There is legal uncertainty and academic disagreement as to the legal status of biological material that has become separated from the person. This article sets out the two criteria upon which the assessment of the legal status of ‘separated biological material’ ought to be made. It is suggested here that any argument concerning the legal status of separated biological material needs to (i) assess which ownership entitlements in the material the law ought recognize and (ii) assess which set of legal (...) rules ought to be used to protect these ownership entitlements. There are also limits to the way these two criteria ought to operate. First, the considerations that are necessary to justify an ownership entitlement in a body part vary between different types of ownership entitlements. Second, whether there is a necessary connection between recognizing an ownership entitlement and protecting the entitlement in a particular way also varies in terms of the type of ownership entitlement in question. By isolating these two criteria, and identifying the limits to their operation, this article prescribes an analytical framework through which the law and academic commentary can be viewed. (shrink)

This article aligns two complementary claims: that sexual penetration should be considered a wrong and that consent requires express words and conduct that manifest a person’s willingness or acquiescence towards the specific act. If sexual penetration is a wrong, it will only be justified if there are reasons that permit the action and if these were the ones that the defendant acted on. A person’s internal attitude of willingness or acquiescence towards the specific act can provide the necessary guiding reasons (...) to justify the wrong. However, words and conduct that manifest or express this internal attitude are also needed in order to provide the applicable explanatory reasons to justify the wrong. Alternatively, expressive consent can excuse the wrong by justifying the defendant’s mistake as to the applicable guiding reasons. Without the requirement of expressive consent, the criminal law is unable to capture the culpability of defendants whose deliberation over the use of force on another person did not include the other person’s expression of willingness to engage in a penetrative sexual act. (shrink)

It is sometimes said by legal scholars that ‘hard cases make bad law’, by which they mean an extreme case provides a poor lens through which to view general laws. It can be said in retort that ‘bad laws make hard cases’; implying that the case may be a controversial one only because the general laws that govern it are poorly formulated. The same tension may be found in medical ethics. Perhaps extreme cases provide a poor lens through which to (...) view general ethical standards, or perhaps the case is controversial by virtue of the prevailing ethical standards being poorly formulated. It becomes important to consider whether a case is controversial or extreme. At first blush, the case of ‘Mrs A’—outlined in this edition by Miller et al 1—is both. The article by Miller et al raises a series of ethical questions concerning Advanced Euthanasia Directives and highlights weaknesses in the Dutch regulatory procedures. Also included in this edition are responses to the Miller et al article, by Menzel2 and Jongsma et al.3 These responses challenge some of implications that Miller et al seek to draw from the case. Miller et al have also replied to Jongsma et al in this edition.4 While the Miller et al article provides a detailed account of the formulation …. (shrink)

The feature article in this edition outlines and then critically examines the Nuffield Council of Bioethics’ Report, ‘Genome Editing and Human Reproduction: Social and Ethical issues’. While Christopher Gyngell, Hilary Bowman-Smart & Julian Savulescu, ‘support the approach taken by the Nuffield Council’,1 their findings are stronger than those in the Report, arguing that - beyond being permissible - many instances of heritable genome editing will be moral imperatives. A collection of engaging responses to this feature article are provided by Rachel (...) Horton & Anneke M Luccason, Pete Mills, and Sarah Chan. As a short-sighed introvert, I am going to leave aside my concerns about Gyngell’s and colleagues’ account of the weak and unhappy gene pool in which I swim, and instead focus on their talk of moral imperatives. Gyngell and colleagues construct their moral imperative argument by way of analogy. The most straightforward, and perhaps most compelling, claim concerns single gene disorders. I reconstruct the claim in the following way: 1. There is a moral imperative to screen newborns for phenylketonuria. 2. If it were possible, there would be a moral imperative to provide replacement enzyme therapy for PKU. 3. By analogy, if it were possible, there would be a moral imperative to make safe genome edits which prevent PKU. The same analogical interference is claimed in arguments in favour of: editing around 27 mutations associated with coronary heart disease, editing to shift individuals of low or …. (shrink)

I am sceptical as to the contribution that human rights can make to our evaluation of medical law. I will argue here that viewing medical law through a human rights framework provides no greater clarity, insight or focus. If anything, human rights reasoning clouds any bioethical or evaluative analysis. In Section 1 of this article, I outline the general structure of human rights reasoning. I will describe human rights reasoning as reasoning from rights that each person has ‘by virtue of (...) their humanity’, reasoning from rights that provide ‘hard to defeat’ reasons for action and reasoning from abstract norms to specified duties. I will then argue in Section 2 that, unless we re-conceive of human rights as narrow categories of liberties, it becomes necessary for our human rights reasoning to gauge the normative force of each claim or liberty. When we apply this approach to disputes in medical law, we end up ‘looking straight through’ the human right to the values and features that each person has by virtue of their humanity. (shrink)

