An exploration of the nexus between ecology, evolutionary biology and molecular biology, via the concept of phenotypic plasticity.

Much recent work in the philosophy of language has been concerned with the project of constructing a theory of reference and truth for natural languages. I shall discuss certain assumptions which have been tacitly in the background of most of this work; what I hope my rather sceptical discussion will show is that the project of giving a theory of reference and truth is much more problematic - and more closely tied to questions of general philosophical interest - than is (...) usually suspected. (shrink)

With the increasing professionalization of clinical ethics, some hospitals and health systems utilize both ethics committees and professional clinical ethicists to address their ethics needs. Drawing upon historical critiques of ethics committees and their own experiences, the authors argue that, in ethics programs with one or more professional clinical ethicists, ethics committees should be dissolved when they fail to meet minimum standards of effectiveness. The authors outline several criteria for assessing effectiveness, describe the benefits of a model that places primary (...) responsibility for ethics work with professional clinical ethicists—the PCE-primary model, and offer suggestions for alternative ethics program structures that empower healthcare professionals to contribute to ethics work in ways more tailored to their strengths and skills while minimizing the shortcomings of ethics committees. (shrink)

Putnam's goal is to embed philosophy in social life. The first part of this book is dedicated to metaphysical questions.

A renewal of philosophy is precisely the point of this book, drawn from the 1989 Gifford Lectures by one of America's most distinguished philosophers.

What is the relationship between our perceptions and reality? What is the relationship between the mind and the body? These are questions with which philosophers have grappled for centuries, and they are topics of considerable contemporary debate as well. Hilary Putnam has approached the divisions between perception and reality and between mind and body with great creativity throughout his career. Now, in _The Threefold Cord: Mind, Body, and World,_ he expounds upon these issues, elucidating both the strengths and weaknesses (...) of current schools of thought. With his characteristic wit and acuity, Putnam offers refreshing solutions to some of philosophy's most vexing problems. Putnam first examines the problem of realism: is objective truth possible? He acknowledges the deep impasse between empirical and idealist approaches to this question, critiquing them both, however, by highlighting the false assumption they share, that we cannot perceive the world directly. Drawing on the work of J. L. Austin and William James, Putnam develops a subtle and creative alternative, which he calls "natural realism." The second part of the book explores the mind-body question: is the mind independent of our interactions with the physical world? Again, Putnam critically assesses two sharply antithetical contemporary approaches and finds them both lacking. _The Threefold Cord_ shows the entire mind-body debate to be miscast and draws on the later work of Wittgenstein, once more advancing original views on perception and thought and their relationship with both the body and the external world. Finally, Putnam takes up two related problems--the role of causality in human behavior and whether or not thoughts and sensations have an "existence" all their own. With Putnam's lucid prose and insightful examples, _The Threefold Cord_ loosens the Gordian knots into which philosophy has bound itself over the issue of epistemology. (shrink)

SummaryI discuss a simple case in which theories with different ontologies appear equally adequate in every way. . I contend that the appearance of equal adequacy is correct, and that what this shows is that the notion of “existence” has a variety of different but legitimate uses. I also argue that this provides a counterexample to the claim advanced by Davidson, that conceptual relativity is incoherent.RésuméJe discute un cas simple où des théories comportant des ontologies différentes apparaissent également adéquates à (...) tout point de vue. . Je prétends que ľapparence ?on;égale adéquation est correcte et ceci montre que la notion ?on;existence a plusieurs sens différents, mais également légitimes. Je montre aussi que cela constitue un contre‐exemple à la thèse avancée par Davidson, selon laquelle la relativité con‐ceptuelle est incoherénte.ZusammenfassungIch diskutiere einen einfachen Fall, wo Theorien mit verschiedenen Ontologien in jeder Beziehung als gleich adäquat erscheinen. . Ich behaupte, dass die Ansicht, wonach gleiche Adäquatheit bestehen soil, korrekt ist und dass entsprechend der Begriff der Existenz mehrere verschiedene Verwendungs‐weisen hat, die alle legitim sind. Ich argumentiere, dass damit ein Gegenbeispiel zu Davidsons Auffassung vorliegt, wonach die These der begrifflichen Relativität inkohärent sein soil. (shrink)

