Given the rise of genetic etiological beliefs regarding psychiatric disorders, a growing body of research has focused on trying to elucidate the effects that such explanatory frameworks might be having on how mental disorders are perceived by patients, clinicians, and the general public. Genetic and other biomedical explanations of mental disorders have long been seen as a potential tool in the efforts to destigmatize mental disorders, given the harshness of the widespread negative attitudes about them and the important negative clinical (...) and social impacts of this stigma. The conventional wisdom has appeared to be that because the effects of genes are seen as falling outside individual control, conceiving of mental disorders as caused by genes casts patients as blameless, thereby reducing stigmatization. Indeed, the results of experimental and correlational research have now robustly linked genetic and other biomedical explanations for mental disorders with reductions in the extent to which people are blamed for their psychiatric symptoms. However, research examining the impact of genetic and other biomedical explanations of mental disorders has also suggested that they can have significant downsides. The most consistently observed negative effect of these kinds of explanations is that they can apparently lead to the assumption that mental disorders are unlikely to improve or abate. Genetic and other biomedical explanations of mental disorders can also increase people’s confidence in the effectiveness of biomedical treatments (such as pharmacotherapy) but decrease their confidence in the effectiveness of “nonbiomedical” treatments (such as psychotherapy). (shrink)

Here I examine the major theories of ethical intuitions, focusing on the epistemic status of this class of intuitions. We cover self-evidence theory, seeming-state theory, and some of the recent contributions from experimental philosophy.

Recent debates within the autism advocacy community have raised difficult questions about who can credibly act as a representative of a particular population and what responsibilities that...

Patient and public involvement (PPI) has gained widespread support in health research and health policy circles, but there is little consensus on the precise meaning or justifications of PPI. We argue that an important step towards clarifying the meaning and justification for PPI is to split apart the familiar acronym and draw a distinction between patient and public involvement. Specifically, we argue that patient involvement should refer to the practice of involving individuals in health research or policy on the basis (...) of their experience with a particular condition, while public involvement should refer to the practice of involving individuals in health policy or research based on their status as members of a relevant population. Analyzing cases from the UK, Australia, and the USA, we show how our proposed distinction can deliver much needed clarity to conversations on PPI, while guiding the development and evaluation of future PPI‐based policies. (shrink)

In a recent article, Jecker and Ko propose that a capabilities approach can be useful as an ethical framework for evaluating the use of BCI applications. Jecker and Ko defend this application, in part, because a capabilities list is not necessarily unchanging, but can account for rapid enhancements in human abilities. In this commentary, I argue that, though the capabilities approach is provisional, its primary relevance for BCI emerges from the ways in which capabilities remain constant amidst changing human abilities.

Despite the ongoing need for managers to fire employees and the wide prevalence of downsizing and layoffs, little research has examined how the conduct of termination interviews affects employee reactions. The current research was designed to explore reactions to several commonly used termination interview practices. Two scenario-based experiments examined the effectiveness of having a third party (an HR manager or a security guard) present, mentioning the employee's positive characteristics and contributions, and using alone, discrete escort, or public escort modes of (...) exit from the interview. Perceptions of being treated with respect and empathy, levels of anger, and the likelihood of complaining to others and taking legal action were assessed. Support for the effectiveness of specific termination interview practices was mixed. Specifically, in Experiment 1, third party presence was viewed as demonstrating a lack of respect, whereas mentioning positive characteristics was generally viewed favorably. Experiment 2 showed the favorable effects of mentioning positive characteristics were eroded by a security guard escort from the interview, and actually reversed and became negative when that escort was public in nature. A public escort also produced the highest levels of anger. These results suggest that multiple aspects of the termination interview process should be considered carefully when developing managerial policies. (shrink)