When part of a person's body is separated from them, or when a person dies, it is unclear what legal status the item of bodily material is able to obtain. A 'no property rule' which states that there is no property in the human body was first recorded in an English judgment in 1882. Claims based on property rights in the human body and its parts have failed on the basis that the human body is not the subject of property. (...) Despite a recent series of exceptions to the 'no property rule', the law still has no clear answer as to the legal status of the body or its material. In this book, Wall examines the appropriate legal status of bodily material, and in doing so, develops a way for the law to address disputes over the use and storage of bodily material that, contrary to the current trend, resists the application of property law. Wall assesses when a person ought to be able to possess, control, use, or profit from, his or her own bodily material or the bodily material of another person. Bodily material may be valuable because it retains a functional unity with the body or is a material resource that is in short supply. With this in mind, Wall measures the extent to which property law can represent the rights and duties that protects the entitlement that a person may exercise in bodily material, and identifies the limits to the appropriate application of property law. An alternative to property law is developed with reference to the right of bodily integrity and the right to privacy. (shrink)

Arguments about Abortion: Personhood, Morality, and Law approaches a complex set of issues with analytical rigour, clarity, and a respectful directness. It extensively buries poor argumentation and...

Olaf has a theory about advancing technologies being both our saviour and our doom. While we ought to avoid over-analysing claims of fictitious snowmen, we can pause to consider whether it is possible for an advancing technology to be both our saviour and our doom. I will maintain that it is. But for now, note how it is tempting to resolve the overlap by thinking about advancing technologies and individuals. In a possible reformulation of Olaf’s claim, advancing technology can be (...) one person’s saviour, but in being so, is another person’s doom. This reformulation is a type of an ‘individualisation argument’ against advancing technology. Specifically, it is the claim that while an individual’s use of technology may solve their iteration of a problem, it may also undermine a societal response to the broader problem. Peterson, in this edition’s Feature Article, has this type of ‘individualisation argument’ in his sights when he considers its application to non-medical egg freezing. That is, freezing an egg for social reasons rather than medical reasons. Peterson formulates the ‘individualisation argument’ in the following way1: > P1: It is morally wrong to let individuals use technology X—in order to try to handle a problem that is social in nature—if the use of X will somehow work against a social solution to a social problem P. > > P2: If individuals make use of a technology like …. (shrink)

Sport is predicated on the idea of victors emerging from a level playing field. All ethically informed evaluate practices are like this; they require an equality of respect, consideration, and opportunity, while trying to achieve substantively unequal outcomes. For instance: limited resources mean that physicians must treat some patients and not others, while still treating them with equal respect; examiners must pass some students and not others, while still giving their work equal consideration; employers may only be able to hire (...) one applicant, while still being required to treat all applicants fairly, and so on. The 800 m is meant to be one of these practices: a level and equidistance running track from which one victor is intended to emerge. The case of Caster Semenya raises challenging questions about what makes level-playing-fields level, questions that extend beyond any given playing field. In the Feature Article for this issue Loland provides us with new and engaging reasons to support of the Court of Arbitration for Sport decision in the Casta Semenya case. The impact of the CAS decision requires Casta Semenya to supress her naturally occurring testosterone if she is to compete in an international athletics events. The Semenya case is described by Loland as creating a ‘dilemma of rights’.i The dilemma lies in the choice between ‘the right of Semenya to compete in sport according to her legal sex and gender identity’ and ‘the right of other athletes within the average female testosterone range to compete under fair conditions’ (see …. (shrink)

Consider a scenario where, at the start of an appointment with a therapist, she explains to you that ‘the success of the therapy will depend on your own positive expectations, the respect and esteem that you have for me as a qualified health professional, the warm tone and empathic approach that I adopt towards you, and the trust that you place in me, during the course of treatment’. You might find this transparency about the therapeutic process to be refreshingly honest. (...) You might, however, be surprised if this openness turned out to be an ethical obligation that she owed you. Yet, for some commentators, this ‘open’ approach to psychotherapy – where there is openness about the common factors that can explain the efficacy of the therapy –is required by ethical standards of informed consent and respect for patient autonomy. In this edition of the Journal of Medical Ethics, Garson Leder formulates two responses to this type of ‘open therapy claim’: that ‘….informed consent does not require the practitioners ‘go open’ about the therapeutic common factors in psychotherapy, and clarity about the mechanism of change shows us …. (shrink)

