We argue that human rights are best conceived as norms arising from a fiduciary relationship that exists between states and the citizens and noncitizens subject to their power. These norms draw on a Kantian conception of moral personhood, protecting agents from instrumentalization and domination. They do not, however, exist in the abstract as timeless natural rights. Instead, they are correlates of the state's fiduciary duty to provide equal security under the rule of law, a duty that flows from the state's (...) institutional assumption of irresistible sovereign powers. (shrink)

Arguing that the state and its people stand in a fiduciary relationship, Sovereignty's Promise puts forward a bold new account of political authority and its legal limits. In doing so it presents a fresh argument for common law constitutionalism and a novel theoretical framework for understanding the requirements of the rule of law.

The fundamental interaction that triggers a fiduciary obligation is the exercise by one party of discretionary power of an administrative nature over another party's interests, where the latter party is unable, as a matter of fact or law, to exercise the fiduciary's power. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate that there is something "deeply fiduciary" about the interaction between a state and its subjects. The fiduciary nature of this relationship provides the justification for the state's legal authority and (...) its obligation to act in the interests of its subjects. The practical manifestation of the state's overarching fiduciary obligation to its subjects is the rule of law. (shrink)

A broad range of scholars contend that the rule of law is indifferent to human rights. I call this view the "no-rights thesis," and attempt to unsettle it. My argument draws on the work of Lon L. Fuller and begins with the idea that the fundamental justification of the rule of law rests on a juridical conception of human agency, one that finds expression in the legal and moral claims that can arise from human agency within the context of legal (...) relationships. I argue that the state and its legal subjects are in a particular kind of legal relationship with one another, a fiduciary relationship, and that the content of the state's ensuing fiduciary obligation is the rule of law. Because the rule of law is intelligible in terms of the right, and independently of the good, it follows that compliance with the rule of law necessarily makes a moral difference regardless of how poorly the state lives up to the demands of the good. This is a conceptual rather than an empirical claim, and it leads to the conclusion that respect for human agency in the context of the state-subject fiduciary relationship necessarily entails respect for human dignity, respect for human dignity entails respect for human rights, and therefore a commitment to the rule of law entails a commitment to human rights. (shrink)

For several decades, international law has recognized certain norms such as the prohibitions against genocide, slavery, and military aggression as "jus cogens"- peremptory law which supersedes conflicting international treaties and customs. Despite widespread acceptance of the jus cogens concept, legal theorists continue to debate whether peremptory norms derive their legal authority from state consent, natural law, or the demands of international public order. Anxiety over peremptory norms' legal basis has frustrated efforts to clarify the scope and content of jus cogens, (...) as well as placing peremptory norms on a collision course with inherited notions of state sovereignty. Drawing on Immanuel Kant 's conception of fiduciary relations, this Article develops a new theory of jus cogens based on the idea that states are fiduciaries of their people. According to the fiduciary theory, peremptory norms do not stand in opposition to state sovereignty; rather, they are constitutive of state sovereign authority because all states owe their subjects a fiduciary obligation to comply with such norms. The fiduciary model of the state resolves the longstanding tension in international legal theory between peremptory norms and state sovereignty and points to discrete formal and substantive criteria for identifying peremptory norms. (shrink)

The prevailing view in Canada of the Crown-Native fiduciary relationship is that it arose as a consequence of the Crown taking on the role of intermediary between First Nations and British settlers eager to acquire Aboriginal lands. First Nations are sometimes deemed to have surrendered their sovereignty in exchange for Crown protection. The author suggests that the sovereignty-for-protection argument does not supply a compelling account of how Aboriginal peoples lost their sovereignty to the Crown. Furthermore, Aboriginal treaties compel the courts (...) to take seriously Aboriginal peoples' sovereign authority to treat with the Crown. First Nations did not intend to surrender their sovereignty through the treaty process, but courts assume that this is the result. Against this background, the author argues that the Supreme Court of Canada has imposed fiduciary obligations on the Crown in order to legitimise the Crown's assertions of sovereignty over Canada's Aboriginal peoples. (shrink)

