The “scarred villain” trope, where facial differences like scars signify moral corruption, is ubiquitous in film (e.g., Batman’s The Joker). Strides by advocacy groups to undermine the trope, however, suggest cinematic representations of facial differences could be improving with time. This preregistered study characterized facial differences in film across cultures (US vs. India) and time (US: 1980-2019, India: 2000-2019). Top-grossing films by country and decade were screened for characters with facial differences. We found that the scarred villain trope has actually (...) worsened with time, although in tandem with progress in also representing non-villainous characters with facial anomalies. Country of origin did not predict the presence of facial differences in villains or heroes. “Action” and “fantasy” movies were the most likely genres to depict villains with facial differences. Finally, villains’ facial differences crossed more facial subunits and were more likely to involve lips, chin, and mandible than when present in heroes. Our findings underscore the need for critical reflection on the role of cultural practices—even when seemingly innocuous—in shaping and maintaining negative biases against already stigmatized groups. (shrink)

In this paper we critically examine and seek to extend Philip Kitcher’s Ethical Project to weave together a distinctive naturalistic conception of how ethics came to occupy the place it does in our lives and how the existing ethical project should be revised and extended into the future. Although we endorse his insight that ethical progress is better conceived of as the improvement of an existing state than an incremental approach towards a fixed endpoint, we nonetheless go on to argue (...) that the metaethical apparatus Kitcher constructs around this creative metaethical proposal simply cannot do the work that he demands of it. The prospect of fundamental conflict between different functions of the ethical project requires Kitcher to appeal to a particular normative stance in order to judge specific changes in the ethical project to be genuinely progressive, and we argue that the virtues of continuity and coherence to which he appeals can only specify rather than justify the normative stance he favors. We conclude by suggesting an alternative approach for ethical naturalists that seems to us ultimately more promising than Kitcher’s own. (shrink)

Background: Facial proportionality and symmetry are positively associated with perceived levels of facial attractiveness. -/- Objective: The aims of this study were to confirm and extend the association of proportionality with perceived levels of attractiveness and character traits and determine differences in attractiveness and character ratings between "anomalous" and "typical" faces using a large dataset. -/- Methods: Ratings of 597 unique individuals from the Chicago Face Database were used. A formula was developed as a proxy of relative horizontal proportionality, where (...) a proportionality score of "0" indicated perfect proportionality and more negative scores indicated less proportionality. Faces were categorized as "anomalous" or "typical" by 2 independent reviewers based on physical features. -/- Results: Across the ratings for all faces, Spearman correlations revealed greater proportionality was associated with attractiveness ( ρ = 0.292, P < 0.001) and trustworthiness ( ρ = 0.193, P < 0.001), while lesser proportionality was associated with impressions of anger (ρ = 0.132, P = 0.001), dominance (ρ = 0.259, P < 0.001), and threateningness ( ρ = 0.234, P < 0.001). Mann-Whitney U tests revealed the typical cohort had significantly higher levels of proportionality (-13.98 versus -15.14, P = 0.030) and ratings of attractiveness (3.39 versus 2.99, P < 0.001) and trustworthiness (3.48 versus 3.35, P < 0.001). -/- Conclusions: This study demonstrated that facial proportionality is not only significantly associated with higher ratings of attractiveness, but also associated with judgements of trustworthiness. Proportionality plays a role in evoking negative attributions of personality characteristics to people with facial anomalies. (shrink)

A good deal of attention has been given in recent philosophy of religion to the question of whether we can sensibly attribute to God a form of knowledge which the 16th-century Jesuit theologian Luis de Molina termed "middle knowledge". Interest in the doctrine has been spurred by a recognition of its intimate connection to certain conceptions of providence, prophecy, and response to petitionary prayer. According to defenders of the doctrine, which I will call "Molinism", the objects of middle knowledge are (...) all the true counterfactuals of the form, 'If C were to occur, then S would freely do A', where C specifies a particular set of circumstances. (Such propositions are usually referred to as "counterfactuals of freedom" - hereafter "CFs".)' I will try to assess the current status of two distinct questions: (1) Are there true CFs? and (2) Could God know true CFs if there are any? Obviously, Molinism must answer both questions affirmatively. Most of the discussion has focused on the first question. I hope to show that this approach has been a dialectical mistake on the part of critics of Molinism, for the difficulties of giving an affirmative answer to question (2) are, I believe, far easier to state clearly and convincingly. (shrink)

