Trust is a central concept in the philosophy of science. We highlight how trust is important in the wide variety of interactions between science and society. We claim that examining and clarifying the nature and role of trust (and distrust) in relations between science and society is one principal way in which the philosophy of science is socially relevant. We argue that philosophers of science should extend their efforts to develop normative conceptions of trust that can serve to facilitate trust (...) between scientific experts and ordinary citizens. The first project is the development of a rich normative theory of expertise and experience that can explain why the various epistemic insights of diverse actors should be trusted in certain contexts and how credibility deficits can be bridged. The second project is the development of concepts that explain why, in certain cases, ordinary citizens may distrust science, which should inform how philosophers of science conceive of the formulation of science policy when conditions of distrust prevail. The third project is the analysis of cases of successful relations of trust between scientists and non-scientists that leads to understanding better how ‘postnormal’ science interactions are possible using trust. (shrink)

Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein (2008) contend that mandated choice is the most practical nudge for increasing organ donation. We argue that they are wrong, and their mistake results from failing to appreciate how perceptions of meaning can influence people's responses to nudges. We favor a policy of default to donation that is subject to immediate family veto power, includes options for people to opt out (and be educated on how to do so), and emphasizes the role of organ procurement (...) organizations and in-house transplant donation coordinators creating better environments for increasing the supply of organs and tissues obtained from cadavers. This policy will provide better opportunities for offering nudges in contexts where in-house coordinators work with families. We conclude by arguing that nudges can be introduced ethically and effectively into these contexts only if nudge designers collaborate with in-house coordinators and stakeholders. (shrink)

ABSTRACTPolitical reconciliation between Indigenous peoples and settler nations is among the major ethical issues of the twenty-first century for millions of Indigenous peoples globally. Political reconciliation refers to the aspiration to transform violent and harmful relationships into respectful relationships. This essay discusses how efforts to achieve reconciliation are not feasible when settler nations and some of their citizens believe Indigenous peoples to be clamoring for undeserved privileges. Settler colonialism often includes the illusion that historic and contemporary settler populations have moral (...) grounds for their mistreatment of Indigenous peoples. This illusion masks historical and ongoing practices of settler colonialism that thwart effective practices of reconciliation. (shrink)

Indigenous peoples often embrace different versions of the concept of food sovereignty. Yet some of these concepts are seemingly based on impossible ideals of food self-sufficiency. I will suggest in this essay that for at least some North American Indigenous peoples, food sovereignty movements are not based on such ideals, even though they invoke concepts of cultural revitalization and political sovereignty. Instead, food sovereignty is a strategy of Indigenous resurgence that negotiates structures of settler colonialism that erase the ecological value (...) of certain foods for Indigenous peoples. (shrink)

Ethics, Policy & Environment, Volume 15, Issue 2, Page 172-187, June 2012.

The government claims that the important decisions it is now making are guided by principles that simply cannot be guiding them. Their decisions must in fact be guided by other considerations. Yet they prefer to peddle nonsense than to reveal their actual thinking (assuming there is some). Why? Why do politicians, who are experts in rhetoric and seek to win public favour, relentlessly and publicly indulge in shoddy reasoning?

Concerns for safety and security as South Africa’s hosting of 2010 FIFA World Cup draws nearer highlight the degree to which South Africa’s reputation for a relatively peaceful transition from Apartheid has been replaced by its reputation for violent crime. Its transition, and the peacebuilding efforts that followed it, are not completely unrelated to its current high levels of violent crime. In fact, this article argues that there were a number of issues South Africa’s peacebuilding process failed to address that (...) are relevant to the country’s violent crime situation. A significant reason for this failure was an inability or unwillingness to engage the full spectrum of Apartheid’s violence with equal rigour. Apartheid inflicted structural violence, through its racially oppressive laws, as well as physical violence, through enforcing its laws and suppressing its opposition, on the people of South Africa. Peacebuilding in South Africa primarily focused on Apartheid’s physical violence. Through the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the focus was narrowed down further to physical political violence. Due to this narrow focus, it did not attend effectively to non-political violence – which includes gender-based violence, the esteem violence had attained during and due to Apartheid, disarming the country of illegal firearms, and narrowing the income gap between the country’s rich and poor. While South Africa proudly claims ownership of its conflict resolution and peacebuilding processes, it still emulated predominant models of building peace through liberal democracy and a market economy. These models have been drawn from Western success stories in diminishing interstate conflict, while South Africa is a developing country that was recovering from an intrastate conflict. Pursuing these models has had benefits for South Africa, but not in many of the ways it needed in order to effectively prevent a surge in criminal violence in the wake of Apartheid. (shrink)

