New approaches in the design of information technologies for work practices are drawing upon theories from sociology, anthropology, and social philosophy. Under the labels of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Participatory Design, work is done to "neturn" to design insights gained in the social study of the use of technological artifacts. Aftera brief introduction of these developments, the article zooms in on those authors for whom "better" technologies refer to hopes for more democratic and more worker-oriented workplaces. How do these approaches (...) conceptualize "humans, " "machines, " and their interrelation in work practices? The conceptual engine which generates the analytical and political power of this approach, I argue, thrives upon the assertion of an ontological difference between the realms of "technology" and "human work. " What are the consequences of such conceptualizations for design? How do different ways of depicting "technology" and "work practice" yield different politics of technology? (shrink)

Formal tools are attributed central roles in organizing work within many modern workplaces. How should one comprehend the power of these tools? Taking the medical record as an example, this article builds on recent calls to overcome the dichotomy between the formal and the informal and proposes an understanding of the generative power of such tools that does not attribute mythical capacities to either tool or human work. To do so, it is important to look both at the history offormal (...) tools and to their real-time use in concrete work practices. These steps toward a sociology of the formal are crucial for a more comprehensive understanding and evaluation offormal systems in practice. (shrink)

Health authorities increasingly request that general practitioners use information and communication technologies such as electronic patient records for accountability purposes. This article deals with the use of EPRs among general practitioners in Britain. It examines two ways in which GPs use the EPR for accountability purposes. One way is to generate audit reports on the basis of the information that has been entered into the record. The other is to let the computer intervene in the clinical process through prompts. The (...) article argues that GPs' ambivalence toward using the EPR makes them active in finding ways that turn the EPR into a meaningful tool for them, that is, a tool that helps them provide what they see as good care. The article's main contribution is to show how accountability and autonomy are coproduced; less professional autonomy does not follow from more requests to document one's work. Instead, new forms of autonomy are produced in the sociotechnical network that is made up by health policy and local engagements with patients and technology. (shrink)

The Royal Dutch Medical Association recently completed a researchproject aimed at investigating how guidelines for `appropriatemedical care' should be construed. The project took as a startingpoint that explicit attention should be given to ethical andpolitical considerations in addition to data about costs andeffectiveness. In the project, two research groups set out todesign guidelines and cost-effectiveness analyses (CEAs) for twocircumscribed medical areas (angina pectoris and majordepression). Our third group was responsible for the normativeanalysis. We undertook an explorative, qualitative pilot study ofthe (...) normative considerations that played a role in constructingthe guidelines and CEAs, and simultaneously interviewedspecialists about the normative considerations that guided theirdiagnostic and treatment decisions. Explicating normativeconsiderations, we argue, is important democratically: the issuesat stake should not be left to decision analysts and guidelinedevelopers to decide. Moreover, it is a necessary condition for asuccessful implementation of such tools: those who draw uponthese tools will only accept them when they can recognizethemselves in the considerations implied. Empirical normativeanalysis, we argue, is a crucial tool in developing guidelinesfor appropriate medical care. (shrink)

This article discusses the emergence of the modern body, as portrayed by Foucault, in early 20th-century medical practice. Specifically, this article argues how the coming of the patient-centered record in the United States was a pivotal event in this emergence. We argue how the shape and functions that the record acquired during this period was fundamentally intertwined with the new shape that both the patient’s body and medical institutions acquired. We zoom in on two specific examples: the re-historizing and subjectifying (...) of the body, both afforded by new record-keeping practices. The topic addressed here is the embodying of the patient: the production of a patient with a body whose characteristics are the effect of the interrelation of the patient with a growing number of professionals and investigative instruments, and with a medical record which becomes more and more significant in these interrelations. (shrink)

Modelling nursing activities: electronic patient records and their discontents A fully integrated and operating EPR in a clinical setting is hard to find: most applications can be found in outpatient or general practice settings or in isolated hospital wards. In clinical work practice problems with the electronic patient record (EPR) are frequent. These problems are at least partially due to the models of health care work embedded in EPRs. In this paper we will argue that these problems are at least (...) partially due to the models of health care work embedded in current EPRs. We suggest that these models often contain projections of nurses’ and doctors’ work as it should be performed on the ward, rather than depicting how work is actually performed. We draw upon sociological insights to elucidate the fluid and pragmatic nature of healthcare work and give recommendations for the development of an empirically based EPR, which can support the work of nurses and other health care providers. We argue that these issues are of great importance to the nursing profession, since the EPR will help define the worksettings of the future. Since it is a tool that will impact the development of the nursing profession, nurses have and should have a stake in its development. (shrink)

