Lloyd (2009) contends that climate models are confirmed by various instances of fit between their output and observational data. The present paper argues that what these instances of fit might confirm are not climate models themselves, but rather hypotheses about the adequacy of climate models for particular purposes. This required shift in thinking—from confirming climate models to confirming their adequacy-for-purpose—may sound trivial, but it is shown to complicate the evaluation of climate models considerably, both in principle and in practice.

First published in 1982. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Whether in characterizing Catharine MacKinnon's theory of gender as itself pornographic or in identifying liberalism as unable to make good on its promises, Wendy Brown pursues a central question: how does a sense of woundedness become the basis for a sense of identity? Brown argues that efforts to outlaw hate speech and pornography powerfully legitimize the state: such apparently well-intentioned attempts harm victims further by portraying them as so helpless as to be in continuing need of governmental protection. "Whether (...) one is dealing with the state, the Mafia, parents, pimps, police, or husbands," writes Brown, "the heavy price of institutionalized protection is always a measure of dependence and agreement to abide by the protector's rules." True democracy, she insists, requires sharing power, not regulation by it; freedom, not protection.Refusing any facile identification with one political position or another, Brown applies her argument to a panoply of topics, from the basis of litigiousness in political life to the appearance on the academic Left of themes of revenge and a thwarted will to power. These and other provocations in contemporary political thought and political life provide an occasion for rethinking the value of several of the last two centuries' most compelling theoretical critiques of modern political life, including the positions of Nietzsche, Marx, Weber, and Foucault. (shrink)

T. G. Masaryk’s thought is famous for his concept of the Czech nation as well as his ideals of humanity. As a philosopher, sociologist, and politician, he was confronted with Czech anti-Semitism, and after Czechoslovakia was founded, with issues of the Jewish national minority. He tried to solve all the questions with respect to his ethical conviction and the ideals of democracy and equality. The most difficult personal situation for Masaryk emerged with the ‘Hilsner affair’, when his brave stance against (...) anti-Semitism caused animosity and even hatred from the public. As a consequence of that Masaryk had to abandon his public activities including lecturing at university for some time. The philosopher Jan Patočka analysed Masaryk’s involvement in this case and the following events in his study Masaryk’s struggle against anti-Semitism. Patočka pointed out that there is an interconnection between Masaryk’s involvement in this affair and his engagement in the question of Czech nationality, as Masaryk intended to improve the ethical level of the nation by disposing of bias and namely the ritual murder myth. The second part of the present contribution is focused on Masaryk’s views on Zionism and the assimilation movement and his ambiguity in relation to the issue. It seems that Masaryk’s concept of the Czech nation, formed for the struggle against the Habsburg monarchy, became inadequate in the new republic, as it was not inclusive of the many minorities, the Jewish one included. On the other hand, Masaryk’s ideals of humanity provide a certain solution on the level of ethics. (shrink)

According to an adequacy-for-purpose view, models should be assessed with respect to their adequacy or fitness for particular purposes. Such a view has been advocated by scientists and philosophers...

Bioethics, Volume 35, Issue 7, Page 623-633, September 2021.

One of the most complex areas of Foucault's work is his relationship to Freudian psychoanalysis. Foucault consistently argued for the historical specificities of the two principal human objects of psychoanalysis – madness and sexuality. He now stands starkly removed from Freudian thought, which cannot countenance ethnographic or cultural versions of madness or sexuality. Foucault welcomed the extra‐psychoanalytic potentials of the Freudian unconscious for undermining existentialist and phenomenological accounts of the subject and knowledge. Foucault in fact celebrated the political divergences of (...) psychoanalysis as one of its strengths. The critique of desire is really the climax of Foucault's efforts to develop an alternative Nietzschean genealogy of the modern subject as a historical and cultural reality – a domain that had hitherto excluded sexual identity, while the Freudian and feminist traditions had perhaps seen only sexuality and not the wider political domains. (shrink)

In Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials , Wendy Kaminer argues that we are a society intoxicated by the irrational: religion, spirituality, and popular therapies threaten to replace rational thought with supernaturalism and impassioned but unexamined personal testimony. Ranging from our fascination with angels, aliens, and near- death experiences to the rise of junk science, the recovery movement, and the digital culture, Kaminer points out the amusing and ominous effects of our deference to spiritual authorities and resistance to critical thinking. She questions (...) conventional wisdom about the association of religious belief with virtue, identifying the sectarianism of efforts to establish religion in the public square. With both wit and empathy, Kaminer takes on what many people hold sacred. Kaminer is an eloquent and incisive critic and rationalist living in a superstitious, evangelical age. In Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials she challenges us to exercise skepticism, reason, and irreverence and to appreciate the pleasures of free inquiry. (shrink)

Overdiagnosis refers to diagnosis that does not benefit patients because the diagnosed condition is not a harmful disease in those individuals. Overdiagnosis has been identified as a problem in cancer screening, diseases such as chronic kidney disease and diabetes, and a range of mental illnesses including depression and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. In this paper, we describe overdiagnosis, investigate reasons why it occurs, and propose two different types. Misclassification overdiagnosis arises because the diagnostic threshold for the disease in question has (...) been set at a level where many people without harmful disease are nonetheless diagnosed. We illustrate misclassification overdiagnosis using the example of chronic kidney disease. Misclassification occurs in diseases diagnosed using biomarkers or based on patient reported phenomena. Maldetection overdiagnosis arises because, at the time the diagnosis is made and despite the presence of a 'gold standard' diagnostic test, it is not possible to discriminate between harmful and non-harmful cases of the index disease. We illustrate maldetection overdiagnosis using the example of thyroid cancer. While there is some overlap between misclassification and maldetection overdiagnosis, this conceptual analysis helps to clarify the phenomenon of overdiagnosis and is a necessary first step in developing strategies to address the problem. (shrink)

Concern for human vulnerability seems to be at the heart of bioethical inquiry, but the concept of vulnerability is under-theorized in the bioethical literature. The aim of this article is to show why bioethics needs an adequately theorized and nuanced conception of vulnerability. We first review approaches to vulnerability in research ethics and public health ethics, and show that the bioethical literature associates vulnerability with risk of harm and exploitation, and limited capacity for autonomy. We identify some of the challenges (...) emerging from this literature: in particular, how to reconcile universal human vulnerability with a context-sensitive analysis of specific kinds and sources of vulnerability; and how to reconcile obligations to protect vulnerable persons with obligations to respect autonomy. We then briefly survey some of the theoretical resources available within the philosophical literature to address these challenges, and to assist in understanding the conceptual connections between vulnerability and related concepts such as harm, exploitation, needs, and autonomy. We also sketch out a taxonomy of sources and kinds of vulnerability. Finally, we consider the implications for policy evaluation of making vulnerability an explicit and central focus of bioethics. Our investigation is in the form of a broad survey motivating a research agenda rather than a detailed analysis. (shrink)

Tolerance is generally regarded as an unqualified achievement of the modern West. Emerging in early modern Europe to defuse violent religious conflict and reduce persecution, tolerance today is hailed as a key to decreasing conflict across a wide range of other dividing lines-- cultural, racial, ethnic, and sexual. But, as political theorist Wendy Brown argues in Regulating Aversion, tolerance also has dark and troubling undercurrents. Dislike, disapproval, and regulation lurk at the heart of tolerance. To tolerate is not to (...) affirm but to conditionally allow what is unwanted or deviant. And, although presented as an alternative to violence, tolerance can play a part in justifying violence--dramatically so in the war in Iraq and the War on Terror. Wielded, especially since 9/11, as a way of distinguishing a civilized West from a barbaric Islam, tolerance is paradoxically underwriting Western imperialism. Brown's analysis of the history and contemporary life of tolerance reveals it in a startlingly unfamiliar guise. Heavy with norms and consolidating the dominance of the powerful, tolerance sustains the abjection of the tolerated and equates the intolerant with the barbaric. Examining the operation of tolerance in contexts as different as the War on Terror, campaigns for gay rights, and the Los Angeles Museum of Tolerance, Brown traces the operation of tolerance in contemporary struggles over identity, citizenship, and civilization. (shrink)