Can we reconcile the idea that we are free and responsible agents with the idea that what we do is determined according to natural laws? For centuries, philosophers have tried in different ways to show that we can. Hilary Bok takes a fresh approach here, as she seeks to show that the two ideas are compatible by drawing on the distinction between practical and theoretical reasoning.Bok argues that when we engage in practical reasoning--the kind that involves asking "what should (...) I do?" and sifting through alternatives to find the most justifiable course of action--we have reason to hold ourselves responsible for what we do. But when we engage in theoretical reasoning--searching for causal explanations of events--we have no reason to apply concepts like freedom and responsibility. Bok contends that libertarians' arguments against "compatibilist" justifications of moral responsibility fail because they describe human actions only from the standpoint of theoretical reasoning. To establish this claim, she examines which conceptions of freedom of the will and moral responsibility are relevant to practical reasoning and shows that these conceptions are not vulnerable to many objections that libertarians have directed against compatibilists. Bok concludes that the truth or falsity of the claim that we are free and responsible agents in the sense those conceptions spell out is ultimately independent of deterministic accounts of the causes of human actions.Clearly written and powerfully argued, Freedom and Responsibility is a major addition to current debate about some of philosophy's oldest and deepest questions. (shrink)

As George Boole saw it, the laws of logic are the laws of thought, and by this he meant, not that human thought is actually governed by the laws of logic, but, rather, that it should be. Boole’s view that the laws of logic have normative implications for how we ought to think is anything but an outlier. The idea that violating the laws of logic involves epistemic impropriety has seemed to many to be just obvious. It has seemed especially (...) obvious to those who see propositional justification as more fundamental than doxastic justification. Whatever other principles are required for defining propositional justification, the laws of logic seem indispensable. The idea that violation of the laws of logic involves some sort of epistemic impropriety—whatever the peculiarities of our psychology may be—has served as a fixed point around which defenders of the fundamentality of propositional justification are united, whatever their other differences. This paper challenges that common thread in defenses of the fundamentality of propositional justification. It is argued that the laws of logic have no bearing whatever on epistemic justification. Once we see why this should be so, the way is paved for seeing why it is that doxastic justification is more fundamental than propositional justification. (shrink)

David Malament has recently responded to David Albert's argument that classical electrodynamics is not time-reversal invariant by introducing a novel conception of time reversal, which supports the conventional view that under time reversal the magnetic field changes sign but the electric field remains unchanged. I will argue here that Malament's transformation has both passive and active versions. I will claim that the passive version is not relevant to Albert's argument, and the active version does not lead to the conventional transformation.

According to Bayesian epistemology, the epistemically rational agent updates her beliefs by conditionalization: that is, her posterior subjective probability after taking account of evidence X, pnew, is to be set equal to her prior conditional probability pold(·|X). Bayesians can be challenged to provide a justification for their claim that conditionalization is recommended by rationality—whence the normative force of the injunction to conditionalize? There are several existing justifications for conditionalization, but none directly addresses the idea that conditionalization will be epistemically rational (...) if and only if it can reasonably be expected to lead to epistemically good outcomes. We apply the approach of cognitive decision theory to provide a justification for conditionalization using precisely that idea. We assign epistemic utility functions to epistemically rational agents; an agent’s epistemic utility is to depend both upon the actual state of the world and on the agent’s credence distribution over possible states. We prove that, under independently motivated conditions, conditionalization is the unique updating rule that maximizes expected epistemic utility. (shrink)

This paper describes the enormous impact of Gödel's work on mathematical logic and recursion theory. After a brief description of the major theorems that Gödel proved, it focuses on subsequent work extending what he did, sometimes by quite different methods. The paper closes with a new result, applying Gödel's methods to show that if scientific epistemology could be completely represented by a particular Turing machine, then it would be impossible for us to know that fact.