Ecclesial commentators often describe the corrective function Pope St. John Paul’s 1993 encyclical letter Veritatis splendor exercised at the end of the twentieth century. Dissenting theological opinions, both from revisionist theologians of the immediate post-conciliar period and dissenting authors today, can find magisterial clarity in the encyclical. The document’s importance for an adequate understanding of the subsequent moral magisterium has received less fulsome treatment. With this essay, we examine five important and challenging teachings of the moral magisterium since the publication (...) of Veritatis splendor that rely on the wisdom of the encyclical. In fact, a proper conception of each of these teachings will require adherence to the truths expressed in the 1993 document. (shrink)

"Why should we care about having true beliefs? And why do demonstrably false beliefs persist and spread despite consequences for the people who hold them? Philosophers of science Cailin O’Connor and James Weatherall argue that social factors, rather than individual psychology, are what’s essential to understanding the spread and persistence of false belief. It might seem that there’s an obvious reason that true beliefs matter: false beliefs will hurt you. But if that’s right, then why is it irrelevant to (...) many people whether they believe true things or not? In an age riven by "fake news," "alternative facts," and disputes over the validity of everything from climate change to the size of inauguration crowds, the authors argue that social factors, not individual psychology, are what’s essential to understanding the persistence of false belief and that we must know how those social forces work in order to fight misinformation effectively."–Publisher’s description. (shrink)

There exists in academic medicine a core ethical issue that is seldom pursued: trainees are frequently not the best person in the operating room at a given intervention being performed, and yet as a profession we understand a fundamental need to afford them opportunities to perform. Academic centres are traditionally associated with a higher quality of care than non-academic centres, suggesting that practical measures exist within teaching hospitals that effectively mask the clinical discrepancies between trainees and their preceptors. Nonetheless, we (...) are bound by our ethical commitments as physicians to balance the obligations of care with the duty to teach. In order to ethically validate the model of ‘surgeon as teacher’, we propose that there must be a reconciliation of the tensions between traditional professional values in medicine with the constraints inherent in a time-bound utilitarian medical system. Ultimately, we must consciously accept that ensuring the longitudinal availability of skilled surgeons in society aligns more closely with our core ethical obligations as outlined in the social contract that medical professionals maintain with the general public than does the ethical demand to provide unreservedly individual-focused patient care. It is the duty of individual practitioners, as a necessity of lineage to maintain and fulfil our greater duties to society, to foster deontological relationships where possible within this utilitarian system while accepting short-term imperfection in our practice. There are no data in this manuscript. (shrink)

In this paper, I will examine the notion of an epistemic dilemma, its characterizations in the literature, and the different intuitions prompted by it. I will illustrate that the notion of an epistemic dilemma is expected to capture various phenomena that are not easily unified with one concept: while some aspects of these phenomena are more about the agent in a certain situation, other aspects seem to be more about the situation as such. As a consequence, incompatible intuitions emerge concerning (...) the transparency of epistemic dilemmas as well as regarding the role that doxastic suspension plays in resolving cases of epistemic dilemma. I suggest to distinguish between the mental state of agents who find themselves in an epistemic dilemma and the normative situation that gives rise to a dilemma. I will refer to the agent’s mental state as epistemic conflict and will reserve the term epistemic dilemma for evidential situations in which epistemic principles either recommend incompatible doxastic responses or render all options impermissible. The concept of epistemic conflict not only captures the mental state of agents who find themselves in a genuine epistemic dilemma but also applies to agents who face difficult epistemic choices that they cannot resolve without substantial cognitive (and often pragmatic) effort, for example, via doxastic suspension. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine some main threads of the identification stage of Scotus's project in the fourth chapter of De Primo, where he tries to show that a first efficient cause must have the attributes of simplicity, intellect, will, and infinity. Many philosophers are favorably disposed towards one or another argument such as Scotus's (e.g., the cosmological argument from contingency) purporting to show that there is an absolutely first efficient cause. How far can Scotus take us from this starting (...) point towards the ultimate aim of establishing the existence of a being more recognizably identifiable as God? (shrink)

In Cajetan's Biblical Commentaries, Michael O'Connor argues that Cajetan's motive was more 'Catholic Reform' than 'Counter-Reformation', and that his method was a bold hybrid of scholasticism and Renaissance humanism, correcting the Vulgate's errors and expounding the text according to the literal sense.

