This paper presents and applies a conceptual framework to address human vulnerability to climate change. Drawing upon social risk management and asset-based approaches, the conceptual framework provides a unifying lens to examine links between risks, adaptation, and vulnerability. The result is an integrated approach to increase the capacity of society to manage climate risks with a view to reduce the vulnerability of households and maintain or increase the opportunities for sustainable development. We identify 'no-regrets' adaptation interventions, meaning actions that generate (...) net social benefits under all future scenarios of climate change and impacts. We also make the case for greater external support for community-based adaptation, discuss the role of social protection, and propose a research agenda. (shrink)

Paul Thompson’s excellent book, From Field to Fork: Food Ethics for Everyone, argues that contemporary food ethics persistently ignores the nature and actual impact of GMOs, Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, food aid to developing countries, and more. On Thompson’s view, such philosophical analyses must incorporate empirical knowledge. Additional strengths of Thompson’s book: its attention to quality-of-life issues, its openness to the concerns of the marginalized, and its emphasis on the interconnectedness of problems in food ethics. I raise one area (...) of disagreement with Thompson: his treatment of GMOs is, I argue, insufficiently skeptical. I suggest a three-fold revision of the book’s treatment of the precautionary principle, and I levy an additional argument against GMOs, the Inductive Argument. Using the herbicide Roundup as a case study of the ways in which industry urges the use of technologies that have not been fully vetted or monitored, I argue that products originally seen as safe often turn out instead to be harmful to the environment and health. Significant inductive experience with similar cases gives people additional reason to be even more suspicious of GMOs than Thompson suggests. (shrink)

The essays in this volume critically analyze and revitalize agrarian philosophy by tracing its evolution in the classical American philosophy of key figures such as Franklin, Jefferson, Emerson, Thoreau, Dewey, and Royce.

Issues of social justice underlie the clamour for greater gender balance in top-management. The present study reveals that pursuit of such social justice is also value-enhancing in relation to the longer-run performance of initial public offerings stocks, especially where female board members are unencumbered by family-connection with other directors. This study examines the economic benefits of board gender diversity for state- and privately controlled firms in the Hong Kong IPO market. Gender board diversity is much less common in state-run IPO (...) firms. Within the subset of privately controlled IPO firms, distinction exists between entities that accommodate family-connected board officers and those that do not. Specifically, this study focuses on family-ties between board members. This issue allows for finer-grained assessment of family influence on firm performance. Stronger post-listing stock, return-on-assets and sales-on-assets performance arise in privately controlled firms without family-connected board members and in state-run entities. Gender diversity thus serves as a positive, but only when female director presence is untrammelled by family associations between directors. However, there is little evidence of a link between female board representation and IPO underpricing. Relative to state-backed issuers, privately controlled firm boards accommodate more women, younger officers and a broader mix of nationalities, but appear more-inclined to unify CEO and chair positions. Board duality, the fraction of independent directors and directors’ age and nationality exhibit little relation with initial and aftermarket stock returns. In prescriptive terms, minority investors gain from the inclusion of female directors, especially when IPO firm directors are unencumbered by family-affiliation with other board members. Results therefore add to the clarion of calls for greater female board presence. (shrink)

After centuries of neglect, the ethics of food are back with a vengeance. Justice for food workers and small farmers has joined the rising tide of concern over the impact of industrial agriculture on food animals and the broader environment, all while a global epidemic of obesity-related diseases threatens to overwhelm modern health systems. An emerging worldwide social movement has turned to local and organic foods, and struggles to exploit widespread concern over the next wave of genetic engineering or nanotechnologies (...) applied to food. Paul B. Thompson's book applies the rigor of philosophy to key topics in the first comprehensive study explore interconnections hidden deep within this welter of issues. Bringing to bear more than thirty years of experience working closely with farmers, agricultural researchers and food system activists, he explores the eclipse of food ethics during the rise of nutritional science, and examines the reasons for its sudden re-emergence in the era of diet-based disease. Thompson discusses social injustice in the food systems of developed economies and shows how we have missed the key insights for understanding food ethics in the developing world. His discussions of animal production and the environmental impact of agriculture break new ground where most philosophers would least expect it. By emphasizing the integration of these issues, Thompson not only brings a comprehensive philosophical approach to moral issues in the production, processing, distribution, and consumption of food -- he introduces a fresh way to think about practical ethics that will have implications in other areas of applied philosophy. (shrink)