Population axiology is the study of the conditions under which one state of affairs is better than another, when the states of affairs in ques- tion may differ over the numbers and the identities of the persons who ever live. Extant theories include totalism, averagism, variable value theories, critical level theories, and “person-affecting” theories. Each of these the- ories is open to objections that are at least prima facie serious. A series of impossibility theorems shows that this is no coincidence: (...) it can be proved, for various sets of prima facie intuitively compelling desiderata, that no axiology can simultaneously satisfy all the desiderata on the list. One’s choice of population axiology appears to be a choice of which intuition one is least unwilling to give up. (shrink)

Difficulties over probability have often been considered fatal to the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics. Here I argue that the Everettian can have everything she needs from `probability' without recourse to indeterminism, ignorance, primitive identity over time or subjective uncertainty: all she needs is a particular *rationality principle*. The decision-theoretic approach recently developed by Deutsch and Wallace claims to provide just such a principle. But, according to Wallace, decision theory is itself applicable only if the correct attitude to a future (...) Everettian measurement outcome is subjective uncertainty. I argue that subjective uncertainty is not to be had, but I offer an alternative interpretation that enables the Everettian to live without uncertainty: we can justify Everettian decision theory on the basis that an Everettian should *care about* all her future branches. The probabilities appearing in the decision-theoretic representation theorem can then be interpreted as the degrees to which the rational agent cares about each future branch. This reinterpretation, however, reduces the intuitive plausibility of one of the Deutsch -Wallace axioms. (shrink)

I explore the prospects for modelling epistemic rationality (in the probabilist setting) via an epistemic decision theory, in a consequentialist spirit. Previous work has focused on cases in which the truth-values of the propositions in which the agent is selecting credences do not depend, either causally or merely evidentially, on the agent’s choice of credences. Relaxing that restriction leads to a proliferation of puzzle cases and theories to deal with them, including epistemic analogues of evidential and causal decision theory, and (...) of the Newcomb Problem and ‘Psychopath Button’ Problem. A variant of causal epistemic decision theory deals well with most cases. However, there is a recalcitrant class of problem cases for which no epistemic decision theory seems able to match our intuitive judgements of epistemic rationality. This lends both precision and credence to the view that there is a fundamental mismatch between epistemic consequentialism and the intuitive notion of epistemic rationality; the implications for understanding the latter are briefly discussed. (shrink)

Decisions, whether moral or prudential, should be guided at least in part by considerations of the consequences that would result from the various available actions. For any given action, however, the majority of its consequences are unpredictable at the time of decision. Many have worried that this leaves us, in some important sense, clueless. In this paper, I distinguish between ‘simple’ and ‘complex’ possible sources of cluelessness. In terms of this taxonomy, the majority of the existing literature on cluelessness focusses (...) on the simple sources. I argue, contra James Lenman in particular, that these would-be sources of cluelessness are unproblematic, on the grounds that indifference-based reasoning is far less problematic than Lenman (along with many others) supposes. However, there does seem to be a genuine phenomenon of cluelessness associated with the ‘complex’ sources; here, indifference-based reasoning is inapplicable by anyone’s lights. This ‘complex problem of cluelessness’ is vivid and pressing, in particular, in the context of Effective Altruism. This motivates a more thorough examination of the precise nature of cluelessness, and the precise source of the associated phenomenology of discomfort in forced-choice situations. The latter parts of the paper make some initial explorations in those directions. (shrink)

The authors present a case study involving truth telling responsibilities in the setting of nonepileptic seizures. Specifically, over the course of several suspected nonepileptic seizures, a patient’s seizures stopped after he received a saline flush meant to precede the administration of anti-seizure medication. The patient and his surrogate believed he had received the medication each time, and the team wondered whether they should disclose the truth. Some worried that disclosure would reinforce the suspected psychogenic behavior, exacerbating the patient’s condition. In (...) this way, the case study presents a twist on the traditional truth telling archetype. While most truth telling cases center on navigating cultural differences or worries about emotional harm, this case presented concerns about medical harm in the form of exacerbating the patient’s condition. The authors describe the complex patient-family-team dynamic that preceded this ethical dilemma, describe the case, analyze the ethical issue, and describe the outcome. (shrink)

R. Jay Wallace’s Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments is an interesting and provocative book. In the brief space available to me I will not discuss the points on which I agree with Wallace, nor will I consider the point libertarians are most likely to disagree with—namely, his claim that moral responsibility for some act does not require the specific ability to do something else. Instead, I want to consider Wallace’s arguments for his ‘normative approach’ to questions of moral responsibility.

