Book reviewed in this article: Taking Care of Strangers: The Rule of Law in Doctor‐Patient Relations. By Robert A. Burt.

This paper explores ethical issues raised by whole slide image-based computational pathology. After briefly giving examples drawn from some recent literature of advances in this field, we consider some ethical problems it might be thought to pose. These arise from the tension between artificial intelligence research—with its hunger for more and more data—and the default preference in data ethics and data protection law for the minimisation of personal data collection and processing; the fact that computational pathology lends itself to kinds (...) of data fusion that go against data ethics norms and some norms of biobanking; the fact that AI methods are esoteric and produce results that are sometimes unexplainable and the fact that computational pathology is particularly dependent on scanning technology manufacturers with interests of their own in profit-making from data collection. We shall suggest that most of these issues are resolvable. (shrink)

This series celebrates the Bodleian Library's acquisition of Tom Phillips's archive of over 50,000 photographic postcards dating from the first half of the twentieth century, a period in which, thanks to the ever cheaper medium of photography, 'ordinary' people could afford to own their portraits. Each title in this series is thematically assembled and designed by the artist, the covers featuring a linked painting specially created for each title from Tom Phillips's signature work, A Humument.With an illuminating foreword by Eric (...) Musgrave, 'Menswear' presents postcards of men in all manner of outfits, whether formal, practical or casual, dating from around 1900 up to c. 1949. Most of the subjects are posing for portraits, displaying both their individual style and an interpretation of the fashions of the time. The rich variety of accessories on display includes ties, gloves, pocket squares, walking sticks, canes, boutonnières and spats. (shrink)

This article poses a challenge to Schurz’s proposed metainductive justification of induction. It is argued that Schurz’s argument requires a notion of optimality that can deal with an expanding pool of prediction strategies.

I argue that it is possible for a subject to undergo experiences of emotional absence, during which she becomes aware of her own failure to be moved by the world around her. Just as a part of one's body feels numb when it manifestly fails to incur the ordinary sensory consequences of transactions at the surface of the skin, so an individual feels emotional absence when her affective condition manifestly fails to vary in predictable ways as she navigates her surroundings. (...) Experiences of emotional absence, such as feeling numb with shock or grief, feeling unamused, or feeling fearless, are not simply flat or neutral states of awareness, but can bear psychological and epistemic significance for the agent. (shrink)

This volume of seminal and recent articles by philosophers in the distributive justice debate covers a range of representative positions, including libertarian, egalitarian, desert and welfare theories. The introduction and articles are designed to allow students and professionals to see some of the most influential pieces that have shaped the field, as well as some key critics of these positions. The articles intersect in such a way as to develop an appreciation of the types of theories and the central issues (...) addressed by theories of distributive justice. (shrink)

Since its publication in 1981, Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue has made a significant impact throughout the humanities disciplines. This new collection unpacks the influence of After Virtue on ethical and political theory, sociology and theology, and offers a multi-faceted exploration of its significance.

It is generally held that doctors and researchers have an obligation to obtain informed consent. Over time there has been a move in relation to this obligation from a requirement to disclose information to a requirement to ensure that that information is understood. Whilst this change has been resisted, in this article I argue that both sides on this matter are mistaken. When investigating what information is needed for consent to be informed we might be trying to determine what information (...) a person would need in order to consent at all, or we might be trying to determine what information a person needs in order to make an informed choice about whether or not to consent. I argue that the obligation to ensure understanding only applies to information generated by the first type of enquiry; but that much of the information generally thought necessary in order for consent to be informed is only required if our concern is with the second type of enquiry. For this reason it is neither the case that doctors and researchers should ensure all the information they provide is understood, nor is it the case that their only obligation is to disclose it. (shrink)

What is the organizational structure of Hume’s essay? The first three paragraphs are purely introductory and somewhat incidental. To someone untutored in Hume’s general religious skepticism, these opening remarks might appear to be the vain boasts of a philosopher in praise of philosophy. More plausibly, his opening remarks are stage-setting devices. They prepare the reader not for what Hume will argue but rather for how he will uncompromisingly challenge commonly held presuppositions about the sensitive issue of suicide. His comments are (...) methodological or perhaps meta-philosophical in character. In more contemporary language, Hume is promoting the following two theses in these introductory paragraphs, each of which has to do with the inadequacy of non-philosophical foundations for reaching conclusions about the morality of suicide. (shrink)