The relationship between law and a population’s health is complex and poorly understood. To the extent that scholarship exists on the subject, it has usually focused on epidemics that are concentrated in relatively vulnerable, marginalized communities. Often, individual behaviors are assumed to play a major role in the epidemiology of these diseases. Perhaps, as a result, these illnesses become stigmatized and the object of coercive laws, which in turn become the subject of litigation, legal debate, and ultimately scholarly analysis. Thus, (...) to the extent that U.S. legal scholars have thought about public health in the last 30 years, they have generally done so in the context of tuberculosis, intravenous drug abuse, and a handful of similar conditions. Likewise, Jonathan Mann’s own appreciation of the importance of human rights to public health emerged in the wake of his work with HIV, which is perhaps the prototypical stigmatized disease. (shrink)

Bioethics is a practically oriented discipline that developed to address pressing ethical issues arising from developments in the life sciences. Given this inherent practical bent, some form of advocacy or activism seems inherent to the nature of bioethics. However, there are potential tensions between being a bioethics activist, and academic ideals. In academic bioethics, scholarship involves reflection, rigour and the embrace of complexity and uncertainty. These values of scholarship seem to be in tension with being an activist, which requires pragmatism, (...) simplicity, certainty and, above all, action. In this paper I explore this apparent dichotomy, using the case example of my own involvement in international efforts to end forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience in China. I conclude that these tensions can be managed and that academic bioethics requires a willingness to be activist. (shrink)

On the 24th June 2015, Feminist Legal Studies and the London School of Economics Law Department hosted an afternoon event with Professor Wendy Brown, Class of 1936 First Professor of Political Science, University of California. Professor Brown kindly agreed to discuss her scholarship on feminist theory, and its relationship to both the law and neoliberalism. The event included an interview by Dr Katie Cruz and a Q&A session, which are presented here in an edited version of the transcript. Sumi (...) Madhock, Professor of Gender Studies, LSE chaired the interview and discussion and introduced Professor Brown’s work. Katie Cruz asked Wendy Brown to reflect upon topics that span her scholarship and activism, including the state of critical, feminist, and Left approaches to rights, neoliberalism, despair and utopianism, and the future of feminist theory and practice in the context of neoliberalism and current debates about intersectionality. Participants in the discussion asked questions on a wide range of issues, including the limits of feminist engagement with law as a tool for social change, the dominance of neoliberalism, imperialist feminism, Islamophobia, secularism, and our attachment to the figure of homo politicus. (shrink)

In this paper we explore the nature of the emerging purpose ecosystem and its role in transforming and supporting business to help address the UN Sustainable Development Goals. We argue that interactions among its ‘private actors’, who share efforts and belief in changing and redefining the purpose and nature of business by advocating broader non-financial performance outcomes, have the potential to contribute to a wider sustainability-oriented transformation of the business sector. Through interview data collected in the UK and Australia, we (...) identify six main roles that characterise the activities and interactions among its actors and their stakeholders. Our research contributes to expanding knowledge on the emerging phenomenon of the purpose ecosystem and how its actors support the achievement of the UN SDGs by seeking to change the purpose of business and integrating the goals into their operations and engagements with stakeholders. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Mill's Liberal Feminism Objection: Mill's Defense of Gendered Division of Labor Further Reading.

This chapter contains sections titled: Education: Development and Self‐Development Two Senses of Education Further Reading.