I. Pragmatismus und Neukantianismus Marc Rölli: Die Durchquerung des Absoluten. Zur Hegel-Rezeption John Deweys Wolfgang Bonsiepen: Hegel und der Neukantianismus Matthias Wunsch: Phänomenologie des Symbolischen? Die Hegelrezeption Ernst Cassirers II. Phänomenologie - Ontologie - Lebensphilosophie Annette Sell: Das Geheimnis des Anfangs. Die Aufnahme des Hegelschen Anfangsbegriffs in der Philosophie Martin Heideggers Hans-Ulrich Lessing: Hegel und Helmuth Plessner: Die verpaßte Rezeption Walter Jaeschke: Der Geist und sein Sein. Nicolai Hartmann auf Hegelschen Wegen Holger Glinka: Aus Phänomenologie mach Dialektik. Jean-Paul Sartres (...) Anverwandlung Hegels III. Marxistische Tradition und kritische Theorie Andreas Arndt: Lenin liest Hegel Daniel Althof: Das "Geklapper der Triplizität" - Adornos Hegelrezeption Christoph J. Bauer: Mit Hegel gegen den 'Positivismus' - mit Hegel zum 'Wesen des Menschen'. Herbert Marcuses Interpretation der Hegelschen Urteilslehre IV. Postmoderne und Gegenwart Karin de Boer: Differenz: zwischen Hegel und Derrida Robert B. Pippin: Brandoms Hegel. (shrink)

Social scientists widely believe that trust begets trustworthiness, meaning that persons reward actions that they view as expressing trust. But evidence from the trust game (also known as the investment game)—introduced by Berg, Dickhaut, and McCabe and frequently used to test this relationship—is surprisingly inconclusive. The present article therefore reexamines this hypothesis (Experiment 1), using the trust game but incorporating mediation analysis and distinguishing between trust and distrust effects. The trust game has been used to study the effects of trust (...) within a relationship: when A trusts B, does this affect B’s behavior toward A? This research (in Experiment 2) extends the question: when A trusts B, is B more likely to trust another player C in a second (unrelated) game? If so, then trust relationships have a transitive structure. Taken together, findings from these experiments show that trust begets trustworthiness and also trust in others. (shrink)

A long tradition of discourse and practice claims that technology designers need to take note of the characteristics and aspirations of potential users in design. Practitioners in the field of user-centered design have developed methods to facilitate this process. These methods represent interesting vehicles for the pursuit of normative politics of technology. In this article, the authors use a case study of the introduction and use of UCD methods in Australia to explore the politics of getting the methods to work (...) in practice. Drawing on the work of Bruno Latour and Marc Berg, the authors argue that UCD methods are tools for engendering new forms of socio-technical relations. However, their normative potential does not arise out of their ability to manipulate abstract categories such as user, technology, and workplace. Instead, it arises out of the complex and unpredictable socio-technical mixes that are generated when people attempt to put them into practice. (shrink)

Berg, J. Buñuels dagdröm.--Bergström, L. Pessimismens konsekvenser.--Furberg, M. Möjliga teser hos Johannes Climacus.--Halldén, S. Teckenrelationen och språkreglernas juridik.--Hedenius, I. Ett argument mot den rättsfilosofiska domstolsrealismen.--Mates, B. Om Platons argument "den tredje människan."--Marc-Wogau, K. Kant om lögnen.--Næss, A. Om filosofiske projekter som forener empirisk semantikk og metafysisk spekulasjon.--Ofstad, H. Får nazister lettere magesår enn humanister?--Prawitz, D. Om moraliska och logiska satsers sanning.--Stenius, E. Om Descartes' psykofysiska modell.--Tranøy, K. E. Filosofenes etiske ansvar.--Wright, G. H. von. En filosof ser på filosofien.