We report on the deliberations of an interdisciplinary group of experts in science, law, and philosophy who convened to discuss novel ethical and policy challenges in stem cell research. In this report we discuss the ethical and policy implications of safety concerns in the transition from basic laboratory research to clinical applications of cell-based therapies derived from stem cells. Although many features of this transition from lab to clinic are common to other therapies, three aspects of stem cell biology pose (...) unique challenges. First, tension regarding the use of human embryos may complicate the scientific development of safe and effective cell lines. Second, because human stem cells were not developed in the laboratory until 1998, few safety questions relating to human applications have been addressed in animal research. Third, preclinical and clinical testing of biologic agents, particularly those as inherently complex as mammalian cells, present formidable challenges, such as the need to develop suitable standardized assays and the difficulty of selecting appropriate patient populations for early phase trials. We recommend that scientists, policy makers, and the public discuss these issues responsibly, and further, that a national advisory committee to oversee human trials of cell therapies be established. **NB we did not reccommend a NAC, we think it might be appropriate**. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The EU’s activation of Article 7 procedures against Hungary and Poland signals that it is beginning to take seriously the illiberal turn in Central Europe. However, the likelihood that the EU can restrain populist and illiberal tendencies in Hungary and Poland in the near future is slim. Despite the efficacy of the EU and other international organizations in promoting liberalism in these countries in the past, similar efforts are hobbled by a lack of political will and by significant bureaucratic (...) hurdles. The impetus to protect the liberal institutions and practices developed after the collapse of communism must come from the combined efforts of additional external actors and, most of all, by strong pressure from below. (shrink)

Studies of reasoning have often invoked a distinction between a natural or ordinary consideration of the premises, in which they are interpreted, and even distorted, in the light of empirical knowledge, and an analytic or logical consideration of the premises, in which they are analysed in a literal fashion for their logical implications. Two or three years of schooling have been seen as critical for the spontaneous use of analytic reasoning. In two experiments, however, 4-year-olds who were given brief instructions (...) that prompted use of an analytic approach continued to adopt this approach one week later. Thus, when given syllogistic problems in which the major premise was incongruent with their empirical knowledge (e.g. "All snow is black"), instructed children reasoned more accurately from that premise both immediately and a week later as compared to children given only a basic introduction. A third experiment showed that instructions also improved 4-year-olds' performance on hard-to-imagine, abstract material (e.g."All mib is white"). Similarities between the effects of brief instruction and of schooling are discussed. (shrink)

This qualitative study examined how social studies teachers implemented experiential instructional techniques by closely analyzing videotaped lessons taught over four years in third through 12th grade classrooms across 16 school districts. Data analysis indicated that of the 438 lessons, only 14 involved experiential instructional techniques, and their implementation generally failed to reflect the potential benefits of this instructional approach. Twelve of the experiential exercises (a) lacked a clear instructional purpose related to the content; (b) did reflect an instructional purpose, but (...) it was ultimately thwarted by the activity's unanticipated dynamism; or (c) encouraged the development of significant misconceptions about the content, while one of the two lessons without these problems demonstrated the strategy's use for reinforcement of factual recall rather than critical thinking. Implications for social studies education research and practice are considered. (shrink)

In response to growing concerns of bias, discrimination, and unfairness perpetuated by algorithmic systems, the datasets used to train and evaluate machine learning models have come under increased scrutiny. Many of these examinations have focused on the contents of machine learning datasets, finding glaring underrepresentation of minoritized groups. In contrast, relatively little work has been done to examine the norms, values, and assumptions embedded in these datasets. In this work, we conceptualize machine learning datasets as a type of informational infrastructure, (...) and motivate a genealogy as method in examining the histories and modes of constitution at play in their creation. We present a critical history of ImageNet as an exemplar, utilizing critical discourse analysis of major texts around ImageNet’s creation and impact. We find that assumptions around ImageNet and other large computer vision datasets more generally rely on three themes: the aggregation and accumulation of more data, the computational construction of meaning, and making certain types of data labor invisible. By tracing the discourses that surround this influential benchmark, we contribute to the ongoing development of the standards and norms around data development in machine learning and artificial intelligence research. (shrink)

Given the deep disagreement surrounding population axiology, one should remain uncertain about which theory is best. However, this uncertainty need not leave one neutral about which acts are better or worse. We show that, as the number of lives at stake grows, the Expected Moral Value approach to axiological uncertainty systematically pushes one toward choosing the option preferred by the Total View and critical-level views, even if one’s credence in those theories is low.