In this important new book, David O'Connor discusses both logical and empirical forms of the problem of inscrutable evil, perennially the most difficult ...

Available in paperback for the first time, this landmark volume examines the course of Western philosophy over the past 2,500 years. A Critical History of Western Philosophy focuses on the most significant thinkers and philosophical movements while emphasizing key ideas of permanent interest and relevance. Arranged chronologically from early Greece to the twentieth century, this comprehensive work includes expert histories of all major figures from Socrates and Plato to G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, and of every important school from the (...) Epicureans to the Existentialists. (shrink)

Divided into two parts this book examines the train of social theory from the 19th century, through to the `organization of modernity', in relation to ideas of social planning, and as contributors to the `rationalistic revolution' of the `golden age' of capitalism in the 1950s and 60s. Part two examines key concepts in the social sciences. It begins with some of the broadest concepts used by social scientists: choice, decision, action and institution and moves on to examine the `collectivist alternative': (...) the concepts of society, culture and polity, which are often dismissed as untenable by postmodernists today. This is a major contribution to contemporary social theory and provides a host of essential insights into the task of social science today. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 8, August 2020, Page 51-53.

David Chalmers has distinguished the “hard” and the “easy” problem of consciousness, arguing that progress on the “easy problem”—on pinpointing the physical/neural correlates of consciousness—will not necessarily involve progress on the hard problem—on explaining why consciousness, in the first place, emerges from physical processing. Chalmers, however, was hopeful that refined theorizing would eventually yield philosophical progress. In particular, he argued that panpsychism might be a candidate account to solve the hard problem. Here, I provide a concise stock-take on both the (...) empirical-neuroscientific and philosophical-conceptual progress on consciousness. It turns out that, whereas empirical progress is indisputable, philosophical progress is much less pronounced. While Chalmers was right, I argue, in distinguishing distinctive types of problems of consciousness, his prediction of progress on the hard problem was overly optimistic. Empirical progress and philosophical progress are essentially uncoupled; a more skeptical perspective on progress in philosophy in general is appropriate. (shrink)

In many jurisdictions, legal frameworks afford patients the opportunity to make prospective medical decisions or to create directives that contain a special provision forfeiting their own ability to object to those decisions at a future time point, should they lose decision‐making capacity. These agreements have been described with widely varying nomenclatures, including Ulysses Contracts, Odysseus Transfers, Psychiatric Advance Directives with Ulysses Clauses, and Powers of Attorney with Special Provisions. As a consequence of this terminological heterogeneity, it is challenging for healthcare (...) providers to understand the terms and uses of these agreements and for ethicists to engage with the nuances of clinical decision‐making with such unique provisions surrounding patient autonomy. In theory, prospective self‐binding agreements may safeguard patient's “authentic” wishes from future “inauthentic” changes of mind. In practice, it is unclear what may be comprised within these agreements or how—and to what effect—they are used. The primary focus of this integrative review is to curate the existing literature describing Ulysses Contracts (and analogous decisions) used in the clinical arena, in order to empirically synthesize their shared essence and provide insights into the traditional components of these agreements when used in practice, the requirements of their consent processes, and the outcomes of their utilization. (shrink)

Most non-human animals live in the wild and it is probable that suffering predominates in their lives due to natural events. Humans may at some point be able to engage in paradise engineering, or the modification of nature and animal organisms themselves, to improve the well-being of wild animals. We may, in other words, make nature 'red in tooth and claw' no more. We argue that this creates a tension between environmental ethics and animal ethics which is likely insurmountable. First, (...) we argue that concern for the environment can be compatible with helping individual wild animals but should see redesigning nature as morally impermissible. Second, we argue that if we are concerned with animal well-being, we may reject that we have a duty to help wild animals even to the point of redesigning nature, but we must nevertheless concede that it is permissible to do so under certain circumstances. We show how this permissibility can be derived from three animal rights views: Tom Regan's, a novel account inspired by Thomas Pogge and a libertarian approach to animal rights. (shrink)

