“You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” These are some of the most quoted lines written by Samuel Beckett, which speak to the impulse of persevering in times of crisis and impossibility. Yet few readers of Beckett agree about what this paradoxical formula could mean, let alone what mode of engagement it would seem to indicate, be it committed, autonomous, or something else entirely. This volume of essays explores what that mode of engagement could be, all (...) the while elucidating the ethical and political stakes of the “ongoing” in both Beckett’s life and work. Across multiple disciplines in the humanities, the authors delve into questions of political subjectivity and representation, the ethics of powerlessness and refusal, the aesthetics of syncopation and destitution, multimedia experiments between genre, as well as Beckett’s wider impact on transnational itineraries of modernism and philosophy up to the contemporary. (shrink)

This book taps the best American thinkers to answer the essential American question: How do we sustain our experiment in government of, by, and for the people? Authored by an extraordinary and politically diverse roster of public officials, scholars, and educators, these chapters describe our nation's civic education problem, assess its causes, offer an agenda for reform, and explain the high stakes at risk if we fail.

ABSTRACTHow should we conceive of a right to reproduce? And, morally speaking, what might be said to justify such a right? These are just two questions of interest that are raised by the technologies of assisted reproduction. This paper analyses the possible legitimate grounds for a right to reproduce within the two main theories of rights; interest theory and choice theory.

Joseph Raz’s service conception of law remains one of the best known theories of political authority. Setting aside ongoing debates about the nature of authority, I locate a problem in the basic justificatory structure of the service conception. I show that the service justification of the state does not yield the conclusion that the law generates exclusionary reasons, which are meant to be the key hallmark of authority. An automatic but defeasible _habit _of obeying the state is likely to lead (...) to better outcomes than exclusionary deference to the state. Given the instrumental justification of the service conception, this means that exclusionary reasons to defer do not obtain. Habituation and automaticity have been developed in other contexts and are here extended to the context of political authority. The possibility of habitual obedience undercuts Raz's theory while suggesting a new approach to the question of political authority. (shrink)

An increasing portion of contemporary politics revolves around a set of claims made by those (typically derisively) referred to as NIMBYs. Despite its practical significance, NIMBYism has not received significant attention in academic philosophy. I attempt a charitable but limited reconstruction of NIMBYism in terms of legitimate expectations. I argue that, despite NIMBY expectations being somewhat vague and at least moderately unjust, they may be legitimate. This does not imply that they are decisive, or entail a conclusion about their overall (...) normative force. I close by developing some tentative details in institutional design, focusing on the possibility of monetary compensation as a way of recognizing, but limiting the force of, NIMBY expectations. (shrink)

I formulate a compatibilism that is distinctively responsive to skeptical worries about the justification of punishment and other moral responsibility practices. I begin with an evolutionary story explaining why backward-looking reactive attitudes are “given” in human society. Cooperative society plausibly could not be sustained without such practices. The necessary accountability practices have complex internal standards. These internal standards may fully ground the appropriateness of reactive attitudes. Following a recent analogy, we can similarly hold that there are no external standards for (...) what is funny; the norms of comedy are complex, but funny is funny. However, this is compatible with moral reasons to change the practices themselves, and therefore change what is fitting within them: in the first instance, a moralistic “that's not funny” is ill-fitting, but “that shouldn't be funny” can be apt. The analogous reformist position prescribes practices constituting the minimal responsibility norms necessary for cooperative society. (shrink)

Researchers of the Northeast Ethics Education Partnership at Brown University sought to improve an understanding of the ethical challenges of field researchers with place-based communities in environmental studies/sciences and environmental health by disseminating a questionnaire which requested information about their ethical approaches to these researched communities. NEEP faculty sought to gain actual field guidance to improve research ethics and cultural competence training for graduate students and faculty in environmental sciences/studies. Some aspects of the ethical challenges in field studies are not (...) well-covered in the literature. More training and information resources are needed on the bioethical challenges in environmental field research relating to maximizing benefits/reducing risks to local inhabitants and ecosystems from research; appropriate and effective group consent and individual consent processes for many diverse communities in the United States and abroad; and justice considerations of ensuring fair benefits and protections against exploitation through community-based approaches, and cultural appropriateness and competence in researcher relationships. (shrink)