The Spirit of the Soil challenges environmentalists to think more deeply and creatively about agriculture. Paul B. Thompson identifies four `worldviews' which tackle agricultural ethics according to different philosophical priorities; productionism, stewardship, economics and holism. He examines current issues such as the use of pesticides and biotechnology from these ethical perspectives. This book achieves an open-ended account of sustainability designed to minimise hubris and help us to recapture the spirit of the soil.

Risk communication poses a challenge to ordinary norms of truth-telling because it can easily mislead. Analyzing this challenge in terms of a systematic divergence between expertise and public attitudes fails to recognize how two specific features of the concept of risk play a role in managing daily affairs. First, evaluating risk always incorporates an estimate of the reliability of information. Since risk communication is an effort at providing information, audiences will naturally and appropriately incorporate their assessment of the reliability of (...) the risk communicator into their assessment of the risk as such. Second, one conceptual and grammatical feature of the concept of risk is to categorize experience as non-routine and demanding further deliberation. That is, the whole point of calling something a risk can be to distinguish it from activities or phenomena that need no further attention. Risk communications that stress relative comparisons of measured probabilities and expected utilities can be inconsistent with both features of our concept of risk. At best they mislead; at worst they undermine our society’s capacity to cope with risk. While there are no simple answers to these two conundrums, technical experts should bear them in mind when communicating with the broader public. (shrink)

The emergence of individuality during the evolutionary transition from single cells to multicellularity poses a range of problems. A key issue is how variation in lower‐level individuals generates a corporate (collective) entity with Darwinian characteristics. Of central importance to this process is the evolution of a means of collective reproduction, however, the evolution of a means of collective reproduction is not a trivial issue, requiring careful consideration of mechanistic details. Calling upon observations from experiments, we draw attention to proto‐life cycles (...) that emerge via unconventional routes and that transition, in single steps, individuality to higher levels. One such life cycle arises from conflicts among levels of selection and invokes cheats as a primitive germ line: it lays the foundation for collective reproduction, the basis of a self‐policing system, the selective environment for the emergence of development, and hints at a plausible origin for a soma/germ line distinction. (shrink)

What is the significance of the wicked problems framework for environmental philosophy? In response to wicked problems, environmental scientists are starting to welcome the participation of social scientists, humanists, and the creative arts. We argue that the need for interdisciplinary approaches to wicked problems opens up a number of tasks that environmental philosophers have every right to undertake. The first task is for philosophers to explore new and promising ways of initiating philosophical research through conducting collaborative learning processes on environmental (...) issues. The second task is for philosophers to recognize the value of philosophical skills in their engagements with members of other disciplines and walks of life in addressing wicked problems. The wicked problems framework should be seen as an important guide for facilitating philosophical research that is of relevance to problems like climate change and sustainable agriculture. Content Type Journal Article Category Articles Pages 1-14 DOI 10.1007/s10806-011-9344-0 Authors Paul B. Thompson, Department of Philosophy, Michigan State University, 503 S. Kedzie Hall, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA Kyle Powys Whyte, Department of Philosophy, Michigan State University, 503 S. Kedzie Hall, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA Journal Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics Online ISSN 1573-322X Print ISSN 1187-7863. (shrink)