Parliamentary privilege immunises certain activities of legislative bodies and their members from the ordinary law and judicial scrutiny. The rule of law, on the other hand, insists that everyone - including public officials - is subject to the law. Moreover, the rule of law is usually understood to involve judicial review of executive rather than legislative action. Thus, parliamentary privilege seems to establish a public sphere that is beyond the rule of law. Notwithstanding the tension that appears between these two (...) ideas, I argue that parliamentary privilege and the rule of law, properly understood, support rather than oppose one another. However, the ideas can be reconciled only if we reject the jurisdictional and categorical approach to parliamentary privilege adopted recently by the Supreme Court of Canada in Canada (House of Commons) v. Vaid [2005] 1 S.C.R. 667, 2005 SCC 30. This approach should be rejected because it trades on an unsustainable distinction between review of the scope of an asserted privilege and review its actual exercise, with the Court finding that only issues of scope are subject to review, even if important human rights are at stake. (shrink)

The relationship between Canadian administrative law and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is complex and still unfolding. If a decision touches a Charter right, frontline decision-makers and reviewing courts alike determine the requirements of legality using the Charter, administrative law principles, or some combination of the two. There is an emerging consensus that the Charter does not replace the common law, but rather embodies and supplements fundamental legal principles contained within it.This chapter sets out various ways in which (...) judicial review at common law has influenced understandings of the Charter, as well as the manner in which the Charter has influenced review of administrative decisions when a Charter right is clearly at stake. The influence runs in both directions, and has significant implications for judicial review of both the procedure and substance of administrative action. In the realm of procedure, the courts rely on the common law doctrine of procedural fairness to interpret the principles of fundamental justice set out in s. 7 of the Charter. However, when courts review the substance rather than the procedural aspects of a decision that engages a Charter right, they tend to review the decision using the analytical framework developed in R. v. Oakes for testing the validity of legislation. Taken together, these general features of the relationship between Charter jurisprudence and administrative law suggest that each is porous and open-textured to the other. Put another way, the relationship between the Charter and administrative law exhibits a cross-fertilization of principles and approaches which inform judicial review of administrative action. (shrink)

The self-ownserhip thesis claims that people are the rightful owners of themselves, and that as a consequence that are entitled to do as they please, and appropriate what they will, just so long as they do not harm others. I argue that this no-harm proviso is problematic in that our best conception of harm is not that A harms B if, and only if, A makes B worse off, but rather that A harms B if, and only if, A's action (...) makes B worse off than B ought to be under the lights of our best political and moral theory. A consequence of this analysis of harm is that the self-ownership thesis turns out to be too crude to serve as a foundational principle of any political theory concerned with the distribution of scarce resources. (shrink)

In international law, the term "jus cogens" refers to norms that are considered peremptory in the sense that they are mandatory and do not admit derogation. Although the jus cogens concept has achieved widespread acceptance, international legal theory has yet to furnish a satisfying account of jus cogens's legal basis. We argue that peremptory norms are inextricably linked to the sovereign powers assumed by all states. The key to understanding international jus cogens lies in Immanuel Kant 's discussion of the (...) innate right of children to their parents' care. Drawing on Kant 's account, our theory of jus cogens posits that states exercise sovereign authority as fiduciaries of the people subject to their power. An immanent feature of this state-subject fiduciary relationship is that the state must comply with jus cogens. The fiduciary theory clarifies jus cogens's content by generating discrete criteria for identifying peremptory norms. (shrink)

