The Covid‐19 pandemic has exposed four myths in bioethics. First, the flood of bioethics publications on how to allocate scarce resources in crisis conditions has assumed authorities would declare the onset of crisis standards of care, yet few have done so. This leaves guidelines in limbo and patients unprotected. Second, the pandemic's realities have exploded traditional boundaries between clinical, research, and public health ethics, requiring bioethics to face the interdigitation of learning, doing, and allocating. Third, without empirical research, the success (...) or failure of ethics guidelines remains unknown, demonstrating that crafting ethics guidance is only the start. And fourth, the pandemic's glaring health inequities require new commitment to learn from communities facing extraordinary challenges. Without that new learning, bioethics methods cannot succeed. The pandemic is a wake‐up call, and bioethics must rise to the challenge. (shrink)

Grodzinsky examines Broca's aphasia in terms of some specific grammatical deficits. However, his grammatical models offer no way to characterize the distinctions he observes. Rather than grammatical deficits, his patients seem to have intact grammars but defective modules of parsing and production.

It is a widespread view that affective and emotional responses to many works of literature are often components of an appreciation of literature that is richer than it would be without them. In this paper, I raise three points designed to show that Lamarque does not give emotional and other affective responses their due. First, I propose that he does not sufficiently distinguish emotion and imagination from concerns about knowledge and truth. Second, he does not sufficiently distinguish appreciation, and the (...) role of emotions within it, from criticism. And third, there is a conflation of accounts of the value of individual works with accounts of the value of having literature as an institution around. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that several features of Big Business in the United States, and its influence on our society, have caused far too many Americans to stop thinking about what is morally right as they choose their actions. An ethical vacuum has been created that Big Business has been only too glad to fill with questionable values that Americans have absorbed without consciously embracing. The time is right, and the stakes have never been higher, for us to reflect (...) on our values and change our thinking and behavior. Big Business and Philosophy each have important roles to play — one because of the power it now has and the other because of the power it ought to have — if we are to improve the moral climate in this country. (shrink)

In this paper I examine the justification of proposals to conserve threatened languages, those in danger of dying out from the lack of primary speakers. These proposals presuppose that there is value in the continued existence of languages, and I explore the different kinds of value involved: instrumental, aesthetic, subjective, and cognitive, the last involving the ability of each language to express distinctive thoughts. The attempt to retain the cognitive value of a language underlies proposals to conserve a pool of (...) primary speakers of threatened languages. Analyzing cognitive value in terms of Rolston’s systemic value flags a dual problem for conservation proposals: attempts to conserve the cognitive value of a language may be futile and attempts to defeat the factors creating the futility are morally problematic. The other values of language may still justify morally permissible projects to conserve or preserve threatened languages. (shrink)

To explain the causal relation between institutional rules and people’s actions and expectations, Searle relies upon his concept of the Background, the thesis that intentional states function only given a background of capacities that do not themselves consist in intentional phenomena. Any sentence, for instance, only acquires truth conditions or other conditions of satisfaction against a background of capacities, dispositions, know-how, etc. that are not themselves part of the content of the sentence. The Background also structures expectations. La Rouchefoucauld said, (...) for instance, that few people would fall in love if they had never read about it. (shrink)

Susan Hekman believes we are witnessing an intellectual sea change. The main features of this change are found in dichotomies between language and reality, discourse and materiality. Hekman proposes that it is possible to find a more intimate connection between these pairs, one that does not privilege one over the other. By grounding her work in feminist thought and employing analytic philosophy, scientific theory, and linguistic theory, Hekman shows how language and reality can be understood as an indissoluble unit. (...) In this broadly synthetic work, she offers a new interpretation of questions of science, modernism, postmodernism, and feminism so as to build knowledge of reality and extend how we deal with nature and our increasingly diverse experiences of it. (shrink)

A defendant’s failure to show remorse is one of the most powerful factors in criminal sentencing, including capital sentencing. Yet there is currently no evidence that remorse can be accurately evaluated in a courtroom. Conversely there is evidence that race and other impermissible factors create hurdles to evaluating remorse. There is thus an urgent need for studies about whether and how remorse can be accurately evaluated. Moreover, there is little evidence that remorse is correlated with future law-abiding behavior or other (...) legitimate penal purposes, and, in fact, there is evidence that remorse is often conflated with shame, which is correlated with increased future criminality. More accurate information on the nature and evaluation of remorse can be used to reform the criminal justice system. (shrink)

Hobbes's central insight about ethics was that it should not be understood to require that we make ourselves a prey for others. It is this insight that both varieties of contractarianism [Hobbesian and Kantian] respect. Consider a relationship between two human beings that exists for reasons of either love or duty; let us also suppose that it is a relationship that can be instrumentally valuable to both parties. In order for that relationship to receive our full moral endorsement, we must (...) ask whether either party uses the duty or the love connecting them in a way that affects the other party's ability to realize the instrumental value from that relationship. To be sure, good marriages and good friendships ought not to be centrally concerned with the question of justice, but they must also be, at the very least, relationships in which love or duty are not manipulated by either party in order to use the other party to her detriment. (shrink)

By definitively establishing that racism has broad implications for how the entire field of philosophy is practiced -- and by whom -- this powerful and ...