: When may a physician legitimately offer enrollment in a randomized clinical trial (RCT) to her patient? Two answers to this question have had a profound impact on the research ethics literature. Equipoise, as originated by Charles Fried, which we term Fried's equipoise (FE), stipulates that a physician may offer trial enrollment to her patient only when the physician is genuinely uncertain as to the preferred treatment. Clinical equipoise (CE), originated by Benjamin Freedman, requires that there exist a state of (...) honest, professional disagreement in the community of expert practitioners as to the preferred treatment. FE and CE are widely understood as competing concepts. We argue that FE and CE offer separable and, in themselves, incomplete justifications for the conduct of clinical trials. FE articulates conditions under which the fiduciary duties of physician to patient may be upheld in the conduct of research. CE sets out a standard for the social approval of research by institutional review boards. Viewed in this way, FE and CE are not necessarily competing notions, but rather address complementary moral concerns. (shrink)

Agrarian political philosophies since ancient Greece stress the role of agriculture in forming political solidarity and civic virtue. More recent transformations suggest a way to conjoin these elements of what makes a polity politically sustainable with environmental sensitivity and literacy.

Agricultural crops developed using the tools of genetic engineering have become socially institutionalized in three ways that substantially compromise the inherent potential of plant transformation tools. The first is that when farming depends upon debt finance, farmers find themselves in a competitive situation such that efficiency-enhancing technology fuels a trend of bankruptcy and increasing scale of production. As efficiency increasing tools, GMOs are embedded in controversial processes of social change in rural economies. The United States, at least, has chosen not (...) to undertake policy interventions to slow or reverse this trend. The second institutionalization of GMOs is found in the way that agricultural science has become divided between two camps, one focused on efficiency and total global production, the other focused on maintaining soil and water ecosystems in the face of both population growth and climate change. GMOs have been strongly supported by the first camp and regarded as irrelevant to the goals of the second. Finally, GMOs have become symbolic markers in the global debate over neoliberal institutions for trade and the protection of intellectual property. While there may be agronomic arguments for favoring GMO technology, the way that it has become situated in each of these social debates insures that it will be subject to strong opposition without regard to its biological risks and potential benefits. (shrink)

I will argue that one class of issues in computer ethics oftenassociated with privacy and a putative right to privacy isbest-analyzed in terms that make no substantive reference toprivacy at all. These issues concern the way that networkedinformation technology creates new ways in which conventionalrights to personal security can be threatened. However onechooses to analyze rights, rights to secure person and propertywill be among the most basic, the least controversial, and themost universally recognized. A risk-based approach to theseissues provides a (...) clearer statement of what is ethicallyimportant, as well as what is ethically problematic. Once theissues of security have been articulated clearly, it becomespossible to make out genuine issues of privacy in contrast tothem. (shrink)

Special moral, regulatory, and scientific questions surround the inclusion of children in health-related research. These questions arise from a fundamental moral tension between the obligation to expose children to research participation to ensure that they share in the benefits that arise from it and the obligation to protect them from the harms associated with their inappropriate involvement in research. This tension is felt in the development of moral and regulatory frameworks for the protection of child research subjects and in the (...) implementation and interpretation of these frameworks by institutional review boards. (shrink)

Abstract Critics of The Agrarian Vision: Sustainability and Environmental Ethics (Lexington: 2010, University Press of Kentucky) have difficulties with its commitment to agrarian philosophy, and have also suggested that the program described there needs more elaboration of how sustainability might be pursued, especially in its social dimensions. The book draws upon agrarian philosophy to argue that habit and material practice are an appropriate and vital focus of ethics. Attention to habit and material practice will counterbalance an overemphasis on intentions and (...) outcomes in contemporary environmental philosophy. It is in this sense that agrarianism contributes to an ethic of sustainability by showing how contemporary food practices—the culture of the table—might contribute to an enabling sense of community solidarity. The book does not advocate a return to once vibrant agrarian traditions. Content Type Journal Article Category Articles Pages 1-10 DOI 10.1007/s10806-011-9329-z Authors Paul B. Thompson, WK Kellogg Professor of Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics, Department of Philosophy, Michigan State University, 503 South Kedzie Hall, East Lansing, MI 48824-1032, USA Journal Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics Online ISSN 1573-322X Print ISSN 1187-7863. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Bolzano's concept of deducibility and Tarski's concept of logical consequence differ with respect to their philosophical intent. I distinguish between epistemic and ontic approaches to logic, and argue that Bolzano's deducibility presupposes an epistemic approach, while Tarski's logical consequence presupposes an ontic approach.

