Much legislation dealing with the uses of genetic information could be criticised for exceptionalising genetic information over other types of information personal to the individual. This paper contends that genetic exceptionalism clouds the issues, and precludes any real debate about the appropriate uses of genetic information. An alternative to “genetically exceptionalist” legislation is to “legislate for fairness”. This paper explores the “legislating for fairness” approach, and concludes that it demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of both how legislation is drafted, and how (...) it is interpreted. The uncomfortable conclusion is this: policy-makers and legislators must tackle head-on the difficult policy questions concerning what should and should not be done with genetic information. Only by confronting this crucial issue will they achieve a workable legislative solution to the problems caused by genetic information. (shrink)

Theorists have debated whether our ability to understand sarcasm (pertaining here to verbal irony) is principally determined by the context or by properties of the comment itself. The current research investigated an alternative view that broadens the focus on the comment itself, suggesting that mitigating a highly positive concept by using negation generates sarcastic interpretations by default. In the current study, pretests performed on the target utterances presented in isolation established their default interpretations; novel affirmative phrases (e.g., He is the (...) best lawyer) were interpreted literally, whereas equally novel negative counterparts (e.g., He isn’t the best lawyer) were interpreted sarcastically. In Experiment 1 (an eye-tracking study), prior context biased these utterances toward literal or sarcastic interpretations. Results showed that target utterances were easier to process in contexts supporting their default interpretations, regardless of affirmation/negation. Results from a second eye-tracking experiment suggested that readers’ tendency to interpret negative phrases sarcastically is related to their own tendency to use malicious humor. Our findings suggest that negation leads to certain ambiguous utterances receiving sarcastic interpretations by default and that this process may be further intensified by personality factors. (shrink)

The Mental Capacity Act will come into force in 2007. It sets out guidelines for the ethical review of research involving incompetent adults which will have an impact on the REC process. This paper attempts to explain the Act's requirements in a way that will give research ethics committees some clarity about what must be considered when reviewing applications. Potential difficulties have been highlighted with guidance as to how these might be resolved.

Deciding to undergo a predictive genetic test is difficult. The patient has no symptoms that might tip the balance in favor of the test, and knowledge of the information might have significant implications for her physical and mental health, her family, and her financial position. Furthermore, although the decision to undergo many medical tests might reasonably be said to be the patient's own business, it could be argued that predictive genetic tests are different. Dean Bell and Belinda Bennett argue that (...) genetic information has a “shared” or “familial” character due to the likelihood of it affecting others. If others might be affected by the results of your test, then it is certainly plausible to suggest that they have an interest in knowing the information. If that is the case, then it could also be argued that they are entitled to be considered when you are deciding whether to undergo a test. (shrink)

In a world with limited resources, allocation of resources to certain individuals and conditions inevitably means fewer resources allocated to other individuals and conditions. Should a patient's personal responsibility be relevant to decisions regarding allocation? In this project we combine the normative and the descriptive, conducting an empirical bioethical examination of how both Norwegian and British doctors think about principles of responsibility in allocating scarce healthcare resources. A large proportion of doctors in both countries supported including responsibility for illness in (...) prioritization decisions. This finding was more prominent in zero‐sum scenarios where allocation to one patient means that another patient is denied treatment. There was most support for incorporating prospective responsibility (through patient contracts), and low support for integrating responsibility into co‐payments (i.e. through requiring responsible patients to pay part of the costs of treatment). Finally, some behaviours were considered more appropriate grounds for deprioritization (smoking, alcohol, drug use)—potentially because of the certainty of impact and direct link to ill health. In zero‐sum situations, prognosis also influenced prioritization (but did not outweigh responsibility). Ethical implications are discussed. We argue that the role that responsibility constructs appear to play in doctors' decisions indicates a needs for more nuanced—and clear—policy. Such policy should account for the distinctions we draw between responsibility‐sensitive and prognostic justifications for deprioritization. (shrink)

