In this chapter, the impact of “functional blindness” during saccades—rapid point-to-point eye movements—on the current theories of perception is explored. These saccades cause gaps in the visual stream that reaches our mental representation of the environment. A detailed explanation of the phenomenon is provided, from its physical and anatomical causes to its functional effect on perception. Several experiments and studies pertaining to the study are discussed to support the conclusions drawn at the end of the chapter. The chapter posits that (...) this phenomenon supports the assumption that there is an area of the brain responsible for maintaining representations of the visual world, which allows inferences to be made during those visual gaps. These representations are assumed to be based primarily on the general information provided by the stimuli rather than specific details, which allows greater focus on areas of importance to the viewer. (shrink)

This new and revised edition provides a comprehensive dictionary of Indian philosophical terms. Terms are provided in both devanagari and roman transliteration along with their English translations.

Critical study of the Naiṣkarmyasiddhi, compendium of Advaita philosophy of Sureśvarācārya.

From the time of Descartes a strong tendency emerged to exclude the consideration of metaphysical questions as a necessary step towards developing truly scientific disciplines. Within human geography, positivism had a significant influence in moulding the discipline as "spatial science", resulting in a reductionist vision of humanity. Since the 1970s, in reaction to the limitations of this narrow vision and also to the deterministic perspective of marxism, humanistic approaches became important, but have failed to adequately deal with the exclusion of (...) metaphysical issues. The more recent emergence of postmodern influences within human geography, while being critical of the rigidities associated with Enlightenment thinking, and suggesting a greater tolerance of "difference", appears reluctant to reconsider the exclusion of metaphysics. This paper suggest that such a reconsideration could contribute significantly towards increasing human geography's capacity to help policy makers deal more adequately with some of the major issues facing humanity. (shrink)

How can social institutions complicate and worsen vulnerabilities of particular individuals or groups? We begin by explicating how certain diagnoses within mental health and medicine operate as interactive kinds of labels and how such labels can create institutional barriers that hinder one's capacity to achieve wellbeing. Interactive-kind modeling is a conceptual tool that elucidates the ways in which labeling can signal to others how the labeled person ought to be treated, how such labeling comes about and is perceived, and how (...) it compounds vulnerabilities. We argue that this shift in standpoint helps us recognize and mitigate compounded vulnerabilities. (shrink)

In this issue of the Hastings Center Report, Jason Wasserman and Mark Navin argue that patients without decisional capacity can still have relatively stable wishes or inclinations toward one treatment option over another and that these preferences are “not devoid of moral weight and might therefore guide or at least influence treatment decisions when they cannot be defeated by other considerations.” This position is not controversial among most bioethicists. The hard work comes in sussing out the details of this position. (...) How much moral weight do these preferences have? When should preferences be defeated by other considerations? How should we identify actual preferences, and how should preferences be differentiated and weighed against one another? (shrink)

In this essay, we suggest practical ways to shift the framing of crisis standards of care toward disability justice. We elaborate on the vision statement provided in the 2010 Institute of Medicine (National Academy of Medicine) “Summary of Guidance for Establishing Crisis Standards of Care for Use in Disaster Situations,” which emphasizes fairness; equitable processes; community and provider engagement, education, and communication; and the rule of law. We argue that interpreting these elements through disability justice entails a commitment to both (...) distributive and recognitive justice. The disability rights movement's demand “Nothing about us, without us” requires substantive inclusion of disabled people in decision‐making related to their interests, including in crisis planning before, during, and after a pandemic like Covid‐19. (shrink)

A single Sanskrit commentary exists for the Caṇḍamahāroṣaṇatantra—the Padmāvatī of Mahāsukhavajra—the only palm-leaf witness of which is preserved in a late thirteenth-century manuscript in Kathmandu. The tantra is relatively late, unmentioned outside Nepal, and the only in-depth study to date examines only the first eight of its twenty five chapters. No study or edition of the Padmāvatī exists. Here we present the first edition and translation of a complete chapter, the sixth paṭala, a section dealing mainly with transgressive sexual practices. (...) Some of the ideas and pragmatic details presented by the author, Mahāsukhavajra, are unique in Vajrayāna literature. (shrink)

After presenting the major objections raised against standard formulations of the H-D method of theory testing, I identify what seems to be an important element of truth underlying the method. I then draw upon this element in an effort to develop a plausible formulation of the H-D method which avoids the various objections.