While Immanuel Kant is recognized as one of history's most influential philosophers and ethicists, his thought and writings also contain significant clinical implications that deserve attention. His philosophy is briefly explained and shown to anticipate modern developments in understanding human consciousness and many principles for effective psychotherapy. Kant's "categorical imperative," in particular, implies and anticipates valuable clinical interventions. Kant's principles that are ethically "right" for clients turn out to be clinically "good" for them as well. 2012 APA, all rights reserved).

The role of Amartya Sen's early work on famine notwithstanding, food security is generally seen as but one capability among many for scholars writing in development ethics. The early literature on the ethics of hunger is summarized to show how Sen's Poverty and Famines was written in response to debates of past decades, and a brief discussion of food security as a capability follows. However, Sen's characterization of smallholder food security also supports the development of agency in both a political (...) and an economic sense. Economic agency is discussed and tied to longstanding literatures on the moral significance of farming within political economy. Finally, while the newly emergent literature on food sovereignty includes many themes, it is shown to be re-articulating arguments that stress smallholder's economic agency as a development goal. This pattern of argument thus provides a way to reconcile at least some of the claims being advanced under the banner of food sovereignty with the human development.. (shrink)

Replies to commentaries on my 2012 article ‘Synthetic Biology Needs a Synthetic Bioethics,’ note that I do not, in fact, call for some ‘new’ kind of ethics. The focus then and now is on integrating questions that relate to distributive justice and environmental quality more faithfully into the topics that have come to preoccupy mainstream bioethics as institutionalized in medical schools and medical research institutions.

John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel can be given a reading that links events and the mentality of characters to mainstream schools of liberal and neo-liberal political theory: libertarianism, egalitarianism, and utilitarianism. Each of these schools is sketched in outline and applied to topics in rural political culture. While it is likely that Steinbeck himself would have identified with an egalitarian or utilitarian view, he resists the temptation to deny his Okie characters an authentic voice that matches none of these schools so (...) well as it articulates an agrarian mentality once associated with Thomas Jefferson and today articulated by Wendell Berry. This reading of The Grapes of Wrath, in turn, can be interpreted as both a rebuke to contemporary social theorists who continue to impose an ill-fitting left-right dichotomy on working class political culture in rural America and as a roadmap suggesting ways that philosophy and rural sociology might engage one another more directly and productively with respect to contemporary rural development and environmental quality issues. (shrink)

Bioethics is currently witnessing unprecedented debate over the moral and legal norms governing the conduct of clinical research. At the center of this debate is the duty of care in clinical research, and its most widely accepted specification, clinical equipoise. In recent work, we have argued that equipoise and cognate concepts central to the ethics of clinical research have been left unnecessarily vulnerable to criticism. We have suggested that the vulnerability lies in the conspicuous absence of an articulated foundation in (...) moral and legal theory of the physician-researcher's duty of care to the patient-subject. We have repeatedly suggested that the requisite foundation is in the ethics of trust and the law of fiduciaries.Curiously, despite the absence of a published thorough exposition of our position, some have preemptively criticized our suggestion that the relationship between physician-researcher and patient-subject is fiduciary. Others have offered their own accounts of the implications of fiduciary law for the relationship. (shrink)

