The Rejected Body argues that feminist theorizing has been skewed toward non-disabled experience, and that the knowledge of people with disabilities must be integrated into feminist ethics, discussions of bodily life, and criticism of the cognitive and social authority of medicine. Among the topics it addresses are who should be identified as disabled; whether disability is biomedical, social or both; what causes disability and what could 'cure' it; and whether scientific efforts to eliminate disabling physical conditions are morally justified. (...) class='Hi'>Wendell provides a remarkable look at how cultural attitudes towards the body contribute to the stigma of disability and to widespread unwillingness to accept and provide for the body's inevitable weakness. (shrink)

Chronic illness is a major cause of disability, especially in women. Therefore, any adequate feminist understanding of disability must encompass chronic illnesses. I argue that there are important differences between healthy disabled and unhealthy disabled people that are likely to affect such issues as treatment of impairment in disability and feminist politics, accommodation of disability in activism and employment, identification of persons as disabled, disability pride, and prevention and “cure” of disabilities.

This essay discusses a cluster of problems for feminist theory and practice which concern responsibility and choice under conditions of oppression. I characterize four major perspectives from which situations of oppression or victimization can be seen and questions about choice and responsibility answered: The Perspective of the Oppressor; The Perspective of the Victim; The Perspective of the Responsible Actor; and The Perspective of the Observer/Philosopher. I compare their strengths and weaknesses and discuss their compatibility.

We need a feminist theory of disability, both because 16 percent of women are disabled, and because the oppression of disabled people is closely linked to the cultural oppression of the body. Disability is not a biological given; like gender, it is socially constructed from biologically reality. Our culture idealizes the body and demands that we control it. Thus, although most people will be disabled at some time in their lives, the disabled are made "the other," who symbolize failure of (...) control and the threat of pain, limitation, dependency, and death. If disabled people and their knowledge were fully integrated into society, everyone's relation to her/his real body would be liberated. (shrink)

A response to Maryann Ayim's "In Praise of Clutter as a Necessary Part of the Feminist Perspective.".

Liberal feminism is not committed to a number of philosophical positions for which it is frequently criticized, including abstract individualism, certain individualistic approaches to morality and society, valuing the mental/rational over the physical/emotional, and the traditional liberal way of drawing the line between the public and the private.Moreover, liberal feminism's clearest political commitments, including equality of opportunity, are important to women's liberation and not necessarily incompatible with the goals of socialist and radical feminism.

In this anthology of new and classic articles, fifteen noted feminist philosophers explore contemporary ethical issues that uniquely affect the lives of women. These issues in applied ethics include autonomy, responsibility, sexual harassment, women in the military, new technologies for reproduction, surrogate motherhood, pornography, abortion, nonfeminist women and others. Whether generated by old social standards or intensified by recent technology, these dilemmas all pose persistent, 'nagging,' questions that cry out for answers.

In 1880, when Oliver Wendell Holmes (later to be a Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court) criticized the logical theology of law articulated by Christopher Columbus Langdell (the first Dean of Harvard Law School), neither Holmes nor Langdell was aware of the revolution in logic that had begun, the year before, with Frege's Begriffsschrift. But there is an important element of truth in Holmes's insistence that a legal system cannot be adequately understood as a system of axioms and corollaries; (...) and this element of truth is not obviated by the more powerful logical techniques that are now available. (shrink)

What is called legal pragmatism today is very different from the older style of legal pragmatism traditionally associated with Oliver Wendell Holmes; and there is much that is worthwhile on the conception of the law revealed by reading Holmes's The Path of the Law in the light of the classical pragmatist tradition of Peirce, James, and Dewey. Here, reflections on the varieties of pragmatism - philosophical and legal, old and new - will be wrapped around an exploration of Holmes's (...) legal philosophy and the strengths and weaknesses of his arguments. (shrink)

This essay builds on recent work by Susan Haack to suggest that Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s conception of the common law was influenced by Darwinian evolution and classical pragmatism. This is no small claim: perceptions of what the common law is and does within the constitutional framework of the United States continue to be heavily debated. Holmes’s paradigm for the common law both revised and extended the models set forth by Sir Edward Coke, Thomas Hobbes, Sir Matthew Hale, (...) and Sir William Blackstone. Adding additional substance to Haack’s argument by pointing out passages in Holmes’s opinions and in his only book, The Common Law, that corroborate her claims about the particular features of Holmes’s pragmatism, this essay concludes by suggesting that, because of his connections with the classical pragmatists and his reverence for Emerson, Holmes is the best place to begin answering the famous question formulated by Stanley Cavell: “What’s the Use in Calling Emerson a Pragmatist?”. (shrink)

A comment on Susan Wendell's paper "Oppression and Victimization; Choice and Responsibility" that appeared in Hypatia 5(3).

Crowdsourcing has attracted increasing attention as a means to enlist online participants in organisational activities. In this paper, we examine crowdsourcing from the perspective of its ethical use in the support of open innovation taking a broader system view of its use. Crowdsourcing has the potential to improve access to knowledge, skills, and creativity in a cost-effective manner but raises a number of ethical dilemmas. The paper discusses the ethical issues related to knowledge exchange, economics, and relational aspects of crowdsourcing. (...) A guiding framework drawn from the ethics literature is proposed to guide the ethical use of crowdsourcing. A major problem is that crowdsourcing is viewed in a piecemeal fashion and separate from other organisational processes. The trend for organisations to be more digitally collaborative is explored in relation to the need for greater awareness of crowdsourcing implications. (shrink)

Savulescu argues that it may be ethically acceptable for governments to require citizens be vaccinated against COVID-19. He also recommends that governments consider providing monetary or in-kind incentives to citizens to increase vaccination rates. In this response, we argue against mandatory vaccination and vaccine incentivisation, and instead suggest that targeted public health messaging and a greater responsiveness to the concerns of vaccine-hesitant individuals would be the best strategy to address low vaccination rates.