This paper considers the legal position of genetic test results in insurance law in England and Wales. The strict position is that this information is material to the decision of the insurer to offer insurance cover and should be disclosed by insurance applicants. However, the British Government and the Association of British Insurers have agreed to a moratorium on the use of genetic test results in insurance, which will run until 2014. The moratorium prohibits unfavourable treatment of insurance clients on (...) their basis of their genetics, unless it can be justified. In this paper, I consider the notion of genetic discrimination and ask whether it is possible to justify the concept in such a way that its existence should be accepted. The paper suggests that the insurance industry and the general public have different viewpoints on the concept of discrimination, and that this causes much of the disagreement over the issue of using genetic test results in insurance. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt claims the concept of brotherhood presents false notions of political community that elide historic hatreds of others and threaten modern political life. This paper explores Arendt’s critical assessment of the concept of brotherhood in order to reflect on one specific example: the politics of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in the wake of the Arab Spring of 2011. While some observers reject Arendt’s assessment of brotherhood as too narrow, her criticisms raise useful questions about democracy and plurality, (...) which confront any community that exhorts its members to act as ‘brethren’ rather than as ‘citizens.’ The Muslim concept of brotherhood suggests many different possibilities for belonging: a classic universalism of the Abrahamic natural law tradition; a progressive counter-public sphere; and as well the authoritarian private community of believers as represented in the early writings of the Muslim Brotherhood leadership. Therefore, the politically controversial Muslim Brotherhood has no monopoly over the understanding of the Muslim concept of brotherhood. However, it is the most powerful, most well-organized brotherhood movement. The paper opens and ends with reflections on the Arab Spring of 2011, its one-year anniversary in January 2012, and considers other possibilities for the concept of brotherhood against the backdrop of Arendt’s analysis. (shrink)

The article surveys Kant’s treatment of biological teleology in the ’Critique of Judgment’, with special attention to the question of whether the notion of natural teleology is coherent. It argues that our entitlement to regard nature as teleological is not established by the argument of the ’Antinomy’, but rather results from our entitlement to regard the workings of our own cognitive faculties in normative terms. This implies a view of the relation between biological teleology and the representational character of mind (...) which is the reverse of that adopted by naturalistic theorists of mind like Fred Dretske and Ruth Millikan. (shrink)

A portrait of the development of the author's philosophy includes philosophical discussions with intellectuals such as Paul Tillich, Erich Fromm, Albert Einstein, and Hannah Arendt.

Observers of German-Jewish political theorist Hannah Arendt often disagree on her politics, yet many view her as a staunch early critic of Zionism. Whereas her criticism of Israel rendered her unpopular in the American-Jewish and Israeli communities for many decades after 1948, commentators more recently have come to see her perspective as a prescient assessment of the ills of Jewish nationalism. This interpretation, however, fails to grasp the complexity of Arendt‘s political views of Zionism in particular and of Jewish (...) nationhood in general, which evolved over time and remained ambivalent from her early to her late works. (shrink)

What I learned from you and what helped me in the ensuing years to find my way around in reality without selling my soul to it the way people in earlier times sold their souls to the devil is that the only thing of importance is not philosophies but the truth, that one has to live and think in the open and not in one's own little shell, no matter how comfortably furnished it is, and that necessity in whatever form (...) is only a will-o'-the-wisp that tries to lure us into playing a role instead of attempting to be a human being.On YouTube, you can find a recording of Flannery O'Connor reading "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." It is fun to hear the audience erupt in laughter when O'Connor, in her thick southern accent, has... (shrink)

In the ´Introduction´ to "The Great Philosophers" Karl Jaspers explores the criteria for recognizing human greatness in general and in philosphers in particular. He comments on the historical process related to the selection and grouping of great philosophers. Jaspers acknowledges the questionable aspect of greatness, yet he affirms that such distinction is indispensable. The 1957 English translation by Ralph Mannheim and Hannah Arendt of Jaspers' Die Grossen Philosophen and all its subsequent editions did not include this Introduction. The translation (...) offered here redresses this omission and is the first ever published English translation of Jaspers' extended Introduction. (shrink)