Though the term “commodification” is used broadly, a theory of the processes by which goods become exchangeable and in fact objects of monetized exchange reveals a key site for technological politics. Commodities are goods that are alienable, somewhat rival, generally with low exclusion costs, and that are often consumed in use. Technological advances can affect all of these traits for certain goods, effectively bringing about a process of commodification by technological means. However, in order to function with specific contexts, technologies (...) are designed and manufactured according to technical standards, standards that in turn take on features of what David Grewal ( 2008 ) has called “network power.” As such, standard setting processes become the potential locus for political argument over the legitimacy of a commodification process. Theorists hoping to develop more democratic theories of technological governance should thus recognize the significance of standards and the role they play in either promoting or controlling social relations organized according to the norms of monetized exchange. (shrink)

In 1924The Classical Quarterlypublished a note by Alexander Haggerty Krappe titled ‘Euripides’Alcmaeonand the Apollonius Romance’. Drawing attention to the obscure origins of the ancient Greek and Roman novels in general and pointing out the scholarly agreement on the role love plays in both the ancient novels and Euripidean tragedy, Krappe observed that ‘Euripides was drawn upon for whole episodes in order to enrich the plot of the [ancient] novel’. Krappe then goes on in his note to attribute the plot of (...) Euripides' lostAlcmaeonas a source of inspiration for one of the major episodes of theHistoria Apollonii Regis Tyri. Today, this reliance of the ancient novels on Euripides is generally recognized, but, curiously, Krappe, while identifying an episode from the lostAlcmaeon, failed to identify a clear plot-borrowing from another extant Euripidean play, theAlcestis. (shrink)

Critically analyzes and revitalizes agrarian philosophy by tracing its evolution. Today, most historians, philosophers, political theorists, and scholars of rural America take a dim view of the agrarian ideal that farmers and farming occupy a special moral and political status in society. Agrarian rhetoric is generally seen as special pleading on the part of farmers seeking protection from labor reform and environmental regulation while continuing to receive direct payments and subsidies from the public till. Agrarianism should not be viewed as (...) a set of immutable claims about farming and political order, but as a tradition of moral and political philosophy that has evolved and deepened over the centuries. Agrarian naturalism--the belief that culture and conduct are conditioned by nature because they are of a piece with nature--becomes pragmatic naturalism, giving way to a new set of puzzles about how we are to understand the rural landscape and our responsibilities for its use. The agrarian idea that personality and sociability are integrated with the material transformation of the landscape can serve as the basis for a new, pragmatically grounded ethic of natural resources and rural development. The essays in this volume critically analyze and revitalize agrarian philosophy by tracing its evolution in the classical American philosophy of key figures such as Franklin, Jefferson, Emerson, Thoreau, Dewey, and Royce. Three chapters address the belief that farming peoples develop moral virtue and a taste for democracy as it evolved in the American context, and four examine how a reconstitution of agrarian themes might invigorate our nation's thinking on environment, food, and rural development policy. The Agrarian Roots of Pragmatism will be of broad interest to scholars of American philosophy, rural history, history of ideas, geography, and agricultural or natural resource policy. (shrink)

This article is about the religious roots of violence, in particular religious terrorism. The author argues that there is a great reluctance to study this relationship. This is unfortunate because only on the basis of a realistic estimate of the facts can a successful counterterrorist strategy be developed. One of the problems with religious violence is that holy scriptures, in some passages, exhort believers to violent acts. In combination with a theory of ethics that is known as “divine command morality” (...) this is problematic. Even if the holy book contains only a small percentage of passages invoking violence they pose a problem if the whole book is considered to be holy and the word of God. (shrink)