This paper defends a reading of Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics in the Lectures on the Foundation of Mathematics as a radical conventionalist one, whereby our agreement about the particular case is constitutive of our mathematical practice and ‘the logical necessity of any statement is a direct expression of a convention’ (Dummett 1959, p. 329). -/- On this view, mathematical truths are conceptual truths and our practices determine directly for each mathematical proposition individually whether it is true or false. Mathematical truths (...) are thus not consequences of a prior adoption of a convention or rules as orthodox conventionalism has it. -/- The goal of the paper is not merely exegetical, however, and argues that radical conventionalism can withstand some of the most difficult objections that have been brought forward against it, including those of Dummett himself, and thus that radical conventionalism has been prematurely excluded from consideration by philosophers of mathematics. (shrink)

In The Slow Professor, Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber discuss how adopting the principles of the Slow movement in academic life can counter the erosion of humanistic education.

In this paper, I offer a close reading of Wittgenstein's remarks on inconsistency, mostly as they appear in the Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics. I focus especially on an objection to Wittgenstein's view given by Alan Turing, who attended the lectures, the so-called ‘falling bridges’-objection. Wittgenstein's position is that if contradictions arise in some practice of language, they are not necessarily fatal to that practice nor necessitate a revision of that practice. If we then assume that we have adopted (...) a paraconsistent logic, Wittgenstein's answer to Turing is that if we run into trouble building our bridge, it is either because we have made a calculation mistake or our calculus does not actually describe the phenomenon it is intended to model. The possibility of either kind of error is not particular to contradictions nor inconsistency, and thus contradictions do not have any special status as a thing to be avoided. (shrink)

The effective altruism movement (EA) is one of the most influential philosophically savvy movements to emerge in recent years. Effective Altruism has historically been dedicated to finding out what charitable giving is the most overall-effective, that is, the most effective at promoting or maximizing the impartial good. But some members of EA want the movement to be more inclusive, allowing its members to give in the way that most effectively promotes their values, even when doing so isn’t overall-effective. When we (...) examine what it means to give according to one’s values, I argue, we will see that this is both inconsistent with what EA is like now and inconsistent with its central philosophical commitment to an objective standard that can be used to critically analyze one’s giving. While EA is not merely synonymous with act utilitarianism, it cannot be much more inclusive than it is right now. (shrink)

In this interview with Jan Hendrik van den Berg, the Dutch phenomenologist and psychiatrist addresses the origins of his work, his most significant influences, and the purpose of metabletic phenomenology in the modern age. In the course of the interview. Dr. Van den Berg provides a basic overview of his work, and highlights the central finding of his metabletic analyses: a loss of wonder before nature, which results from the more fundamental loss of genuine spirituality in the modern world.

It has been widely accepted that Kant holds the “Opacity Thesis,” the claim that we cannot know the ultimate grounds of our actions. Understood in this way, I shall argue, the Opacity Thesis is at odds with Kant's account of practical self-consciousness, according to which I act from the (always potentially conscious) representation of principles of action and that, in particular, in acting from duty I act in consciousness of the moral law's determination of my will. The Opacity Thesis thus (...) threatens to render acting from duty unintelligible. To diffuse the threat, I argue, first, that we need not attribute the Opacity Thesis to Kant. Kant's concern with the ubiquity of moral self-opacity does not imply the strong skeptical conclusion that knowledge of the grounds of one's action is impossible. Second, I show how moral self-opacity in cases of morally bad action emerges from the intrinsic inability of representing oneself, insofar as one is pursuing the indeterminate end of “happiness.” Thus, moral self-opacity does not undermine the will's self-consciousness but is born of it. (shrink)

Narrativists about well-being claim that our lives go better for us if they make good stories—if they exhibit cohesion, thematic consistency, and narrative arc. Yet narrativism leads to mistaken assessments of well-being: prioritizing narrative makes it harder to balance and change pursuits, pushes us toward one-dimensionality, and can’t make sense of the diversity of good lives. Some ways of softening key narrativist claims mean that the view can’t tell us very much about how to live a good life that we (...) can’t find in other theories of well-being; while there are smaller-scale ways we can incorporate narrativist insights into our views of well-being, narrativism should not be a universal organizing principle for our lives. (shrink)

This paper centers two complementary theoretical approaches to advance the debate about transgender women’s inclusion in elite women’s sports – namely, non-ideal theory and cultural studies. In doing so, the paper highlights divisions between ideal theory and non-ideal theory, normative internalism in sports and normative externalism in sports, and essentialist views of sports compared to non-essentialist views of sports. The paper’s main agenda is to show the value of applying non-ideal theory, externalism, and non-essentialism to the discourse over transgender inclusion.

