Rawls’s theory does not, as many philosophers assume, rule out the possibility of justice for nonhuman animals. A careful reading of Rawls shows that the issue hinges on the answer to this question: Would it be reasonable for moral agents to agree to terms of social cooperation that include protections for animals? To establish that it is reasonable, one must make an argument for these legal protections which is grounded in public reason alone. Such arguments exist and, indeed, dominate discussions (...) of the status of animals. As such, a Rawlsian framework can be used to argue for justice for animals. (shrink)

This article considers the appropriate limits of legal regulation through an analysis of the 2010 French law banning the wearing of full-face veils in public. The author examines the law from the perspective of John Stuart Mill's harm principle and Patrick Devlin's legal moralism. The author concludes that neither position provides a convincing justification for the French law.

There is widespread agreement among political philosophers that there is a core set of civil and political liberties that ought to be given special protections by any state. In contrast, there is significant disagreement about whether (and which) economic liberties deserve the same level of protection and priority. To what extent should freedom in economic activities be protected by and from the government? To what extent is it justifiable for government to interfere with economic activities for the sake of equalizing (...) opportunities and protecting the welfare of society’s vulnerable? John Rawls famously held that only a narrow range of economic liberties are basic liberties deserving special protections, though he never offered a full defense of that claim. In _Free Market Fairness_ John Tomasi argued against Rawls, claiming it follows from Rawls’s own assumptions that we ought to protect a broad range of economic liberties as basic liberties. This paper attempts to provide the missing argument in favor of Rawls’s position in this debate and against Tomasi’s. First, I argue for a novel interpretation of Rawls’s criterion for basic liberties. Second, I use that interpretation to argue that Rawls was correct and consistent to exclude contract rights and productive property rights from the scheme of basic liberties. (shrink)

In the United States, there continue to be significant gender and racial wage gaps. The causes of these earnings gaps are complex. Some people argue that, to the extent that the wage gaps are due to individual career and family choices, as opposed to employer discrimination, they are not the appropriate object of policy change. Other people respond by claiming that this underestimates the role of discriminatory norms influencing and limiting family and career choices. I agree with that response, but (...) I think the argument makes another mistake as well. In this paper, I argue that it is incorrect to assume that only the aspects of the wage gaps caused by discrimination or discriminatory norms are the appropriate object of policy. (shrink)

From the article's conclusion: "This article does not challenge the coherence of retributive theory nor does it challenge the consistency of a retributive theorist who supports the death penalty. I have only argued that one cannot justify the death penalty simply by establishing the claim that wrongdoers deserve punishment which fits the crime. Unless one is willing to condone all sorts of barbaric punishments, then one must appeal to additional ethical considerations to establish which equivalent (or roughly equivalent or proportional) (...) punishments are morally acceptable.". (shrink)

John Rawls is widely considered one of the most important political philosophers of the 20th century, and his highly original and influential works play a central role in contemporary philosophical debates. Given the vast scholarship written in response to his work, students and scholars need some guidance in finding and understanding the central debates and arguments. This book meets this need like no other collection has before. This collection of original essays is divided into ten parts, with each part covering (...) a major area of philosophical debate inspired by Rawls's work. In each part, there is an introductory essay, providing an overview of the relevant arguments from Rawls's work and the historical contours of the debate that ensued. Each introductory essay is followed by two essays written by scholars who take opposing positions on the debate, moving the debate forward in a fruitful way. (shrink)

The emerging field of eco-ability draws attention to important connections between the injustices faced by people with disabilities and the injustices faced by non-human animals and the rest of the natural world (Nocella et al. 2012). Recognizing the common roots of different forms of injustice can be illuminating and unifying, creating powerful allies in the quest for a just society. At the same time, Anthony Nocella rightly cautions that one should be careful not to exaggerate commonalities, intersections, and analogies between (...) different forms of oppression (2015). To overstate connections between different forms of discrimination risks misrepresenting that discrimination, thereby perpetuating it or at least failing to address it adequately. This cautiousness about analogizing oppressions is all the more important for eco-activists who exist within a privileged position in civil society. The potential for eco-ability studies to build lasting coalitions hinges on scholars’ ability to strike the right balance between drawing connections and acknowledging differences in a thoughtful way. In this paper, I explore some of the connections and differences between ableism, speciesism and ecocide by focusing on two oft-cited themes: reason and normalcy. My hope in doing so is to illuminate some of the more compelling connections that can move us forward on the path toward a more just world. (shrink)

