One of the central elements of John Rawls’ argument in support of his two principles of justice is the intuitive normative ideal of citizens as free and equal. But taken in isolation, the claim that citizens are to be treated as free and equal is extremely indeterminate, and has virtually no clear implications for policy. In order to remedy this, the two principles of justice, together with the stipulation that citizens have basic interests in developing their moral capacities and pursuing (...) their conceptions of the good life, are meant to provide a more precise interpretation of what is involved in treating citizens as free and equal. Rawls’ critics, however, have argued that satisfying the two principles of justice is not the most appropriate or plausible way to respect the status of citizens as free and equal. In relation to this debate, the present paper has two aims. The first is to examine Rawls’ account of the type of freedom that a just society must guarantee equally to its citizens. I will argue that those who think of Rawls as a theorist of freedom as non-interference are mistaken, because his notion of liberty resembles in important respects the republican notion of freedom as non-domination. Second, I will consider the extent to which Rawls’ principles of justice successfully protect the freedom as non-domination of all citizens so as to effectively treat them as free and equal. (shrink)

More involvement of sub-Saharan African countries in biomedical studies, specifically in genetic research, is needed to advance individualized medicine that will benefit non-European populations. Missing infrastructure, cultural and religious beliefs as well as lack of understanding of research benefits can pose a challenge to recruitment. Here we describe recruitment efforts for a large genetic study requiring three-generation pedigrees within the Yoruba homelands of Nigeria. The aim of the study was to identify genes responsible for keloids, a wound healing disorder. We (...) also discuss ethical and logistical considerations that we encountered in preparation for this research endeavor. (shrink)

In contemporary discourse, inclusion has evolved into a core value, with inclusive societies being lauded as progressive and inherently positive. Conversely, exclusion and excluding practices are typically deemed undesirable. However, this paper questions the prevailing assumption that inclusion is always synonymous with societal progress. Could it be that exclusion, in certain contexts, serves as a more effective tool for advancing societal development? Is there a more intricate interconnection between these phenomena than conventionally acknowledged? This paper advocates moving beyond a simplistic (...) inclusion/exclusion dichotomy and puts forth two theses. First, it posits that exclusion can, at times, be a superior metric for gauging progress. Second, it contends that inclusion and exclusion are thoroughly entwined, challenging the notion of a clear demarcation between them. The underlying premise is that, much like inclusion, there can be meaningful value associated with exclusion. Furthermore, applying a rigid inclusion/exclusion dichotomy oversimplifies the discourse on societal progress, providing an artificial representation of what constitutes advancement. Such oversimplification hampers both contemporary research in the humanities and broader political discourse. The primary objective of this paper is to introduce a fresh perspective to the discourse surrounding societal progress. By challenging the fundamental conceptual framework, it seeks to add nuance to the ongoing debate, fostering a more comprehensive understanding of the complexities inherent in measuring progress within society. (shrink)

Philosophers and social scientists have focussed a great deal of attention on our human capacity to trust, but relatively little on the capacity to hope. This is a significant oversight, as hope and trust are importantly interconnected. This paper argues that, even though trust can and does feed our hopes, it is our empowering capacity to hope that significantly underwrites—and makes rational—our capacity to trust.

Summary This article questions certain assumptions concerning film form made by the recent psychological film research and compares them to those of precursors of film psychology like Hugo Münsterberg and Rudolf Arnheim, as well as the principles of Gestalt psychology. It is argued that principles of Gestalt psychology such as those of ‘good form’ and good continuation are still underlying the psychological research of film, becoming particularly apparent in its approach to continuity editing. Following an alternative Gestalt genealogy that links (...) Gestalt theory with more recent dynamic models of brain activity and with accounts of brain complexity and neuronal synchronisation, the article concludes that psychological research on film needs to shift the focus from form to transformation, both in conceiving the perceptual and cognitive processing of films and in approaching film aesthetics more broadly. (shrink)

This article examines the trend of looping videos online. It distinguishes between different types of loops (photography-based and video loops) and their functions (background and foreground). It also argues that the loop through its unit multiplication serves the human need for duration, self-reference and communication.