We explore two special challenges indigenous peoples pose to the idea of sovereigns as trustees for humanity. The first challenge is rooted in a colonial history during which a trusteeship model of sovereignty served as an enabler of paternalistic colonial policies. The challenge is to show that the trusteeship model is not irreparably colonial in nature. The second challenge, which emerges from the first, is to specify the scope and nature of indigenous peoples’ sovereignty within the trusteeship model. Whereas the (...) interaction between states and foreign nationals is the locus of cosmopolitan law, the relationship between states and indigenous peoples is distinctive. In the ordinary cosmopolitan case, foreign nationals do not purport to possess legal authority. Indigenous peoples often do make such a claim, pitting their claim to authority against the state’s. We discuss how international law has attempted to come to grips with indigenous sovereignty by requiring states to include indigenous peoples in decision-making processes that affect their historical lands and rights. A crucial fault line in the jurisprudence, however, separates a duty to consult indigenous peoples from a duty to acquire their free, prior and informed consent. The latter but not the former recognizes that indigenous peoples possess a veto over state projects on their lands, in effect recognizing in them a limited co-legislative power. We focus on recent jurisprudence from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and consider whether either the duty to consult or FPIC are enough to dispel the shadow of the trusteeship model’s colonial past. We suggest that they are a move in the right direction, and that implicitly they represent international law’s recognition that states are no longer the sole bearers of sovereignty at international law. In limited circumstances, international law recognizes indigenous peoples as sovereign actors. (shrink)

In Sovereignty’s Promise: The State as Fiduciary, Evan Fox-Decent uses the idea of fiduciary relationships to explain the legitimate exercise of governmental authority. He makes use of the idea of the state as a fiduciary for the people to ground an account of the duty to obey the law, to explain the proper relationships between colonial (or “settler”) societies and aboriginal populations, the role of agency discretion and judicial review in the administrative state, the rule of law, the (...) relationship between law and morality, and the foundations of human rights. While I was not convinced by several of the arguments, the book does have many important virtues. In particular, it provides a clear discussion of the idea of fiduciary relationships and duties that is useful for, and should be largely accessible to, non-lawyers. And, though I do not think that Fox-Decent has established all that he hoped to in the book, he does a good job of showing how fiduciary relationships are relevant to the above issues and worth considering. (shrink)

Despite increasing scientific interest in self-generated thought-mental content largely independent of the immediate environment-there has yet to be any comprehensive synthesis of the subjective experience and neural correlates of affect in these forms of thinking. Here, we aim to develop an integrated affective neuroscience encompassing many forms of self-generated thought-normal and pathological, moderate and excessive, in waking and in sleep. In synthesizing existing literature on this topic, we reveal consistent findings pertaining to the prevalence, valence, and variability of emotion in (...) self-generated thought, and highlight how these factors might interact with self-generated thought to influence general well-being. We integrate these psychological findings with recent neuroimaging research, bringing attention to the neural correlates of affect in self-generated thought. We show that affect in self-generated thought is prevalent, positively biased, highly variable (both within and across individuals), and consistently recruits many brain areas implicated in emotional processing, including the orbitofrontal cortex, amygdala, insula, and medial prefrontal cortex. Many factors modulate these typical psychological and neural patterns, however; the emerging affective neuroscience of self-generated thought must endeavor to link brain function and subjective experience in both everyday self-generated thought as well as its dysfunctions in mental illness. (shrink)

Review of Evan Fox-Decent, _Sovereignty's Promise: The State as Fiduciary_.

A Decent Proposal: Ethical Review of Clinical Research Donald Evans and Martyn Evans Centre for Philosophy and Health Care University of Wales Swansea, UK The investigation and development of modern medicines and medical technology can create numerous ethical dilemmas both for clinical researchers and research ethics committees. A Decent Proposal: Ethical Review of Clinical Research seeks to facilitate and encourage good clinical research by exploring the concerns, responsibilities, general issues and particular pitfalls associated with ethical aspects of research. (...) It provides practical guidelines for researchers on how to improve the quality of research design, while for those appointed to scrutinise research proposals it offers advice on how to apply consistent, careful and critical reasoning to the process of assessing ethical standards. As such, it will provide invaluable assistance to clinical researchers and ethics committees alike in understanding the moral challenges posed by modern health care. (shrink)