It has become increasingly difficult for individuals to exercise meaningful control over the personal data they disclose to companies or to understand and track the ways in which that data is exchanged and used. These developments have led to an emerging consensus that existing privacy and data protection laws offer individuals insufficient protections against harms stemming from current data practices. However, an effective and ethically justified way forward remains elusive. To inform policy in this area, we propose the Ethical Data (...) Practices framework. The framework outlines six principles relevant to the collection and use of personal data—minimizing harm, fairly distributing benefits and burdens, respecting autonomy, transparency, accountability, and inclusion—and translates these principles into action-guiding practical imperatives for companies that process personal data. In addition to informing policy, the practical imperatives can be voluntarily adopted by companies to promote ethical data practices. (shrink)

This article argues against a leading cognitivist and moral interpretation of shame that is present in the philosophical literature. That standard view holds that shame is the felt-response to a loss of self-esteem, which is the result of negative self-assessment. I hold that shame is a heteronomous and primitive bodily affect that is perceptual rather than judgmental in nature. Shame results from the breakdown and thwarting of our desire for anonymous, unexceptional, and disattentive co-existence with others. I use the sociological (...) theory of Erving Goffman and the theory of shame found in philosophical anthropology to support this view. I also use the cases of shame and chronic shame that often accompany disability to show that shame is separable from negative self-assessment and, instead, emerges as an affective response to a world (of equipment, things, and people) that disallows unburdened and unreflective interpersonal equilibrium. (shrink)

For George Woodcock, the key to appreciating Colin Ward was first to understand the importance of Peter Kropotkin’s classic work Mutual Aid (1902). While images of the French Revolution and the Par...

This is a review of Eklund's book. It discusses his suggestion that "ardent realists" use the practical profiles of normative concepts to A) explain what it is for a concept to be normative, B) fix reference, and C) provide an extensional theory of normative properties. I argue that those sympathetic to ardent realism will be happier to focus on the way in which normativity presents itself to cognition, particularly that presentation of inherent, authoritative guidance, and whether that 1) explains what (...) it is for a concept to be normative, 2) fixes reference, 3) aptly characterizes the nature of normativity in the world, and perhaps 4) explains why normative thoughts have the Eklund-style normative roles—the practical profiles of things like motivation, preference, and intention—that they have. (shrink)