This article provides a critical review of literature on ‘social suffering’. Analytical attention is focused upon the ways in which writers struggle to bring ‘meaning’ to this topic. All sense that there is always something in events of extreme suffering that resists conceptualisation and defies analysis. This problem of establishing a language for ‘thinking with suffering’ is explored with reference to the works of Hannah Arendt, Paul Ricoeur and Max Weber. An agenda for sociological research is proposed which focuses (...) on the struggle to make sense out of the phenomenon of suffering as a force of cultural innovation. In this context, it is suggested that what is most interesting here is the evidence to suggest that, when faced with the ‘brute fact’ of a world where there appears to be too much suffering, people are always moved to make this phenomenon productive for thought and action. (shrink)

Predictive processing accounts of neural function view the brain as a kind of prediction machine that forms models of its environment in order to anticipate the upcoming stream of sensory stimulation. These models are then continuously updated in light of incoming error signals. Predictive processing has offered a powerful new perspective on cognition, action, and perception. In this chapter we apply the insights from predictive processing to the study of emotions. The upshot is a picture of emotion as inseparable from (...) perception and cognition, and a key feature of the embodied mind. (shrink)

Written by one of today's most creative and innovative philosophers, Ruth Garrett Millikan, this book examines basic empirical concepts; how they are acquired, how they function, and how they have been misrepresented in the traditional philosophical literature. Millikan places cognitive psychology in an evolutionary context where human cognition is assumed to be an outgrowth of primitive forms of mentality, and assumed to have 'functions' in the biological sense. Of particular interest are her discussions of the nature of abilities as (...) different from dispositions, her detailed analysis of the psychological act of reidentifying substances, and her critique of the language of thought for mental representation. In a radical departure from current philosophical and psychological theories of concepts, this book provides the first in-depth discussion on the psychological act of reidentification. (shrink)

Various decision theories share a troubling implication. They imply that, for any finite amount of value, it would be better to wager it all for a vanishingly small probability of some greater value. Counterintuitive as it might be, this fanaticism has seemingly compelling independent arguments in its favour. In this paper, I consider perhaps the most prima facie compelling such argument: an Egyptology argument (an analogue of the Egyptology argument from population ethics). I show that, despite recent objections from Russell (...) (2023) and Goodsell (2021), the argument’s premises can be justified and defended, and the argument itself remains compelling. (shrink)

Philosophers ask just whose expression, if anyone’s, we hear in lyric poetry. Walton provides a novel possibility: it’s the reader who “uses” the poem (just as a speech giver uses a speech) who makes the language expressive. But worries arise once we consider poems in particular social or political settings, those which require a strong self-other distinction, or those with expressions that should not be disassociated from the subjects whose experience they draw from. One way to meet this challenge is (...) to consider the poem expressive of a plural subject, which frees us from looking for a particular individual whose voice we hear in the work, whether she be fictional or actual. Some lyrics give voice to a group whose experience is attended to in the work. This may be done through a posited fictional speaker, but the ontology of the speaker is shown to be less important. Attending to a group whose concerns are voiced allows us to explain how poems can manage to address our-worldly concerns even when lacking actual persons whose expressions we encounter in the poems. (shrink)

Identifying a range of key concerns related to representation and difference, Representing the Other offers a provocative agenda for the future development of feminist theory and practice. The book's contributors, including many key international researchers in women's studies, draw on personal experiences of speaking "for" and "about" others in their research, professional practice, academic writing, or political activism. They highlight problems of representing the Other with an ethnic or cultural background different from one's own and extend discussions of "Othering" to (...) representations of children, prostitutes, infertile women, fat women, gay men with HIV/AIDS, and people with disabilities. The reader, which includes articles and discussions from four issues of the journal Feminism & Psychology, also features new pieces and an extensive editorial introduction. Representing the Other will be integral reading for students and academics in women's studies, gender studies, and feminist theory across a range of social science disciplines, including social psychology, sociology, anthropology, sociolinguistics, social policy, and political science. (shrink)