The world of international relations and law is constantly changing. There is a risk of the systematic undermining of international organisations and law over the next years. Feminist approaches to international law will need to adapt accordingly, to ensure that they continue to challenge inequalities, and serve as an important and critical voice in international law. This article seeks to tell the story of feminist perspectives on international law from the early 1990s till today through a discussion between three generations (...) of feminist international legal scholars: Hilary Charlesworth, who, with her colleagues, contributed to the area in the immediate post-Cold War years, Gina Heathcote, who over the past decade has published extensively on feminist perspectives on the use of force and collective security, and Emily Jones, an early career scholar working on feminist approaches to international law. The conversation, which began as a Skype discussion, considers both the ways in which feminist approaches to international law have changed over the past two decades, as well as the ways in which they have been shaped by global politics, before turning to consider the future for feminist approaches to international law. The impact of feminist approaches to international law has been considerable. However, it seems that feminist approaches still lack legitimacy and credibility in many mainstream circles, remaining on the disciplinary periphery. Charlesworth, Heathcote and Jones discuss potential ways in which to manage some of these tensions, noting both the importance of ‘speaking to ourselves’ as a creative and nurturing space, as well as the need to be seen as a more credible voice in the mainstream. They note the need, too, for further feminist work beyond the realms of sexual violence and women’s representation. While the great amount of work in this area is, indeed, foundational, having achieved many important legal and political outcomes, feminist approaches should now develop beyond these areas. Doing so will not only propel this area of scholarship in new and exciting directions, but it might help feminist scholarship gain further traction by avoiding categorisation only under the umbrella of “women’s issues” and thus ready dismissal as just another specialist area of international law in the era of fragmentation. (shrink)

Three visual habituation studies using abstract animations tested the claim that infants’ attachment behavior in the Strange Situation procedure corresponds to their expectations about caregiver–infant interactions. Three unique patterns of expectations were revealed. Securely attached infants expected infants to seek comfort from caregivers and expected caregivers to provide comfort. Insecure-resistant infants not only expected infants to seek comfort from caregivers but also expected caregivers to withhold comfort. Insecure-avoidant infants expected infants to avoid seeking comfort from caregivers and expected caregivers to (...) withhold comfort. These data support Bowlby’s (1958) original claims—that infants form internal working models of attachment that are expressed in infants’ own behavior. (shrink)

What are the objects of the so-called ‘propositional attitudes’ — belief, desire, and the like? One of the best-known accounts holds them to be sentences. According to this account — which I shall call the ‘linguistic theory’ — an analysis of the logical form of a sentence like John believes that the moon is roundwill see the word ‘that’ as a hidden pair of quotation marks: except for niceties of idiom, might be written John believes ‘the moon is round’. asserts (...) that a certain relation, the ‘believes’-relation, holds between John and the sentence ‘the moon is round’. (shrink)

Countering hegemonic understandings of rage as a deleterious emotion, this article examines rage across specific sites of trans cultural production—the prison letters of CeCe McDonald and the durational performance art of Cassils—in order to argue that it is integral to trans survival and flourishing. Theorizing rage as a justified response to unlivable circumstances, a response that plays a key role in enabling trans subjects to detach from toxic relational dynamics in order to transition toward other forms of gendered subjectivity and (...) intimate communality, I develop an account of what I call an “infrapolitical ethics of care” that indexes a web of communal practices that empathetically witness and amplify rage, as well as support subjects during and after moments of grappling with overwhelming negative affect. I draw on the work of trans, queer, and feminist theorists who have theorized the productivities of so‐called “negative” affects, particularly Sara Ahmed's work on willfulness and killing joy, María Lugones's writing on anger, Judith Butler's Spinozan reassessment of the vexed relations between self‐preservation and self‐destruction, and the rich account of trans rage provided by Susan Stryker. (shrink)

An important objection to preference-satisfaction theories of well-being is that they cannot make sense of interpersonal comparisons. A tradition dating back to Harsanyi :434, 1953) attempts to solve this problem by appeal to people’s so-called extended preferences. This paper presents a new problem for the extended preferences program, related to Arrow’s celebrated impossibility theorem. We consider three ways in which the extended-preference theorist might avoid this problem, and recommend that she pursue one: developing aggregation rules that violate Arrow’s Independence of (...) Irrelevant Alternatives condition. (shrink)

This paper examines the relationship between methodological naturalism and the standard practice within philosophy of constructing theories on the basis of our intuitions about imaginary cases, especially in the work of Alvin Goldman. It is argued that current work in cognitive science presents serious problems for Goldman's approach.