The COVID-19 (Coronavirus disease of 2019) pandemic has led to intense conversations about ventilator allocation and reallocation during a crisis standard of care. Multiple voices in the media and multiple state guidelines mention reallocation as a possibility. Drawing upon a range of neuroscientific, phenomenological, ethical, and sociopolitical considerations, the authors argue that taking away someone’s personal ventilator is a direct assault on their bodily and social integrity. They conclude that personal ventilators should not be part of reallocation pools and that (...) triage protocols should be immediately clarified to explicitly state that personal ventilators will be protected in all cases. (shrink)

This collection addresses whether ethicists, like authorities in other fields, can speak as experts in their subject matter. Though ethics consultation is a growing practice in medical contexts, there remain difficult questions about the role of ethicists in professional decision-making. Contributors examine the nature and plausibility of moral expertise, the relationship between character and expertise, the nature and limits of moral authority, how one might become a moral expert, and the trustworthiness of moral testimony. This volume engages with the growing (...) literature in these debates and offers new perspectives from both academics and practitioners. The readings will be of particular interest to bioethicists, clinicians, ethics committees, and students of social epistemology. These new essays promise to advance discussions in the professionalization and accreditation of ethics consultation. (shrink)

Although research into the biosemiotic mechanisms underlying the purposeful behavior of brainless living systems is extensive, researchers have not adequately described biosemiosis among neurons. As the conscious use of signs is well-covered by the various fields of semiotics, we focus on subconscious sign action. Subconscious semiotic habits, both functional and dysfunctional, may be created and reinforced in the brain not necessarily in a logical manner and not necessarily through repeated reinforcement. We review literature that suggests hypnosis may be effective in (...) changing subconscious dysfunctional habits, and we offer a biosemiotic framework for understanding these results. If it has been difficult to evaluate any psychological approach, including hypnosis, this may be because contemporary neuroscience lacks a theory of the sign. We argue that understanding the fluid nature of representation in biological organisms is prerequisite to understanding the nature of the subconscious and may lead to more effective of treatments for dysfunctional habits developed through personal experience or culture. (shrink)

The United States Securities and Exchange Commission recently began requiring mutual funds to make their proxy voting transparent so that investors can make better decisions about investing with the mutual fund and with the ultimate goal of improving corporate governance. We review the proxy voting records of major mutual funds to determine if transparency has changed the patterns of voting by mutual funds. Initial results show that support for management increased and support for social responsibility resolutions decreased after transparency was (...) required. (shrink)

The question of whether a patient has insight is among the first to be considered in psychiatric contexts. There are several competing conceptions of clinical insight, which broadly refers to a patient’s awareness of their mental illness. When a patient is described as lacking insight, there are significant implications for patient care and to what extent the patient is trusted as a knower. Insight is currently viewed as a multidimensional and continuous construct, but competing conceptions of insight still lack consensus (...) on the specifics. Studies also give contradictory evidence regarding the frequency and consequences of poor insight. A number of crucial questions remain unanswered. After outlining some of the key theoretical disagreements about what insight means, I highlight ethical issues that have not received much attention in the literature. Given the conceptual ambiguities and the absence of standardised bedside tools, there are significant ethical concerns about insight assessments. I highlight two main ethical concerns, specifically that these assessments risk: (1) marginalising patients by setting unattainable ideals for self-knowledge and (2) minimising the patient’s own perspective on their mental health. I close with recommendations for documenting and responding to concerns about poor insight, so patients who are vulnerable to losing epistemic trust are better supported in their therapeutic relationships. (shrink)