Capitalism is a system of selfish individualism. That is why it is so successful. Individualism is the idea that individuals should decide for themselves what they will do, including what they will produce and consume. Because an individual’s preferences both cause their actions and measure the value of their outcomes, individualism naturally promotes personal welfare. Understood as a tendency to give more weight to our own welfare than to others’, selfishness is an unavoidable—and welcome—feature of human life. Individualism protects each (...) of us against the selfishness of our fellow citizens, including the authorities. (shrink)

Ideas for How to Take Wicked Problems Seriously Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-5 DOI 10.1007/s10806-011-9348-9 Authors Kyle Powys Whyte, Department of Philosophy, Michigan State University, 503 S. Kedzie Hall, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA Paul B. Thompson, Department of Philosophy, Michigan State University, 503 S. Kedzie Hall, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA Journal Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics Online ISSN 1573-322X Print ISSN 1187-7863.

On the classical account of evolution by natural selection found in Lewontin and many subsequent authors, ENS is conceived as involving three key ingredients: phenotypic variation, fitness differences, and heredity. Through the analysis of three problem cases involving heredity, I argue that the classical conception is substantially flawed, showing that heredity is not required for selection. I consider further problems with the classical account of ENS arising from conflations between three distinct senses of the central concept of ‘fitness’ and offer (...) an alternative to the classical conception of ENS involving the interaction of distinct evolutionary mechanisms. (shrink)

Indigenous ethics and feminist care ethics offer a range of related ideas and tools for environmental ethics. These ethics delve into deep connections and moral commitments between nonhumans and humans to guide ethical forms of environmental decision making and environmental science. Indigenous and feminist movements such as the Mother Earth Water Walk and the Green Belt Movement are ongoing examples of the effectiveness of on-the-ground environmental care ethics. Indigenous ethics highlight attentive caring for the intertwined needs of humans and nonhumans (...) within interdependent communities. Feminist environmental care ethics emphasize the importance of empowering communities to care for themselves and the social and ecological communities in which their lives and interests are interwoven. The gendered, feminist, historical, and anticolonial dimensions of care ethics, indigenous ethics, and other related approaches provide rich ground for rethinking and reclaiming the nature and depth of diverse relationships as the fabric of social and ecological being. (shrink)

Abuse, when committed by spiritual authority figures, can have far-reaching consequences for church communities well after perpetrators have been removed and held accountable. In attending to survivors, a host of issues may come to light, including but not limited to, organizational complicity in abuse, institutional marginalization of the vulnerable, and the revelation that worship spaces can be traumatically triggering. The work of scholars like Michelle Panchuk, Elaine Heath, and Katharina von Kellenbach all point to the challenging reality that ecclesial repentance­ (...) may demand dramatic changes to restore a safe environment and righteous expressions of worship that honour God's intentions for all. Glen Kinoshita's ‘ministry of reconciliation’ and Dietrich Bonhoeffer's ‘preparing the way’ and ‘religionless Christianity’ are texts that on the surface address this type of process; however, it is not clear that either scholar fully reckons with the issue of a worshipping community or space that has been so marred by abuse as to become an impediment to a survivor's participation in liturgy. In this article, I modify Bonhoeffer's work to move beyond his claims and make recommendations for further steps towards repentance. (shrink)

Indigenous peoples are referenced at various times in communication, debates, and academic and policy discussions on geoengineering. The discourses I have in mind f...

Despite growing interest from historians in the built environment, the use of architecture as evidence remains remarkably under-theorized. Where this issue has been discussed, the interpretation of buildings has often been likened to the process of reading, in which architecture can be understood by analogy to language: either as a code capable of use in communicating the architect’s intentions or more literally as a spoken or written language in its own right. After a historiographical survey, this essay, by contrast, proposes (...) that the appropriate metaphor is one of translation. More particularly, it draws on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin to suggest that architecture—and the interpretation of architecture—comprises a series of transpositions. As a building is planned, built, inhabited, and interpreted, so its meaning changes. The underlying logic of each medium shapes the way in which its message is created and understood. This suggests that the proper role of the historian is to trace these transpositions. Buildings, then, can be used as a historical source, but only if the historian takes account of the particular problems that they present. In short, architecture should not be studied for its meaning, but for its meanings. As historians we are always translating architecture: not reading its message, but exploring its multiple transpositions. (shrink)

Whyte chooses nine thinkers to illustrate this historical and evolutionary movement, including Heraclitus, Marx, and Freud, and the resulting vignettes are a synthesis of knowledge that suggest, as well, a reorientation of thought, feeling, and action for the future."--BOOK JACKET.

Avoiding the seductive trap of utopianism, Whyte approaches this challenge by defining the terms of a potentially worldwide consensus of heart, mind, and will ...