Open-source communities that focus on content rely squarely on the contributions of invisible strangers in cyberspace. How do such communities handle the problem of trusting that strangers have good intentions and adequate competence? This question is explored in relation to communities in which such trust is a vital issue: peer production of software (FreeBSD and Mozilla in particular) and encyclopaedia entries (Wikipedia in particular). In the context of open-source software, it is argued that trust was inferred from an underlying ‘hacker (...) ethic’, which already existed. The Wikipedian project, by contrast, had to create an appropriate ethic along the way. In the interim, the assumption simply had to be that potential contributors were trustworthy; they were granted ‘substantial trust’. Subsequently, projects from both communities introduced rules and regulations which partly substituted for the need to perceive contributors as trustworthy. They faced a design choice in the continuum between a high-discretion design (granting a large amount of trust to contributors) and a low-discretion design (leaving only a small amount of trust to contributors). It is found that open-source designs for software and encyclopaedias are likely to converge in the future towards a mid-level of discretion. In such a design the anonymous user is no longer invested with unquestioning trust. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Minding Psychiatric PracticePaul B. Lieberman, MD (bio)In recent discussions of what makes or should make something 'a psychiatric disorder' (if anything does; Lange, 2007), attention and contention have mostly involved problems distinguishing disorder from normal life, expectable suffering, neurological disease, criminality, prejudice, error, religious experience and effects of injustice, but the question of what makes or should make something psychiatric is also important and difficult to answer. It's important (...) because general conceptions of what kinds of things we treat (e.g., disorders of the heart, brain, or mind) guide practice by specifying what constitutes, nurtures or poisons them, ways they may break apart or be repaired and processes that produce change, as well as by helping to draw appropriate boundaries between psychiatry and other fields. It's difficult because psychiatry comprises many kinds of objects, theories and forms of practice (primarily biomedical, psychodynamic and cognitive behavioral), and we don't know which, if any, are 'natural' or valid. It's also not established whether or why all or any should be called, 'psychiatric,' what explains their being so-called (if it is correct to do so), or which may be fundamental or constitutive and which derivative and potentially eliminable.One appealing answer (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders [DSM] an swer; American Psychiatric Association, 2013) to the question of what makes something psychiatric is that it is mental in some essential way. But few psychiatrists could explain what that might mean, nor would many be able to say what a mental disorder is or defend the idea that the conditions they work with are (always?) such things (though many probably wouldn't deny it either; they wouldn't know what to say and most wouldn't think it mattered). But if the idea that 'psychiatric disorders are essentially mental' seems obvious yet unclear to psychiatrists, what's the alternative? And if no alternative leaps to mind, then are psychiatrists practicing without knowing what they're treating?In "What makes a disorder 'mental'? A practical treatment of psychiatric disorder," Joseph Gough (2023) addresses these problems with two bold proposals: first, that we abandon altogether using 'mental' (assuming we understand its meaning) in the definition of 'psychiatric disorder,' and, second, that we, instead, define psychiatric disorders as those conditions best treated by psychiatrists (including psychologists, social workers, nurses and other practitioners).To a psychiatrist, these proposals seem, both, a welcome validation of our work ("At last, someone appreciates us!"), but also a troubling destabilization of how we understand that work ("That can't be right: it's backwards!") In Gough's [End Page 37] wide-ranging and carefully reasoned defense of his two proposals, he offers many novel and provocative insights relevant to problems defining psychiatric disorders. I will consider only a few of the issues he raises, which I think are especially worth emphasis and further thought.Gough initially rejects mentality in the definition of psychiatric disorder by reminding us that it is neither sufficient nor necessary for inclusion in the DSM. Vision is mental but blindness is not in the manual; caffeinism and erectile dysfunction are not mental but are included. Later, he offers two additional reasons for abandoning mentality: it promotes stigma and encourages dualism. I think all these arguments are correct. (Although blindness is not the best example because DSM defines mental disorders as disturbances of "thought, feeling and behavior" and blindness is none of these. But many other examples (e.g., encephalopathies) could make the point.)But Gough passes over this issue too quickly: we should pause and consider more carefully possible reasons to keep or even privilege the mental in psychiatry as well as the losses we might suffer if we gave it up. The examples and arguments he offers for abandoning the mental could be contested if one were motivated to do so. For example, one could argue, as Gough does elsewhere, that the DSM is just wrong sometimes and should be revised. Perhaps, as Gough briefly considers, there is a subset of 'mental' disorders that are properly psychiatric (where, e.g., certain favored features such as meaning, agency, narrative, or connection of 'self and world' are preserved, and... (shrink)