Robert Veatch’s The Foundations of Justice: Why the Retarded and the Rest of Us Have Claims to Equality delves into deep questions of justice through the case of a child with disabilities. I describe what is basically right about this vision, as well as what is problematic from the standpoint of contemporary disability bioethics. From there, I dive into the notion of vulnerability that is at play in his work. He describes disability as necessarily a condition of weakness, lesser-than existence, (...) and neediness. When disability is viewed in this way as an inherently vulnerable state of being, the essential sociopolitical dimensions of disability receive inadequate attention, which, in turn, makes it impossible to identify injustices correctly. I connect these points to concrete challenges faced by disability communities during the COVID-19 pandemic, which have raised profound questions about the just use of scarce critical care resources. Any case drawn from the pandemic is a very different kind of case than that of the child in Veatch’s book, but a commonality is the question of who should get what limited resources when needs and urgency vary. (shrink)

This book offers new essays exploring concepts and applications of nonideal theory in bioethics. Nonideal theory refers to an analytic approach to moral and political philosophy (especially in relation to justice), according to which we should not assume that there will be perfect compliance with principles, that there will be favorable circumstances for just institutions and right action, or that reasoners are capable of being impartial. Nonideal theory takes the world as it actually is, in all of its imperfections. Bioethicists (...) have called for greater attention to how nonideal theory can serve as a guide in the messy realities they face daily. Although many bioethicists implicitly assume nonideal theory in their work, there is the need for more explicit engagement with this theoretical outlook. A nonideal approach to bioethics would start by examining the sociopolitical realities of healthcare and the embeddedness of moral actors in those realities. How are bioethicists to navigate systemic injustices when completing research, giving guidance for patient care, and contributing to medical and public health policies? When there are no good options and when moral agents are enmeshed in their sociopolitical viewpoints, how should moral theorizing proceed? What do bioethical issues and principles look like from the perspective of historically marginalized persons? These are just a few of the questions that motivate nonideal theory within bioethics. This book begins in Part I with an overview of the foundational tenets of nonideal theory, what nonideal theory can offer bioethics, and why it may be preferable to ideal theory in addressing moral dilemmas in the clinic and beyond. In Part II, authors discuss applications of nonideal theory in many areas of bioethics, including reflections on environmental harms, racism and minority health, healthcare injustices during incarceration and detention, and other vulnerabilities experienced by patients from clinical and public health perspectives. The chapters within each section demonstrate the breadth in scope that nonideal theory encompasses, bringing together diverse theorists and approaches into one collection. (shrink)

How do we know what nations intend when they wage war? Scholars of the just war tradition have tended to assume that belligerent nations intend whatever their heads of state say they intend. But this confuses descriptions of intentions—only some of them sincere—with intentions themselves. In truth, intentions are much more action‐oriented and embodied than scholars have so far realized. Nor have scholars of the just war tradition adequately reckoned with the corporate character of national intentions. In order to remedy (...) this, I draw upon the insights of both neuroscience and the scholarly subfield known as “cognitive sports psychology” in order to craft a robustly embodied and adequately corporate account of a nation’s wartime intentions. But we cannot simply plug this new understanding of intention into existing formulations of what qualifies as a just war. Assessments of national intentions will remain overly verbal and insufficiently corporate as long as scholars split war into the three phases of jus ad bellum, jus in bello, and jus post bellum. Because intention is action‐oriented, we cannot know what a nation intends until it has acted; intention unfolds across all phases of war and therefore cannot be fully known until a war is finished. (shrink)

The MedStar Washington Hospital Center clinical ethics team became involved in a case when the family requested the posthumous removal of a patient’s ovaries for future reproductive use. This case presents a novel question for clinical ethicists, since the technology for posthumous female reproduction is still in development. In the bioethics literature, the standard position is to refuse to comply with such a request, unless there is explicit consent or evidence of explicit conversations that demonstrate the deceased would have wanted (...) this option pursued. Ms D’s case, we suggest, offers an exception to this default position; complying with the family’s request could have been ethically permissible in this case, had it been medically feasible. (shrink)

Previously published in The mountain path, quarterly published from Sri Ramanansramam.