It is likely that internal factors play an important role in restricting the possible avenues of evolutionary change from any starting point. Internal selective processes operating on premutational disturbances, on mutations, and on developmental phases may usefully be separated from the adaptive selection of phenotypes. The precise structural and morphological consequences of internal factors should soon become an isolable problem owing to a) the observational correlation of definite changes in hereditary specificity with particular developmental consequences; and b) the progressive theoretical (...) identification of the coordinative conditions in organisms. Increasing clarity regarding the coordinative conditions should throw light on the “mutational selection rules” and on the differentiative mutations which led to the most important steps in the past history of evolution.Die Wege der Evolution können sowohl durch innere Auslese der Genotypen wÄhrend der Entwicklung als auch durch die Äussere Darwinische Auslese der Phenotypen bestimmt werden. Seit 1949 haben sich zumindest fünf Forscher mit dieser Möglichkeit befasst. Es ist zur Zeit möglich, zwischen den beiden Arten von Zuchtwahl theoretisch und experimentell zu unterscheiden.Les chemins de l'évolution peuvent Être déterminés non seulement par la sélection extérieure Darwinienne des phénotypes mais aussi par la sélection intérieure des genotypes pendant le développement. Depuis 1949 aux moins cinq investigateurs en ont considéré la possibilité. Il est possible à présent de faire la distinction entre les deux types de sélection dans la théorie comme dans l'expérience. (shrink)

Indigenous environmental movements have been important actors in twentieth- and twenty-first-century global environmental politics and environmental justice. Their explicit foci range from the protection of indigenous environmental stewardship systems to upholding and expanding treaty responsibilities to securing indigenous rights in law and policy. This chapter suggests that these movements open important intellectual spaces for thinking about the function of environmental governance institutions in addressing complex environmental issues such as clean water and forest conservation. Different from institutional functions based on market (...) mechanisms or appeals to human psychological tendencies, a variety of indigenous environmentalists suggest that institutions should function to convene reciprocal responsibilities across relatives as diverse as humans, non-human beings such as plants, entities such as water, and collectives such as forests. (shrink)

_Offers a striking new reading of Agamben’s political thought and its implications for political action in the present._.

Science is continually faced with describing that which is beyond. This book, through contributions from nine prominent scholars, tackles that challenge.

Cette bande dessine prsente par le Haut Commissariat des Nations Unies aux droits de l'homme (HCDH) le Programme commun des Nations Unies sur le VIH/SIDA (ONUSIDA) et l'Organisation mondiale de la Sant (OMS) a t conue pour donner aux jeunes les moyens de dfendre les droits de l'homme en relation avec le VIH/SIDA pour sensibiliser aux liens cruciaux existant entre le VIH/SIDA et les droits de l'homme pour faire mieux connatre la maladie et pour lutter contre les ides fausses et (...) les tabous qui s'y associent. (shrink)

Indigenous peoples must adapt to current and coming climate-induced environmental changes like sea-level rise, glacier retreat, and shifts in the ranges of important species. For some indigenous peoples, such changes can disrupt the continuance of the systems of responsibilities that their communities rely on self-consciously for living lives closely connected to the earth. Within this domain of indigeneity, some indigenous women take seriously the responsibilities that they may perceive they have as members of their communities. For the indigenous women who (...) have such outlooks, responsibilities that they assume in their communities expose them to harms stemming from climate change impacts and other environmental changes. Yet at the same time, their commitment to these responsibilities motivates them to take on leadership positions in efforts at climate change adaptation and mitigation. I show why, at least for some indigenous women, this is an important way of framing the climate change impacts that affect them. I then argue that there is an important implication in this conversation for how we understand the political responsibilities of nonindigenous parties for supporting distinctly indigenous efforts at climate change adaptation and mitigation. (shrink)

The move towards the use of new technologies and the new focus on citizen engagement in Scotland provides the opportunity for e-democracy to emerge. Working towards the goal of e-democracy, the International Teledemocracy Centre is developing a body of ICT, supporting skills, tools and techniques, designed specifically to facilitate the use of technology, capable of enhancing democratic engagement. This paper begins to articulate how citizens are engaging with government and with their elected representatives about issues that concern them, using technology (...) specially designed for the purpose. The paper examines the nature of e-democracy and considers concepts of democracy, issues of democratization, and issues surrounding citizen access and participation. In addition, the paper discusses the design and use of two electronic tools developed by the ITC between 1999 and 2001 i. e. e-consultant and e-petitioner. Finally, the paper presents analyses of findings drawn from research to monitor and evaluate the use of these tools and the arrangements which accompany their entry into society. (shrink)