À première vue, la précaution n’a plus de rôle majeur à jouer face aux risques liés aux changements climatiques dont l’origine anthropique est désormais avérée. Elle aurait ainsi laissé la place en partie à la prévention, ce qui n’a rien de surprenant puisque ces deux approches s’inscrivent dans un continuum. Les risques générés par les changements climatiques ont cependant la particularité d’être des risques globaux à la fois en raison de la multiplicité des acteurs qui en sont à l’origine et (...) de la portée des préjudices qui découlent de leur réalisation. Or il reste au moins deux éléments d’incertitude scientifique qui concernent, d’une part, les liens entre les effets globaux des changements climatiques et les effets au niveau local et, d’autre part, les interactions possibles entre risques multiples. Face à ces éléments d’incertitude variables, la précaution est le curseur permettant de déterminer à un instant précis l’acceptabilité sociale des risques. L’approche de précaution constitue l’origine et le principe directeur d’un processus de recherche et de décision caractérisé par la pluralité : des situations de précaution ouvrent la voie à des degrés de précaution et à différents niveaux de mesures de précaution. Cette dynamique se manifeste du point de vue juridique au niveau du processus d’identification des risques, de la détermination des obligations des Etats et enfin de l’engagement de leur responsabilité. (shrink)

In this article, we discuss expertise by considering the activity of reading. Cognitive scientists have traditionally conceptualised reading as a single, well-defined task, namely the decoding of letter sequences into meaningful sequences of speech sounds. This definition captures a core feature of the reading activity at the computational level, but it is an overly narrow model of how reading behaviour occurs in the real world. We propose a more expansive model of expertise. In our view, expertise in general is best (...) conceptualised as a distributed process that takes place within a cultural-cognitive ecosystem. Our model allows for a more inclusive view of expertise in reading. We argue that reading is better understood as a manifold task domain that admits multiple reasonable criteria for evaluating performance. We draw on ethnographic data to show how our model allows for a wider appreciation of what expertise in reading amounts to in educational contexts. (shrink)

In this reflection, I respond to Anthony Reddie's reflections and assertions about the sacramentality of black flesh in a world shaped by white supremacy. I locate myself as Korean American and refer to my experience of ministering to university students during the rise of Black Lives Matter in the US. Instead of offering cognate claims for the sacramentality of Asian flesh, I ask what theological repentance should look like in light of the historical profaning of the black body. Using the (...) work of two black American artists, jazz musician Robert Glasper and painter Titus Kaphar, I offer beginning reflections on how our liturgies and practices need to change as part of theological repentance—including lament. (shrink)

In Memory: A Philosophical Study, Bernecker argues for an account of contiguity. This Contiguity View is meant to solve relearning and prompting, wayward causation problems plaguing the causal theory of memory. I argue that Bernecker’s Contiguity View fails in this task. Contiguity is too weak to prevent relearning and too strong to allow prompting. These failures illustrate a problem inherent in accounts of memory causation. Relearning and prompting are both causal relations, wayward only with respect to our interest in specifying (...) remembering’s requirements. Solving them requires saying more about remembering, not causation. I conclude by sketching such an account. (shrink)

Whereas traditional abolitionist arguments call for putting an end to capital punishment, French-Algerian philosopher Jacques Derrida emphasizes its survival, writing that “even when it will have been abolished, the death penalty will survive.” My dissertation interprets this perplexing claim by attending to the specificity of Derrida’s discourse on survival or survivance, contending that the death penalty serves an irreducible role in the constitution of the (individual or collective) subject, such that, even in the event of its abolition, some form of (...) the death penalty must continue. Through close readings of Heidegger, Kant, Nietzsche, Freud, Michel de Montagne, and Victor Hugo, as well as Shakespeare, linguist Émile Benveniste, Hungarian psychoanalysts Abraham and Torok, and the nineteenth-century political theorist Juan Donoso Cortés, the dissertation provides an account of the function of the death penalty as a specific institution within the modern penal system of a collective political body and as the legacy of ancient political economies based on sacrificial rites. This analysis interprets the death penalty both structurally and specifically, accounting for the indissociable relationship between the institution and its conceptual structure more broadly. Survivance, I argue, only ever occurs through an other, leaving open the question of the survival of the death penalty to the dissemination of indefinite and unpredictable forms that could consist in its abolition. (shrink)