Value conservatism is the thesis that there is a distinctive reason to preserve valuable things even when a (somewhat) more valuable thing might be created by their destruction. I offer an account that improves on the current literature in response to Cohen's “Rescuing Conservatism.” In short, we become psychologically attached to valuable things that make up part of our lives; the same holds true, interestingly, with things of relatively neutral value. Severing attachments is painful. This yields a reason to favor (...) an object that someone is attached to over an object that no one is attached to. But an analysis is only part of a theory of conservatism: we also need to know whether such conservatism is justified. I argue that Cohen's idea of “accepting the given” can be read to yield such a justification: it is valuable to maintain some moderate disposition to accept what one already has. This attachment‐based account of conservatism displays a number of attractive theoretical features, including accounting for the impulse to restore past valuables and providing a framework for judging conservatism excessive. (shrink)

In a challenge trial, research subjects are purposefully exposed to some pathogen in a controlled setting, in order to test the efficacy of a vaccine or other experimental treatment. This is an example of medical effective altruism (MEA), where individuals volunteer to risk harms for the public good. Many bioethicists rejected challenge trials in the context of Covid‐19 vaccine research on ethical grounds. After considering various grounds of this objection, I conclude that the crucial question is how much harm research (...) subjects can permissibly risk. But we lack a satisfying way of making this judgment that does not appeal simply to the intuitions of doctors or bioethicists. I consider one recent and structurally plausible approach to critically evaluating the harm question. Alex London defends a social consistency test for research risks: we should compare the risks undertaken by research subjects to relevantly similar risks which are accepted in other spheres of society. I argue there is no good reason not to consider volunteer military service as a relevant social comparison. This implies there is essentially no cap on acceptable risks on the social consistency rationale. In short, if soldiers can be heroes, why can't research volunteers? (shrink)

Research ethics principles and regulations typically have been applied to the protection of individual human subjects. Yet, new paradigms of research that include the place-based community and cultural groups as partners or participants of environmental research interventions, in particular, require attention to place-based identities and geographical contexts. This paper argues the importance of respecting “place” within human subjects protections applied to communities and cultural groups as part of a critical need for research ethics and cultural competence training for graduate research (...) students. These protections and benefits are extensions of the Belmont Principles and have been included in recent recommendations from research regulatory committees. (shrink)

Governments and policy-makers have of late displayed renewed attention to behavioural research in an attempt to achieve a range of policy goals, including health promotion. In particular, approaches which could be labelled as ‘nudges’ have gained traction with policy-makers. A range of objections to nudging have been raised in the literature. These include claims that nudges undermine autonomy and liberty, may lead to a decrease in responsibility in decision-making, lack transparency, involve deception, and involve manipulation, potentially occasioning coercion. In this (...) article I focus on claims of coercion, examining nudges within two of the main approaches to coercion—the pressure approach and the more recent enforcement approach. I argue that coercion entails an element of control over the behaviour of agents which is not plausibly displayed by the kinds of serious examples of nudges posited in the literature. (shrink)