Recent work on blameworthiness has prominently featured discussions of guilt. The philosophers who develop guilt-based views of blameworthiness do an excellent job of attending to the evaluative and affective features of feeling guilty. However, these philosophers have been less attentive to guilt’s characteristic action tendencies and the role admissions of guilt play in our blaming practices. This paper focuses on the nature of guilty confession and argues that it illuminates an important function of blame that has been overlooked in the (...) recent work on guilt as it relates to blameworthiness: Blame can communicate respect. (shrink)

The fourth edition of this bestselling title is designed to help you think critically and thoughtfully about ethical decisions you'll face in practice-in any health care discipline. Utilizing a unique 6-step decision making process designed by the author, this multi-disciplinary text provides an expert framework for making effective choices that lead to a professional and caring response to patients and clients.

On rivers, mountains and secrets : an introduction to the study and its subjects -- Talking to God-- and God talking back -- Mind embodied : spiritual practice and consciousness -- Place and the making of religious practice -- The spirit of the work : challenging oppression, nurturing diversity -- Conscious sex, sacred celibacy : sexuality and the spiritual path.

This article examines the inherently ethical nature of resource allocation in policing. Decision-makers must make trade-offs between values such as efficiency vs. equity, individual vs. collective benefit, and adopt principles of distribution which allocate limited resources fairly. While resource allocation in healthcare has been the subject of extensive discussion in both practitioner and academic literature, ethical resource allocation in policing has received almost no attention. We first consider whether approaches used in healthcare settings would be suitable for policing. Whilst there (...) are some high-level similarities in the relevant ethical considerations and processes—such as aiming for efficient and equitable resource deployment—there are also fundamental differences between the two settings, which we argue necessitate a different approach. These differences include: (1) greater diversity and incommensurability of the benefits of policing, (2) more frequent non-linearity in returns on policing investment, (3) greater “ethical divisibility” (permissible scaling down) of programs in policing, (4) a requirement to assess “need” for policing resources at the collective (rather than individual) level, and (5) clearer primacy of equity considerations in policing. Having drawn out the implications of these differences, we sketch some tentative proposals for ethical resource allocation in policing. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Organizations constitute morally-complex environments, requiring organization members to possess levels of moral courage sufficient to promote their ethical action, while refraining from unethical actions when faced with temptations or pressures. Using a sample drawn from a military context, we explored the antecedents and consequences of moral courage. Results from this four-month field study demonstrated that authentic leadership was positively related to followers’ displays of moral courage. Further, followers’ moral courage fully mediated the effects of authentic leadership on followers’ ethical and (...) pro-social behaviors. Theoretical and practical implications for further integrating the work on moral courage, authentic leadership and ethics are discussed. (shrink)

Various philosophers accept moral views that are impartial, additive, and risk-neutral with respect to moral betterness. But, if that risk neutrality is spelt out according to expected value theory alone, such views face a dire reductio ad absurdum. If the expected sum of value in humanity's future is undefined--if, e.g., the probability distribution over possible values of the future resembles the Pasadena game, or a Cauchy distribution--then those views say that no option is ever better than any other. And, as (...) I argue, this holds in practice: our evidence supports such a probability distribution. Indeed, it supports a probability distribution that cannot be evaluated even if we adopt one of the various extensions of expected value theory proposed in the literature. Must we therefore reject all impartial, additive, risk-neutral moral theories? It turns out that we need not. I develop an alternative solution: a new method of extending expected value theory, which allows us to deal with this distribution and to salvage those moral views. I also examine how this solution affects one of the most notable implications of those views--namely, longtermism. (shrink)