The Journal of Medical Ethics can sometimes read part Men Like Gods and part A Brave New World. At times, we learn how all controversies can resolved with reference to four principles. At other times, we learn how “every discovery in pure science is potentially subversive”.1 This issue is no exception. Here, we can read about the utopia of gene editing, manufactured organs, and machine learnt algorithmic decision-making. We can also read about the dystopia of inherited disorders from edited germlines, (...) the testing of xenotransplants on braindead patients, and misdiagnosis by artificial intelligence. What we see in the three papers that I will foreground here is the application of medical ethics to avoid the dystopia while preserving the promises of medical science. But as I seek to explain here, our ability to address the controversies that we anticipate in medical science depend on our ability to refine our understanding of what medical ethics requires of us now. From the diagnosis of eye diseases from fungus images to predicting the risk of imminent risk of suicide attempts, machine learnt medical decision making has, in some high profile instances, outperformed clinicians in medical diagnosis and treatment recommendations. While clinician and machine learnt diagnoses will both involve degrees of uncertainty and fallibility, Thomas Grote2 asks us to consider is how much weight a clinician ought to give an algorithmic diagnosis which she disagreements with. Since a clinician is held to account for …. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to identify a limit to the appropriate application of property law to the use and storage of bodily material. I argue here that property law ought to be limited to protecting ‘contingent rights’ and that recent cases where property rights have been recognised in semen represent the application of property law beyond this limit. I also suggest how the law ought to develop in order to avoid the overextensive use of property law.

Described as one of the two fathers of medical law, Professor Peter Skegg has been a leading figure in the study of law and medicine. Over a 46 year academic career at the University of Auckland, University of Oxford, and the University of Otago, Professor Skegg has helped develop the field of medical law into a burgeoning academic discipline and has provided intellectual guardianship for the practice of law and medicine. This collection brings together contemporaries, colleagues, and former students of (...) Professor Skegg to celebrate his enduring contribution to the study of medical law. This edited collection contains twelve essays written by a range of internationally recognised medical lawyers. The topics cover the regulation of medical practitioners, consent, rights in bodily material, euthanasia, compensation and ethical approval for medical research, treatment orders for mental health conditions, and surrogacy laws. Whilst some of the essays return to territory that has been initially surveyed by Peter s research and analysis, others touch upon some wider medical law topics, illustrating Peter s lasting contribution to medical law as well as mapping out some of the new frontiers for the discipline of medical law. Academics, students and practitioners, from a range of jurisdictions, who are interested in how the law governs the provision of healthcare will benefit reading the various essays contained here. In addition, anyone who has had the good fortune of working with, or learning from, Professor Skegg will also enjoy the opportunity to return to the field of study that he founded. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic will generate vexing ethical issues for the foreseeable future and many journals will be open to content that is relevant to our collective effort to meet this challenge. While the pandemic is clearly the critical issue of the moment, it’s important that other issues in medical ethics continue to be addressed as well. As can be seen in this issue, the Journal of Medical Ethics will uphold its commitment to publishing high quality papers on the full array (...) of medical ethics. At the same time, JME aims to be a premiere home for ground-breaking scholarship on the ethical issues raised by COVID-19. Toward this end, we have a number of papers that are freely available online and for which production has been fast-tracked.1–5 A challenge for authors who want to write about the pandemic is the rapidly evolving nature of the situation and the time it takes for journal content to be reviewed and published, even when fast-tracked. For that reason, all authors who would like to submit a paper on the pandemic can also submit a post to the JME blog prior to submitting a full paper to the journal. Those interested in writing for the JME blog should contact one of its editors, Hazem Zohny or Mike King. Over the last 3 weeks, 30 high-quality commentaries on the pandemic have been posted to the blog. These posts are circulated widely via the JME Twitter and Facebook feeds and have stimulated significant …. (shrink)

Community acts of material signification are an important form of sculpture that occur through an exchange of human and non-human agents. First these acts of sculpture are discussed in relation to extended mind, the morphogenic model of making, material engagement theory and entanglement to frame how humans shape the world as collaborators with non-humans by extending mind through material. I then discuss various acts of community material accumulation that I consider sculpture, skateboarding and clay forming as evidence of extended mind, (...) comparison of the morphogenic to the hylomorphic model of making, occurrences of materials affecting other materials absent of human intervention and my recent participatory installation Stone Fruit. These topics are used to present a lens for understanding the production of sculpture as a collaboration with opposed to dictation on systems of materials, places and people. This lens, in turn, presents community sites of material accumulation to be an important form of sculpture production. (shrink)

