domains of work, (...) education, leisure, close personal relationships, and romantic relationships. The present study investigates whether strengths-related behavior across different life domains explains additional variance in flourishing beyond the trait level of each respective character strength and studies differences in the relevance of character strengths and strengths-related behavior across different life domains, and examines their relationships with flourishing. A sample of 203 German-speaking adults completed self-reports assessing flourishing and character strengths. They also indicated which of the five life domains were personally relevant to them and reported the character strengths' perceived relevance and the frequency of displaying strengths-related behavior for each of these life domains separately. The results demonstrate that strengths-related behavior averaged across all relevant life domains explained unique variance in flourishing above the trait-level of character strengths in some cases, different life domains were characterized by specific profiles of character strength—regarding both their relevance and strength-related behavior. Moreover, character strengths and strengths-related behavior in different life domains both showed substantial correlations with flourishing. In some cases, these associations were domain-specific. In conclusion, we suggest that examining strengths-related behavior across different life domains represents a worthwhile addition to research on character strengths. (shrink)

George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, was one of the great philosophers of the early modern period. He was a brilliant critic of his predecessors, particularly Descartes, Malebranche, and Locke. He was a talented metaphysician famous for defending idealism, that is, the view that reality consists exclusively of minds and their ideas. Berkeley's system, while it strikes many as counter intuitive, is strong and flexible enough to counter most objections. His most studied works, the Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (...) Principles, for short) and Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous Dialogues), are beautifully written and dense with the sort of arguments that delight contemporary philosophers. He was also a wide ranging thinker with interests in religion (which were fundamental to his philosophical motivations), the psychology of vision, mathematics, physics, morals, economics, and medicine. Although many of Berkeley's first readers greeted him with incomprehension, he influenced both Hume and Kant, and is much read (if little followed) in our own day. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 47, no. 2. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 251 7 preface 8 In recent years, people all over the world have become ever more aware of being drawn into intimate—and unequal—relations with one another, whether through environmental crises, the COVID-19 pandemic, global economic commodity chains, violent conflicts, forced displacements, or political protests and social movements. This special issue features China’s so-called rising presence as one of (...) the key nodes in these global intimacies. The essays by Mei-Hua Chen and Hong-zen Wang, Sealing Cheng, and Wei Wei contribute new approaches to migrant intimacies across borders through their ethnographically rich analyses. Chen and Wang explore cross-border marriages and sex work between Taiwanese men and Mainland Chinese and southeast Asian women; Cheng investigates refugee marriages and the difficulties men from various African nations face in seeking asylum in Hong Kong; and Wei analyzes Mainland Chinese queer reproduction that uses transnational Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs) to enable queer parents to have a genetic link with their children and to be more accepted in Chinese society. In his essay, Petrus Liu pushes us to move beyond the idea that a theory of gender construction traveled to China from the West and was wholly adopted there, instead demonstrating the complexities of gender theories in China in the age of the Beijing Consensus. Christina Yuen Zi Chung and Sasha Su-Ling Welland explore a broad range of artworks that critically reflect on China’s efforts to create a China-centered global Global Intimacies: China and/in the Global South 252Preface trading network. Paul Amar offers a “deimperial queer analysis” of the all-time top-earning Chinese film, Wolf Warrior 2, illuminating how it both buttresses China’s extractive and militarized investments in African nations and manifests anti-imperialist and utopian impulses. Poems by Zhai Yongming and Xu Lizhi feature the gendered and sexualized precarity and violence of recent social transformations in China resulting from China’s intimate linkages with the global capitalist economy. Finally, Cai Yiping’s News and Views offers a nuanced engagement with the Chinese government’s formal proclamations on women’s rights.1 In the first essay, “Flexible Intimacies in the Global Intimate Economy : Evidence from Taiwan’s Cross-Border Marriages,” Mei-Hua Chen and Hong-zen Wang demonstrate the fallacy of treating cross-border marriages and cross-border sex work as separate as well as grouping women dichotomously under one or the other set of practices. These two seemingly disparate categories are, in effect, produced by state immigration regulations and dominant intersectional discourses of gender, sexuality, and class. Rather than distinguishing between marriage migrants and economic migrants, or between real marriages and fake marriages, Chen and Wang demonstrate the overlapping means by which women from the Global South try to better their lives in what they call the global intimate economy—where the Global North appropriates the reproductive and intimate labor of women from the Global South. The authors develop the concept of “flexible intimacy” to highlight how migrant women treat marriage as an investment through which to improve their lives. They argue that many marriage migrants have economic motivations for cross-border marriage and that migrant sex workers, conversely, are often involved in intimate relationships. Chen and Wang focus their study on Taiwan, which they argue is economically part of the North but politically part of the South due to Mainland China’s “One China” policy, which has marginalized Taiwan in the international political arena. To assert its sovereignty, the Taiwanese government 1. These essays grew out of a Ford Foundation-funded series of workshops on China and/in the Global South: The Central Role of Gender and Sexuality, which took place in Beijing and also at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Thanks to the Ford Foundation grants, and especially Susie Jolly, Lisa Rofel and the authors have built a transnational network of scholars and activists addressing China’s transformed presence in the Global South. Preface 253 strictly controls border crossings by migrant women from China and Southeast Asia yet simultaneously allows Taiwanese husbands to appropriate migrant women’s intimate and reproductive labor. Both Taiwanese men and migrant women expect... (shrink)