Private industry funds more than half of all medical research in the United States. While industry involvement in research has benefits, it can also create conflicts of interest. The most common policies adopted to address conflict of interest in medical research are focused primarily on the ways in which industry sponsorship may undermine a clinician’s judgment regarding patient care. Insufficient attention has been given to the ways in which industry sponsorship may undermine judgment relative to the goal of scientific integrity (...) in research. The most common conflict of interest policies do not adequately address this problem. Disclosure policies alone will not remove or ameliorate all conflicts. Further, severing or monitoring ties between clinicians and industries will not adequately address the problem, since in many cases it is not the clinicians who are making the relevant research judgments. In order to address the problem of conflict of interest inindustry-sponsored research, fundamental changes in strategy and practice must be adopted which either remove the power to make research decisions from industry employees, or increase the review of those decisions by independent investigators. (shrink)

Research focused on the prodromal period prior to the onset of psychosis is essential for the further development of strategies for early detection, early intervention, and disease pre-emption. Such efforts necessarily require the enrollment of individuals who are at risk of psychosis but have not yet developed a psychotic illness into research and treatment protocols. This work is becoming increasingly internationalized, which warrants special consideration of cultural differences in conceptualization of mental illness and international differences in health care practices and (...) rights regarding research participation. The process of identifying and requesting informed consent from individuals at elevated risk for psychosis requires thoughtful communication about illness risk and often involves the participation of family members. Empirical studies of risk reasoning and decisional capacity in young people and individuals with psychosis suggest that most individuals who are at-risk for psychosis can adequately provide informed consent; however ongoing improvements to tools and procedures are important to ensure that this work proceeds with maximal consideration of relevant ethical issues. This review provides a discussion of these issues in the context of international research efforts. (shrink)

In December of 2017, President Trump reduced the size of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante Monuments by 2 million acres. Conservatives rejoiced, and progressives railed. Yet neither side has clearly identified the moral facets of the situation. The crucial moral question is this: How ought public property be regulated to protect landscapes with cultural significance? We offer criteria for determining when something has cultural value and argue that the moral merits of the present case turn on whether the reduction adequately (...) addresses the cultural interests at play. (shrink)

In the last 50 years, multiauthored publications have become more prevalent, given the increasing number of collaborative, interdisciplinary, multicenter research studies. The determination of authorship credit and order is a difficult process, especially for graduate students, whose disadvantaged power position in research settings increases their vulnerability to exploitation. The American Psychological Association has published ethical standards for determining authorship credit, but the power difference inherent in the student-faculty relationship may complicate this ethical dilemma. The authors reviewed a number of previously (...) recommended strategies and proposed that determining authorship credit is most effectively facilitated through professional development. (shrink)

This study uses the ATBEQ, as published by J.F. Preble and A. Reichel (1988) to measure attitudes towards ethical business attitudes held by final year South African Bachelor of Commerce students at Rhodes University. Three samples of students were assessed over three consecutive years of 1989, 1990 and 1991, and results are compared with samples (1988) of American and Israeli students and a sample (1991) of Western Australian students. A significant difference in attitudes was found to exist between the Israeli (...) and South African samples. A factor analysis of the questionnaire identified eleven factors of which seven are theoretically labelled. A revised version of the ATBEQ is suggested which excludes the poorly performing questions. (shrink)

On one view, the point of an assertion is to update the common ground (Stalnaker 1978, Karttunen 1974). On another, the point of an assertion is to propose an update to the com- mon ground (Groenendijk 2009, Mascarenhas 2009, and related work on the structure of discourse, e.g., Ginzburg 1996, Roberts 1996, Gunlogson 2001). In Murray (to appear), I merge these two views. I argue based on evidence from declarative sentences with eviden- tials that assertion has two components: what (...) is at-issue and what is not. The not-at-issue component of assertion is added directly to the common ground while the at-issue compo- nent is proposed to be added to the common ground. Here, I extend this analysis to yes/no questions in Cheyenne and their interaction with evidentials. I propose that the distinction between what is at-issue and what is not is also present in questions, and that it can be modeled in the same way. Specifically, both declarative and interrogative sentences make two contributions: they restrict and structure the common ground. The restriction is based on the not-at-issue component while the structuring relation is based on the at-issue component. (shrink)