The Netherne Hospital in Surrey is perhaps the most prestigious site in the history of British art therapy, associated with the key figures Edward Adamson and Eric Cunningham Dax, whose pioneering work involved the setting-up of a large studio for psychiatric patients to create expressive paintings. What is little-known, however, is the work of the designated scientist for psychiatric research, Hungarian Jewish émigré Francis Reitman, who was charged with an overall scientific analysis of the artistic products of the studio. Schooled (...) in the biological psychiatric tradition of Ladislas J. Meduna in Budapest prior to his exile to the Maudsley Hospital in 1938 – and committed to treatments such as leucotomy and electro-convulsive therapy (ECT) – Reitman was an unusual candidate for research into the unconscious processes behind art and psychosis. Yet he authored two highly popular and widely reviewed books on his analyses of the abundant artistic output created by patients with schizophrenic diagnoses at the Netherne. In his Psychotic Art (1950) and Insanity, Art and Culture (1954), Reitman compared such schizophrenic images with those produced by artists under the influence of mescaline and examined the artistic output of patients having undergone leucotomy. This article draws on archival materials and Reitman’s original research publications in order to reconstruct his theory of schizophrenic art within the complex context of postwar British psychiatry, negotiating as he did between biologically reductive understandings of Freudian and Jungian psychoanalytic categories, and ultimately synthesizing concepts from both. It also analyses Reitman’s implicit theory of the therapeutic mechanism of art in the treatment of psychiatric patients. (shrink)

Objective: To examine the role of explainability in machine learning for healthcare (MLHC), and its necessity and significance with respect to effective and ethical MLHC application. Study Design and Setting: This commentary engages with the growing and dynamic corpus of literature on the use of MLHC and artificial intelligence (AI) in medicine, which provide the context for a focused narrative review of arguments presented in favour of and opposition to explainability in MLHC. Results: We find that concerns regarding explainability are (...) not limited to MLHC, but rather extend to numerous well-validated treatment interventions as well as to human clinical judgment itself. We examine the role of evidence-based medicine in evaluating unexplainable treatments and technologies, and highlight the analogy between the concept of explainability in MLHC and the related concept of mechanistic reasoning in evidence-based medicine. Conclusion: Ultimately, we conclude that the value of explainability in MLHC is not intrinsic, but is instead instrumental to achieving greater imperatives such as performance and trust. We caution against the uncompromising pursuit of explainability, and advocate instead for the development of robust empirical methods to successfully evaluate increasingly inexplicable algorithmic systems. (shrink)

In her Pharmaceutical Freedom, Jessica Flanigan argues that antibiotics can be regulated consistent with her otherwise largely deregulatory view with respect to pharmaceuticals and recreational drugs. I contend in this essay that the reasons for justifying antibiotic regulation are reasons that can be offered to justify the regulation of many other drugs, both pharmaceutical and recreational. After laying out the specifics of Flanigan’s view, I suggest that it is amenable to the regulation of drugs like varenicline. Though such drugs can (...) legitimately improve the quality of a patient’s life by helping them quit smoking, they could be permissibly regulated if they expose others to impermissible risks. I then argue that recreational drugs like alcohol could be regulated using the same reasoning. In the penultimate section of this essay, I anticipate objections that one might have to my extension of arguments favoring antibiotic regulation to drugs correlated with aggression. Flanigan might find my extrapolation of her view as entirely plausible and accept that her view is relatively friendly to these regulations, or she might reconsider her antibiotic caveat if these regulations are overly paternalistic on her understanding. I conclude by briefly considering the benefits and drawbacks of adopting each view. (shrink)

Who Comes After the Subject offers the most comprehensive overview to date of contemporary French thinking on the question of the "subject." Nineteen philosophers and critics offer diverse perspectives on the subject as it has manifested itself in our modern discourses: the subject of philosophy, of the State, of history, of psychoanalysis. Each contribution asks What has become of the subject? or What has the subject become? in the wake of its critiques and deconstructions .