Our urban problem is how to revive the reality of the outside as a dimension of human experience.Richard Sennett.

The purpose of this paper is to outline an ethics development activity that uses scenarios in university classes to further the knowledge, engagement, and enhancement of the ethical actions of the students. By starting with a brief review of the objective and use of scenarios in ethics research, the paper progresses to explain the activity, debrief the activity, and finally to provide an analysis of the activity with examples. Included in this activity are ways to incorporate a discussion of Kant’s (...) Categorical Imperative Theories, NCA Credo of Ethical Communication, and the use of videos for Milgram’s Blind Obedience and Stanford’s Prison studies—thus making this activity useful across all disciplines. (shrink)

Susan Haack; IX*—Theories of Knowledge: An Analytic Framework, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 83, Issue 1, 1 June 1983, Pages 143–158, https://.

In 1885, Holloway Sanatorium, an asylum for the ‘mentally afflicted of the middle classes’ opened in Egham, Surrey, 20 miles outside London. Until 1910, photographs of about a third of the patients—both those ‘Certified Lunatic by Inquisition’ and the ‘Voluntary Boarders’ who admitted themselves—were pasted into the asylum's case books. This paper analyses the photographs that were included in the very first of these, when there was a great uncertainty as to how to represent these patients, or whether to represent (...) them at all. The photographs are unlike any other institutional images of the period, and raise critical questions about the imagined incompatibility between documentary photography and personal agency. (shrink)

Michael Levin, in Feminism and Freedom, argues that sex-stereotyping is inevitable and legitimate since there are innate non-anatomical differences between the sexes. He, further, believes that sex-stereotyping is compatible with members of both sexes acting freely and having equal opportunity in the job market and other areas of life. I will attack both claims, but I will particularly concentrate on the second one. I believe that Levin is only able to make his view sound plausible because of his minimal definitions (...) of “freedom” and “equal opportunity” which I shall argue are not acceptable. The result of his mistake is that he presents us with a false dilemma: We must choose between either a Libertarian ideal---which includes freedom, equal opportunity, the inevitable sex-stereotyping and resulting patriarchal society (since it cannot be eliminated voluntarily)---and Feminism---which denies the legitimacy of sex-stereotyping, insists that unequal outcome means inequality of opportunity and so supports a quota system, and attempts to accomplish its aims, at great cost, by depriving people of freedom. (shrink)

This paper reports on a recent symposium seminar series entitled ‘Governing genetic databases – collection, storage and use’ hosted by the Ethox Centre at the University of Oxford. It outlines the inadequacy of the current UK framework for governing genetic databases and biobanks and some of the implications of this. It then briefly describes and reflects on each of the five symposium papers.

Much of the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein can be brought to bear directly on the theoretical and critical determinations made by literature scholars. Like a language game which consists of a structural center in its essential grammar or rules and a temporal and contingent diversity in its actual uses or playing moves, Wittgensteinian philosophy as adapted herein for literary criticism points us toward a strategy of descriptive investigations whose coherence and usefulness is demonstrated in its circumstantial adaptability and responsiveness to (...) diverse texts . A reliance on Wittgensteinian philosophy adds to our work a means of discriminating among divergent critical perspectives insofar as certain perspectives will be more or less appropriate or useful in opening up different texts. For Wittgenstein, every path to a text may be different, but that does not make all equally useful or efficacious in every case. ;Chapter One discusses Wittgenstein's heuristic of the language game, his rejection of theory, and his methodology of descriptive investigations as they might be applied to literary criticism. The second chapter investigates the similarities and differences between Wittgensteinian philosophy and the deconstructive project. In the third chapter, a Wittgensteinian literary methodology is applied to the poetry of several women poets as the poems' language games and their "resemblances" are discussed. The fourth and concluding chapter points the way for future uses of Wittgenstein for literary criticism and theory: specifically regarding axiological determinations of literary and critical texts, deliberations of canonicity, and the parallels with and divergences from the poststructural critical approach of the New Historicism. The crucial point of the dissertation is that of fit: which critical methods prove most useful towards opening up which texts? Close investigations into the parameters of the language games of texts, critics, and methods will enable us to determine which paths to take towards more complete descriptive analyses and critiques. Wittgenstein's philosophical approach provides us with a strong means of developing such a method for literary criticism. (shrink)

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