Kant’s account of the feeling of moral respect has notoriously puzzled interpreters: on the one hand, moral action is supposed to be autonomous and, in particular, free of the mediation of any feeling on the other hand, the subject’s grasp of the law somehow involves the feeling of moral respect. I argue that moral respect for Kant is not, pace both the ‘intellectualists’ and ‘affectivists,’ an effect of the determination of the will by the law – whether it be a (...) mere effect or the motivating cause of action – but is instead identical to it. Drawing on Kant’s general account of feeling as the awareness of how representations and their objects harm or benefit our own powers, I argue that the identity between moral respect and the determination to action contains two elements. Moral respect is, first, a form of practical self-consciousness which constitutes the subject’s recognition of the moral law and thus of herself as intrinsically bound by it, i. e., as a moral agent. Second, respect is a capacity for receptive awareness of particular features of our environment as well as other persons insofar as they benefit and harm us as moral agents. Thereby moral respect affords us awareness in concreto of particular, morally-conditioned ends. In this way moral respect provides the key for a Kantian account of genuinely free practical receptivity. (shrink)

What is the best way to make sustained societal progress over time? Non-ideal theory done on its own faces the problem of second best, but ideal theory seems unable to cope with disagreement about how to make progress. If ideal theory gives up its claims to completeness, then we can use the method of incompletely theorized agreements to make progress over time.

When we can’t live up to the ultimate standards of morality, how can moral theory give us guidance? We can distinguish between ideal and non-ideal theory to see that there are different versions of the voluntarist constraint, ‘ought implies can.’ Ideal moral theory identifies the best standard, so its demands are constrained by one version. Non-ideal theory tells us what to do given our psychological and motivational shortcomings and so is constrained by others. Moral theory can now both provide an (...) ultimate standard and give us guidance; this view also gives us new insights into demandingness and blame. (shrink)

Genetic testing is currently subject to little oversight, despite the significant ethical issues involved. Repeated recommendations for increased regulation of the genetic testing market have led to little progress in the policy arena. A 2005 Internet search identified 13 websites offering health-related genetic testing for direct purchase by the consumer. Further examination of these sites showed that overall, biotech companies are not providing enough information for consumers to make well-informed decisions; they are not consistently offering genetic counseling services; and some (...) sites even offer tests with little evidence of clinical value. This article aims to raise company and consumer awareness about the ethical concerns surrounding the direct-to-consumer marketing of health-related genetic tests. It also suggests ways that biotech companies can bring their services to the public in an ethically responsible manner, without increased regulatory oversight. (shrink)

Kant is well known for his restrictive conception of proper science. In the present paper I will try to explain why Kant adopted this conception. I will identify three core conditions which Kant thinks a proper science must satisfy: systematicity, objective grounding, and apodictic certainty. These conditions conform to conditions codified in the Classical Model of Science. Kant’s infamous claim that any proper natural science must be mathematical should be understood on the basis of these conditions. In order to substantiate (...) this reading, I will show that only in this way it can be explained why Kant thought (1) that mathematics has a particular foundational function with respect to the natural sciences and (2) as such secures their scientific status. (shrink)

ABSTRACTEvidence-based practice in psychology is ordinarily understood to demarcate between legitimate and illegitimate psychotherapy practice, based upon the epistemic demarcation distingui...

Journal of Political Philosophy, EarlyView.

In this paper the importance of public affairs management in multinational corporations in India will be examined. After briefly discussing the state of the art in international business and society literature, a conceptual framework for public affairs management in multinational corporations will be developed. This framework serves as the theoretical basis for an empirical study among German multinational corporations in India. In the main part of this paper the results of this study will be presented and discussed. The paper ends (...) with a critical assessment and some major implications for future studies. (shrink)

In this article, I present the arguments of three republican women philosophers of eighteenth-century France, focusing especially on two themes: equality (of class, gender, and race) and the family. I argue that these philosophers, Olympe de Gouges, Marie-Jeanne Phlipon Roland, and Sophie de Grouchy, who are interesting and original in their own right, belong to the neo-republican tradition and that re-discovering their texts is an opportunity to reflect on women’s perspectives on the ideas that shaped our current political thought.

