The medical profession contains five “spheres of morality”: clinical care, clinical research, scientific knowledge, population health, and the market. These distinct sets of normative commitments require physicians to act in different ways depending on the ends of the activity in question. For example, a physician-scientist emphasizes patients’ well-being in clinic, prioritizes the scientific method in lab, and seeks to maximize shareholder returns as a board member of a pharmaceutical firm. Physicians increasingly occupy multiple roles in healthcare and move between them (...) frequently, creating the possibility of conflict between the ethical obligations of their various roles. This paper examines the entire moral landscape of medicine through the lens of role morality. It develops a novel framework that helps physicians recognize how their moral commitments depend on the nature and context of the situation, clarifies ethical conflicts that physicians face, and concludes with ideas for resolving these conflicts. (shrink)

Dignity plays a central role in current thinking about law and human rights, but there is sharp disagreement about its meaning. Combining conceptual precision with a broad historical background, Michael Rosen puts these controversies in context and offers a novel, constructive proposal. “Penetrating and sprightly...Rosen rightly emphasizes the centrality of Catholicism in the modern history of human dignity. His command of the history is impressive...Rosen is a wonderful guide to the recent German constitutional thinking about human dignity...[Rosen] is in general (...) an urbane and witty companion, achieving his aim of accessibly written philosophy.” —Samuel Moyn, The Nation “[An] elegant, interesting and lucid exploration of the concept of dignity...Drawing on classical, liberal and Catholic traditions, Rosen hopes to rehabilitate dignity to its rightful place near the centre of moral thought...Rosen's admirable book deserves wide attention from political theorists, jurisprudes and political philosophers.” —Simon Blackburn, Times Higher Education “Dignity deserves to be widely read, not only for its intrinsic interest, but also as a corrective to the habit of discussing such topics in abstraction from their social context. Whether or not one agrees with Rosen's arguments, there can be no doubt he has widened our horizons.” —Rae Langton, Times Literary Supplement. (shrink)

The role or function of experimental and observational replication within empirical science has implications for how replication should be measured. Broadly, there seems to be consensus that replication’s central goal is to confirm or vouchsafe the reliability of scientific findings. I argue that if this consensus is correct, then most of the measures of replication used in the scientific literature are actually poor indicators of this reliability or confirmation. Only meta-analytic measures of replication align functionally with the goals of replication. (...) I conclude by addressing some objections to meta-analysis. (shrink)

Marxism has often been associated with two different legacies. The first rests on a strong exposition and critique of the logic of capitalism, grounded in a systematic analysis of the laws of motion of capitalism as a system. The second legacy refers to a strong historicist perspective grounded in a conception of social relations that emphasises the centrality of power and social conflict to the analysis of history. This article challenges the prominence of structural accounts of capitalism by showing how (...) the tension between these legacies has played out within Political Marxism, both orientations already having co-existed, somewhat uneasily, within Robert Brenner’s original contributions to the Transition Debate. Through this internal critique and re-formulation of Political Marxism, we wish to open a broader debate within Marxism on the need for a more agency-based account of capitalism, which builds more explicitly on the concept of social relations, to recover the historicist legacy of Marxism. (shrink)

As concern over the use of questionable research practices in academic science has increased over the last couple of decades, some reforms have been implemented and many others have been debated and recommended. While many of these proposals have merit, efforts to improve scientific practices are more likely to succeed when they are responsive to the prevailing views and concerns of scientists themselves. To date, there have been few efforts to solicit wide-ranging input from researchers on the topic of needed (...) reforms. This article is a qualitative report of responses from federally funded scientists to the question of what should be done to address the problem of QRPs in their disciplines. Overall, participants were concerned about how institutional and career-oriented incentives encourage the use of QRPs. Compared to previous recommendations, participants had surprisingly little confidence in the ability of ethics training to improve research integrity. (shrink)

The controversy over the equivalence of continuous sedation until death (CSD) and physician-assisted suicide/euthanasia (PAS/E) provides an opportunity to focus on a significant extended use of CSD. This extension, suggested by the equivalence of PAS/E and CSD, is designed to promote additional patient autonomy at the end-of-life. Samuel LiPuma, in his article, “Continuous Sedation Until Death as Physician-Assisted Suicide/Euthanasia: A Conceptual Analysis” claims equivalence between CSD and death; his paper is seminal in the equivalency debate. Critics contend that sedation (...) follows proportionality protocols for which LiPuma’s thesis does not adequately account. Furthermore, sedation may not eliminate consciousness, and as such LiPuma’s contention that CSD is equivalent to neocortical death is suspect. We not only defend the equivalence thesis, but also expand it to include additional moral considerations. First, we explain the equivalence thesis. This is followed by a defense of the thesis against five criticisms. The third section critiques the current use of CSD. Finally, we offer two proposals that, if adopted, would broaden the use of PAS/E and CSD and thereby expand options at the end-of-life. (shrink)

Taking a thematic approach to Butler as a political thinker, this text develops Butler's theory of the political through an exploration of her politics of troubling.