ABSTRACT After the tragedies of the twentieth century, the utopian impulse was subject to searching criticism by a host of liberal intellectuals including Karl Popper, Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, and Jacob Talmon. Looking to history and political philosophy, these thinkers impugned utopianism for so frequently destroying the freedoms it appeared to pursue. Defined by its theoretical contradictions, the utopian project, rooted in the politics of the Enlightenment, bore some responsibility for the totalitarianism and genocide that had shaped their lives. As (...) this critique became liberal orthodoxy, a heretic group of anarchist thinkers challenged these conclusions. While travelling some distance with the liberal critics, for Paul Goodman, Marie Louise Berneri, and Herbert Read, the twentieth century, rather than invalidating the utopian urge made its boldness and experimentalism all the more vital. Their act of heresy was defending utopianism as a central component of their anarchist critique of the present. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Unmastering Speech:Irony in Plato's PhaedrusMatthew S. Linck"So, my shall suffer what it deserves."—Phaedrus 242a1It is tempting, after one has reflected closely on the words and deeds of the Phaedrus, to read the dialogue as if Socrates had the whole conversation worked out from the first words. The art of Plato is such that the intricate cohesion of word and action reveals itself through many layers. Plato writes; and as (...) a writer he has the time and the means (written letters) to compose. But what is Socrates doing? He does not have the leisure to compose "over a long period of time" (228a). He is responding to particular individuals, in particular circumstances, in the moment. He is thinking on his feet. One might claim that this is actually the first deficiency of the dialogues, that they are artificial and unrealistic in this way. If the written text reveals itself as finely crafted in the subtlety of its inner connections, how seriously can we take the apparent spontaneity of the spoken discourse? My suggestion would be that we take this not as a fault of the dialogues, but rather as the first instance of Plato's irony. This may be Plato's supreme irony—the evocation of truth through artificiality.But that is already going too fast. I want to begin by looking at the words and deeds of Socrates and Phaedrus, without considering yet what Plato might be doing as the author of the dialogue. My first interpretive principle will be to take the drama at face value, as naturalistic, temporal, and even commonplace—two friends go for a walk in the countryside to listen to speeches.Immediately, however, the commonness is disrupted. The city, the commonwealth, is left behind. This is certainly uncommon for Socrates, who never leaves the city walls.2 Furthermore, the language of the text indicates a thematization of, out-of-placeness, strangeness. Rather than being accused of already violating my one hermeneutical principle, it should be noted that this indication of strangeness comes through the words [End Page 264] and deeds of the characters, not through a retrospective recovery of the dialogue as a whole. From the beginning the reader encounters a tension between the commonplace and the unusual.3Nevertheless, the impetus to move outside of the city is commonplace enough. Phaedrus has a speech that Socrates wants to hear. Before Socrates is told what this speech is about, he indicates that nothing would please him more than "hearing how you [Phaedrus] and Lysias passed the time" (227b). After Phaedrus, in his excitement, gives away the topic of the speech—"an attempted seduction of a handsome boy—but not by a lover!" (227c)—Socrates seems even more eager to hear the speech. Does Socrates already see what is to come? Is he merely excited to hear a speech, or is he excited about challenging the beautiful Phaedrus' excitement about a speech that defends an unworthy principle—"that one should gratify the one who does not love rather than the one who does" (227c)?After leaving the city and finding a comfortable place for their speech, for, Phaedrus reads his copy of Lysias' speech for Socrates. The gist of Lysias' speech, as Phaedrus has already announced, is that a young lover should associate himself with, and gratify, a non-lover rather than one who is in love. One central theme of the speech, which will be important for thinking about irony, is that of self-mastery. The recurring motif in Lysias' speech is that the lover is not in control of himself, while the non-lover is. Therefore (the non-lover argues) associating with a lover is unpredictable, and will most likely result in harm to the beloved. The non-lover claims that his self-control will prevent and preclude unforeseen harm. This slippage, from self-mastery to mastery of the situation, is decisive. We would be wrong to interpret Socrates' two speeches as wholesale rejections of everything in Lysias' speech. Socrates cannot reject self-control outright. His consistent concern with rules out simply espousing lack of control. Yet the measuredness of Socratic practice does not entail the... (shrink)

Normative cognition seems rather important, even ineliminable. Communities that lack normative concepts like SHOULD, IS A REASON TO, JUSTIFIES, etc. seem cognitively handicapped and communicatively muzzled. And yet a popular metaethic, normative naturalism, has a hard time accommodating this felt ineliminability. Here, I press the argument against normative naturalism, consider some replies on behalf of normative naturalists, and suggest that a version of sophisticated subjectivism does the best job preserving the importance and ineliminability of the special, normative way of thinking.

The movements by national governments, funding agencies, universities, and research communities toward “open data” face many difficult challenges. In high-level visions of open data, researchers’ data and metadata practices are expected to be robust and structured. The integration of the internet into scientific institutions amplifies these expectations. When examined critically, however, the data and metadata practices of scholarly researchers often appear incomplete or deficient. The concepts of “accountability” and “transparency” provide insight in understanding these perceived gaps. Researchers’ primary accountabilities are (...) related to meeting the expectations of research competency, not to external standards of data deposition or metadata creation. Likewise, making data open in a transparent way can involve a significant investment of time and resources with no obvious benefits. This paper uses differing notions of accountability and transparency to conceptualize “open data” as the result of ongoing achievements, not one-time acts. (shrink)

China and Islam examines the intersection of two critical issues of the contemporary world: Islamic revival and an assertive China, questioning the assumption that Islamic law is incompatible with state law. It finds that both Hui and the Party-State invoke, interpret, and make arguments based on Islamic law, a minjian law in China, to pursue their respective visions of 'the good'. Based on fieldwork in Linxia, 'China's Little Mecca', this study follows Hui clerics, youthful translators on the 'New Silk Road', (...) female educators who reform traditional madrasas, and Party cadres as they reconcile Islamic and socialist laws in the course of the everyday. The first study of Islamic law in China and one of the first ethnographic accounts of law in postsocialist China, China and Islam unsettles unidimensional perceptions of extremist Islam and authoritarian China through Hui minjian practices of law. (shrink)