Doctors’ strikes are legally permissible in the UK, with the situation differing in other countries. But are they morally permissible? Doug McConnell and Darren Mann have systematically attempted to dismiss the arguments for the moral impermissibility of doctors’ strikes and creatively attempted to provide further moral justification for them. Unfortunately for striking doctors, they fail to achieve this. Meanwhile, junior doctors’ strikes have continued in the UK through 2023 and have now extended into 2024. In this response, which focuses on (...) the UK situation and specifically junior doctors’ strikes in the National Health Service (NHS) in England, I will demonstrate a central problem with their arguments—namely that they underplay the harms caused by prolonged doctors’ strikes by ignoring the harms to patients with cancer. This weakens their conclusion that strikes are morally permissible in terms of the conditions and thresholds they set. I then provide a psychological critique of their justification for strikes in terms of the interests of the public. It follows that invoking the controversial concept of supererogatory action is ungrounded but also absurd when you consider time-critical cancer care. If those representing striking doctors wish to maintain a modicum of moral respectability, they should mitigate for patients with cancer and negotiate reasonably and with urgency. (shrink)

A particular feature of this book is substantial "Stretch and Challenge" material throughout which allows students to develop further.

One of the most contentious ethical issues in the neonatal intensive care unit is the withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment from infants who may otherwise survive. In practice, one of the most important factors influencing this decision is the prediction that the infant will be severely intellectually disabled. Most professional guidelines suggest that decisions should be made on the basis of the best interests of the infant. It is, however, not clear how intellectual disability affects those interests. Why should intellectual disability (...) be more important than physical disability to the future interests of an infant? Is it discriminatory to base decisions on this? This paper will try to unravel the above questions. It seems that if intellectual disability does affect the best interests of the child it must do so in one of three ways. These possibilities will be discussed as well as the major challenges to the notion that intellectual disability should have a role in such decisions. The best interests of the child can be affected by severe or profound intellectual disability. It is, though, not as clear-cut as some might expect. (shrink)

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz -- Gabriel Álvarez de Toledo -- Pedro de Peralta Barnuevo -- Francisco Botello de Moraes.

The current position on the deceased’s consent and the family’s consent to organ and tissue donation from the dead is a double veto—each has the power to withhold and override the other’s desire to donate. This paper raises, and to some extent answers, questions about the coherence of the double veto. It can be coherently defended in two ways: if it has the best effects and if the deceased has only negative rights of veto. Whether the double veto has better (...) effects than other policies requires empirical investigation, which is not undertaken here. As for rights, the paper shows that it is entirely possible that individuals have a negative right of veto but no positive right to compel acceptance of their offers. Thus if intensivists and transplant teams turn down the deceased’s offer, they do not thereby violate the deceased’s right. This leaves it open whether non-rights based reasons—such as avoiding bad publicity or distress —require intensivists and transplant teams to turn down or accept the deceased’s offer. This, however, is beyond the scope of this paper. The current position may or may not be wrong, but it is at least coherent. (shrink)

One of the pressures placed upon researchers is the process of ethics review. This frequently provides considerable conflict. The process of review of student projects of little inherent risk is identical to that of their more senior colleagues. In this article I propose that we should be more tolerant of design problems within student research if the overall risk is minimal in order that the student can learn about the process of carrying out research.The frequency and content of papers discussing (...) research ethics review in specialist,1 professional2 3 and lay4 press suggests that many senior researchers find the process challenging. The opinion most frequently expressed is that research ethics committees work to an imprecise set of rules and represent a barrier to significant pieces of clinical research. In particular, specific criticism has been aimed at the review of student research5–8 and the difficulties that students and their supervisors face.In ethics committees we usually police research very carefully, monitoring the detail of projects, including how participants will be selected, what data will be collected, how it will be handled and how the research is funded in addition to the adequacy of the consent process and information that underlies it. My experience as a member of NHS REC and governance committees and, more particularly, coordinator of student research, is that National Research Ethics Service REC usually apply the same standards to student research with little inherent risk as to complex phase 1 studies with significant risk. Guidance in the standard operating procedures for NHS REC is at best unhelpful and at worst supportive of this view. …. (shrink)