This text of Elizabeth Fox-Genovese's is published posthumously in the context of pieces dedicated to her memory. It is unclear whether she intended it for eventual publication or whether she had intended it as a lecture; nor is there decisive evidence for a date of composition. In it, she reviews the stance of feminist literary criticism toward religion and finds it to be generally negative. She regrets that feminist critics see in religion mostly a means of subordinating women to men, (...) given that most of the writers whose work they explicate were themselves fervently religious. She then examines the feminization of religion in nineteenth-century America and the growing idea at the time of female moral stewardship. After examining the contrasting approaches taken to the process of feminization by Harriet Beecher Stowe and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Fox-Genovese then takes as her main case Augusta Jane Evans's novels Beulah and St. Elmo. She argues that feminist critics, in concentrating on questions about the marriage or independence of Evans's characters miss Evans's central concern, which was the loss and recovery of her characters' faith. The feminist critics (given their hostility to religion) misunderstand that Evans's stance was not one against female individualism, but rather (given her commitment as a Christian) a stance against the unbridled individualism of modern American society. (shrink)

The recent removal of the Richard Prince’s artwork Spiritual America from the Tate Modern’s “Pop Life: Art in a Material World” exhibition is the most recent and high-profile case of a work of art being withdrawn from a gallery in the UK on the grounds that it has allegedly breached legislation concerning indecent images of children. Surprisingly, the issue has been hardly considered by academics from law departments and is almost entirely ignored by philosophers specializing in aesthetics and ethics. This (...) essay considers the ethics of images of children by drawing from continental ethics and aesthetics, and by engaging with the only significant treatment of the subject undertaken by a philosopher, namely Peter J. King’s “No Plaything.” This paper shows that a continental perspective can open up positions that King’s ‘objectivist utilitarianism’ is oblivious of. In particular, the essay draws from Derrida’s reading of Kant’s Third Critique and the former’s quasi-conception of “the frame” in The Truth in Painting and “droit de regard” in Right of Inspection. In distinction to King, this paper engages with the actual existing reality of currently enacted laws and their application in particular cases such as in Spiritual America. I will begin with art ‘in the frame’ as the colloquial expression has it, art wrongfully and unjustly accused by the police. I will proceed via an examination of the question of the frame in Kant and Derrida, to demonstrate a need to reclaim the ethical status of works of art. The core procedure of my paper will be a ‘rediscovery’ of Spiritual America as the Kantian example that allows us to find the law. My argument will be that no work of art or image can of itself be decent or indecent. (shrink)

_Desk Set_, a 1957 20th Century Fox studio comedy, made with the sponsorship of IBM, charts the relationship between a reference librarian, Bunny Watson, and Richard Sumner, the inventor of a computer which appears to threaten her job. The film displays a thriving philodendron within Bunny’s skyscraper office, illustrating her organic style of thinking, and implicitly inviting us to see the plant in opposition to the computer. The suggestion that the plant is in some sense excessive, claiming attention beyond the (...) norms of the ornamental background houseplant, opens questions about how we look at plants on film. We find here a reframing of figure and ground, which relates the philodendron to moments where plants become conspicuous in early film and in horror. _Desk Set_ reflects a vegetal landscape characterised by all the commonplace instrumentalising of plants in modernity, amongst which the philodendron emerges as an exception. The plant does not point outwards to a putative wilderness. Instead, our looking at it allows us to contemplate it as an individuated specimen, and to move from that act of looking to recognise its deep entanglement with the urban environment, and with human care. (shrink)