How does perceptual learning take place early in life? Traditionally, researchers have focused on how infants make use of information within displays to organize it, but recently, increasing attention has been paid to the question of how infants perceive objects differently depending upon their recent interactions with the objects. This experiment investigates 10-month-old infants' use of brief prior experiences with objects to visually organize a display consisting of multiple geometrically shaped three-dimensional blocks created for this study. After a brief exposure (...) to a multipart portion of the display, each infant was shown two test events, one of which preserved the unit the infant had seen and the other of which broke that unit. Overall, infants looked longer at the event that broke the unit they had seen prior to testing than the event that preserved that unit, suggesting that infants made use of the brief prior experience to (a) form a cohesive unit of the multipart portion of the display they saw prior to test and (b) segregate this unit from the rest of the test display. This suggests that infants made inferences about novel parts of the test display based on limited exposure to a subset of the test display. Like adults, infants learn features of the three-dimensional world through their experiences in it. (shrink)

1 Evidence-based policy requires researchers to provide the answers to ecological questions that are of interest to policy makers. To find out what those questions are in the UK, representatives from 28 organizations involved in policy, together with scientists from 10 academic institutions, were asked to generate a list of questions from their organizations. 2 During a 2-day workshop the initial list of 1003 questions generated from consulting at least 654 policy makers and academics was used as a basis for (...) generating a short list of 100 questions of significant policy relevance. Short-listing was decided on the basis of the preferences of the representatives from the policy-led organizations. 3 The areas covered included most major issues of environmental concern in the UK, including agriculture, marine fisheries, climate change, ecosystem function and land management. 4 The most striking outcome was the preference for general questions rather than narrow ones. The reason is that policy is driven by broad issues rather than specific ones. In contrast, scientists are frequently best equipped to answer specific questions. This means that it may be necessary to extract the underpinning specific question before researchers can proceed. 5 Synthesis and applications. Greater communication between policy makers and scientists is required in order to ensure that applied ecologists are dealing with issues in a way that can feed into policy. It is particularly important that applied ecologists emphasize the generic value of their work wherever possible. (shrink)

Dementia is a growing issue at the end of life that presents unique challenges for advance care planning. Advance directives are a useful and important component of end-of-life planning, but standard advance directives have less utility in cases of loss of capacity due to dementia. An advance directive designed to specifically address end-of-life issues in the setting of dementia can provide patients with increased autonomy and caregivers with improved information about the desires of the individual in question. The Dartmouth Dementia (...) Directive is a dementia-specific advance directive, available online, that seeks to address common concerns of individuals who are planning for dementia-related end-of-life care. This directive was piloted in a community-based workshop, which provided important details and perspective on the best use of dementia-specific advance directives in the greater population. (shrink)

Community-based participatory research (CBPR) focuses on specific community needs, and produces results that directly address those needs. Although conducting ethical CBPR is critical to its success, few academic programs include this training in their curricula. This article describes the development and evaluation of an online training course designed to increase the use of CBPR in mental health disciplines. Developed using a participatory approach involving a community of experts, this course challenges traditional research by introducing a collaborative process meant to encourage (...) increased participation by special populations and narrow the parity gap in effective mental health treatment and services delivery. (shrink)

The interactions between genetic and environmental risk factors contribute to the aetiology of complex human diseases. Genome‐wide association studies (GWAS) have revealed that most of the genetic variants associated with complex diseases are located in the non‐coding part of the genome, preferentially within enhancers. Enhancers are distal cis‐regulatory elements composed of clusters of transcription factors binding sites that positively regulate the expression of their target genes. The generation of genome‐wide maps for histone marks (e.g., H3K27ac), chromatin accessibility and transcription factor (...) and coactivator (e.g., p300) binding profiles have enabled the identification of enhancers across many human cell types and tissues. Nonetheless, the functional and pathological consequences of the majority of disease‐associated genetic variants located within enhancers seem to be rather minor under normal conditions, thus questioning their medical relevance. Here we propose that, due to the prevalence of enhancer redundancy, the pathological effects of many disease‐associated non‐coding genetic variants might be preferentially (or even only) manifested under environmental stress. (shrink)

This book brings together scholars from a variety of epistemological perspectives to explore the multiple ways in which sexuality does indeed matter in the arena of public education.