Abram Brummett and Christopher Ostertag offer critiques of my argument that clinical ethics consultants have expertise but are not “ethics experts”. My argument begins within our less-than-ideal world and asks what a justification of a clinical ethics consultation recommendation might look like under those conditions. It is a challenge to what could be called an “inflationary” position on ethics expertise that requires agreement on or rational proof of metaethical facts about the values at stake in clinical ethics consultation. Brummett and (...) Ostertag critique three distinct steps in the argument. Two of those I have a brief answer for, and an assessment of the third demonstrates that Brummett and Ostertag do not consider the premise upon which I based my account. Instead, they assert a counter-premise without argument, which at best results in a stalemate between our two accounts. However, the reasons supporting my premise still seem to me to be stronger, so I am in the end unconvinced by their critiques. (shrink)

“Chiaroscuro” is a art technique that makes use of light and shade to suggest depth and solidity on a flat surface. I argue that the standards regarding accountability in the second edition of the Core Competencies for Healthcare Ethics Consultation , are chiaroscuro, because, despite the offered lists of competencies, it is very difficult to imagine how consultants might be held accountable to such standards. It is not clear to which of the many suggested standards a consultant should be held (...) accountable, and even if one stipulates that only the tabulated competencies are meant as standards, the vague wording makes it hard to know how a consultant might fail to meet the standards or perform excellently. In addition, because terms such as “ethics” and “ethical” are not defined in the document, we are left with no way to determine whether consultants have made appropriate recommendations. The document is useful as a point of discussion, but not yet ready to serve as a tool for holding practitioners accountable. (shrink)

‘This class is so [insert expletive] depressing.’ I overheard a student communicating this to a friend upon exiting one of my ethics courses and I wondered how my classes could generate a sense of empowerment rather than depression, a sense of hope rather than despair. Drawing from David Hume's and Martin Hoffman's work on the psychology of empathy and sympathy, I contend that dominant Western philosophical pedagogy is inadequate for facilitating morally empowered students. Moreover, I stipulate that an adequate analysis (...) of the role emotion should play in pedagogy requires tending to the politics of emotional expression and how oppression functions. I argue that ethical educators have a moral responsibility to facilitate not only critical moral thinking but critical moral agency. Part of ethical education should involve the provision of tools for effective citizen engagement, and reasoning alone is insufficient for this goal. The role of emotion in ethical decision-making and action remains devalued and u.. (shrink)

Presenting state-of-the-art work on the conscious and unconscious processes involved in emotion, this integrative volume brings together leading psychologists, ...

Data reveal that the physical effects of trauma exposure increasingly surface in business, social, and other settings. Exposure to trauma at any point in life can cause employee health concerns, yet many firms do not acknowledge or address this. Herein, we combine trauma theory with human capital theory to explain how manifestations of trauma exposure— hyperarousal, intrusion, and constriction—impact employee health and performance. This article outlines how each manifestation affects human capital deployment, and thus employee performance. It further demonstrates how (...) these human capital deployment issues have individual- and unit-level performance implications. This article offers a theory linking health effects of trauma to performance outcomes at work. It suggests how managerial awareness of trauma manifestations is a necessary step toward workplaces becoming supportive or healing. Our model offers new explanations related to why some individuals behave as they do at work and connects trauma to employee behavior and value creation. (shrink)