‘Virtue signaling’ is the practice of using moral talk in order to enhance one’s moral reputation. Many find this kind of behavior irritating. However, some philosophers have gone further, arguing that virtue signaling actively undermines the proper functioning of public moral discourse and impedes moral progress. Against this view, I argue that widespread virtue signaling is not a social ill, and that it can actually serve as an invaluable instrument for moral change, especially in cases where moral argument alone does (...) not suffice. Specifically, virtue signaling can change the broader public’s social expectations, which can in turn motivate the adoption of new, positive social norms. I also argue that the reputation-seeking motives underlying virtue signaling impose important constraints on virtue signalers’ behavior, which serve to keep the worst excesses of virtue signaling in check. (shrink)

Character judgments play an important role in our everyday lives. However, decades of empirical research on trait attribution suggest that the cognitive processes that generate these judgments are prone to a number of biases and cognitive distortions. This gives rise to a skeptical worry about the epistemic foundations of everyday characterological beliefs that has deeply disturbing and alienating consequences. In this paper, I argue that this skeptical worry is misplaced: under the appropriate informational conditions, our everyday character-trait judgments are in (...) fact quite trustworthy. I then propose a mindreading-based model of the socio-cognitive processes underlying trait attribution that explains both why these judgments are initially unreliable, and how they eventually become more accurate. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been a heated debate about how to interpret findings that seem to show that humans rapidly and automatically calculate the visual perspectives of others. In the current study, we investigated the question of whether automatic interference effects found in the dot-perspective task (Samson, Apperly, Braithwaite, Andrews, & Bodley Scott, 2010) are the product of domain-specific perspective-taking processes or of domain-general “submentalizing” processes (Heyes, 2014). Previous attempts to address this question have done so by implementing inanimate (...) controls, such as arrows, as stimuli. The rationale for this is that submentalizing processes that respond to directionality should be engaged by such stimuli, whereas domain-specific perspective-taking mechanisms, if they exist, should not. These previous attempts have been limited, however, by the implied intentionality of the stimuli they have used (e.g. arrows), which may have invited participants to imbue them with perspectival agency. Drawing inspiration from “novel entity” paradigms from infant gaze-following research, we designed a version of the dot-perspective task that allowed us to precisely control whether a central stimulus was viewed as animate or inanimate. Across four experiments, we found no evidence that automatic “perspective-taking” effects in the dot-perspective task are modulated by beliefs about the animacy of the central stimulus. Our results also suggest that these effects may be due to the task-switching elements of the dot-perspective paradigm, rather than automatic directional orienting. Together, these results indicate that neither the perspective-taking nor the standard submentalizing interpretations of the dot-perspective task are fully correct. (shrink)

Phillips and colleagues convincingly argue that knowledge attribution is a faster, more automatic form of mindreading than belief attribution. However, they do not explain what it is about knowledge attribution that lends it this cognitive advantage. I suggest an explanation of the knowledge-attribution advantage that would also help to distinguish it from belief-based and minimalist alternatives.

The current industrial revolution is said to be driven by the digitization that exploits connected information across all aspects of manufacturing. Standards have been recognized as an important enabler. Ontology-based information standard may provide benefits not offered by current information standards. Although there have been ontologies developed in the industrial manufacturing domain, they have been fragmented and inconsistent, and little has received a standard status. With successes in developing coherent ontologies in the biological, biomedical, and financial domains, an effort called (...) Industrial Ontologies Foundry (IOF) has been formed to pursue the same goal for the industrial manufacturing domain. However, developing a coherent ontology covering the entire industrial manufacturing domain has been known to be a mountainous challenge because of the multidisciplinary nature of manufacturing. To manage the scope and expectations, the IOF community kicked-off its effort with a proof-of-concept (POC) project. This paper describes the developments within the project. It also provides a brief update on the IOF organizational set up. (shrink)

The question has long confounded philosophers and scientists, and it is this so-called explanatory gap between biological life and consciousness that Evan ...

It is time to bring the rich resources of these traditions into the contemporary debate about the nature of self. This volume is the first of its kind.