© 2017. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.We present new observations of the low-mass companion to HD 984 taken with the Gemini Planet Imager as a part of the GPI Exoplanet Survey campaign. Images of HD 984 B were obtained in the J and H bands. Combined with archival epochs from 2012 and 2014, we fit the first orbit to the companion to find an 18 au orbit with a 68% confidence interval between 14 and 28 au, an eccentricity (...) of 0.18 with a 68% confidence interval between 0.05 and 0.47, and an inclination of 119°with a 68% confidence interval between 114°and 125°. To address the considerable spectral covariance in both spectra, we present a method of splitting the spectra into low and high frequencies to analyze the spectral structure at different spatial frequencies with the proper spectral noise correlation. Using the split spectra, we compare them to known spectral types using field brown dwarf and low-mass star spectra and find a best-fit match of a field gravity M6.5 ±1.5 spectral type with a corresponding temperature of K. Photometry of the companion yields a luminosity of log=2.88 ± 0.07 dex with DUSTY models. Mass estimates, again from DUSTY models, find an age-dependent mass of 34 ±1 to 95 ±4 M Jup. These results are consistent with previous measurements of the object. (shrink)

BackgroundThe COVID-19 crisis has introduced a variety of stressors, while simultaneously decreasing the availability of strategies to cope with stress. In this context, it could be useful to understand issues that people find most concerning and ways in which they cope with stress. In this study, we explored these questions with a sample of graduate and professional students.MethodUsing open-ended assessments, we asked participants to identify their biggest challenge or concern, their most effective way of handling stress, and their most common (...) way of handling stress. We applied thematic analysis and evaluated whether participants’ strategies corresponded with evidence-based practices.ResultsParticipants frequently reported top problems relating to productivity, physical health, and emotional health. Distraction was the most frequently classified common strategy, whereas behavioral activation was the most frequently identified effective strategy. Participants who reported a common strategy classified as an EBP reported lower depressive and anxiety symptoms. In contrast, there was no evidence of an association between symptom levels and whether or not participants’ effective strategy was an EBP. Participants who reported the same strategy as both their common and effective strategy reported lower depressive symptoms than those whose common and effective strategies were different.ConclusionOur findings highlight stressors that students are experiencing and ways they are coping during the COVID-19 crisis. We discuss how these findings can inform mental health promotion efforts and future research on coping with stressors. (shrink)

Error is a neglected epistemological category in the history of science. This neglect has been driven by the commonsense idea that its elimination is a general good, which often renders it invisible or at least not worth noticing. At the end of the sixteenth century across Europe, medicine increasingly focused on “popular errors,” a genre where learned doctors addressed potential patients to disperse false belief about treatments. By the mid-seventeenth century, investigations into popular error informed the working methodology of natural (...) philosophers, rather than just physicians. In 1646, Thomas Browne published Pseudodoxia Epidemica, a large volume on popular error. Despite Browne’s formal training as a physician, this work examined only a few medical errors and instead aspired to be an encyclopedia of error. Pseudodoxia Epidemica was highly popular, running to six editions, and was known by the Fellows of the Royal Society. Influenced by Browne, alongside Bacon’s theory of the idols, natural philosophic practice in the late sixteenth and seventeenth century developed a focus on error that revised traditional attention to the discovery of knowledge. Fellows such as Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke proposed new ways to secure truth under the far-reaching influence of Bacon’s refutations of “natural human reason” distorted by false idols, of syllogistic logic, and of “theories,” his label for traditional philosophical systems that bias thought toward falsity. In three parts, this article traces the progression in early modern scientific approaches to handling error, and especially medical error – from physicians’ efforts to identify and eradicate it through collaborative effort, to the striking tension in Browne’s work between seeking to eliminate error while also showing a marked tolerance for it, to the Royal Society’s Baconian objective of instrumentalizing error to find truth. Error emerges as its own epistemic category that serves as a driving force toward knowledge production. (shrink)