A Future of the History of Science Is in the Institution. In this article, I warn against a tendency seen in the history of science towards very particular and isolating microhistories. The call for contextualization should be more than mere lip service and taken seriously. I suggest that a stronger focus on the history of institutions could be one particularly productive way to contextualize knowledge. There are at least five benefits that an analysis of institutions might bring for the history (...) of science: The history of scientific institutions offers the potential for (1) entangled histories that (2) include longer time periods and pay not only attention to (3) the dissemination of knowledge but also to (4) the field of law and the mechanisms of vocational bureaucracy. In this way, (5) questions of power and politics come into view. (shrink)

According to some theories of interpretation, it is difficult to explain and predict irrational behavior in intentional terms because irrational behavior does not support the ascription of intentional states with determinate content. In this paper I challenge this claim by offering a general diagnosis of those cases in which behavior, rational or not, resists interpretation. I argue that indeterminacy of ascription and paralysis of interpretation ensue when the interpreter lacks relevant information about the system to be interpreted and about the (...) environment in which the system is embedded. Moreover, the heuristics of interpretation that guide the ascription of beliefs can be limited in scope. In the end I suggest that by giving up the idea of a necessary rationality constraint on the ascription of intentional states we can develop a new framework for a more psychologically realistic account of interpretation. (shrink)

back in about 1984 or 1985, when I'd been in graduate school for a couple of years at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, I started hanging around with three chemists who shared a house. They were colleagues of my roommate, a chemistry grad student. One of them, no kidding, was named Lloyd A. Bumm, who would always introduce himself by saying, "My name is the best joke I know." Lloyd was a quirky, curious guy who often explored unusual places around (...) the City, unlike the typical chemistry grad student. For instance, he frequently would head into Chicago on Sunday mornings to go to this crazy street market he knew about. He invited me to go with him one weekend; he was looking for a power supply, whatever... (shrink)

This paper addresses the location of virtue within a virtuous person. It examines the relations of body, mind and spirit in the Shijing 詩經, which describes virtue in terms of the bodies and minds of virtuous agents. I argue that virtue is attributed to outward behavior, rather than inner state, and that that behavior is described via the performance of the shen or gong body.

This chapter contains section titled: Introduction: How Brent Spar Changed the Rules The Brent Spar was not Alone: Two Sentinel Cases What is Going on? The Power Shift Third Sector, Global Civil Society Dealing with Attacks from CSOs Challenges for the CSOs The Ultimate Hope for the CSOs Case 7: Monsanto and the Genetically Modified Organisms Notes.

Sexual and reproductive health is a challenge worldwide, and much progress is needed to reach the relevant UN Sustainable Development Goals. This paper presents cross-sectional data collected in Sierra Leone on sexual and gender-based violence, family planning, child, early and forced marriage, and female genital mutilation using an innovative method of measurement: situational judgment tests, as a subset of questions within a larger survey tool. For the SJTs, respondents saw hypothetical scenarios on these themes and had to indicate how they (...) would react. The objective is to give an impression of beliefs and norms on specific behaviors, which provide insights for social and behavior change interventions. Data was collected by enumerators traveling to villages randomly selected in six districts of the country. The sample is composed of 566 respondents. Results show that FGM in particular seem to be a priority topic, in comparison to the other topics for which the norms seem to be stronger against those practices. Age differences emerged and suggest priority groups to be targeted. In terms of validity of the measurement methods, situational judgment test answers correlated positively with other items in the survey, but the magnitude of the association is often small, and sometimes not significant. Thus, more studies are needed to further explore the validity of this measure by comparing against a reference value. Using SJTs could complement other data collection tools to perform community assessment, and orient the direction of the program in its planning phase. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Taking On Your Natural Human Role by Killing Non‐Human Animals Discover Nature by Killing Non‐Human Animals The Paradox of Ethical Hunting Hunting and Environmentalism Notes.

Cognitive science currently offers models of cognition that depart substantively from those of information processing models and classical artificial intelligence, while it embraces methods of inquiry that include case-based, ethnographic, and philosophical methods. To illustrate, five overlapping approaches that constitute departures from classical representational cognitive science are briefly discussed in this paper: dynamical cognition, situated cognition, embodied cognition, extended mind theory, and integrative cognition. Critical responses to these efforts from members of the self-proclaimed cognitive science orthodoxy are also summarized. The (...) paper then discusses ethical and epistemological implications arising from the “new” cognitive science and from critical responses to it and considers the broader importance of this literature for theoretical and philosophical psychology. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