Machine ethics and robot rights are quickly becoming hot topics in artificial intelligence and robotics communities. We will argue that attempts to attribute moral agency and assign rights to all intelligent machines are misguided, whether applied to infrahuman or superhuman AIs, as are proposals to limit the negative effects of AIs by constraining their behavior. As an alternative, we propose a new science of safety engineering for intelligent artificial agents based on maximizing for what humans value. In particular, we challenge (...) the scientific community to develop intelligent systems that have human-friendly values that they provably retain, even under recursive self-improvement. (shrink)

The experience of a reward appears to enhance memory for recent prior events, adaptively making that information more available to guide future decision-making. Here, we tested whether reward enhances memory for associative item-location information and also whether the effect of reward spreads to other categorically-related but unrewarded items. Participants earned either points (Experiment 1) or money (Experiment 2) through a time-estimation reward task, during which stimuli-location pairings around a 2D-ring were shown followed by either high-value or low-value rewards. All stimuli (...) were then tested for location memory or recognition (yes/no), immediately and after a 24-hour delay. Across both experiments (combined analysis), there was a robust improvement in location memory following high-value rewards, even though evidence supporting this effect was reliable in Experiment 2 but not in Experiment 1. The memory-enhancing effect of reward was observed on both the immediate and delayed location-memory tests. Reward-enhanced memory for both directly rewarded stimuli and categorically related stimuli that were not directly rewarded. No reliable effect of reward value on yes/no recognition-memory performance was observed in either experiment. We hypothesise that reward enhances the consolidation of recent experience and conceptually related memories to make these more available for future decisions. (shrink)

These are central to the accounts of lexical representation and meaning construction developed, giving rise to the Theory of Lexical Concepts and Cognitive ...

The Embodied Mind provides a unique, sophisticated treatment of the spontaneous and reflective dimension of human experience.

This article explores the principles of interaction that shape grammatical practices of conversational speech cross-linguistically. Seven such principles are explored, and the grammatical practices they give rise to are illustrated. The role of these principles in shaping non-linguistic behavior is also touched on.

In the small but growing literature on the philosophy of country music, the question of how we ought to understand the genre’s notion of authenticity has emerged as one of the central questions. Many country music scholars argue that authenticity claims track attributions of cultural standing or artistic self-expression. However, careful attention to the history of the genre reveals that these claims are simply factually wrong. On the basis of this, we have grounds for dismissing these attributions. Here, I argue (...) for an alternative model of authenticity in which we take claims about the relative authenticity of country music to be evidence of ‘country’ being a dual character concept in the same way that it has been suggested of punk rock and hip-hop. Authentic country music is country music that embodies the core value commitments of the genre. These values form the basis of country artists’ and audiences’ practical identities. Part of country music’s aesthetic practice is that audiences reconnect with, reify, and revise this common practical identity through identification with artists and works that manifest these values. We should then think of authenticity discourse within country music as a kind of game within the genre’s practice of shaping and maintaining this practical identity. (shrink)

• An adequate conceptual framework is still needed to account for phenomena that (i) have a first-person, subjective-experiential or phenomenal character; (ii) are (usually) reportable and describable (in humans); and (iii) are neurobiologically realized.2 • The conscious subject plays an unavoidable epistemological role in characterizing the explanadum of consciousness through first-person descriptive reports. The experimentalist is then able to link first-person data and third-person data. Yet the generation of first-person data raises difficult epistemological issues about the relation of second-order awareness (...) or meta-awareness to first-order experience (e.g. (shrink)

Clinical bioethics is big business. There are now hundreds of people who bioethics in community and university hospitals, nursing homes, rehabilitation and home care settings, and some who play the role of clinical ethics consultant to transplant teams, managed care companies, and genetic testing firms. Still, there is as much speculation about what clinically active bioethicists actually do as there was ten years ago. Various commentators have pondered the need for training standards, credentials, exams, and malpractice insurance for ethicists engaged (...) in clinical consultation. Much of the discussion seems to accept an implicit presumption that all clinical ethics consultation practices look pretty much alike. But is this accurate? What do clinical ethicists do, how and where do they do it, and what kind of clinical ethics is useful in the hospital and in other settings? (shrink)