A quest for information concerning one of the missing room interiors of Wray Castle, a Gothic villa near Windermere in Cumbria, built for a Liverpool surgeon in the 1840s, curiously led the National Trust to the wonderfully contrasting neo-classical Manchester Central Library, designed by E. Vincent Harris and completed in 1934. A trawl through the records revealed a keen donor but a reluctant architect. Sixteenth-and seventeenth-century carved oak panels from the library of Wray Castle were removed and donated for use (...) in the new Central Library by the Lord Mayor of Manchester, Sir Robert Noton Barclay, before he gave the castle to the National Trust. Archive material held at Manchester shows that Harris was reluctant to accept the panels, stating his reasons firmly, but that he was prevailed upon to do so and finally incorporated them some years later. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Post-Genomic RevolutionA Paradigm Shift for Biopsychosocial SystemsClaude Robert Cloninger, MD, PhD (bio)The pstchologist Danielle Dick and psychiatrist Kenneth Kendler (DK) began an ongoing study in 2011 called Spit for Science (S4S) in which they obtained saliva as a peripheral source of DNA along with assessment of detailed self-report information on alcohol and other substance use, selected personality traits, and psychosocial history about the students entering a large university (...) (Dick et al., 2014). They hoped to identify the genes underlying the heritability of alcohol use and related behaviors to inform students about their individual risk, and thereby to promote increased self-awareness and health. The students were highly cooperative volunteers, and many peer-reviewed research papers have been published from these data.Eric Turkheimer, a psychologist who studies how genes and environments shape the development of human behavior (Harden et al., 2007; Loehlin et al., 2009; Turkheimer et al., 2003), reviewed all the resulting publications coming from S4S along with coauthor Sarah Greer (Turkheimer & Greer, 2024). Turkheimer and Greer (TG) were surprised to find the study has failed to identify any genes that have substantial (“nontrivial”) effects on reported levels of consumption or problems related to their use of alcohol or other substances, except for a variant of the gene for aldehyde dehydrogenase (ALDH2), which was already known to cause many people of Asian descent to flush when they drink alcohol. TG state that, “Again and again, the results of S4S investigations demonstrated tiny, and frequently null, contributions of genetics to differences in drinking and related behaviors among college students. GWAS [genome-wide association studies] revealed practically no genome-wide significant SNPs [single nucleotide polymorphisms], and the SNPs identified at less stringent levels of significance were never mentioned more than once” (Turkheimer & Greer, 2024).TG concluded that the design, execution, psychometric measures, and analysis of the data were excellent. However, they also discuss facts that raise doubts about the adequacy of the design and methods. Namely, it is an inconvenient fact, [End Page 429] but widely known, that approaches to GWAS that are frequently used in psychiatric genetics require huge samples (often hundreds of thousands) to detect statistically significant genes because the observed effects have consistently been weak whenever genes are assumed to act independently, as did DK. Consequently, polygenic risk scores are weak and inconsistent predictors of behavioral phenotypes (Zwir et al., 2020c). Nevertheless, TG fault DK and their coauthors for an overemphasis on statistical significance in large samples rather than prominently reporting that the observed effect sizes of genes were only weakly and inconsistently associated with any measured features of substance use.TG report that they were surprised by the weak and inconsistent findings from genetic variants from this GWAS because they knew that twin and family studies (i.e., what they call “genetics at altitude”) have previously found strong and consistent evidence of the heritability of phenotypes like those measured by DK. For example, in my own research with adoptees separated from their biological parents at an early age and reared by adoptive parents, the risk of alcohol abuse in adoptees was strongly predicted by alcohol abuse and related behaviors in their biological, but not adoptive, parents (Bohman et al., 1981; Cloninger et al., 1981; Sigvardsson et al., 1996) and by their childhood personality, particularly novelty seeking, when the children were followed into young adulthood (Cloninger, 1987; Cloninger et al., 1988). However, it is well-known that the methods used by DK for GWAS consistently fail to detect most of the heritable variance for behavioral phenotypes estimated in twin studies, which include much variability from complex patterns of gene–gene interaction (Table 1) (Cloninger & Zwir, 2022). This consistent observation in GWAS studies that assume genes act independently is called the missing or hidden heritability problem.Nevertheless, DK expressed optimism in 2011 that genome-wide measurement of genetic variants would identify genetic markers to predict risk of alcohol-related phenotypes in college students. They do so because they assume that all the information about heritable processes can be extracted from genome-wise scans of SNPS. The heritable phenotypes of interest in S4S included patterns of use of alcohol and other recreational... (shrink)