In the United Kingdom, the debate about how best to meet the shortfall of organs for transplantation has persisted on and off for many years. It is often presumed that the answer is simply to alter the law to a system of presumed consent. Acting perhaps on that presumption in his annual report launched in July, the Chief Medical Officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, advocated a system of organ donation based on presumed consent, the so-called “opt-out” system.1 He is calling for (...) a change in the law in England and Wales whereby consent to organ donation is presumed, making a person’s organs automatically available for transplantation after death, unless they registered objections to this while alive. Subsequently, the British Medical Association lent its support to the introduction of such a system.2 The BMA contends that “the practice of presumed consent legislation has had a significant effect on the number of cadaveric donors per million population.”2It is often taken for granted that there must be a correlation between the enactment of legislation on presumed consent and an increase in organ donation and procurement. However, the correlation is not as straightforward as it might seem. It may be that other practical measures to encourage organ donation could be implemented without changing the Human Tissue Act 2004, an Act which has been in force for barely a year.An analysis by Abadie and Gay demonstrated that “presumed consent legislation has a positive and sizeable effect on organ donation rates”,3 but they themselves admitted that the correlation between rates of donation and presumed consent legislation is “not completely unequivocal”.3 It is true that among the most successful cases in procurement rates are countries with presumed consent legislation . However, since some of the …. (shrink)

Following the publication of the Weatherall report on the use of non-human primates in research, this paper reflects on how to provide appropriate and ethical models for research beneficial to humankind. Two of the main justifications for the use of non-human primates in biomedical research are analysed. These are the “least-harm/greatest-good” argument and the “capacity” argument. This paper argues that these are equally applicable when considering whether humans are appropriate subjects of biomedical research.

Firms’ real estate choices significantly affect their sustainability, due to real estate’s impact on the natural environment. This paper investigates the ecological responsiveness of firms in specific industries by analyzing the decisions these firms make in occupying office space. We analyze the decisions of more than 11,000 tenants to choose office space in green buildings or in, otherwise comparable, conventional buildings nearby. Controlling for building quality and location, we find that corporations in the oil and banking industries, as well as (...) non-profit organizations, are among the most prominent green tenants. Furthermore, measures of an industry’s human capital intensity are positively related to the propensity to lease green office space. These empirical findings confirm the theoretical framework on economic advantage and institutional pressure as important determinants for the ecological responsiveness of firms. (shrink)

This paper argues that the new commercial and quasi-commercial activities of medicine, scientists, pharmaceutical companies and industry with regard to human tissue has given rise to a whole new way of valuing our bodies. It is argued that a property framework may be an effective and constructive method of exploring issues arising from this. The paper refers to A M Honoré’s theory of ownership and aims to show that we have full liberal ownership of our own bodies and as such (...) can be considered to be self-owners. (shrink)

Individual research protections provided by bioethical principles can be extended to group protections, particularly for place-based communities and cultural groups who may share a common harm or burden. In this article, an argument is made for the need to consider the group conditions of individual research subjects in the ethics of individual report-backs of human biomonitoring results. Human biomonitoring, the measuring of concentration of chemicals or their metabolites in blood, urine, breast milk, hair, and other biological samples, can provide an (...) assessment of an individual's exposure to a chemical and can integrate exposures from multiple pathways and sources. Biomonitoring studies have been increasing in the past decade for such purposes as measuring the levels of chemicals that are ingested by members of the general population and at what concentrations, to determine if exposure levels are higher in some groups vs. others, to track temporal trends to establish reference ranges for chemical exposures, and to investigate an association with health. (shrink)

The primary aim of this article is to point up an essential attitude, an anxiety even, that has inflected – and perhaps inhibited - our engagement with film. Film theory has been marked by a ‘refusal to see, a looking away’ (Mulvey & Wollen 1976, 36), and my suggestion is that this has achieved its fullest expression in those strands of film theory heavily influenced by psychoanalysis. These, in turn, have remained within a gendered conceptual framework whereby the discursive or (...) the narrative is associated with the masculine, and the image or spectacle is aligned with the feminine. This is not to reject these applications out of hand but rather to revisit this area with its blind spots in mind and to consider aspects that are perhaps at once obvious but often overlooked. (shrink)

A response is given to the claim by Claxton and Culyer, who stated that the policies of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) do not evaluate patients rather than treatments. The argument is made that the use of values such as quality of life and life-years is ethically dubious when used to choose which patients ought to receive treatments in the National Health Service (NHS).