This paper uses the recent ‘network film’ of Mateo Garrone Gomorrah in order to let Alain Badiou’s theory of subjectivization-in-decision percolate through the immanent networks of contemporary ‘risk societies’ and the narrative structures through which they find expression in cinema. Adumbrating a tension between choices and decisions I seek to create ‘edges’ between two worlds that in the most part of Badiou’s work have been decisively and platonically separated: the world of being and the one of our embodied social experience. (...) Cinema lends its dynamical and ‘tensed’ mediation in order for this new and open topology to be explored. (shrink)

Gathering evidence across disciplines is a strength of interdisciplinary fields like neuroethics. However, conclusions can only be made if the evidence applies to the issue at hand. Libet and colleagues' Citation1983 experiment is an interesting case study in this problem. Despite ongoing critiques about the methods used and the replicability of its findings, many people consider Libet and colleagues' methodology a valid strategy to investigate free will and related topics. We reviewed studies using methods similar to those of Libet and (...) colleagues (N = 48) to identify its use and the evidence produced. Overall, we found substantial variation between studies. While the Libet paradigm may be useful for examining how stimuli affect temporal judgments, the link between this and free will or moral responsibility is not clear. Being aware and critical of the methods used to gather results is important when applying scientific experiments to complex, abstract phenomena. (shrink)

This paper is divided into two parts. In Section 1, I explore and defend a “regulative view” of folk-psychology as against the “standard view”. On the regulative view, folk-psychology is conceptualized in fundamentally interpersonal terms as a “mind-making” practice through which we come to form and regulate our minds in accordance with a rich array of socially shared and socially maintained sense-making norms. It is not, as the standard view maintains, simply an epistemic capacity for coming to know about the (...) mental states and dispositions already there. Importantly, the regulative view can meet and beat the standard at its own epistemic game. But it also does more. In Section 2, I show how the regulative view makes progress on two other problems that remain puzzling on the standard view: the problem of “first-person authority” – accounting for the special features of self-knowledge; and the problem of “reactive.. (shrink)

In his 2014 article “Motivations for Relativism as a Solution to Disagreements”, Steven Hales argues that relativism is a plausible disagreement resolution strategy for epistemically irresolvable disagreements. I argue that his relativistic strategy is not adequate for disagreements of this kind, because it demands an impossible doxastic state for disputants to resolve the disagreement. Contrarily, Fogelin’s :1–8, 1985) theory of deep disagreement does not run into the same problems. Deep disagreements, according to Fogelin, cannot be resolved through argumentation because the (...) conditions for argumentation are lacking in such contexts. I advance the view that deep disagreements arise due to differences in disputants’ mutually supporting interrelated beliefs. This view avoids the hurdles caused by the tiered structure of support found at the heart of Hales’s view on disagreement: the assumption that belief and perspective can be separated, and that disagreement is located. (shrink)

We show that the theory, consisting of the usual axioms of but with the power set axiom removed—specifically axiomatized by extensionality, foundation, pairing, union, infinity, separation, replacement and the assertion that every set can be well‐ordered—is weaker than commonly supposed and is inadequate to establish several basic facts often desired in its context. For example, there are models of in which ω1 is singular, in which every set of reals is countable, yet ω1 exists, in which there are sets of (...) reals of every size, but none of size, and therefore, in which the collection axiom fails; there are models of for which the Łoś theorem fails, even when the ultrapower is well‐founded and the measure exists inside the model; there are models of for which the Gaifman theorem fails, in that there is an embedding of models that is Σ1‐elementary and cofinal, but not elementary; there are elementary embeddings of models whose cofinal restriction is not elementary. Moreover, the collection of formulas that are provably equivalent in to a Σ1‐formula or a Π1‐formula is not closed under bounded quantification. Nevertheless, these deficits of are completely repaired by strengthening it to the theory, obtained by using collection rather than replacement in the axiomatization above. These results extend prior work of Zarach. (shrink)

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, the UK’s main healthcare priority-setting body, recently reaffirmed a longstanding claim that in recommending technologies to the National Health Service it cannot apply the ‘rule of rescue’. This paper explores this claim by identifying key characteristics of the rule and establishing to what extent these are also features of NICE’s approach to evaluating ultra-orphan drugs through its highly specialised technologies programme. It argues that although NICE in all likelihood does not act because (...) of the rule in prioritising these drugs, its actions in relation to HSTs are nevertheless in accordance with the rule and are not explained by the full articulation of any alternative set of rationales. That is, though NICE implies that its approach to HSTs is not motivated by the rule of rescue, it is not explicit about what else might justify this approach given NICE’s general concern with overall population need and value for money. As such, given NICE’s reliance on notions of procedural justice and its commitment to making the reasons for its priority-setting decisions public, the paper concludes that NICE’s claim to reject the rule is unhelpful and that NICE does not currently meet its own definition of a fair and transparent decision-maker. (shrink)