Named one of the Ten Best Books of 2016 by the New York Times, a spirited account of a major intellectual movement of the twentieth century and the revolutionary thinkers who came to shape it, by the best-selling author of How to Live Sarah Bakewell. Paris, 1933: three contemporaries meet over apricot cocktails at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue Montparnasse. They are the young Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and longtime friend Raymond Aron, a fellow philosopher who raves (...) to them about a new conceptual framework from Berlin called Phenomenology. "You see," he says, "if you are a phenomenologist you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!" It was this simple phrase that would ignite a movement, inspiring Sartre to integrate Phenomenology into his own French, humanistic sensibility, thereby creating an entirely new philosophical approach inspired by themes of radical freedom, authentic being, and political activism. This movement would sweep through the jazz clubs and cafés of the Left Bank before making its way across the world as Existentialism. Featuring not only philosophers, but also playwrights, anthropologists, convicts, and revolutionaries, At the Existentialist Café follows the existentialists' story, from the first rebellious spark through the Second World War, to its role in postwar liberation movements such as anti-colonialism, feminism, and gay rights. Interweaving biography and philosophy, it is the epic account of passionate encounters--fights, love affairs, mentorships, rebellions, and long partnerships--and a vital investigation into what the existentialists have to offer us today, at a moment when we are once again confronting the major questions of freedom, global responsibility, and human authenticity in a fractious and technology-driven world. (shrink)

Originally published in 1928 this book was an attempt to acquaint the general public with the fundamentals of Individual Psychology. At the same time it is a demonstration of the practical application of these principles to the conduct of everyday relationships, and the organization of our personal life. Based upon a years’ lectures to audiences at the People’s Institute in Vienna, the purpose of the book was to point out how the mistaken behaviour of the individual affects harmony of our (...) social and communal life; to teach the individual to recognize their own mistakes; and finally, to show them how they may effect a harmonious adjustment to the communal life. Adler felt that mistakes in business or in science were costly and deplorable, but mistakes in the conduct of life are usually dangerous to life itself. This book is dedicated by the author in his preface ‘to the task of illuminating man’s progress toward a better understanding of human nature.’. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Jack Woods advances an intriguing argument against expressivism based on Moore’s paradox. Woods argues that a central tenet of expressivism—which he, following Mark Schroeder, calls the parity thesis—is false. The parity thesis is the thesis that moral assertions express noncognitive, desire-like attitudes like disapproval in exactly the same way that ordinary, descriptive assertions express cognitive, belief-like attitudes. Most contemporary defenders of expressivism seem not only to accept the parity thesis but also to rely on it to (...) distinguish their view from subjectivism, so Woods’s argument against it poses a serious challenge to the view. In this paper, I argue that Woods’s argument is unsuccessful, but show that diagnosing precisely where it goes wrong raises interesting questions for expressivists—and metaethicists more generally—about the transparency of our moral attitudes. (shrink)

In their article “The Civil Rights of Health,” Harris and Pamukcu offer a framework connecting civil rights law to unjust health disparities with the aims of creating broader awareness of subordination as a root cause of health inequities and inviting policymakers to create new legal tools for dismantling it. They close with a call to action. Here, we take up their call and propose cooperative enterprises as a health justice intervention. To illustrate this conceptualization, we focus on childcare as a (...) system with robust connections to social, economic, and health equity for children, workers, and families. (shrink)

The study of reciprocal altruism, or the exchange of goods and services between individuals, requires attention to both evolutionary explanations and proximate mechanisms. Evolutionary explanations have been debated at length, but far less is known about the proximate mechanisms of reciprocity. Our own research has focused on the immediate causes and contingencies underlying services such as food sharing, grooming, and cooperation in brown capuchin monkeys and chimpanzees. Employing both observational and experimental techniques, we have come to distinguish three types of (...) reciprocity. Symmetry-based reciprocity is cognitively the least complex form, based on symmetries inherent in dyadic relationships (e.g., mutual association, kinship). Attitudinal reciprocity, which is more cognitively complex, is based on the mirroring of social attitudes between partners and is exhibited by both capuchin monkeys and chimpanzees. Finally, calculated reciprocity, the most cognitively advanced form, is based on mental scorekeeping and is found only in humans and possibly chimpanzees. (shrink)