Modernist Fiction and Vagueness marries the artistic and philosophical versions of vagueness, linking the development of literary modernism to changes in philosophy. This book argues that the problem of vagueness - language's unavoidable imprecision - led to transformations in both fiction and philosophy in the early twentieth century. Both twentieth-century philosophers and their literary counterparts were fascinated by the vagueness of words and the dream of creating a perfectly precise language. Building on recent interest in the connections between analytic philosophy, (...) pragmatism, and modern literature, Modernist Fiction and Vagueness demonstrates that vagueness should be read not as an artistic problem but as a defining quality of modernist fiction. (shrink)

Jonathan Haidt's research on moral cognition has revealed that political liberals moralize mostly in terms of Harm and Fairness, whereas conservatives moralize in terms of those plus loyalty to Ingroup, respect for Authority, and Purity. Some have concluded that the norms of morality encompass a wide variety of subject matters with no deep unity. To the contrary, I argue that the conservative position is partially debunked by its own lights. IAP norms’ moral relevance depends on their tendency to promote welfare. (...) I argue that all moral agents, including conservatives, are committed to that claim at least implicitly. I then argue that an evolutionary account of moral cognition partially debunks the view that welfare-irrelevant IAP norms have moral force. Haidt's own normative commitments are harmonized by this view: IAP norms are more important than liberals often realize, yet morality is at bottom all about promoting welfare. (shrink)

I argue that with the advent of poststructuralism, traditional theories of representation, truth, and resistance have been seriously brought into question. References to the “natural” and the “wild” cannot escape the poststructural attack against foundational concepts and the constituting character of human-centered language. I explore the ways in which environmental movements and literary expression have tended to posit pre-ideological essences, thereby replicating patterns of power and authority. I also point to how environmentalism might be reshaped in light of poststructuralism to (...) challenge power without reference to authority. (shrink)

Yet another medical ethics book has been published, but the difference this time is that I actually like it Sokol and Bergson’s handbook Medical ethics and law—surviving on the wards and passing exams is for medical students and junior doctors preparing for life in medicine and for the inevitable exams. The format of the book closely follows that of the core curriculum for medical ethics and law set out by the BMA in 2004 in Medical ethics today. The book ….

Ross, Hintikka, Waterlow and Makin have all suggested that there is something problematic about Aristotle’s treatment of possibility. I will canvas their concerns and propose that the problem is not so much with Aristotle as the fact that the notion of possibility is not a single simple concept. I will present eight different components of the notion of possibility and suggest that Aristotle may have been aware of all of them. I will conclude whilst his treatment can appear inconsistent, it (...) is instead, an attempt to give a complete description of a complex notion. (shrink)

Rumination is a key feature of depression and contributes to its onset, maintenance, and recurrence. Researchers have proposed that biases in the attentional processing of emotional information may underlie rumination, and particularly, the brooding component. This investigation evaluated associations between attentional biases for emotional images and rumination, including both brooding and reflection, in currently and never depressed participants. In two separate studies, participants viewed sets of four emotional images (happy, sad, threatening, and neutral) for 8 s in a free-viewing eye-tracking (...) paradigm. In both studies, currently depressed individuals attended to happy face images and happy naturalistic images significantly less than never depressed individuals. In Study 2, currently depressed individuals attended to sad naturalistic images significantly more than never depressed individuals. There were no statistically significant associations between attentional biases and any of the forms of rumination, independent of their shared relationship with depression symptoms. These findings call into question the robustness of the link between attentional biases and rumination. (shrink)

In this paper I will describe four theories of time that can be found in Aristotle. I will compare these four theories with modern notions of time, and propose that the ancient and modern views are substantively the same. Of course, all four theories cannot be true together. I will present four ways to resolve the inconsistencies, and conclude that the contradictions can be resolved.