In their forthcoming article, ‘What makes a medical intervention invasive?’ De Marco, Simons, and colleagues explore the meaning and usage of the term ‘invasive’ in medical contexts. They describe a ‘Standard Account’, drawn from dictionary definitions, which defines invasiveness as ‘incision of the skin or insertion of an object into the body’. They then highlight cases wherein invasiveness is employed in a manner that is inconsistent with this account (eg, in describing psychotherapy) to argue that the term invasiveness is often (...) used to explicitly or implicitly reference interventions that do not fall under the standard account. The authors offer an alternative ‘schematic’ definition of invasiveness, whereby medical interventions entail an underlying context-independent property of ‘basic invasiveness’ and may be understood both relative to each other and to a context-specific threshold of what is ‘invasive’.1 We propose that the meaning of terms such as ‘invasiveness’ is necessarily heterogeneous, and that what is implied by its usage will certainly depend on context, particularly in medical settings. Hence, the creation of a unifying definition is less critical than clarification of the implied and intended meanings of each instance of the term’s use. We further argue that interpreting the use of terms like ‘invasiveness’ in medical practice is complicated by the embedding of each use of this term in a different ‘language game’, whereby words and their meanings are understood by an in-group familiar with …. (shrink)

Part I: Dimensions of time's enigma -- Is time real? -- Eleaticism, temporality, and time -- The makings of a temporal universe -- Pastness and futurity -- Synchronicity and synchronicity -- Temporal pace and measurement -- Presentness or the present -- Aristotle's real account of time -- Parmenidean time and the impossible now -- Cosmic motion and the speed of time -- Time as the motion of the cosmos -- Time as the cosmos itself -- Time as motion and all (...) change -- Temporal cognition and the return of the now -- Real temporality in an Aristotelian world -- Does Aristotle refute eleaticism? -- Bisection argument I -- Bisection argument II -- Bisection argument III -- Plotinus' vitalistic platonism and the real origins of time -- Temporality, eternality, and Plotinus' new metaphysic -- Plotinus' critique of Aristotelian motion -- Indefinite temporality and the measure of motion -- Plotinus' neoplatonic account of time. (shrink)

In this paper, the relationship between the e-value of a complex hypothesis, H, and those of its constituent elementary hypotheses, Hj, j = 1… k, is analyzed, in the independent setup. The e-value of a hypothesis H, ev, is a Bayesian epistemic, credibility or truth value defined under the Full Bayesian Significance Testing mathematical apparatus. The questions addressed concern the important issue of how the truth value of H, and the truth function of the corresponding FBST structure M, relate to (...) the truth values of its elementary constituents, Hj, and to the truth functions of their corresponding FBST structures Mj, respectively. (shrink)

This article argues that Habermas’s formal-pragmatics are better understood as a set of weak-universal dispositions susceptible to erosion over the course of a lifetime, if exposed to continual “disappointing” communicative experiences. Habermas’s rational-reconstructive project to explicate the intuitive rule-consciousness held by competent speakers retains immense theoretical value for analyzing both partisan and mass political discourse, if his emphasis on isolated speech situations is supplemented with a logic of communicative memory better accounting for how disagreement antecedes discourse on the formal-pragmatic register. (...) I argue that Habermas’s concept of the “lifeworld” contains untapped theoretical resources for thinking about the formal-pragmatic consequences of accumulated partisan experiences; namely, how such experiences lead inter-partisan actors to jettison mutual imputations of communicative accountability. I conclude by offering revisions to Habermas’s discourse ethics. Rapport-building intended to alleviate the negative effects of prior accumulated partisan experiences is first necessary if a norm is to enjoy real justification. (shrink)