In philosophy, the last thirty years or so has seen a split between 'simulation theorists' and 'theory-theorists', with a number of variations on each side. In general, simulation theorists favour the idea that our knowledge of others is based on using ourselves as a working model of what complex psychological creatures are like. Theory-theorists claim that our knowledge of complex psychological creatures, including ourselves, is theoretical in character and so more like our knowledge of the world in general. The body (...) of this paper is divided into three parts. In Part I, I introduce the 'contrastive case' of autism. Autism is a developmental disorder that has recently become the focus of sustained philosophical and psychological attention because of the selective way in which it affects individuals' social capacities. Theory-theorists argue that autistic children's unique profile of assets and deficits is most fruitfully explained by their inability to develop and deploy a theory of mind. After considering the strengths of this hypothesis, I claim theory-theorists face two unresolved difficulties: explaining why high-functioning autistics who develop some theory of mind capacities still fail to engage in normal psychological knowing; and explaining why autistics are generally as unknowable to us in the privileged sense of normal psychological knowing as we are to them. In Part II, I provide the theoretical framework for addressing these challenges by developing an account of normal psychological knowing as psycho-practical expertise. In Part III, I return to the problem of autism, showing how this psycho-practical approach to normal psychological knowing may further suggest how to encompass various aspects of the disorder that tend to be ignored under the prevailing theory-theory approach. (shrink)

One of the numerous characterizations of a Ramsey cardinal κ involves the existence of certain types of elementary embeddings for transitive sets of size κ satisfying a large fragment of ZFC. We introduce new large cardinal axioms generalizing the Ramsey elementary embeddings characterization and show that they form a natural hierarchy between weakly compact cardinals and measurable cardinals. These new axioms serve to further our knowledge about the elementary embedding properties of smaller large cardinals, in particular those still consistent with (...) V = L. (shrink)

If ZFC is consistent, then the collection of countable computably saturated models of ZFC satisfies all of the Multiverse Axioms of Hamkins.

Scholars agree that the environmental and societal impacts of consumption require greater attention, and need examining in more diverse market contexts. This editorial essay focuses on the nascent area of ethical/sustainable luxury, and critically considers how the scope of ethical/sustainable consumption can be broadened in the luxury sector. We address the compatibility of ethicality/sustainability and luxury by examining a range of opportunities and inherent tensions in relation to improving the ethical/sustainable consumption practices within the luxury sector. We also introduce several (...) original articles published as part of this Thematic Symposium, whose arguments underscore both the merits, and flaws, of ethical/sustainable luxury. On the basis of this and prior research, we present a balanced perspective by identifying various factors that facilitate or inhibit the acceptance and furtherance of ethicality/sustainability within sector. Thus, this essay serves as a springboard for further research and development in ethical/sustainable luxury whilst simultaneously highlighting the importance of the topic in general. (shrink)

This paper examines the methodological claim made famous by P.F. Strawson: that we understand what features are required for responsible agency by exploring our attitudes and practices of holding responsible. What is the presumed metaphysical connection between holding responsible and being fit to be held responsible that makes this claim credible? I propose a non-standard answer to this question, arguing for a view of responsible agency that is neither anti-realist (i.e. purely 'conventionalist') nor straightforwardly realist. It is instead ‘constructivist’. On (...) the ‘Scaffolding View’ I defend, reactive attitudes play an essential role in developing, supporting, and thereby maintaining the capacities that make for responsible agency. While this view has relatively novel implications for a metaphysical understanding of capacities, its chief virtue, in contrast with more standard views, is providing a plausibly defensible account of how so-called responsible agents genuinely deserve to be treated as such. (shrink)

This article contends that feminism is haunted by its past, and that to be haunted means that feminists need to bear witness to the possibilities, often unrealized, of that past and to actively resist the policing and defensiveness that have marked feminism's relationship to its diverse history in recent years. It engages with the work of Terry Castle and Avery Gordon in order to make this argument, and to map out a methodology for looking for the ghosts of the recent (...) feminist past. In looking for one such ghost - the figure of the feminist-as-lesbian - the article asks, how does the trope of the apparitional in lesbian cultural visibility structure cultural memories of the second wave movement? To that end the article discusses the presence of the ghost in a recent feminist/queer study of feminist historicity and in the popular press respectively. The final section looks back to the 1980s in order to trace the connections between then and now, and, therefore, something of what the ghost wants us to remember. (shrink)