This paper is a response to a paper by John Coggon ‘Best Interests, Public Interest, and the Power of the Medical Profession'. It argues that certain legal judgements in relation to best interests seek to change and curtail the role of the medical profession in this arena while simultaneously extending the jurisdiction of the courts. It also argues that we must guard against replacing one professional standard, that of the medical profession, with another, that of the judiciary in this area.

This lively collection of essays explores the vital role of beauty in the human experience of place, interactions with other species, and contemplation of our own embodied lives. Devoting attention to themes such as global climate change, animal subjectivity, environmental justice and activism, and human moral responsibility for the environment, these contributions demonstrate that beauty is not only a meaningful dimension of our experience, but also a powerful strategy for inspiring cultural transformation. Taken as a whole, they underscore the ongoing (...) relevance of aesthetics to the ecocritical project and the concern for beauty that motivates effective social and political engagement. (shrink)

This article reviews the latest report from the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, Human Bodies: Donation for Medicine and Research. It argues that the report represents a notable evolution in the Council's position regarding the appropriate governance of the human body and biomaterials. It then goes on to examine in more depth one of the report's recommendations – that a pilot payment scheme for eggs for research purposes should be trialled. In particular, it looks at whether the distinctions drawn, first, between (...) eggs for research and therapeutic purposes and, secondly, between eggs for research and other biomaterials can be adequately justified. (shrink)

The Islamic Law of War: Justifications and Regulations. By Ahmed Al-Dawoody. Palgrave Series in Islamic Theology, Law, and History, vol. 2. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Pp. xiii + 338. $90.

This paper examines Jacques Derrida's analysis of Walter Benjamin's ‘Critique of Violence’ in the context of their respective theories of the university. Whereas Derrida foregrounds the complex ways that the university and law are intertwined, Benjamin claims that the ‘educative power’ stands removed from the law by identifying the university with ‘divine violence’. ‘Force of Law’ not only questions the possibility of a neutral, pre-legal space that Benjamin's theory warrants, ‘Force of Law’ also draws attention to the laws structuring the (...) colloquia that gave rise to Derrida's text. This paper claims that Derrida's analysis of justice, law, violence, and justesse is thus informed by a theory of the university, and that the ways in which Derrida's theory of law stands opposed to Benjamin's parallels the ways in which Derrida's theory of the university questions Benjamin's understanding of the ‘educative power’. This paper concludes by drawing attention to the demand posed by the absence of justice in the academy. Although the laws of the academy produce justesse in the present, this negatively affirms justice in the future, which cannot wait. (shrink)

A collaborative team of environmental sociologists, community psychologists, religious studies scholars, environmental studies/science researchers and engineers has been working together to design and implement new training in research ethics, culture and community-based approaches for place-based communities and cultural groups. The training is designed for short and semester-long graduate courses at several universities in the northeastern US. The team received a 3 year grant from the US National Science Foundation’s Ethics Education in Science and Engineering in 2010. This manuscript details the (...) curriculum topics developed that incorporate ethical principles, particularly for group protections/benefits within the field practices of environmental/engineering researchers. (shrink)

The traditional ‘no property’ approach of the law to human biomaterials has long been punctured by exceptions. Developments in the jurisprudence of property in human tissue in English law and beyond demonstrate that a variety of tissues are capable of being subject to proprietary considerations. Further, among commentators, there are few who would deny, given biotechnological advances, that such materials can be considered thus. Yet, where commentators do admit human biomaterials into the realm of property, it is often done with (...) an emphasis on some sort of separation from the person who is the source of those materials. One line of argument suggests that there is a difference between persons and things, which constitutes a morally justifiable distinction when it comes to property. This article examines whether the idea of separability can do the work of demarcating those objects that ought to be considered property from those that ought not to be. It argues that, despite the entailment of a separability criterion inherent in both the statutory and common law positions, and the support given to this by some commentators, it is philosophically problematic as the basis for delineating property in human tissue and other biomaterials. (shrink)