Sarah E. Wilson, University of Central LancashireThis paper's account of the core issues at stake in relation to genetic enhancement is presented as an alternative to mainstream liberal defenses of enhancement. The mainstream arguments are identified as being associated with reproductive autonomy, individual choice, and a `neutral', passive interpretation of technology. The alternative account is associated with the perspective of `woman' or child-bearer, with a fundamental concern for social justice, and an understanding of society in both a global and (...) a contextual sense. This paper adopts a theoretical framework informed by feminist ethics, particularly a feminist ethic of care. The paper begins by outlining some of the key points of the care perspective, highlighting how this contrasts with a mainstream `justice' perspective, and illustrating how this is reflected in arguments relating to genetic enhancement. The paper then turns to a consideration of how a care perspective might be applied to questions of genetic enhancement, and how this may bring forward new issues. This includes in particular a consideration of IVF technologies and how applying understandings from research into this area brings forward usually unaddressed concerns in considering genetic enhancement. The final section of the paper covers some of the questions that there is space to ask once the narrow focus on individual rights is overcome. (shrink)

Many languages grammatically mark evidentiality, i.e., the source of information. In assertions, evidentials indicate the source of information of the speaker while in questions they indicate the expected source of information of the addressee. This dissertation examines the semantics and pragmatics of evidentiality and illocutionary mood, set within formal theories of meaning and discourse. The empirical focus is the evidential system of Cheyenne (Algonquian: Montana), which is analyzed based on several years of fieldwork by the author.

Withholding or withdrawing life-saving ventilators can become necessary when resources are insufficient. In the USA, such rationing has unique social justice dimensions. Structural elements of dominant allocation frameworks simultaneously advantage white communities, and disadvantage Black communities—who already experience a disproportionate burden of COVID-19-related job losses, hospitalisations and mortality. Using the example of New Jersey’s Crisis Standard of Care policy, we describe how dominant rationing guidance compounds for many Black patients prior unfair structural disadvantage, chiefly due to the way creatinine and (...) life expectancy are typically considered.We outline six possible policy options towards a more just approach: improving diversity in decision processes, adjusting creatinine scores, replacing creatinine, dropping creatinine, finding alternative measures, adding equity weights and rejecting the dominant model altogether. We also contrast these options with making no changes, which is not a neutral default, but in separate need of justification, despite a prominent claim that it is simply based on ‘objective medical knowledge’. In the regrettable absence of fair federal guidance, hospital and state-level policymakers should reflect on which of these, or further options, seem feasible and justifiable.Irrespective of which approach is taken, all guidance should be supplemented with a monitoring and reporting requirement on possible disparate impacts. The hope that we will be able to continue to avoid rationing ventilators must not stand in the way of revising guidance in a way that better promotes health equity and racial justice, both to be prepared, and given the significant expressive value of ventilator guidance. (shrink)

School gardens and garden-based learning continue to gain great popularity in the United States, and their pedagogical potential, and ability to impact students’ fruit and vegetable consumption and activity levels have been well-documented. Less examined is their potential to be agents of food system reskilling and transformation. Though producer and consumer are inextricably linked in the food system, and deskilling of one directly influences the other, theorists often focus on production-centered and consumption-centered deskilling separately. However, in a school garden, the (...) production/consumption disconnect is erased, by virtue of the design of the site itself and how it is utilized by the actors within it. School gardens provide the critical component of education in alternative food networks, and contribute to the producer/consumer reskilling that is a necessary part of food system transformation. We conducted a case study of an established school garden program during its transition from autonomous non-profit to official, district-funded program of a rural school district in the Midwest. By participating in the full “seed to plate” life cycle of a garden crop, students in the garden were actively involved in the reconnection of producer and consumer, while educators were fostering in students an appreciation for fresh, healthy foods and actively challenging the “McDonaldization” of both students’ diets and education. Based upon these findings, we argue that school gardens in rural areas could leverage the dominant role of rural America in developing and shifting food system paradigms. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to review critically Julian Savulescu's principle of 'Procreative Beneficence,' which holds that prospective parents are morally obligated to select, of the possible children they could have, those with the greatest chance of leading the best life. According to this principle, prospective parents are obliged to use the technique of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) to select for the 'best' embryos, a decision that ought to be made based on the presence or absence of both disease (...) traits and non-disease traits such as intelligence. While several articles have been written in response to Savulescu's principle, none has systematically explored its philosophical underpinnings to demonstrate where it breaks down. In this paper I argue that the examples that Savulescu employs to support his theory in fact fail to justify it. He presents these examples as analogous to PGD, when in fact they differ from it in subtle but morally relevant ways. Specifically, Savulescu fails to acknowledge the fact that his examples evoke deontological and virtue ethics concerns that are absent in the context of PGD. These differences turn out to be crucial, so that, in the end, the analogies bear little support for his theory. Finally, I lay out the implications of this analysis for reproductive ethics. (shrink)