Some of the early‐modern changes in the social framing of science, while often believed to be essential, are shown to be contingent. They contribute to the flawed public narrative around science today, and especially to the misconceptions around science and religion. Four are examined in detail, each of which contributes to the demise of the contemplative stance that science both requires and offers. They are: (1) a turn from an immersed subject to the pretense of a pure objectivity, (2) a (...) turn from imagination as a legitimate pathway to knowledge, (3) a turn from shared and participative science to a restricted professionalism, and (4) an overprosaic reading of the metaphor of the “Book of Nature.” All four, but especially the imperative to consider reading nature as poetry, and a deeper examination of the entanglements between poetry and theoretical science, draw unavoidably on theological ideas, and contribute to a developing “theology of science.”. (shrink)

This article articulates the Hippocratic medical ethic found in the Oath and the Christian medical ethic as exemplified in the parable of the Good Samaritan. It proposes that the Oath has a natural-law-based deontological character (as understood by Aquinas) that governs friendships of utility (as understood by Aristotle) between student and teacher and physician and patient. The article elaborates on the Samaritan’s conduct as exemplifying Christian agapeic-love. It contrasts agapeic-love with friendship-love, while noting that the Samaritan relies on friendship-love (as (...) found between the Samaritan and the innkeeper) to realize agapeic-love towards the robbers’ victim. It concludes with noting that the grace-based Christian medical ethic perfects the nature-based Hippocratic ethic not by destroying it, but, rather, by employing it. (shrink)

A discussion of the connection between activism and academia in bioethics, highlighting the author’s own trajectory, exploring the extent to which academics have an obliation to be ‘judges’ rather than ‘barristers’ (as explored by Jonathan Haidt) and asking questions about the relationship of disability to positions in bioethics.

Two dogmas lie at the heart of modern work on Aristotle's ethical theory. The first is that that theory is essentially secular or non-theistic. The second is that Aristotle's ethics assumes what Gr...

Recent years have witnessed an enormous increase in behavioral and neuroimaging studies of numerical cognition. Particular interest has been devoted toward unraveling properties of the representational medium on which numbers are thought to be represented. We have argued that a correct inference concerning these properties requires distinguishing between different input modalities and different decision/output structures. To back up this claim, we have trained computational models with either symbolic or nonsymbolic input and with different task requirements, and showed that this allowed (...) for an integration of the existing data in a consistent manner. In later studies, predictions from the models were derived and tested with behavioral and neuroimaging methods. Here we present an integrative review of this work. (shrink)

Politics, Philosophy & Economics, Volume 21, Issue 4, Page 393-414, November 2022. Sometimes, people consent to sex because they face social constraints. For example, someone may agree to sex because they believe that it would be rude to refuse. I defend a consent-centric analysis of these encounters. This analysis connects constraints from social contexts with constraints imposed by persons e.g. coercion. It results in my endorsing what I call the “Constraint Principle.” According to this principle, someone's consent to a sexual (...) encounter lacks justificatory force if they are consenting because withholding consent has an adverse feature, they are entitled to withhold consent without it being the case that withholding consent has this adverse feature; and it is not the case that the consent-giver has sincerely expressed that, out of the options that are available to their sexual partner, they most prefer to go through with the sexual encounter in the circumstances. (shrink)

What conditions on a person’s knowledge must be satisfied in order for them to be morally responsible for something they have done? The first two decades of the twenty-first century saw a surge of interest in this question. Must an agent, for example, be aware that their conduct is all-things-considered … Continue reading Epistemic Conditions of Moral Responsibility →.

Wenmackers and Romeijn (2016) formalize ideas going back to Shimony (1970) and Putnam (1963) into an open-minded Bayesian inductive logic, that can dynamically incorporate statistical hypotheses proposed in the course of the learning process. In this paper, we show that Wenmackers and Romeijn’s proposal does not preserve the classical Bayesian consistency guarantee of merger with the true hypothesis. We diagnose the problem, and offer a forward-looking open-minded Bayesians that does preserve a version of this guarantee.