Here I present and defend an etiological theory of objective, doxastic justification, and related theories of defeat and evidence. The theory is intended to solve a problem for reliabilist epistemologies— the problem of identifying relevant environments for assessing a process's reliability. It is also intended to go some way to accommodating, neutralizing, or explaining away many internalist-friendly elements in our epistemic thinking.

This article delineates the core concerns and motivations of the ontological work of Gilles Deleuze, and is intended as a programmatic statement for a general philosophical audience. The article consists of two main parts. In the first, two early writings by Deleuze are analysed in order to clarify his understanding of ontology broadly, and to specify the precise aim of his understanding of being in terms of difference. The second part of the article looks at the work of Heidegger and (...) Derrida in order to distinguish Deleuze's conceptions of ontology and difference from theirs. A final section clarifies Deleuze's efforts to undertake the construction of an ontology divergent from the dominant tradition and in contrast to the emphasis on the closure of metaphysics in the thought of Heidegger and Derrida. (shrink)

Biomedical research funding bodies across Europe and North America increasingly encourage—and, in some cases, require—investigators to involve members of the public in funded research. Yet there remains a striking lack of clarity about what ‘good’ or ‘successful’ public involvement looks like. In an effort to provide guidance to investigators and research organisations, representatives of several key research funding bodies in the UK recently came together to develop the National Standards for Public Involvement in Research. The Standards have critical implications for (...) the future of biomedical research in the UK and in other countries as researchers and funders abroad look to the Standards as a model for their own policy development. We assess the Standards and find that despite offering useful suggestions for dealing with practical challenges associated with public involvement, the Standards fail to address fundamental questions about when, why and with whom public involvement should be undertaken in the first place. We show that presented without this justificatory context, many of the recommendations in the Standards are, at best, fragments that require substantial elaboration by those looking to apply the Standards in their own work and, at worst, subject to potentially harmful misapplication by well-meaning investigators. As funding bodies increasingly push for public involvement in research, the key lesson of our analysis is that future recommendations about how public involvement should be conducted cannot be coherently formulated without a clear sense of the underlying goals and rationales for public involvement. (shrink)

There are a number of proposals as to exactly how reasons, ends and rationality are related. It is often thought that practical reasons can be analyzed in terms of practical rationality, which, in turn, has something to do with the pursuit of ends. I want to argue against the conceptual priority of rationality and the pursuit of ends, and in favor of the conceptual priority of reasons. This case comes in two parts. I first argue for a new conception of (...) ends by which all ends are had under the guise of reasons. I then articulate a sense of rationality, procedural rationality, that is connected with the pursuit of ends so conceived, where one is rational to the extent that one is motivated to act in accordance with reasons as they appear to be. Unfortunately, these conceptions of ends and procedural rationality are inadequate for building an account of practical reasons, though I try to explain why it is that the rational pursuit of ends generates intuitive but misleading accounts of genuine normative reasons. The crux of the problem is an insensitivity to an is-seems distinction, where procedural rationality concerns reasons as they appear, and what we are after is a substantive sense of rationality that concerns reasons as they are. Based on these distinct senses of rationality, and some disambiguation of what it is to have a reason, I offer a critique of internalist analyses of one’s reasons in terms of the motivational states of one’s ideal, procedurally rational self, and I offer an alternative analysis of one’s practical reasons in terms of practical wisdom that overcomes objections to related reasons externalist views. The resulting theory is roughly Humean about procedural rationality and roughly Aristotelian about reasons, capturing the core truths of both camps. (shrink)

Here I discuss the conceptual structure and core semantic commitments of reason-involving thought and discourse needed to underwrite the claim that ethical normativity is not uniquely queer. This deflates a primary source of ethical scepticism and it vindicates so-called partner in crime arguments. When it comes to queerness objections, all reason-implicating normative claims—including those concerning Humean reasons to pursue one's ends, and epistemic reasons to form true beliefs—stand or fall together.