This essay addresses the relation between ghosts and the fires of writing. It allows itself to dream of purely burning, of consuming and leaving behind all objects, topics and occasions in an absolutely concrete, singular, sensational experience of reading. It is written to and for ghosts – the only ones who can survive in the blazing building that writing can become. The ghosts live in burning house scenes, in poems about dream rooms and erotic hauntings, and in the intellectual tension (...) of literary and non-literary texts. They have something to do with the fires of sexuality, and the intensities of sublimation. It is all about love and death. (shrink)

Despite multiple axes of variation in defining wellbeing, the paper argues for the dominance of a ‘components approach’ in current research and practice. This approach builds on a well-established tradition within the social sciences of attending to categories whether for their identification, their value or their meanings and political resonance. The paper critiques the components approach and explores how to move beyond it towards conceptually integrating the various categories and dimensions through a relational and situated account of wellbeing. Drawing on (...) more fluid social sciences, wellbeing is framed as an effect, dependent on the mobilisation of resources from everyday encounters with complex assemblages of people, things and places. Through such a framing, wellbeing can be conceived of as stable and amenable to change, as individual and collective and as subjective and objective. Policy interventions then need to attend to the relationalities of particular social and spatial contexts. (shrink)

The Art of Contact: Comparative Approaches to Greek and Phoenician Art. By S. Rebecca Martin. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. Pp. 282, illus. $59.95.

Sex offender registries have given way to residency restrictions for people convicted of sex crimes in many communities in the US. Research suggests, however, that such restrictions can actually undermine the safety of the communities they are ostensibly meant to protect. Drawing on the work of Judith Butler, this essay explores why such restrictions, and strategies like them, fail and are bound to fail. Then, it considers the work of generationFIVE, an organization that seeks to eliminate child sexual abuse in (...) five generations, to explore modes of response to sexual abuse and assault that build community safety. (shrink)

This paper comprises a case study illustrating ethical and practical challenges for a Ugandan hospital-based social worker early in the COVID-19 pandemic, followed by a commentary. The hospital was under-resourced, with staff and patients experiencing lack of information and panic. The social worker, Denis Adia, recounts his responses to new and ethically challenging situations, including persuading Muslim patients to stop fasting for the good of their health; deciding to keep a baby in hospital with parents although this was against the (...) rules; and supporting a stigmatised former patient in the face of intimidation by colleagues. He reflects on the importance of recognising each person’s unique needs and circumstances, seeing this as a vital role for social workers. The case is followed by a commentary from a UK academic (Sarah Banks), who notes the cognitive and emotional effort (‘ethics work’) undertaken by the social worker to: see the ethical aspects of particular situations; take account of patients’ specific needs; ensure they are treated with respect; promote their well-being; and perform as a good social worker. Banks draws attention to the key role of the virtue of courage in pandemic conditions, which involves working with new risks and facing fears with confidence. (shrink)

As mechanical devices become lighter, sleeker, and cheaper, the issue of technology in wilderness becomes an increasingly more important ethical concern because many high-tech luxuries or devices stand to separate the backcountry traveler from the very goals he or she hopes to actualize by recreating in wilderness. As recreationists, we need to determine which items are essential and which aredistracting, separating important “equipment” from needless “devices,” and exercising the self-control to carry only what we need. This process can be called (...) “responsible simplicity.” It is in the backcountry traveler’s best interest to exercise responsible simplicity, to choose only the devices necessary to actualize the telos, or goal, of one’s wilderness experience. A critique of the appropriateness of technology in the backcountry should entail examining devices in their context and also by their relationship to other technologies brought into the backcountry. From a virtue ethics standpoint, responsible simplicity can promote the integrity of wilderness recreation by providing oversight with regard to what goods are internal to the practice. It can also allow room for “wilderness” in our everyday lives in association with David Strong’s notion of “counterbalancing” and Albert Borgmann’s notions of “eloquent reality” and “focal practices.”. (shrink)

This book explores the significance of the Resurrection for human moral imagination and moral life. It shows that the Resurrection, contemplatively apprehended, shifts our ethically conditioned understanding of what it means to be human. It shifts our relationship to mortality and finitude, and opens up new possibilities and sources for human life and hope. It thereby transforms the picture of human being operative in moral thinking about justice and personal relations, as well as some of our fundamental moral concepts.