There is a wide scholarly consensus that Nietzsche's GM contains two principal projects. First, GM aims to explain—historically and psychologically—how some of morality's central strands emerged and evolved into their contemporary forms; and, second, GM aims to provide a critical assessment of the value of morality itself. Brian Leiter captures this consensus when he writes, "By investigating the origin of morality Nietzsche hopes to undermine morality or, more precisely, to loosen the attachment of potentially great human beings to this morality."1 (...) But if the scholarly consensus is correct, the opening section of the preface to GM presents us with a puzzle. The opening passage bears no obvious... (shrink)

“Public health is directly shaped by war, conflict, and capitalism, yet exploring the connections between these processes remains neglected in scholarship and policymaking arenas.” This chapter five lede by social work professors Scott Harding and Kathryn Libal could serve as the epigraph to the entire volume. War and Health is edited by two prominent researchers from Brown University’s Watson Institute Costs of War Project, which seeks a meaningful aggregation of the actual cost of wars, especially those of the new millennium. (...) The volume presents significant findings from nineteen researchers at various institutions, including culturally competent anthropologists. The result is a deep exegesis of syndemics—or synergistic epidemics—that endanger the health of all combatants and civilians. (shrink)

The career of J. G. Fichte, a central figure in German idealism and in the history of philosophy, divides into two distinct phases: the first period, in which he occupied the chair of critical philosophy at the University of Jena ; and the following period, after he left Jena for Berlin. Due in part to the inaccessibility of the German texts, Fichte scholarship in the English-speaking world has tended to focus on the Jena period, neglecting the development of this major (...) thinker's mature development. The essays collected in this book begin to correct this imbalance. Concerned in a variety of ways with Fichte's post-Jena philosophy, these essays by distinguished and emerging scholars demonstrate the depth and breadth of Fichte scholarship being done in English. With an introduction that locates the essays in philosophical and historical terms, the book divides into three related categories: Fichte’s development, his view of religion, and other aspects of his "popular" philosophy. From a wide range of perspectives, the essays show how Fichte’s later development reflects the philosophical concerns of his time, the specific debates in which he engaged, and the complex events of his philosophical career. (shrink)

This article discusses the different contexts in which disabled people encounter and deploy humour, both as victims and as agents, and provides examples. It raises questions about identity and audience and interpretation and about embodiment itself.

To honour the memory of Sir Karl Popper, I put forward six elements of his philosophy which might be of particular interest to biologists and to philosophers of biology and which I think Popper would like them not to ignore, even if they disagree with him. They are: the primacy of problems; the criticizability of metaphysics (and thus the dubiousness of materialism); how downward causation might be real; how norms should matter to scientists; why dogmatism should be avoided; how genuine (...) science is recognizable. I preface these six things with a brief discussion of Popper's early (but later recanted) mistakes concerning biology. (shrink)

A countless variety of stakeholder approaches are referenced by management scholars and practitioners, with theories on stakeholders divided into normative and descriptive categories and managerial and instrumental theories. This paper addresses the normative stakeholder approach and evaluates its strengths and weaknesses in the context of a new framework. We argue that stakeholder theory arose from a philosophical and scientific tradition where the object of scientific analysis was divided into constituent parts that made them easier to understand and to analyse. Although (...) this process of ‘reduction to the minimum’ is powerful and has worked very well in the past, we argue that the excessive emphasis on elemental parts, while ignoring the whole, runs the risk of overlooking the actual nature of organisation:environment relationships. Moreover, this traditional stakeholder approach can overlook change as a fundamental variable in management processes. The specific contribution of this paper is integrating stakeholder theories with an organisation:environment approach grounded in niche-construction and specie preservation. Doing so allows stakeholder theory not only to embrace human agency as part of a broadened evolutionary dynamic but also to incorporate within this view an improved understanding of the co-evolutionary processes of organisation:environment relationships and the nature of change. In this proposed niche-construction framework, stakeholders are explicitly identified as integral actors in, and co-creators of, organisational-environmental change. (shrink)

Cohen Kadosh, Tzelgov, and Henik [Cohen Kadosh, R., Tzelgov, J., and Henik, A. (2008). A synesthetic walk on the number line: The size effect. Cognition, 106, 548-557] present a new paradigm to probe properties of the mental number line. They describe two experiments which they argue to be inconsistent with the exact small number model proposed by Verguts, Fias, and Stevens [Verguts, T., Fias, W., Stevens, M. (2005). A model of exact small-number representation. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 12, 66-80]. We (...) discuss the data, assumptions, and conclusions of Cohen Kadosh et al.'s paper in relation to existing models of numerical cognition. (shrink)