Preimplantation genetic diagnosis and some prenatal screening programmes have been criticized for being 'eugenic'. This paper aims to analyse this criticism and to evaluate one of the main ethical arguments lying behind it. It starts with a discussion of the meaning of the term 'eugenics' and of some relevant distinctions: for example, that between objections to eugenic ends and objections to certain means of achieving them. Next, a particular argument against using preimplantation genetic diagnosis to 'screen out' disability is considered, (...) one based on the Equal Value Principle, which says that we should value disability and non-disability equally. It is argued that present practice and policy probably do violate the Equal Value Principle, but that this principle is itself unsound. (shrink)

This article considers two arguments that purport to show that inductive reasoning is unjustified: the argument adduced by Sextus Empiricus and the (better known and more formidable) argument given by Hume in the Treatise. While Sextus’ argument can quite easily be rebutted, a close examination of the premises of Hume’s argument shows that they are seemingly cogent. Because the sceptical claim is very unintuitive, the sceptical argument constitutes a paradox. And since attributions of justification are theoretical, and the claim that (...) they are never (or seldom) true isn’t preposterous, the correct response to the paradox may well be to admit that the sceptic has exposed our error in making them. (shrink)

Based on her earlier ground-breaking axiomatization of quantified modal logic, the papers collected here by the distinguished philosopher Ruth Barcan Marcus cover much ground in the development of her thought, spanning from 1961 to 1990. The first essay here introduces themes initially viewed as iconoclastic, such as the necessity of identity, the directly referential role of proper names as "tags", the Barcan Formula about the interplay of possibility and existence, and alternative interpretations of quantification. Marcus also addresses the putative (...) puzzles about substitutivity and about essentialism. The collection also includes influential essays on moral conflict, on belief and rationality, and on some historical figures. Many of her views have been incorporated into current theories, while others remain part of a continuing debate. (shrink)

In liberal political theory, meaningful work is conceptualised as a preference in the market. Although this strategy avoids transgressing liberal neutrality, the subsequent constraint upon state intervention aimed at promoting the social and economic conditions for widespread meaningful work is normatively unsatisfactory. Instead, meaningful work can be understood to be a fundamental human need, which all persons require in order to satisfy their inescapable interests in freedom, autonomy, and dignity. To overcome the inadequate treatment of meaningful work by liberal political (...) theory, I situate the good of meaningful work within a liberal perfectionist framework, from which standpoint I develop a normative justification for making meaningful work the object of political action. To understand the content of meaningful work, I make use of Susan Wolf’s distinct value of meaningfulness, in which she brings together the dimensions of objectivity and subjectivity into the ‘bipartite value’ of meaningfulness (BVM) (Wolf, Meaning in life and why it matters, 2010). However, in order to be able to incorporate the BVM into our lives, we must become valuers, that is, co-creators of values and meanings. This demands that we acquire the relevant capabilities and status as co-authorities in the realm of value. I conclude that meaningful work is of first importance because it is a fundamental human need, and that society ought to be arranged to allow as many people as possible to experience their work as meaningful through the development of the relevant capabilities. (shrink)

Research on visual attention has uncovered significant anomalies, and some traditional methods may have inadvertently probed peripheral vision rather than attention. Vision science needs to rethink visual attention from the ground up. To facilitate this, for a year I banned the word “attention” in my lab. This constraint promoted a more precise discussion of attention-related phenomena, capacity limits, and mechanisms. The insights gained lead me to challenge attributing to “attention” those phenomena that can be better explained by perceptual processes, are (...) predictable by an ideal observer model, or that otherwise may not require an additional mechanism. I enumerate a set of critical phenomena in need of explanation. Finally, I propose a unifying theory in which all perception results from performing a task, and tasks face a limit on complexity. (shrink)