In the 1920s, Carnap and Schlick both made an important use of definitions in their main publications: Schlick, in his Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre (1918, 2nd ed. 1925) and Carnap in Der logische Aufbau der Welt (1928, mostly written by 1925). In this paper, we first provide an analysis of the kinds of definitions that are distinguished in these books and a few other papers, and we then propose a systematic comparison of Schlick’s and Carnap’s diverging conceptions of definitions in the 1920s, (...) relating them, in both cases, to their respective philosophical projects in the Allgemeine Erkenntnislehre and in Der logische Aufbau der Welt. (shrink)

The defection thesis holds that members of marginalized social groups are obligated not to express views important to others in the group that are regarded by the others as substantively wrong. In this essay, I evaluate arguments that seek to vindicate the defection thesis and conclude they all fail. Then, I argue that we have reason to believe sanctioning defectors in certain ways is wrongful and that the expression of their contentious ideas is good for members of marginalized groups. We (...) are left to conclude both that members of marginalized groups have no obligation to suppress certain heterodox views and that it is likely wrong to sanction them for expressing these views even if it were wrong for them to do so. (shrink)

In 1942, replying to a criticism put to him by Langford, G. E. Moore confessed that he was unable to solve the paradox of analysis. But while conceding inability to solve the puzzle Moore offered the following suggestion, which he did not further develop: I think that, in order to explain the fact that, even if ‘To be a brother is the same thing as to be a male sibling’ is true, yet nevertheless this statement is not the same as (...) the statement ‘To be a brother is to be a brother’, one must suppose that both statements are in some sense about the expressions used as well as about the concept of being a brother. But in what sense they are about the expressions used I cannot see clearly; and therefore I cannot give any clear solution to the puzzle. (shrink)

Social network analysis has become an increasingly important tool among political scientists for understanding legislative cooperation in modern, democratic nation-states. Recent research has demonstrated the influence that group affinity (homophily) and mutual exchanges (reciprocity) have in structuring political relationships. However, this literature has typically focused on political cooperation where costs are low, relationships are not exclusive, and/or partisan competition is high. Patterns of legislative behavior in alternative contexts are less clear and remain largely unexamined. Here, we compare theoretical expectations of (...) cooperation in these contexts from the political and biosocial sciences and implement the first assessment of political alliance formation in a novel legislative environment where costs to cooperation are high and party salience low. We implement a stochastic actor-oriented model (SAOM) to examine bill floor sponsorship, a process in which a “floor sponsor” becomes the exclusive advocate for a colleague’s piece of legislation, in the Utah state legislature from 2005 to 2008—a context in which gender (male) and political party (Republican) supermajorities exist. We find that (1) party and gender homophily predict who legislators recruit as floor sponsors, whereas seniority does not, and (2) legislators frequently engage in reciprocal exchanges of floor sponsorship. In addition, whereas gender homophily increases the likelihood of reciprocity, party homophily decreases it. Our findings suggest that when the cost of cooperation is high, political actors use in-group characteristics for initiating alliances, but once a cooperative relationship is established with an out-group political member, it is reinforced through repeated exchanges. These findings may be useful for understanding the rise of political polarization and gridlock in democracies internationally. (shrink)

In this paper I explore the role played by public monuments in the narration of national stories. I examine several monuments that have been built to promote various national narratives, with a particular focus on the South Australian National War Memorial, located in Adelaide, Australia. My analysis reveals that monuments have a dynamic capacity to embody simplified narratives of the past, and to shape collective memory accordingly. I contend that, owing to this capacity, monuments play a significant role in the (...) narration of national stories. I also consider the power of monuments to serve vehicles for the promulgation of dissenting narrative strands. I ultimately argue that the prevalence of such strands reveals that many “memory wars” can never definitively be won—that is, that it is impossible to achieve homogeneity in history. (shrink)

In this essay an engineer and a philosopher, after many conversations, develop an argument for why the Aristotelian version of virtue ethics is the most promising way to develop what we call artificial moral, social agents, i.e. robots. This, evidently, applies to humans as well. There are several claims: first, that humans are not born moral, they are socialized into morality; second, that morality involves affect, emotion, feeling, before it engages reason; third, that how a moral being feels is related (...) to some narrative, whether moral or not; and finally, that narrativity is what builds a sense of a “moral” I, namely an authorial moral self. (shrink)

Journal Name: Semiotica Issue: Ahead of print.