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) is the UK’s primary healthcare priority-setting body, responsible for advising the National Health Service in England on which technologies to fund and which to reject. Until recently, the normative approach underlying this advice was described in a 2008 document entitled ‘Social value judgements: Principles for the development of NICE guidance’ (SVJ). In January 2020, however, NICE replaced SVJ with a new articulation of its guiding principles. Given the significant evolution of NICE’s (...) methods between 2008 and 2020, this study examines whether this new document (‘Principles’) offers a transparent account of NICE’s current normative approach. It finds that it does not, deriving much of its content directly from SVJ and failing to fully acknowledge or explain how and why NICE’s approach has since changed. In particular, Principles is found to offer a largely procedural account of NICE decision-making, despite evidence of the increasing reliance of NICE’s methods on substantive decision-rules and ‘modifiers’ that cannot be justified in purely procedural terms. Thus, while Principles tells NICE’s stakeholders much about how the organisation goes about the process of decision-making, it tells them little about the substantive grounds on which its decisions are now based. It is therefore argued that Principles does not offer a transparent account of NICE’s normative approach (either alone, or alongside other documents) and that, given NICE’s reliance on transparency as a requirement of procedural justice, NICE does not in this respect satisfy its own specification of a just decision-maker. (shrink)

Two experiments investigated the factors that people consider when evaluating informal arguments in newspaper and magazine editorials. Experiment 1 showed that subjects were more likely to object to the truth of the premises and the conclusions of an argument than to the strength of the link between them. Experiment 1 also revealed two manipulations that helped subjects object to the link between premises and conclusions: rating how well the premises support the conclusions and rating the believability of the premises and (...) conclusions. Experiment 2 further demonstrated that subjects who identified the premises and conclusions of an argument were better at formulating objections to the link between premises and conclusions. Moreover, subjects in Experiment 2 were better and faster at formulating objections to the truth of the premises and conclusions than to the link between premises and conclusions. The results are discussed in terms of the constraints they pose for developing a cognitive theory of informal reasoning. (shrink)

This paper examines developing trust in two related senses: (1) rationally overcoming distrust, and (2) developing a mature capacity for trusting/distrusting. In focussing exclusively on the first problem, traditional philosophical discussions fail to address how an evidence- based paradigm of rationality is easily co-opted by (immature) agents in support of irrational distrust (or trust) - a manifestation of the second problem. Well-regulated trust requires developing a capacity to tolerate the uncertainties that chracterise relationships among fully autonomous self-directed agents. Early relationships (...) lack this uncertainty since care-givers take primary responsibility for determining a child's interests, reducing the scope (if not the intensity) of potential conflict between self and other. Once agents recognize that adulthood demands foregoing the security embedded in such relationships of dependency, they are free to embrace a more appropriate paradigm of rationality for guiding their thought and action in interactions with others. (shrink)

We call systematic disputes that are particularly hard to resolve deep disagreements. We can divide most theories of deep disagreements in analytic epistemology into two camps: the Wittgensteinian view and the fundamental epistemic principles view. This essay analyzes how both views deal with two of the most pressing issues a theory of deep disagreement must address: their source and their resolution. After concluding that the paradigmatic theory of each camp struggles on both fronts, the essay proceeds to show that, despite (...) their differences, these theories share some core assumptions and think of deep disagreements similarly: as grounded in fundamental epistemic differences between the parties. This underlying conception of deep disagreements the author calls “the fundamental model.” The essay provides reasons to be wary of this conception, and hence, mainstream epistemologists’ treatment of the issue. (shrink)

This paper argues that our folk-psychological expertise is a special case of extended and enculturated cognition where we learn to regulate both our own and others’ thought and action in accord with a wide array of culturally shaped folk-psychological norms. The view has three noteworthy features: it challenges a common assumption that the foundational capacity at work in folk-psychological expertise is one of interpreting behaviour in mentalistic terms, arguing instead that successful mindreading is largely a consequence of successful mindshaping; it (...) argues that our folk-psychological expertise is not only socially scaffolded in development, it continues to be socially supported and maintained in maturity, thereby presenting a radically different picture of what mature folk-psychological competency amounts to; it provides grounds for resisting a recent trend in theoretical explanations of quotidian social interaction that downplays the deployment of sophisticated mentalizing resources in understanding what others are doing. (shrink)

What is hope? Though variously characterized as a cognitive attitude, an emotion, a disposition, and even a process or activity, hope, more deeply, a unifying and grounding force of human agency. We cannot live a human life without hope, therefore questions about the rationality of hope are properly recast as questions about what it means to hope well. This thesis is defended and elaborated as follows. First, it is argued that hope is an essential and distinctive feature of human agency, (...) both conceptually and developmentally. The author then explores a number of dimensions of agency that are critically implicated in the art of hoping well, drawing on several examples from George Eliot’s Middlemarch. The article concludes with a short section that suggests how hoping well in an individual context may be extended to hope at the collective level. (shrink)