Both mindreading and stereotyping are forms of social cognition that play a pervasive role in our everyday lives, yet too little attention has been paid to the question of how these two processes are related. This paper offers a theory of the influence of stereotyping on mental-state attribution that draws on hierarchical predictive coding accounts of action prediction. It is argued that the key to understanding the relation between stereotyping and mindreading lies in the fact that stereotypes centrally involve character-trait (...) attributions, which play a systematic role in the action–prediction hierarchy. On this view, when we apply a stereotype to an individual, we rapidly attribute to her a cluster of generic character traits on the basis of her perceived social group membership. These traits are then used to make inferences about that individual’s likely beliefs and desires, which in turn inform inferences about her behavior. (shrink)

A renowned philosopher of the mind, also known for his groundbreaking work on Buddhism and cognitive science, Evan Thompson combines the latest neuroscience research on sleep, dreaming, and meditation with Indian and Western philosophy of the mind, casting new light on the self and its relation to the brain. Thompson shows how the self is a changing process, not a static thing. When we are awake we identify with our body, but if we let our mind wander or daydream, (...) we project a mentally imagined self into the remembered past or anticipated future. As we fall asleep, the impression of being a bounded self distinct from the world dissolves, but the self reappears in the dream state. If we have a lucid dream, we no longer identify only with the self within the dream. Our sense of self now includes our dreaming self, the "I" as dreamer. Finally, as we meditate--either in the waking state or in a lucid dream--we can observe whatever images or thoughts arise and how we tend to identify with them as "me." We can also experience sheer awareness itself, distinct from the changing contents that make up our image of the self. Contemplative traditions say that we can learn to let go of the self, so that when we die we can witness its dissolution with equanimity. Thompson weaves together neuroscience, philosophy, and personal narrative to depict these transformations, adding uncommon depth to life's profound questions. Contemplative experience comes to illuminate scientific findings, and scientific evidence enriches the vast knowledge acquired by contemplatives. (shrink)

Critics of clinical equipoise have long argued that it represents an overly permissive, and therefore morally unacceptable, mechanism for resolving the tensions inherent in clinical research. In particular, the equipoise requirement is often attacked on the grounds that it is not sufficiently responsive to the interests of individual patients. In this paper, we outline a view of equipoise that not only withstands a stronger version of this objection, which was recently articulated by Deborah Hellman, but also plays important roles in (...) clarifying the discussion. (shrink)

The relation between Hume’s constructive and skeptical aims has been a central concern for Hume interpreters. Hume’s two definitions of ‘cause’ in the Treatise and first Enquiry apparently represent an important constructive achievement, but this paper argues that the definitions must be understood in terms of Hume’s skepticism. The puzzle I address is simply that Hume gives two definitions rather than one. I use Don Garrett’s interpretation as a foil to develop my alternative skeptical interpretation. Garrett claims the definitions exhibit (...) a general susceptibility to two kinds of definition that all “sense-based concepts” share. Against Garrett, I argue that the definitions express an imperfection Hume finds only in our concept of causation. That imperfection is absent from other sense-based concepts, and prompts skeptical sentiments in Hume’s conclusion to the Treatise’s Book 1. I close by comparing my interpretation with those of Helen Beebee, Stephen Buckle, Galen Strawson and Paul Russell. (shrink)