Well-being advocates state that it provides a more holistic, humanistic focus for public policy. Paradoxically, however, well-being debates tend to be dominated by highly quantitative, de-contextualised statistical methods accessible to only a minority of technical experts. This paper argues the need to reverse this trend. Drawing on original primary mixed method research in Zambia and India it shows the critical contribution of qualitative methods to the development of a quantitative model of subjective perspectives on well-being. Such contributions have a political, (...) ethical and practical urgency if subjective measures of well-being are to be used in policy. (shrink)

Cost-benefit analysis is a widely used governmental evaluation tool, though academics remain skeptical. This volume gathers prominent contributors from law, economics, and philosophy for discussion of cost-benefit analysis, specifically its moral foundations, applications and limitations. This new scholarly debate includes not only economists, but also contributors from philosophy, cognitive psychology, legal studies, and public policy who can further illuminate the justification and moral implications of this method and specify alternative measures. These articles originally appeared in the Journal of Legal Studies. (...) Contributors: - Matthew D. Adler - Gary S. Becker - John Broome - Robert H. Frank - Robert W. Hahn - Lewis A. Kornhauser - Martha C. Nussbaum - Eric A. Posner - Richard A. Posner - Henry S. Richardson - Amartya Sen - Cass R. Sunstein - W. Kip Viscusi. (shrink)

In The Man Without Content (1970), his first published book, Giorgio Agamben calls for a “destruction of aesthetics.” According to Agamben, aesthetics has to be overcome since it prevents the experience of art as the original and privileged space of our “doing” by splitting art into the passivity of the recipient and the purposeful artistic productivity. This article aims to show that Agamben develops, discussing Nietzsche’s concepts of the artist and Heidegger’s exegesis of Nietzsche, the anthropological paradigm of an interested (...) man who transcends the opposition artist versus recipient and draws the sense of his “doing” from presentification (poie¯sis) and the intensity of the experience of a “being-for-itself” rather than from deliberate production (praxis) and consumption. Currently, however, this paradigm is graspable only negatively by means of the paradox conception of the “potentiality not to” that does not end up in materiality but expresses itself in reflexivity that obtains its force by the creative-formal interruption of the logic of producing. (shrink)

Tips and tricks for capturing your canine's personality withevery click of the camera Simply snapping a picture may not capture the playfulness orspontaneity of a dog. Knowing what kind of equipment, angle, andcomposition to use while photographing a dog can make all thedifference in the character captured in the photo. DogPhotography For Dummies gives you practical and fun guidancefor capturing your dog's personality and turning ordinary shotsinto priceless memories that will last a lifetime. Covering all the latest and greatest gadgets (...) and accessoriesavailable to capture and alter photos of your favorite pooch,Dog Photography For Dummies offers techniques that amateursand intermediates alike can use to improve their photographyskills. This hands-on guide features great examples of dogportraiture, plus tons of ideas for fun new places to pose yourfurry friend, such as the beach, the park, the car, in the snow,and more. Detailed discussions of color versus black-and-white, indoorsversus outdoors, composition, and capturing movement Advice on how to get a dog to sit still Considerations for photographing a shy dog who is scared of thecamera Guidance on making the most of natural light Tips for photographing dogs with black coats How to photograph people and dogs together Whether for decorating, memories, or holiday cards, DogPhotography For Dummies makes it easy to capture the best ofyour four-legged friend. (shrink)

This article discusses the nature of interprofessional ethics and some of the ethical issues and challenges that arise when practitioners from different professions work closely together in the fields of health and social care. The article draws on materials from a conference on this theme, covering issues of confidentiality and information sharing in practice and research with vulnerable people; challenges for teaching and learning about ethics in interprofessional settings; the potential of virtue ethics and an ethic of care for understanding (...) and handling ethical issues in interprofessional practice; and the extent to which interprofessional working may be about surveillance and control. It concludes that the need to understand and handle ethical issues in interprofessional working is contributing to the revitalisation of professional ethics as a dynamic field of study. (shrink)