This paper offers a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the common law of property and the rule of law. The standard way of framing this relationship is within the terms of the form/substance debate within the literature on the rule of law: Does the rule of law include only formal and procedural aspects or does it also encompass and support substantive rights such as private property rights and civil liberties? By focusing on the nature of common-law reasoning, (...) I wish to question the form/substance dichotomy that frames this debate and to show that the formal aspects of the rule of law are in fact principles widely adopted within the practice of common-law reasoning and as such play a large role in shaping the substantive content of common-law property rights. Understanding this has implications beyond the relationship between property law and the rule of law. (shrink)

Do bioethicists need yet another theoretical approach with which to frame their disagreements? Many pragmatists contend that pragmatism, unlike its liberal and utilitarian counterparts, is uniquely commendable in (a) beginning from our lived experiences and (b) locating those experiences amid our social relations. In place of an " principlism," pragmatism offers a practical "bedside-bioethic"; in lieu of "autonomy run amuk," pragmatism proposes an ethic rooted in our communal resources. To date, however, efforts to develop such a bioethic have been stymied (...) by pragmatists' own abstract theoretical commitments, commitments that prevent them, most directly, from beginning with the lived experiences and communal resources of those who hold theological commitments. This self-imposed methodological constraint, I argue, has needlessly thwarted pragmatism's most striking methodological promise: its potential to cultivate productive debates among secular and theologically-informed participants. (shrink)

This article examines the use of dialogues in two texts which functioned superficially as scientific handbooks for women: Aphra Behn's translation of Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle's Entretien sur la pluralité des Mondes and Elizabeth Carter's Sir Isaac Newton's Philosophy Explained for the Use of Ladies (1739) translated from Francesco Algarotti's Il Newtoniasnismo Per le Dame (1737). Original texts exploit the female figure for the scientific cause, but at first glance, both of the original texts appeared generous to the ‘fair (...) sex’. However, neither text is as sympathetic as it initially appears. The confused gender messages emitted by these texts are further complicated by the fact that they were translated by women. (shrink)

In his writings on the gaze and the body in Being and Nothingness , Jean-Paul Sartre describes the ways in which bodies are exposed and vulnerable to the anonymous gaze of the other, and how they in the midst of their vulnerability depend entirely on being seen by the gaze for their meaning and their very being. Although it sometimes appears as quite depressingly restrictive, Sartre’s analysis of the gaze and his account of the body offer rich and important resources (...) for recognizing the force of objectifying categories and meanings in the constitution of identities. This article suggests that Sartre’s almost remorseless descriptions of how the body is molded by the gaze of the other provide a productive point of departure for understanding the becoming of singular identities, as they are lived on the margins and in the intersections of established categories which determine them in often oppressive ways. Being marked by difference, whether sexual, ethnic, racial, or other, is in many ways being trapped by the objectifying gaze of the other in such a way that the ability to return the gaze and claim a subject position is deeply circumscribed. The article gives an account of Sartre’s analysis of the phenomenon of the gaze as the force which objectifies me before the other and of his description of the body as it is subjectively experienced as objectified. This “third ontological dimension of the body” captures the tensions inherent in subjectivity and brings to light its perpetual exposure to its own unknown exterior as it is seen and constituted by the other. (shrink)

In this paper I explore some of the ramifications that thinking ecologically has on thinking about the human self, identity, and ethics. Inspired and informed by the work of the late Val Plumwood, I recommend new directions for Plumwood’s application of ecological continuity to human self-concept. I applaud Plumwood’s recognition of continuity as a key theoretical concept. Her work on revising selfhood in ways both 1) consistent with various insights of ecology, and 2) informed by oppression theory, is innovative and (...) a crucial theoretical move. Building on the work of Plumwood, I argue that an ecological self-concept should reflect dimensions of “open continuity” with the environment. Open continuity literally requires opening one’s self-concept in ways that require revising many presumptions of where one’s self leaves off and the other begins. The familiar notion of a clearly bound human self cannot serve as the hub of moral action and theory if it is to reflect key ecological insights. Attending to ecological selfhood reshapes human self-concept and the moral terrain. (shrink)

An understanding of autonomy has important significance in North American health care. Although a respect for autonomy is necessary to protect the self-determination and agency of birthing women in hospital settings, I suggest that enactments of autonomy that are independent of relationships offer only an incomplete interpretation of such a vital concept. In this article I explore an understanding of autonomy situated within the context of a relational birthing narrative. In so doing, autonomy becomes conceptualized as contextual and concrete, giving (...) rise to an embodied view of the birthing woman. (shrink)