This paper considers normative naturalism, understood as the view that (i) normative sentences are descriptive of the way things are, and (ii) their truth/falsity does not require ontology beyond the ontology of the natural world. Assuming (i) for the sake of argument, I here show that (ii) is false not only as applied to ethics, but more generally as applied to practical and epistemic normativity across the board. The argument is a descendant of Moore's Open Question Argument and Hume's Is-Ought (...) Gap. It goes roughly as follows: to ensure that natural ontology suffices for normative truth, there must be semantically grounded entailments from the natural truths to the normative truths. There are none. So natural ontology does not suffice for normative truth. (shrink)

Economic theory assumes that preferences are rational. However, experiments have found small violations of transitivity. This paper develops a model of rationality with preference discovery costs. Introspection is costly. Thus, agents may find it optimal to use less than full effort, even though this raises the risk of making a poor choice. This model could potentially explain the intransitivities observed in the data while retaining rationality and optimization.

In the spirit of Slavoj Žižek’s book, Hegel in a Wired Brain, this article asks how the questions central to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics are changed and complicated by the possibility of brain-to-brain communication and the datafication of thought made potential through brain-computer interfaces. By taking a phenomenological approach to understanding the nature of communication through a technology that does not require language for the transmission of ideas, this article explores how BCI communication confronts the ontological character of interpretation as (...) presented by Gadamer while also juxtaposing how the insights of Gadamer and Heidegger concerning temporality problematize materialist foundations of BCI communication. In the final analysis, it is argued that thought only becomes meaningful in accord with the temporality of Dasein and that hermeneutics remains central in BCI communication because the material replication of thought does not overcome the particular temporalities of historically effected consciousnesses. (shrink)

Moral Supervenience says that there can be no moral difference without a descriptive difference. This has been considered one of the least controversial principles in ethics. Explaining it has been a central desideratum. And yet an increasingly popular metaethical view appears to be incompatible with it. According to Moral Contingency, there are metaphysically contingent pure moral principles helping to ground particular moral facts. On such a view, it looks like there can be a difference in pure moral principles without a (...) descriptive difference. This looks like a moral difference without a descriptive difference. Are those who find both Moral Supervenience and Moral Contingency plausible faced with a difficult choice? Many contingentists think so, but I am here to argue that they are mistaken. The two principles are compatible after all, for differences in pure moral principle entail descriptive differences. (shrink)

Colin Ward is not necessarily a gift for the biographer. As Sophie Scott-Brown’s engaging study reminds us, one of his defining characteristics was a thoroughgoing humility, and one consequence of...

This commentary on Daniel Stader's recent article, “Algorithms Don't Have a Future: On the Relation of Judgement and Calculation” develops and complicates his argument by suggesting that algorithms ossify multiple kinds of prejudices, namely, the structural prejudices of the programmer and the exemplary prejudices of the dataset. This typology at once suggests that the goal of transparency may be impossible, but this impossibility enriches the possibilities for developing Stader's concept of reflected prejudiced use.

Scholars have failed to adequately distinguish Kant’s grades of evil: frailty (weakness of will), impurity, and depravity. I argue that the only way to distinguish them is, f irstly, to recognize that frailty is explicitly, practically irrational and not caused by any sort of self-deception. Instead, it is caused by the radical evil that Kant finds within the character of all persons. Secondly, impurity can only be understood to be self-deception either about the nature of the act itself, which results (...) in an epistemic error, or about one’s motivations for following a properly reasoned, moral conclusion, which results in a motivational error. Thirdly, depravity is self-deception about morality itself, by which the agent believes that it is morally right to follow self-love. (shrink)