Pope Benedict XVI's encyclical Deus Caritas Est continues the magisterium's twentieth-century shift from an act-oriented, procreative approach to sexual ethics to what I will term a heterosexually personalistic one. Situating a heterosexual anthropology within a heterosexual cosmology, Benedict argues that just as God loves humanity with heterosexual eros, so must human beings love each other heterosexually. Although Benedict depends upon the explanatory power of heterosexuality, he perhaps unwittingly ends up depicting God's love not as iconically heterosexual, but as queer. In (...) casting God's love as queer, I do not, even analogously, impute to God a type of homosexuality as Benedict does a heterosexuality. Instead, by drawing attention to the discursive specificity and historical instability of both homosexuality and heterosexuality, I use “queer” to recognize God's love as beyond categorization and as strange; it cannot be corralled into or contained by the historically specific notions of heterosexual and homosexual. But this essay does not merely deconstruct Benedict's heterosexually personalistic cosmology. It uncovers in Benedict's Eucharistic transfiguration of marital love a new and promising way of situating discussions about the ethics of sex. (shrink)

The covert administration of medication occurs with incapacitated patients without their knowledge, involving some form of deliberate deception in disguising or hiding the medication. Covert medication in food is a relatively common practice globally, including in institutional and homecare contexts. Until recently, it has received little attention in the bioethics literature, and there are few laws or rules governing the practice. In this paper, we discuss significant, but often overlooked, ethical issues related to covert medication in food. We emphasise the (...) variety of ways in which eating has ethical importance, highlighting what is at risk if covert administration of medication in food is discovered. For example, losing trust in feeders and food due to covert medication may risk important opportunities for identity maintenance in contexts where identity is already unstable. Since therapeutic relationships may be jeopardised by a patient’s discovery that caregivers had secretly put medications in their food, this practice can result in an ongoing deception loop. While there may be circumstances in which covert medication is ethically justified, given a lack of suitable alternatives, we argue that in any particular case this practice should be continually re-evaluated in light of the building moral costs to the relational agent over time. (shrink)

Baby A1 was born prematurely with severe encephalopathy, injured brainstem, and a potentially injured spinal cord. He had no response to pain or other external stimuli. The neonatal team unanimousl...

Why flawed logic puts us all at risk, and how critical thinking can save the world. It may seem a big claim, but knowing how to think clearly and critically has literally helped save the world. In September 1983, at the height of the Cold War, the Soviet Union's early warning system showed five US missiles heading towards the country. Stanislaw Petrov knew his duty: he was to inform Moscow that nuclear war had begun, so that they could launch an (...) immediate and devastating response. Instead, he made a call to say the system was faulty. He'd assessed the situation and reasoned that an error was more likely than such a limited attack. We may not have to save the planet from nuclear annihilation, of course, but our ability to think critically has never been more important. In a world where fake news, mistrust of experts, prejudice and ignorance all too often hold sway, we can all too easily be misled. We live in an era where access to all the knowledge in the world is at our fingertips, yet that also means misinformation and falsehoods can spread further and faster than ever before. In The Irrational Ape, David Robert Grimes shows how we can be lured into making critical mistakes or drawing false conclusions, and how to avoid such errors. Given the power of modern science and the way that movements can unite to protest a cause via social media, we are in dangerous times. But fortunately, we can learn from our mistakes, and by critical thinking and scientific method we can discover how to apply these techniques to everything from deciding what insurance to buy to averting global disaster. This book, packed with fascinating case studies and examples, helps ensure we are ready for the modern world. (shrink)

Ableist attitudes and structures regarding disability are increasingly recognized across all sectors of healthcare delivery. After Dobbs, novel questions arose in the USA concerning how to protect reproductive autonomy while avoiding discrimination against and devaluation of disabled persons. As a case study, we examine the Louisiana’s Department of Public Health August 1st Emergency Declaration, “List of Conditions that shall deem an Unborn Child ‘Medically Futile.’” We raise a number of medical, ethical, and public health concerns that lead us to argue (...) the declaration should be rescinded. The ethically objectionable declaration provides valuable lessons concerning how to uphold both reproductive and disability justice in a post-Dobbs landscape. (shrink)