Recent financial fraud legislation such as the Dodd–Frank Act and the Sarbanes–Oxley Act (U.S. House of Representatives, Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010, [H.R. 4173], 2010 ; U.S. House of Representatives, The Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002, Public Law 107-204 [H.R. 3763], 2002 ) relies heavily on whistleblowers for enforcement, and offers protection and incentives for whistleblowers. However, little is known about many aspects of the whistleblowing decision, especially the effects of contextual and wrongdoing attributes on (...) organizational members’ willingness to report fraud. We extend the ethics literature by experimentally investigating how the nature of the wrongdoing and the awareness of those surrounding the whistleblower can influence whistleblowing. As predicted, we find that employees are less likely to report: (1) financial statement fraud than theft; (2) immaterial than material financial statement fraud; (3) when the wrongdoer is aware that the potential whistleblower has knowledge of the fraud; and (4) when others in addition to the wrongdoer are not aware of the fraud. Our findings extend whistleblowing research in several ways. For instance, prior research provides little evidence concerning the effects of fraud type, wrongdoer awareness, and others’ awareness on whistleblowing intentions. We also provide evidence that whistleblowing settings represent an exception to the well-accepted theory of diffusion of responsibility. Our participants are professionals who represent the likely pool of potential whistleblowers in organizations. (shrink)

Healthcare under the auspices of late‐stage capitalism is a total institution that mortifies nurses and patients alike, demanding conformity, obedience, perfection. This capture, which resembles Deleuze's enclosure, entangles nurses in carceral systems and gives way to a postenclosure society, an institution without walls. These societies of control constitute another sort of total institution, more covert and insidious for their invisibility (Deleuze, 1992). While Delezue (1992) named physical technologies like electronic identification badges as key to understanding these societies of control, the (...) political economy of late‐stage capitalism functions as a total institution with no cohesive, centralized, connected material apparatus required. In this manuscript, we outline the ways in which the healthcare industrial complex demands nurse conformity and how that, in turn, operationalizes nurses in service to the institution. This foundation leads to the assertion that nursing must foster a radical imagination for itself, unbound by reality as it presently exists, in order that we might conjure more just, equitable futures for caregivers and care receivers alike. To tease out what a radical imagination might look like, we dwell in paradox: getting folks the care they need in capitalist healthcare systems; engaging nursing's deep history to inspire alternative understandings for the future of the discipline; and how nursing might divest from extractive institutional structures. This paper is a jumping‐off place to interrogate the ways institutions telescope and where nursing fits into the arrangement. (shrink)

Jesse Wall's Being and Owning: The Body, Bodily Material, and the Law addresses the legal status of 'bodily material'; items which used to be, but are no longer, part of a living human organism: especially, 'separated' materials like gametes or tissue samples, and cadavers and other mortal remains. Wall's discussion, however, ranges widely across jurisprudential and philosophical issues concerning our relation to our bodies and our rights in them. His central, plausible contention is that body rights, though (...) a kind of ownership right, need not and often should not be protected by property law. Rather, in many cases, rights in body parts should be protected by a legal regime that more closely... (shrink)

Jesse Prinz argues that recent work in philosophy, neuroscience, and anthropology supports two radical hypotheses about the nature of morality: moral values are based on emotional responses, and these emotional responses are inculcated by culture, not hard-wired through natural selection. In the first half of the book, Jesse Prinz defends the hypothesis that morality has an emotional foundation. Evidence from brain imaging, social psychology, and psychopathology suggest that, when we judge something to be right or wrong, we are (...) merely expressing our emotions. Prinz argues that these emotions do not track objective features of reality; rather, the rightness and wrongness of an act consists in the fact that people are disposed to have certain emotions towards it. In the second half of the book, he turns to a defense of moral relativism. Moral facts depend on emotional responses, and emotional responses vary from culture to culture. Prinz surveys the anthropological record to establish moral variation, and he draws on cultural history to show how attitudes toward practices such as cannibalism and marriage change over time. He also criticizes evidence from animal behavior and child development that has been taken to support the claim that moral attitudes are hard-wired by natural selection. Prinz concludes that there is no single true morality, but he also argues that some moral values are better than others; moral progress is possible. Throughout the book, Prinz relates his views to contemporary and historical work in philosophical ethics. His views echo themes in the writings of David Hume and Friedrich Nietzsche, but Prinz supports, extends, and revises these classic theories using the resources of cutting-edge cognitive science. The Emotional Construction of Morals will stimulate and challenge anyone who is curious about the nature and origin of moral values. (shrink)

In this paper I develop an argument against a type of Non-Analytic Normative Naturalism. This argument, the Normative Property Dualism Argument, suggests that, if Non-Analytic Normative Naturalists posit that normative properties are identical to natural properties and that such identities are a posteriori, they will be forced to posit that these properties which are both normative and natural have higher-order normative properties of their own.