This paper posits a feminist aesthetic of reading, ‘re-captivation,’ which accounts for both the reader's pleasure and his/her ethical responsibility. Re-captivation is distinguished by its introspective and ethical characteristics; it is a pleasure informed by the pain of misrecognition, i.e. acknowledgement of one's own complicity in systems of oppression. After a brief explanation of re-captivation, this paper describes my experience viewing the film Menace II Society. Using my paths of identification and emotional response to this film as my data, I (...) analyze the complexities and ambiguities resulting from my practice of re-captivation. (shrink)

This paper is a discussion of David Albert's approach to the foundations of classical statistical menchanics. I point out a respect in which his account makes a stronger claim about the statistical mechanical probabilities than is usually made, and I suggest what might be motivation for this. I outline a less radical approach, which I attribute to Boltzmann, and I give some reasons for thinking that this approach is all we need, and also the most we are likely to get. (...) The issue between the two accounts turns out to be one about the explanatory role probabilities play in statistical mechanics. (shrink)

Firms located in communities in which people are, on average, more trusting enjoy some benefits in terms of the power of CEO contracts. We present two pieces of empirical evidence to support this claim: (1) higher average trust in a county is associated with “flatter” executive contracts and (2) when an exogenous shock occurs (such as a scandal involving an important social institution), both trust and contracting move in similar directions. We obtain the first result in a panel specification and (...) the second in a “difference-in-difference” specification that uses the revelation of sex scandals involving the Catholic Church across different U.S. localities. (shrink)

If stem cell-based therapies are developed, we will likely confront a difficult problem of justice: for biological reasons alone, the new therapies might benefit only a limited range of patients. In fact, they might benefit primarily white Americans, thereby exacerbating long-standing differences in health and health care.

It is widely agreed that first-person testimony is a good source of evidence, including testimony about the contents of mental states unobservable to others. Thus we generally think that an individual’s testimony is a good source of evidence about her wellbeing—after all, she experiences her quality of life and we don’t. However, some have argued that the first-person testimony of disabled individuals regarding their wellbeing is defeated: regardless of someone’s claim about how disability affects her overall wellbeing, other evidence about (...) disability undermines the force of her testimony with respect to our justified beliefs. In this paper, I argue that at least some cases of first-person testimony about disability is not defeated. Particularly, neither the existence of conflicting testimony nor evidence about disabilities’ associated harms or challenges successfully undermine either the content of the testimony or the reliability of the testifiers. While I do not claim that first-person testimony is the only evidence relevant to characterizing disability, I argue that it is not always blocked by other evidence about disability. At least some first-person testimony from disabled individuals is, therefore, undefeated evidence relevant to evaluating disability and overall wellbeing. (shrink)

In this paper I argue for a Thomistic alternative to Martha Nussbaum’s justice for animals as outlined in Frontiers of Justice. I argue that an account of analogous justice between humans and animals can generate real and robust obligations towards animals. I first show how Aquinas’s treatment of nonhuman animals in the questions on law evince a wider, shared community between humans and animals by which we see animals and humans as equally under divine providence. I then argue that while (...) Aquinas’s definition of justice excludes animals in its proper sense, his treatment of animals in questions such as those on theft and charity prove that there is room to understand at least an analogous or metaphorical sense by which we can see them as recipients of justice. Finally, I examine Nussbaum’s own account and illustrate key similarities between her view and that of Aquinas. (shrink)

This dissertation investigates the metaphysics of human body parts; particularly, the epistemic conditions under which something can be said to be a “body part of” some particular human being. In this dissertation I draw on the hylomorphism of Aristotle and John Duns Scotus to argue that a necessary and sufficient condition on human bodily parthood is an object’s functioning for the sake of the whole human being and the maintenance of her biological life. I argue that, on this view of (...) bodily parthood, at least some prostheses or artificial organs are truly body parts of the human beings in whom they operate. I defend this view in reference to both Aristotelian and Scotistic hylomorphism, as well as answering objections raised by some contemporary views of bodily parthood as merely conventional. I argue that this has important implications for medical ethics, including potentially restricting medical interventions in end-of-life care and heightening the legal ramification of damage done to prostheses. I argue that investigation into the metaphysical questions surrounding body parts and their composition can illuminate hitherto underappreciated dimensions of ethical questions in medicine. (shrink)