At its core, nonideal theory is an attempt not only to address issues of justice, but it also provides us a lens through which we can articulate our limitations as knowers and reasoners, the ways in which we are relational in our autonomy needs, and the ways in which we are deeply dependent upon institutions and social supports for our agency and identities. Bringing this lens into bioethics means shifting our orientation in our scholarship and our practice. This shift will (...) have implications in how bioethical evaluations are taken up and played out in policies, institutional structures that inform the clinical encounter, and avenues for protection and redress for marginalized and vulnerable populations. It will also allow theorists and researchers to interrogate the status quo, revealing how many standard policies and practices are embedded in social and institutional arrangements that privilege the few or are built on exclusionary norms. The path forward, and the aim of this volume, is to extend the scholarship of nonideal approaches to bioethics. The volume is divided into two main parts. The first is focused on philosophically unpacking nonideal theory as an approach in bioethics. The second offers applications of nonideal theory in environmental ethics, healthcare ethics, public heath ethics, and genetic ethics. Our collective aim is to expand what has been considered nonideal bioethics. The history of nonideal theory has as its point of reference a turn away from Rawlsian justice, but the future of nonideal theory is ripe with possibilities. (shrink)

Scholars from various disciplines have explored the powerful symbolic function that children occupy within public discourses of technology, but less attention has been paid to the role this plays in the social shaping of the technologies themselves. Virtual worlds present a unique site for studying how ideas about children become embedded in the artifacts adults make for them. This article argues that children’s virtual worlds are fundamentally negotiated spaces in which broader aspirations and anxieties about children’s relationships with play, technology, (...) consumer culture, and the public sphere resurface as “configurations” of an imagined, ideal child player. The article begins with a brief overview of the children's virtual worlds phenomenon, followed by a discussion of related research on children’s play and play technologies. Findings from a case study of six commercial, game-themed virtual worlds targeted specifically to children are then presented, with a focus on how these artifacts configure their child players in highly ideological and normative ways, wherein play is narrowly defined in accordance with a neoromantic, consumerist ethos. The article aims to uncover the hidden politics inscribed within a particular genre of children’s technology and to explore some of the implications for children’s digital play. (shrink)

This article introduces a new term, “anti‐blackness supremacy,” in order to supplement existing theological discourse about the ethical life of racism. To a much greater extent than the terms “racism, ” “white privilege” or even “white supremacy,” this term also better positions scholars to address what I identify as the two most pressing problems in anti‐racist discourse: first, the inability to diagnose the relation between classism and racism without reducing one into the other; and second, the tendency to treat racism (...) as a monolithic evil that falls upon all people of color equally and in the same way. The former error has distorted political discourse for decades; the latter misconception intensifies as the United States undergoes demographic shifts in the wake of immigration from Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Both of these errors arise from a pervasive misunderstanding of the slave regime that has set our current racial system in motion. In truth, slavery primarily represents not a mechanism of profit extraction, but a relation of a unique type of power. The term “anti‐blackness supremacy,” I contend, corrects both of these misperceptions, affirming both the singularity of black oppression and its fundamental connection to enslaving power. In so doing, it enables ethicists to disarm an older racial foe while thwarting the ascension of a newer one. (shrink)

The Vivekacudamani is one of the most important texts in the Advaita tradition and the most popular philosophical work ascribed to the great Indian philosopher, Sankara. This book presents an accessible translation of the entire text and also includes Upanisadic cross-referencing to most of its 580 verses, extensive notes, a lengthy Introduction, list of variant readings, an extensive bibliography, and an index to the verses.

Scientists, clinicians, and bioethicists are worried about how so‐called personhood measures would limit access to certain types of contraception, research involving stem cells, and access to fertility treatments. While these measures have been struck down in Colorado, South Dakota, California, and Mississippi, the bill signed into law in Oklahoma in February deserves critical scrutiny, particularly into the ways these legal measures influence eligibility for clinical research. Oklahoma's bill states that the laws of the state “shall be interpreted and construed to (...) acknowledge on behalf of the unborn child at every stage of development all the rights, privileges, and immunities available to other persons, citizens, and residents of this state.”. (shrink)