A narrowly person-affecting (NPA) axiology is an account of the moral ranking of outcomes such that the comparison of any two outcomes depends on the magnitude and weight of individuals’ well-being gains and losses between the two. This article systematically explores NPA axiology. It argues that NPA axiology yields an outcome ranking that satisfies three fundamental axioms: Pareto, Anonymity and, plausibly, Pigou-Dalton. The axiology is neutral to non-well-being considerations (desert); and (assuming well-being measurability) leads to the Repugnant Conclusion (RC). In (...) short, NPA axiology provides a grounding for Paretian, equity-regarding welfarism, albeit one that includes the RC. (shrink)

The dominant rule of economic evaluation within health care posits that resources are distributed in order to maximize health benefit. There are instances, however, where the public has demonstrated that they do not prefer such an allocation scheme, particularly in the context of life-saving interventions. Objectives Deviations from preferences of maximizing health benefit have important implications on both financial and distributive levels. This study sought to specify the circumstances in which respondent preferences are inconsistent with maximizing health benefit. Methods Ninety (...) respondents recruited from the London School of Economics and Political Science completed a questionnaire comprised of a series of paired profiles involving various combinations of life-saving or quality-of-life enhancing interventions. Results The results indicate that saving a life holds value beyond that captured by traditional health benefit measurement and that the value of saving a life is not consistent across ages. More specifically, the value of saving a life was age-dependent and markedly attenuated for older-age patients. Conclusions Many respondents were willing to overlook maximizing health benefit in order to rescue a life in immediate peril, and showed a diminished sense of moral imperative to rescue older-age patients. In light of difficulties related to the implementation of larger-scale policies incorporating Rule of Rescue concerns, the most realistic approaches will likely involve adopting smaller-scale policies that address issues such as do not resuscitate (DNRs) and living wills. Potential policy solutions such as age or monetary thresholds for life-saving interventions may be favoured in a research context; however, their overall social feasibility is questionable. (shrink)

Consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages contributes to multiple health problems including obesity, diabetes, and tooth decay, especially among children. Excise taxation has been proven efficacious in changing purchasing behaviors related to tobacco use with resulting improvements in public health outcomes. Similar taxes applied to SSBs are starting to take hold internationally and domestically. SSB taxes have been proposed in over 30 U.S. jurisdictions since 2009, but only Berkeley has passed and implemented one to date. Given empirical evidence of their effectiveness, governments (...) should consider implementation of SSB excise taxes based on uniform definitions of SSBs and other factors. (shrink)

Is it a good time to be alive? Is ours a good society to be alive in? Is it possible to have a good life in our time? And finally, does a good life consist of having a good time? Are happiness and “a good life” interchangeable? These are the questions that Mortimer Adler addresses himself to. The heart of the book lies in its conception of the good life for man, which provides the standard for measuring a century, (...) a society, or a culture: for upon that turns the meaning of each man’s primary moral right – his right to the pursuit of happiness. The moral philosophy that Dr. Adler expounds in terms of this conception he calls “the ethics of common sense,” because it is as a defense and development of the common-sense answer to the question “can I really make a good life for myself?”. (shrink)

In this chapter, we critique a concept of resilience that has emerged from contemporary positive psychology and its application to health education. We argue that the present popularity of “resilience” as a strategy for managing mental health discourages educational institutions from providing students with the mental health services they need. Using the tools of American pragmatism, especially the work of John Dewey, we criticize the paradigm of resilience and identify several concrete reformulations of disability studies which would make concrete differences (...) in the lives of those with mental disability. (shrink)

We review the argument that latent image formation is a measurement in which the state vector collapses, requiring an enhanced noise parameter in objective reduction models. Tentative observation of a residual noise at this level, plus several experimental bounds, imply that the noise must be colored, and hence frame dependent and non-relativistic. Thus a relativistic objective reduction model, even if achievable in principle, would be incompatible with experiment; the best one can do is the non-relativistic CSL model. This negative conclusion (...) has a positive aspect, in that the non-relativistic CSL reduction model evades the argument leading to the Conway–Kochen “Free Will Theorem”. (shrink)