For the last fifty years, the United States healthcare system has done an extremely poor job of delivering healthcare in a just and fair manner. The United States holds the dubious distinction of being the only industrialized nation in the world lacking provisions to ensure universal coverage. We attempt to provide some of the reasons this dysfunctional system has persisted and show that healthcare should not be a commodity. We begin with a brief historical overview of healthcare delivery in the (...) United States since WWII. This is followed by a critical analysis of the for-profit model including reasons to support the view that healthcare should not be a free market commodity. We also demonstrate how special interest groups have been able to win support for their practices based on propaganda rather than fact. A brief analysis of the Affordable Care Act is offered along with critical comments regarding its ineffectiveness. We conclude with a brief overview of international approaches that have resulted in universal coverage and suggest the United States ought to adopt an approach similar to those outlined so that it no longer stands as the only industrialized nation to ignore the glaring problems that exist. (shrink)

The concept of emergence is commonly invoked in modern physics but rarely defined. Building on recent influential work by Jeremy Butterfield, I provide precise definitions of emergence concepts as they pertain to properties represented in models, applying them to some basic examples from space-time and thermostatistical physics. The chief formal innovation I employ, similarity structure, consists in a structured set of similarity relations among those models under analysis—and their properties—and is a generalization of topological structure. Although motivated from physics, this (...) similarity-structure-based account of emergence applies to any science that represents its possibilia with models. (shrink)

This article presents an analysis of James Benning's film, BNSF (2013). It argues that the film comprises a landscape rendered in such a way that the temporal aspects of the processes, both cultural and natural, of which it is composed are brought forth. The article also asserts that, by relating a world that unfolds with a measure of contingency, the film not only manifests the inherent inadequacy of representation, but also it draws attention to the efficacy of the world in (...) the making of its moving image. Finally, the article demonstrates that the qualities of the world delimited by the film impel the viewer to attempt to envision facts of nature that greatly outsize the horizon of her human point of view. (shrink)

Using the taking of the knee by the England men's football team at Euro 2020, this paper looks at political reactions to anti-racist protest. The taking of a knee in other sporting contexts has been met by considerable opprobrium from right-wing politicians and been weaponised as part of a reactionary ‘culture war’ against calls for action to address systemic racial discrimination. This paper offers an analysis of Conservative politicians’ responses to the England players’ actions and to the subsequent negative reactions (...) of fans. After defining soft hate speech and conceptualising booing as a strategy of denial of racism, the analysis reveals three main discursive strategies: delegitimising the players’ protests by linking it to Black Lives Matter; agreeing with the goals of the protests but not the means; and calculated ambivalence towards those who booed. I then show how this allowing of soft hate speech was juxtaposed to a condemnation of hard hate speech. I conclude, firstly, that this relies on a thin understanding of racism as a discursive repertoire rather than as a system of power, and secondly, that the ambivalence towards the booing acted as a gateway for racism. (shrink)

Of all Plato’s dialogues, the Parmenides is notoriously the most difficult to interpret. Scholars of all periods have disagreed about its aims and subject matter. The interpretations have ranged from reading the dialogue as an introduction to the whole of Platonic metaphysics to seeing it as a collection of sophisticated tricks, or even as an elaborate joke. This work presents an illuminating new translation of the dialogue together with an extensive introduction and running commentary, giving a unified explanation of the (...) Parmenides and integrating it firmly within the context of Plato's metaphysics and methodology. Scolnicov shows that in the Parmenides Plato addresses the most serious challenge to his own philosophy: the monism of Parmenides and the Eleatics. In addition to providing a serious rebuttal to Parmenides, Plato here re-formulates his own theory of forms and participation, arguments that are central to the whole of Platonic thought, and provides these concepts with a rigorous logical and philosophical foundation. In Scolnicov's analysis, the Parmenides emerges as an extension of ideas from Plato's middle dialogues and as an opening to the later dialogues. Scolnicov’s analysis is crisp and lucid, offering a persuasive approach to a complicated dialogue. This translation follows the Greek closely, and the commentary affords the Greekless reader a clear understanding of how Scolnicov’s interpretation emerges from the text. This volume will provide a valuable introduction and framework for understanding a dialogue that continues to generate lively discussion today. (shrink)

This paper discusses lower bounds for proof length, especially as measured by number of steps (inferences). We give the first publicly known proof of Gödel's claim that there is superrecursive (in fact. unbounded) proof speedup of (i + 1)st-order arithmetic over ith-order arithmetic, where arithmetic is formalized in Hilbert-style calculi with + and · as function symbols or with the language of PRA. The same results are established for any weakly schematic formalization of higher-order logic: this allows all tautologies as (...) axioms and allows all generalizations of axioms as axioms. Our first proof of Gödel's claim is based on self-referential sentences: we give a second proof that avoids the use of self-reference based loosely on a method of Statman. (shrink)

Much has been written as of late on the status of the physical Church- Turing thesis and the relation between physics and computer science in general. The following discussion will focus on one such article [5]. The purpose of these notes is not so much to argue for a particular thesis as it is to solicit a dialog that will help clarify our own thoughts.