This paper starts from an observation of our practices: when people are ascribed delusional beliefs or conspiracy beliefs, they tend to be excluded from shared epistemic projects relevant to the content of their beliefs. What might motivate this exclusion? One possibility is that delusional beliefs and conspiracy beliefs are considered as evidence of irrationality and pathology, and thus endorsing them suggests that one’s epistemic agency is compromised, at least in some contexts. One common argument for the irrational and pathological nature (...) of delusional beliefs and conspiracy beliefs lies in their being the outputs of faulty cognition. There are some areas of overlap in the cognitive antecedents of delusional beliefs and conspiracy beliefs as identified in the empirical literature. For instance, some biases and thinking styles have been correlated either with the adoption of delusional beliefs and conspiracy beliefs, or with the strength of conviction in such beliefs. The paper challenges the claim that, if delusional beliefs and conspiracy beliefs are the outputs of biased cognition, then it is justified to exclude people endorsing delusional beliefs and conspiracy beliefs from epistemic projects relevant to the content of their beliefs. The relevant biases and thinking styles are widespread in the non-clinical population, do not need to be part of a dysfunctional cognitive process, and can be adaptive in some contexts. (shrink)

Abstract In this paper I discuss one apparent counterexample to the rationality constraint on belief ascription. The fact that there are inconsistent believers does not seem compatible with the idea that only rational creatures can be ascribed beliefs. I consider Davidson's explanation of the possibility of inconsistent believers and claim that it involves a reformulation of the rationality constraint in terms of the believers' subscription to norms of rationality. I shall argue that Davidson's strategy is partially successful, but that the (...) emphasis on the notion of subscription badly fits with the motivations behind his theory of interpretation. (shrink)

Recent years have witnessed a concern among theological bioethicists that secular debate has grown increasingly "thin," and that "thick" religious traditions and their spokespersons have been correspondingly excluded. This essay disputes that analysis. First, religious and theological voices compete for public attention and effectiveness with the equally "thick" cultural traditions of modern science and market capitalism. The distinctive contribution of religion should be to emphasize social justice in access to the benefits of health care, challenging the for-profit global marketing of (...) research and biotechnology to wealthy consumers. Second, religion and theology have been and are still socially effective in sponsoring activism for practical change, both locally and globally. This claim will be supported with specific examples; with familiar concepts like subsidiarity and "mid- dle axioms"; and with recent analyses of "participatory democracy" and of emerging, decentralized forms of global governance. (shrink)

Karen Warren’s work has helped to transform the landscape of environmental philosophy, contributing theoretical grounding for Western ecofeminism and opening the range of theoretical perspectives one can adopt when doing Western environmental ethics. Although her work is laudable, there are substantive worries about how potential subjects of oppression are characterized in her later work. Warren’s work and relevant secondary literature can be used as a foil to illuminate inadequate justification for the failure to include all living entities as potential subjects (...) of the harm of oppression. The failure to provide conceptual room to include all entities that can rightfully be the potential subjects of oppression limits our understanding of oppression and the multiple ways in which it functions. Additionally, failure to attend to all potential subjects of oppression limits practical opportunities for anti-oppressive solidarity in political action. If oppression is correctly described as the harm of particular group members by others, and the class of living entities can be subjected to harm, then nonhuman living entities can potentially be subjects of oppression. The aim here is to provide conceptual support for the possibility that nonhuman life can be oppressed. (shrink)

By its very nature ethnography is an emergent methodology. To be ethical the ethnographer needs to manage research ethics in-situ. This need to manage ethical dilemmas as they arise often comes into conflict with increased ethical regulation and procedures from ethics review boards that require the researcher to foresee ethical quandaries before data collection commences. These regulations can constrain the emerging purpose of the study, evolving means of data collection and multifaceted ways of interacting with participants that are seen as (...) being the strengths of undertaking an ethnographic approach. 0The chapters in this volume problematise this tension and highlight the importance of managing ethics in-situ by reflecting on recently completed and current projects drawing out ethical dilemmas relating to data ownership, dissemination, representation, social justice and managing ethnographic studies in the midst of a global pandemic and Covid-19 lockdowns. 0Reflecting on these experiences of doing educational ethnography with children and young people, drawing on a diverse range of studies conducted in England, Scotland, South America, India, and the Basque Country, this volume argues that administrative and conceptual change is needed to ensure that ethics does not become a tick box exercise but that ethnographers commit fully to conscientiously managing ethics in-situ. (shrink)