In Direct Belief I argue for the Theory of Direct Belief, which treats having a belief about an individual as an unmediated relation between the believer and the individual the belief is about. After a critical review of alternative positions, I use Grice’s theory of conversational implicature to provide a detailed pragmatic account of substitution failure in belief ascriptions and go on to defend this view against objections, including those based on an unwarranted “Inner Speech” Picture of Thought. The work (...) serves as a case study in pragmatic explanation, dealing also with methodological issues about context-sensitivity in language and the relation between semantics and pragmatics. (shrink)

A popular view in metasemantics is the view that a speaker’s dispositions regarding the use of a symbol determine the meaning of that symbol for the speaker. Kripke (Wittgenstein on rules and private language, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1982) arguments against simple versions of semantic dispositionalism have inspired ever new versions. A recent account in the literature, due to Warren (Noûs 54(2):257–289, 2020) offers a sophisticated version of semantic dispositionalism whereby certain conditions are imposed on speaker’s dispositions to count as (...) meaning determining—conditions we can refer to as ‘standard’. In this paper, I argue that there are a number of cases that suggest that even under such conditions, a speaker’s meaning and their dispositions can come apart, and that this suggests that dispositional accounts of semantic content presuppose that there are semantic norms, independent of a speaker’s dispositions, and thus do not explain semantic content. I conclude that, since these problems generalise to non-standard dispositionalist accounts, the dispositionalist’s prospects are dim. (shrink)

There are inherent difficulties in a subject like chemistry particularly the notion of a chemical reaction. In this paper the difficulties are discussed from a teaching and learning perspective and from a history of chemistry perspective. Three teaching/learning studies of the incompleteness of the iron thiocyanate reaction in chemical equilibrium are reviewed and it is shown that a recent historical study of the iron thiocyanate reaction has the potential to challenge the interpretation of the incompleteness of the reaction. This establishes (...) a controversial context where students can be introduced to epistemic thinking, that is, how to interrogate chemistry data and form a conclusion which resonates with what we know about the nature of science. A curriculum suggestion for pre-service chemistry teachers is provided. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 46, no. 2. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 259 Heather Berg Left of #MeToo In her 1949 call to “End the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!” Claudia Jones tells the story of Dora Jones, a Black domestic worker enslaved for forty years by her employer.1 Elizabeth Ingalls, a wealthy white woman, had traveled to Dora Jones’s Alabama home as a missionary teacher and (...) persuaded the seventeen-year-old Jones to travel to Boston as her housekeeper in 1907. Ingalls would keep Jones captive until 1947. In the intervening years, Ingalls subjected Jones to routine physical abuse and an endless expanse of intensive, unpaid domestic labor. With no days off and permitted to leave only for errands, Jones was allowed no personal relationships or contact with the outside world. Ingalls’s first husband, the bureaucrat Walter Harman, raped Jones over the course of three years, and Jones became pregnant.2 Ingalls would term this an “affair” and, as court documents showed, pushed Jones to “submit” to an abortion.3 Later, when Jones protested her abusive conditions and attempted to escape, Ingalls blackmailed her, threatening 1. Claudia Jones, “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!” Political Affairs (June 1949): 11. 2. I am inferring non-consent based on Jones’s captivity. On unfreedom and the politics of consent, see Saidiya Hartman, “Seduction and the Ruses of Power,” Callaloo 19, no. 2 (1996): 537–60. 3. United States v. Ingalls et al., Cr. No. 10568-SD (District Court, S.D. California, July 29, 1947). 260 Heather Berg to “commit Jones to prison” for interracial “adultery” and the abortion she had as a result. Jones finally won her freedom in 1947, a year after Ingalls’s adult daughter reported her mother to the police.4 Claudia Jones offers Dora Jones’s story as evidence of the exceptional precarity of Black women domestic workers. Like others in her cohort of “black left feminists” (to borrow Erik McDuffie’s term), Jones focused on domestic work as a field that epitomized the “triple oppression” at which she took aim.5 Sexual violence at work is not exceptional in Claudia Jones’s telling. Instead, it operates alongside a catalog of abuses at the intersection of capitalism, state terror, the degradation of women, imperialism, and white supremacy. An active member of the Communist Party, Jones insisted on thinking these systems together, maintaining that only through collective struggle against them could justice be won. Women would not be comrades in that struggle in any simple way. Jones was sharply critical of the idea that Black women’s oppression could be explained by “the rotten bourgeois notion about a ‘battle of the sexes.’”6 Instead, she urged working-class Black people to fight “against their common oppressors, the white ruling class.”7 Solidarity among women was illusory, in part, because of white women’s roles as employers of Black women’s domestic work. Against a narrative of sexual violence that describes simple dominance by men over women, Dora Jones’s story highlights the ways that systems of domination work together to enable abuse. Her suffering was not the same as that visited on bourgeois white women. Instead, it was perpetrated and enabled by one. There is no sisterhood to be found here. A critique of this framework is now common sense in most feminist circles, and yet the loudest feminist intervention in recent years trades in exactly the “bourgeois notion about a ‘battle of the sexes.’” Some seventy years after “An End to the Neglect’s” publication, the #MeToo movement has brought broad international attention to 4. For an overview of the case and its legal legacy, see Risa L. Goluboff, The Lost Promise of Civil Rights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 162–5. 5. Erik S. McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 9. 6. Jones, “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!” 13. 7. Ibid. Heather Berg 261 the problem of workplace sexual violence. In 2006, civil rights activist Tarana Burke founded an anti-violence movement based... (shrink)