Bodily methodologies that engage with the affective, rhythmic, and temporal dimensions of movement have altered the landscape of social science and humanities research. Walking is one such methodology by which scholars have examined vital, sensory, material, and ephemeral intensities beyond the logics of representation. Extending this rich field, this article invokes the concept trans to reconceptualize walking research through theories that attend to the vitality and agency of matter, the interconnectedness between humans and non-humans, the importance of mediation and bodily (...) affect, and the necessity of acknowledging ethico-political responsibility. While theoretical and empirical research about embodied, emplaced, and sensorial relations between moving bodies and space are well developed in the field of walking studies, their entanglements become profoundly altered by theories of trans – transcorporeality, transspecies, and transmaterialities. Taking up trans theories we experiment in thinking-with a sonic art performance, Walking to the Laundromat, which probes bodily, affective, and gendered labour. (shrink)

This book provides a compositional, truth-conditional, crosslinguistic semantics for evidentiality, the linguistic encoding of the source of information on which a statement is based. Central to the proposed theory is the distinction between what propositional content is at-issue and what content is not-at-issue. Evidentials contribute not-at-issue content, and can affect the level of commitment a sentence makes to the main proposition, contributed by sentential mood. In this volume, Sarah Murray builds on recent work in the formal semantics of evidentials (...) and related phenomena, and proposes a semantics that does not appeal to separate dimensions of illocutionary meaning. Instead, she argues that all sentences make three contributions: at-issue content, not-at-issue content, and an illocutionary relation. At-issue content is presented and made available for subsequent anaphora, but is not directly added to the common ground; not-at-issue content directly updates the common ground; and the illocutionary relation uses the at-issue content to impose structure on the common ground, which, depending on the clause type, can trigger further updates. 0The analysis is supported by extensive empirical data from Cheyenne, drawn from the author's own fieldwork, as well as from English and a variety of other languages. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn 1651, Alexander Ross published an attack on Thomas Browne's Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Bacon's Natural History and William Harvey's De generatione. Ross's work, Arcana Microcosmi, defended Aristotelian natural philosophy against the ‘new philosophy’ that figures like Bacon, Harvey and Browne represented. Though Ross's attacks on these authors make up no more than half of the treatise’s contents, the book’s paratextual materials emphasise scientific debate. While Ross's authorial approach advocates reading exclusively ancient authorities for the sake of glossing and transmitting their knowledge (...) to a wider public, in order to argue against the new philosophy Ross must engage with its textual production. Furthermore, his works advertise their focus on Bacon, Harvey and Browne, which would have attracted a readership drawn to new scientific approaches to knowledge formation. Ross's polemic represents an effort to model his devotion to ancient authority while also generating a reading public that would resist the new approach to reading that the new philosophy proposed. (shrink)

In this fascinating book, Sarah Worth addresses from a philosophical perspective the many ways in which reading benefits us morally, socially and cognitively.

In this paper, I propose that the distinction between what is at-issue and what is not can be modeled as a distinction between two components of assertion. These two components affect the common ground in different ways. The at-issue component of an assertion, which is negotiable, is treated as a proposal to update the common ground. The not-at-issue component of an assertion, which is not negotiable, is added directly to the common ground. Evidence for this proposal comes from evidentials, which (...) I argue grammaticize this distinction. It has been observed that sentences with evidentials make both an ‘evidential’ and a ‘propositional’ contribution (Faller 2002, 2006, Matthewson et al. 2008). The evidential contribution is not directly challengeable or up for negotiation. In contrast, the propositional contribution, the ‘main point’ of the sentence, is directly challengeable and up for negotiation. I analyze these two contributions of evidentials as the not-at-issue component of assertion and the at-issue component of assertion, respectively. Supporting data comes from Cheyenne, a language with evidentials that are part of the illocutionary mood paradigm. (shrink)