Hume recourt régulièrement à la métaphore selon laquelle nous projetons des valeurs sur le monde du fait des émotions que nous éprouvons. Cette métaphore projectiviste semble impliquer la non-existence des valeurs, et l’impossibilité d’une connaissance morale. Dans cet article, j’essaie de montrer que ces implications sont loin d’être évidentes, et qu’une lecture réaliste de Hume est également possible, qui permet notamment de rendre compte du rapport complexe que Hume entretient avec le rationalisme moral en particulier, et avec la connaissance des (...) valeurs de façon plus générale. (shrink)

Covid‐19 confronts us with tragic choices, in which every option is unacceptable. On the New York State Task Force on Life and the Law, I worked on guidelines for such situations. We did not envision the scale or character of Covid‐19. To minimize fear that the decisions made in these situations might be unfair, we all must know what guidelines or mandates inform them. Only with transparency about how decisions will be made, by whom, and according to what requirements can (...) we have confidence that fairness prevails. We now face many related questions about process, goals, leadership, and trust. For example, how might ethical guidelines evolve as scientific understanding advances? Should guidelines vary with different venues? And if, as I have argued, judgment is necessary even with the best of guidelines, how can we prepare clinicians to make good judgments? Are there implications for better training of personnel in nonemergency times for what they might face in the worst of times? (shrink)

Doctor's Dilemmas, a fascinating study of the moral dilemmas confronting health professionals and patients alike, examines areas of health care where ethical conflicts often arise. Gorovitz illuminates these conflicts by clearly explaining and applying a broad range of philosophical concepts. He lays the groundwork for informed ethical decision-making and provides the general reader with a lucid overview of the complexities of medical practice. Written in accessible, conversational style and making extensive use of anecdotes, examples, and references to literature, Doctor's Dilemmas (...) offers profound insights into medical ethics for all those involved with the health professions--be they doctors, nurses, administrators, or patients. (shrink)

Chapter 1 Introduction How are participants associated with the eventualities they participate in? Are there events? Thematic roles? ...

This collection explicates one of the core ideas underpinning Minimalist theory--explanation via simplification. It introduces and advances Minimalist theory for students and scholars in linguistics and related sub-disciplines of psychology, philosophy, and cognitive science.

Some philosophers have become atheists because of “intellectual probity.” Martin Buber relates two occasions during which he advocated his view of the term “God” and rejected alternative perspectives. He never justified the basis for either his advocacy or his rejection, yet both play an important role in all his writing, especially his specific type of Zionism. Using what has been called the mere theism of William James’ “The Will to Believe” and the criteria for faith that James advances in that (...) essay illuminates both Buber’s general view of the divine and more particularly his Zionism. Once Buber, no less than James, is understood as a mere theist the basis of what he accepts and what he rejects as true religion becomes clearer. Buber’s theism meets James’ requirement of being a live, forced, momentous option and his Zionism also strives to meet those standards. (shrink)

This review concerns the notions of physical possibility and necessity as they are informed by contemporary physical theories and the reconstructive explications of past physical theories according to present standards. Its primary goal is twofold: first, to motivate and introduce a range of accessible issues of philosophical relevance around these notions; and second, to provide extensive references to the research literature on them. Although I will have occasion to comment on the direction and shape of this literature, pointing out certain (...) lacunae in argument or scholarly attention, I intend to advance no overriding thesis or point of view, aside from the selection of issues I deem most interesting. (shrink)

Matching in observational studies faces complications when units enroll in treatment on a rolling basis. While each treated unit has a specific time of entry into the study, control units each have many possible comparison, or “pseudo-treatment,” times. Valid inference must account for correlations between repeated measures for a single unit, and researchers must decide how flexibly to match across time and units. We provide three important innovations. First, we introduce a new matched design, GroupMatch with instance replacement, allowing maximum (...) flexibility in control selection. This new design searches over all possible comparison times for each treated-control pairing and is more amenable to analysis than past methods. Second, we propose a block bootstrap approach for inference in matched designs with rolling enrollment and demonstrate that it accounts properly for complex correlations across matched sets in our new design and several other contexts. Third, we develop a falsification test to detect violations of the timepoint agnosticism assumption, which is needed to permit flexible matching across time. We demonstrate the practical value of these tools via simulations and a case study of the impact of short-term injuries on batting performance in major league baseball. (shrink)