Until recently philosophy of religion has been almost exclusively focused upon the analysis of western religious ideas. The central concern of the discipline has been the concept God , as that concept has been understood within Judaeo-Christianity. However, this narrow remit threatens to render philosophy of religion irrelevant today. To avoid this philosophy of religion should become a genuinely multicultural discipline. But how, if at all, can philosophy of religion rise to this challenge? The paper considers fictionalism about religious discourse (...) as a possible methodological standpoint from which to practice a tradition-neutral form of philosophy of religion. However, after examining some of the problems incurred by fictionalism, the paper concludes that fictionalism and religious diversity are uneasy bedfellows; which implies that fictionalism is unlikely to be the best theory to shape the practice of philosophy of religion in a multicultural context. (shrink)

In this article, I focus on the media's framing of non-mainstream body modification as a social problem. I demonstrate, through an analysis of a sample of 35 newspaper articles on body modification, that a mutilation discourse is one of the dominant frames of meaning used to make sense of body modifiers in the mainstream media. This framing, which effects the pathologization of body modifiers, utilizes the claims making of mental-health experts and relies on a gendered account of body modification as (...) a social problem. While news accounts are a medium for presenting body modification to a large `community of speakers', I find that they have precluded the legitimacy of the claims of subcultural actors. I argue from a poststructuralist perspective that body modifiers' `claims from the underside' are subjugated by accounts that problematize body modification through the dominant discourse of the mental-health model. I suggest that this frame is problematic for its silencing of `underside' or marginal embodied knowledges, which include, for example, alternative accounts of female embodiment. (shrink)

Gendered stereotypes persist in American classrooms despite efforts to create equitable learning environments. Within this qualitative study, we examined both teachers’ and administrators’ perceptions of gender in the classroom and present the data of the continued gender bias among some educators in their own words. The data showed teachers and administrators attributed conflict styles based upon gender and consistently reference boys conflict resolution style as “over quickly” in contrast to girls conflict resolution style. Likewise, participants’ gendered perceptions extended to the (...) kinds of feedback they expected girls and boys to prefer. Additionally, our findings show that participants misunderstood or lacked knowledge of scientifically sound research and participants described changing the curriculum in a single-sex class/school to use stereotypical topics and activities for student engagement. The authors suggest this data should open a discussion between education scholars and practitione... (shrink)

The republican revival in political philosophy, political theory, and legal theory has produced an impressive range of novel interpretations of the historical figures of the republican tradition. It has also given rise to a variety of contemporary neo-republican theories that build on its historical themes. Although there have been some feminist discussions of its historical representatives, neo-republicanism has not generated a great deal of enthusiasm among feminists. The present paper examines Phillip Pettit's theory of freedom as nondomination in order to (...) assess its potential usefulness for those with feminist goals. It defends Pettit's account of interpersonal domination from certain feminist objections, but argues that his account of state domination needs to be amended if it is fully to protect the interests of women and other groups. (shrink)

Is it possible to talk about God without either misrepresentation or failing to assert anything of significance? The article begins by reviewing how, in attempting to answer this question, traditional theories of religious language have failed to sidestep both potential pitfalls adequately. After arguing that recently developed theories of metaphor seem better able to shed light on the nature of religious language, it considers the claim that huge areas of our language and, consequently, of our experience are shaped by metaphors. (...) Finally, it considers some of the more significant implications of this claim for our understanding of both religious language and religious experience. (shrink)

Our objective is to understand how parents and children perceive their roles in decision making about research participation. Forty-five children (ages 4-15 years) with or without a chronic condition and 21 parents were the participants. A semistructured interview assessed perceptions of up to 4 hypothetical research scenarios with varying levels of risk, benefit, and complexity. Children were also administered the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test, Third Edition, to assess verbal ability, as a proxy for the child's cognitive development. The audiotaped interviews (...) were transcribed and analyzed for themes related to parent and child decision-making roles. Both parents and children varied in their perceptions of decision-making roles. Child perceptions of parental influence on decision making as knowledge-based increased with cognitive development, whereas perceptions of parental influence as power-based decreased. Both children and parents commented that they would collaborate with each other when making decisions. Collaborative decision making appeared to increase with cognitive development. These findings suggest that approaches to child assent and parent permission should consider the parent-child relationship and how children and families typically make decisions. Future research is necessary to explain variation in the process of research decision making across children and families, explore the role of collaboration on children's decision-making skills, and understand developmental trajectories and mechanisms related to research decision making. (shrink)