Immigration poses numerous challenges for health professionals and public health lawyers. This article reviews these challenges. We begin by offering some background on immigration and health and then explain some of the reasons why immigrants are less likely than natives to have health insurance. Next we turn to a discussion of some of the particular challenges relating to the health care of refugees. We conclude by analyzing and rejecting some of the arguments that are made for discriminating against immigrants with (...) respect to the provision of public health benefits and services. (shrink)

We invoke the ideal of tolerance in response to conflict, but what does it mean to answer conflict with a call for tolerance? Is tolerance a way of resolving conflicts or a means of sustaining them? Does it transform conflicts into productive tensions, or does it perpetuate underlying power relations? To what extent does tolerance hide its involvement with power and act as a form of depoliticization? Wendy Brown and Rainer Forst debate the uses and misuses of tolerance, an (...) exchange that highlights the fundamental differences in their critical practice despite a number of political similarities. Both scholars address the normative premises, limits, and political implications of various conceptions of tolerance. Brown offers a genealogical critique of contemporary discourses on tolerance in Western liberal societies, focusing on their inherent ties to colonialism and imperialism, and Forst reconstructs an intellectual history of tolerance that attempts to redeem its political virtue in democratic societies. Brown and Forst work from different perspectives and traditions, yet they each remain wary of the subjection and abnegation embodied in toleration discourses, among other issues. The result is a dialogue rich in critical and conceptual reflections on power, justice, discourse, rationality, and identity. (shrink)

Unable to answer the call of our patients: mental health nurses’ experience of moral distress When health practitioners’ moral choices and actions are thwarted by constraints, they may respond with feelings of moral distress. In a Canadian hermeneutic phenomenological study, physicians, nurses, psychologists and non‐professional aides were asked to identify care situations that they found morally distressing, and to elaborate on how moral concerns regarding the care of patients were raised and resolved. In this paper, we describe the experience of (...) moral distress related by nurses working in mental healthcare settings who believed that lack of resources (such as time and staff) leads to dispiritedness, lack of respect, and absence of recognition (for both patients and staff) which severely diminished their ability to provide quality care. The metaphors of flashlight and hammer are used to elaborate nurses’ possible responses to intolerable situations. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:In a world filled with poverty, environmental degradation, and moral injustice, social enterprises offer a ray of hope. These organizations seek to achieve social missions through business ventures. Yet social missions and business ventures are associated with divergent goals, values, norms, and identities. Attending to them simultaneously creates tensions, competing demands, and ethical dilemmas. Effectively understanding social enterprises therefore depends on insight into the nature and management of these tensions. While existing research recognizes tensions between social missions and business ventures, (...) we lack any systematic analysis. Our paper addresses this issue. We first categorize the types of tensions that arise between social missions and business ventures, emphasizing their prevalence and variety. We then explore how four different organizational theories offer insight into these tensions, and we develop an agenda for future research. We end by arguing that a focus on social-business tensions not only expands insight into social enterprises, but also provides an opportunity for research on social enterprises to inform traditional organizational theories. Taken together, our analysis of tensions in social enterprises integrates and seeks to energize research on this expanding phenomenon. (shrink)

Within a week of my first foray into an undergraduate philosophy class, I was pretty well smitten. “You mean you want us to argue? And our grade is determined by how well we do this? Wow. How cool...

This article addresses four hypotheses: (a) that corporate social responsibility (CSR) in Asia is not homogeneous but varies among countries, (b) that the variation is explained by stages of development, (c) that globalization enhances the adoption of CSR in Asia, and (d) that national business systems structure the profile of multinational corporations’ CSR. These hypotheses are investigated through analysis of Web site reporting of 50 companies in seven Asian countries: India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, South Korea, Singapore, and Thailand. The (...) article concludes that CSR does vary considerably among Asian countries but that this variation is not explained by development but by factors in the respective national business systems. It also concludes that multinational companies are more likely to adopt CSR than those operating solely in their home country but that the profile of their CSR tends to reflect the profile of the country of operation rather than the country of origin. (shrink)

The theoretical foundations of climate science have received little attention from philosophers thus far, despite a number of outstanding issues. We provide a brief, non-technical overview of several of these issues – related to theorizing about climates, climate change, internal variability and more – and attempt to make preliminary progress in addressing some of them. In doing so, we hope to open a new thread of discussion in the emerging area of philosophy of climate science, focused on theoretical foundations.