While information technologies present organizations with opportunities to become more competitive, unsettled social norms and lagging legislation guiding the use of these technologies present organizations and individuals with ethical dilemmas. This paper presents two studies investigating the relationship between intellectual property and privacy attitudes, Machiavellianism and Ethical Ideology, and working in R&D and computer literacy in the form of programming experience. In Study 1, Machiavellians believed it was more acceptable to ignore the intellectual property and privacy rights of others. Programmers (...) and R&D workers considered violating intellectual property rights more acceptable. Programmers did not consider violating privacy rights more acceptable, but R&D workers did. Finally, there was an interaction between Machiavellianism, programming and R&D. Machiavellians who also had programming experience or worked in R&D found violations of intellectual property much more acceptable. The effect of Machiavellianism on attitudes toward violations of privacy was enhanced by working in R&D, but not by programming experience. In Study 2, idealists believed it was less acceptable to ignore the intellectual property and privacy rights of others. Relativists found it more acceptable to violate intellectual property rights, though they did not consider it more acceptable to violate privacy rights. Those with programming experience were more accepting of intellectual property rights violations, but not of privacy violations. Finally, programming experience moderated the relationship between idealism, relativism and attitudes toward these unethical information practices. Implications for diminishing unethical behavior among Machiavellians, Relativists, programmers and those in R&D are discussed. (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)

This article examines the historical construction of depression over about a hundred years, employing the social life of methods as an explanatory framework. Specifically, it considers how emerging methodologies in the measurement of psychological constructs contributed to changes in epistemological approaches to mental illness and created the conditions of possibility for major shifts in the construction of depression. While depression was once seen as a feature of psychotic personality, measurement technologies made it possible for it to be reconstructed as changeable (...) and treatable. Different types of scaling techniques (Likert versus dichotomous scales) enabled the separation of depressive personality from reactive depression, paving the way for measuring the severity and intensity of emotions. Techniques to test sensitivity to change provided a means of demonstrating the efficacy of new psychoactive drug treatments. Later, more advanced techniques of precision scaling enabled the management of a new measurement problem, clinician unreliability, associated with the growing number of professionals involved in mental health care. Through statistical management of unreliability, the construct of depression has dramatically reduced over this period from hundreds of questionnaire items to potentially just two. Exploring the history of depression through this lens produces an alternative narrative to those that have emerged as a result of medicalisation and the actions of individuals and pressure groups. (shrink)

Health care reform proposals threaten to exacerbate tensions physicians already face in trying to balance traditional duties to individual patients against increasing pressure to serve broader societal and institutional goals. To cope with reform, medical ethics must clarify physicians' moral obligations, change existing ethical codes, and develop an ethics of institutions.

"Featuring seventeen original essays on the ethics of Artificial Intelligence by some of the most prominent AI scientists and academic philosophers today, this volume represents the state-of-the-art thinking in this fast-growing field and highlights some of the central themes in AI and morality such as how to build ethics into AI, how to address mass unemployment as a result of automation, how to avoiding designing AI systems that perpetuate existing biases, and how to determine whether an AI is conscious. As (...) AI technologies progress, questions about the ethics of AI, in both the near-future and the long-term, become more pressing than ever. Should a self-driving car prioritize the lives of the passengers over the lives of pedestrians? Should we as a society develop autonomous weapon systems that are capable of identifying and attacking a target without human intervention? What happens when AIs become smarter and more capable than us? Could they have greater than human moral status? Can we prevent superintelligent AIs from harming us or causing our extinction? At a critical time in this fast-moving debate, thirty leading academics and researchers at the forefront of AI technology development come together to explore these existential questions, including Aaron James, Allan Dafoe, Andrea Loreggia, Andrew Critch, Azim Shariff, Carrick Flynn, Cathy O'Neil, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Eric Schwitzgebel, Frances Kamm, Francesca Rossi, Hanna Gunn, Iyad Rahwan, Jessica Taylor, JF Bonnefon, K. Brent Venable, Kate Devlin, Mara Garza, Nicholas Mattei, Nick Bostrom, Patrick LaVictoire, Peter Asaro, Peter Railton, S. Matthew Liao, Shannon Vallor, Stephen Wolfram, Steve Petersen, Stuart Russell, Susan Schneider, Wendell Wallach "--. (shrink)

Technology has outpaced the capacity of researchers performing research on human participants to interpret all data generated and handle those data responsibly. This poses a critical challenge to existing rules governing human subjects research. The technologies used in research to generate images, scans, and data can now produce so much information that there is significant potential for incidental findings, findings generated in the course of research but beyond the aims of the study. Neuroimaging scans may visualize the entire brain and (...) even the entire head; computed tomography colonography research may visualize the entire torso, from the base of the lungs to the pubis; genetics studies may reveal “extra” and sometimes unwanted information about the family, such as misattributed paternity and undisclosed adoption; and genomic microarray research increasingly involves whole-genome analysis revealing an individual’s complete genotype, with enormous potential for uncovering unexpected information about an individual’s genetics and risks of developing future conditions. (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)