InLe Bonheur Primitif, Olympe de Gouges takes on Rousseau's account of the evolution of human society in his first twoDiscourses, and she argues that primitive human beings were not only happy, but also capable of virtue. I argue that in that text, Gouges offers a contribution to the eighteenth-century debate on human progress that is distinct from Rousseau's in that it takes seriously the contribution of women and families to human happiness and progress. I show how the concept of emulation (...) plays an important role in Gouges's analysis, both in her account of primitive societies and of the theater, and argue that she uses it to bridge the gap between primitive happiness and future progress. (shrink)

InWord and Object W. V. Quine argues that there is no uniquely correct way to assign referents to the terms of a language; any claim about the reference of a term is implicitly relative to a manual of translation. To Rudolf Carnap this must have seemed familiar. BeforeWord and Object was written Carnap had been saying the same thing inMeaning and Necessity: under the assumption of the method of the name-relation, any claim about the reference of a term is implicitly (...) relative to what Carnap calls a conception of the name-relation. Yet Carnap is often taken to be a victim of Quine's relativistic notion of reference. Drawing on Carnap's discussion of the name-relation inMeaning and Necessity, it is argued that Carnap's and Quine's views on reference are not so far apart as is usually perceived. (shrink)

Jerry Fodor and Ernie LePore argue against inferential role semantics on the grounds that either it relies on an analytic/synthetic distinction vulnerable to Quinean objections, or else it leads to a variety of meaning holism frought with absurd consequences. However, the slide from semantic atomism to meaning holism might be prevented by distinctions not affected by Quine's arguments against analyticity; and the absurd consequences Fodor and LePore attribute to meaning holism obtain only on an implausible construal of inferential roles.

One of David Estlund’s key claims in Utopophobia is that theories of justice should not bend to human motivational limitations. Yet he does not extend this view to our cognitive limitations. This creates a dilemma. Theories of justice may ignore cognitive as well as motivational limitations—but this makes them so unrealistic as to be unrecognizable as theories of justice. Theories may bend to both cognitive and motivational limitations—but Estlund wants to reject this view. The other alternative is to find some (...) non-ad hoc way to distinguish cognitive from motivational limitations. I argue that this strategy will not work. Just as a person’s cognitive limitations may block her motives no matter how much she perseveres, so too motivational limitations may be genuine inabilities. Even ideal theories of justice must bend to even ordinary motivational limitations when they truly cause us to be unable to comply with requirements. (shrink)

It seems as though we have a duty to read the news – that we’re doing something wrong when we refuse to pay attention to what’s going on in the world. But why? I argue that some plausible justifications for a duty to read the news fail to fully explain this duty: it cannot be justified only by reference to its consequences, or as a duty of democratic citizenship, or as a self-regarding duty. It can, however, be justified on the (...) grounds that we have a positive, imperfect duty of respect for strangers, even when our actions don’t affect them directly. Reading the news is a key way, sometimes the only way, that we can respect those who are strangers to us. I close by considering some of the implications and limitations of this duty. (shrink)