(Series copy) The new Oxford Readings in Feminism series maps the dramatic influence of feminist theory on every branch of academic knowledge. Offering feminist perspectives on disciplines from history to science, each book assembles the most important articles written on its field in the last ten to fifteen years. Old stereotypes are challenged and traditional attitudes upset in these lively-- and sometimes controversial--volumes, all of which are edited by feminists prominent in their particular field. Comprehensive, accessible, and intellectually daring, the (...) Oxford Readings in Feminism series is vital reading for anyone interested in the effects of feminist ideas within the academy. Can science be gender-neutral? In recent years, feminist critics have raised troubling questions about the practice and goals of traditional science, demonstrating the existence of a pervasive bias in the ways in which scientists conduct and discuss their work. This exciting volume gathers seventeen essays--by sociologists, scientists, historians, and philosophers--of seminal significance in the emerging field of feminist science studies. Analyzing topics from the stereotype of the "Man of Reason" to the "romantic" language of reproductive biology, these fascinating essays challenge readers to take a fresh look at the limitations--and possibilities--of scientific knowledge. (shrink)

Colour fascinates all of us, and scientists and philosophers have sought to understand the true nature of colour vision for many years. In recent times, investigations into colour vision have been one of the main success stories of cognitive science, for each discipline within the field - neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, computer science and artificial intelligence, and philosophy - has contributed significantly to our understanding of colour. Evan Thompson's book is a major contribution to this interdisciplinary project. Colour Vision provides (...) an accessible review of the current scientific and philosophical discussions of colour vision. Thompson steers a course between the subjective and objective positions on colour, arguing for a relational account. This account develops a novel `ecological' approach to colour vision in cognitive science and the philosophy of perception. It is vital reading for all cognitive scientists and philosophers whose interests touch upon this central area. (shrink)

This article offers a critique of the recently revised BMA guidance on routine neonatal male circumcision and seeks to challenge the assumptions underpinning the guidance which construe this procedure as a matter of parental choice. Our aim is to problematise continued professional willingness to tolerate the non-therapeutic, non-consensual excision of healthy tissue, arguing that in this context both professional guidance and law are uncharacteristically tolerant of risks inflicted on young children, given the absence of clear medical benefits. By interrogating historical (...) medical explanations for this practice, which continue to surface in contemporary justifications of non-consensual male circumcision, we demonstrate how circumcision has long existed as a procedure in need of a justification. We conclude that it is ethically inappropriate to subject children—male or female—to the acknowledged risks of circumcision and contend that there is no compelling legal authority for the common view that male circumcision is lawful. (shrink)

Social norms are commonly understood as rules that dictate which behaviors are appropriate, permissible, or obligatory in different situations for members of a given community. Many researchers have sought to explain the ubiquity of social norms in human life in terms of the psychological mechanisms underlying their acquisition, conformity, and enforcement. Existing theories of the psychology of social norms appeal to a variety of constructs, from prediction-error minimization, to reinforcement learning, to shared intentionality, to domain-specific adaptations for norm acquisition. In (...) this paper, we propose a novel methodological and conceptual framework for the cognitive science of social norms that we call normative pluralism. We begin with an analysis of the explanatory aims of the cognitive science of social norms. From this analysis, we derive a recommendation for a reformed conception of its explanandum: a minimally psychological construct that we call normative regularities. Our central empirical proposal is that the psychological underpinnings of social norms are most likely realized by a heterogeneous set of cognitive, motivational, and ecological mechanisms that vary between norms and between individuals, rather than by a single type of process or distinctive norm system. This pluralistic approach, we suggest, offers a methodologically sound point of departure for a fruitful and rigorous science of social norms. (shrink)

The bearing of certain psychological doctrines upon ethical theory is important, and has been made use of especially by those who espouse empiricism in Ethics. It is the purpose of this paper to examine some of these leading doctrines and the ethical theory which has been connected with them. In doing so, it is appropriate to select for examination the views of Professor W. McDougall, as expressed principally in his Social Psychology and Outline of Psychology ; and this for two (...) reasons. One is, that these views are significant of much more than the opinions of one man. They may be taken quite fairly as representative, in the main, of a definite body of doctrine concerning the nature and development of moral experience. (shrink)