In order to summarize a story, it is necessary to access a high level analysis of the story that highlights its central concepts. A technique of memory representation based on plot units appears to provide a rich foundation for such an analysis. Plot units are conceptual structures that overlap with each other when a narrative is cohesive. When overlapping intersections between plot units are interpreted as arcs in a graph of plot units, the resulting graph encodes the plot of the (...) story. Structural features of the graph then reveal which concepts are central to the story, and which concepts are peripheral. Plot unit analysis is currently being investigated as a processing strategy for narrative summarization by both computer simulation and psychological experiments. (shrink)

DIVA reader aimed at revitalizing left legal and political critique./div.

Informal political representation can be a political lifeline, particularly for oppressed and marginalized groups. Such representation can give these groups some say, however mediate, partial, and imperfect, in how things go for them. Coeval with the political goods such representation offers these groups are its particular dangers to them. Mindful of these dangers, skeptics challenge the practice for being, inter alia, unaccountable, unauthorized, inegalitarian, and oppressive. These challenges provide strong pro tanto reasons to think the practice morally impermissible. This paper (...) considers the question: On what conditions is the informal political representation of oppressed and marginalized groups permissible? By responding to skeptics’ challenges, I develop a systematic account of moral constraints that, if adopted, would make such representation permissible. The account that emerges shows that informal political representatives (IPRs) must aim to fulfill two sets of sometimes conflicting duties to the represented: democracy within duties, which concern how the representative treats and relates to the represented, and justice without duties, which concern how the representative’s actions advance the aims of the representation. (shrink)

In this article I construct a feminist notion of social citizenship from early twentieth-century feminism in the United States. Arguing that there are four aspects to the interconnection between women's citizenship and social democracy-new modes of citizenship, a socialized view of rights, new spaces for participation, and a female-privileged definition of gender equality-I suggest that such a concept could help us move from a welfare state to a feminist social democracy.

Trust is taken to be one of the foundational values in the doctor-patient relationship, facilitating access to the benefits of health care and providing a guarantee against possible harms. Despite this foundational role, some doctors betray the trust of their patients. Trusting involves granting discretionary powers and makes the truster vulnerable to the trustee. Patients trust medical practitioners to act with goodwill and to act competently. Some patients carry pre-existing vulnerabilities, for reasons such as gender, poverty, age, ethnicity, or disability, (...) and these vulnerabilities can be exacerbated when such patients extend their trust to a doctor. Gender stereotypes reduce women's ability to challenge and thereby assess their doctor's competency. In addition, women are more likely to be distrusted by their doctors and have their experiences of medical symptoms discounted. In this paper, we analyze two extreme examples of breaches of medical trust that exploited the vulnerability of women in the health care system: the "unfortunate experiment" at the National Women's Hospital in New Zealand and the Harold Shipman murders of elderly patients in the United Kingdom, examining the potential role of gender in the outcomes with regard to trust. Major breaches of medical trust such as these typically lead to government inquiries, revisions of ethical guidelines, and substantive policy change in an effort to re-establish public and patient trust. We argue that the medical profession has an ethical obligation to put mechanisms in place to protect vulnerable patients from abuses of trust, to monitor colleagues' competence, and to be prepared to blow the whistle to protect patients who are not in a position to recognize misplaced trust. Such mechanisms will act disprosportionately to reduce harm to women as patients. (shrink)

In April 2002, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for a series of columns he wrote in the months following September 11. On the surface, the columns seemed to fit Cummins Gauthier’s criteria for public grieving: they engaged readers emotionally; they empathized with victims and survivors; and they helped readers develop moral attitudes, opinions and responses. However, in analyzing the columns from a feminist ethic of care perspective—one that expands the boundaries of the moral community (...) beyond the borders of a nation-state—one finds that Friedman’s columns can distort the process of public grieving, leading citizens toward anger and an “us” verus “them” mentality rather than healing and a genuine concern that embraces the value of all human beings. (shrink)

A group encompassed of three eighth grade respond to the etiquette of a classroom setting, the “fuzzy area” between adulthood and childhood, and basic accountability between the two categories through unbiased opinions in a philosophical environment.