A timely and uniquely compelling plea for the importance of nurture in the ongoing nature-nurture debate. In this era of genome projects and brain scans, it is all too easy to overestimate the role of biology in human psychology. But in this passionate corrective to the idea that DNA is destiny, Jesse Prinz focuses on the most extraordinary aspect of human nature: that nurture can supplement and supplant nature, allowing our minds to be profoundly influenced by experience and culture. (...) Drawing on cutting-edge research in neuroscience, psychology, and anthropology, Prinz shatters the myth of human uniformity and reveals how our differing cultures and life experiences make each of us unique. Along the way he shows that we can’t blame mental illness or addiction on our genes, and that societal factors shape gender differences in cognitive ability and sexual behavior. A much-needed contribution to the nature-nurture debate, Beyond Human Nature shows us that it is only through the lens of nurture that the spectrum of human diversity becomes fully and brilliantly visible. (shrink)

There seems to be a large gulf between percepts and concepts. In particular, con- cepts seem to be capable of representing things that percepts cannot. We can conceive of things that would be impossible to perceive. (The converse may also seem true, but I will leave that to one side.) In one respect, this is trivially right. We can conceive of things that we cannot encounter, such as unicorns. We cannot literally perceive unicorns, even if we occasionally.

The modal account of luck is the predominant account of luck in epistemology and ethics. In the first half of this paper, I discuss three possible interpretations of the modal account and raise objections to each. I then raise an objection to all plausible versions of the modal account, that is, that whether an event is lucky or the extent to which it is a matter of luck will depend on what initial conditions or features of the event one holds (...) constant across nearby possible worlds. However, there is often reasonable disagreement about what the relevant initial conditions of an event are, and the modal account of luck has no means of determining which description of the event is correct. As such, the modal account is subject to a kind of reference class problem, and the view cannot actually tell us the extent to which certain events are a matter of luck. (shrink)

Writers in the propositions literature consider the Benacerraf objection serious, often decisive. The objection figures heavily in dismissing standard theories of propositions of the past, notably set-theoretic theories. I argue that the situation is more complicated. After explicating the propositional Benacerraf problem, I focus on a classic set-theoretic theory of propositions, the possible worlds theory, and argue that methodological considerations influence the objection’s success.

It is often assumed that all lucky events are significant. The thought is that a chancy event such as winning the lottery is lucky for you in part because it affects your interests or well-being. But whether you win an Absurdist Raffle in which there are no prizes, is, intuitively, not a matter of luck. This is because this event—even if chancy—is not significant for any subject. However, a few philosophers have recently claimed not only that luck does not necessarily (...) involve a significance condition but that we should not view luck involving claims in terms of significance. After reviewing the literature on this topic, I argue that lucky events are significant. A significance condition is necessary to distinguish between different kinds of luck: practical, epistemic, and moral. All lucky events are significant and chancy, but they can be significant for subjects in different ways. For example, an event is epistemically lucky for you if it is epistemically significant and chancy, but such events need not affect your practical interests or moral standing. Furthermore, I argue that events that are chancy but not significant should be thought of in terms of chance and not luck. (shrink)

Aesthetics is a normative domain. We evaluate artworks as better or worse, good or bad, great or grim. I will refer to a positive appraisal of an artwork as an aesthetic appreciation of that work, and I refer to a negative appraisal as aesthetic depreciation. (I will often drop the word “aesthetic.”) There has been considerable amount of work on what makes an artwork worthy of appreciation, and less, it seems, on the nature of appreciation itself. These two topics are (...) related, of course, because they nature of appreciation may bear on what things are worthy of that response, or at least on what things are likely to elicit it. So I will have some things to say about the latter. But I want to focus in this discussion on appreciation itself. When we praise a work of art, when we say it has aesthetic value, what does our praise consist in? This is a question about aesthetic psychology. I am interested in what kind of mental state appreciation is. What kind of state are we expressing when we say a work of art is “good”? This question has parallels in other areas of value theory. In ethics, most notably, there has been much attention lavished on the question of what people express when they refer to an action as “morally good.” One popular class of theories, associated with the British moralists and their followers, posits a link between moral valuation and emotion. To call an act morally good is to express an emotion toward that act. I think this approach to morality is right on target (Prinz, 2007). Here I want to argue that an emotional account of aesthetic valuation is equally promising. There are important differences between the two domains, but both have an affective foundation. I suspect that valuing of all kinds involves the emotions. Here I will inquire into the role of emotions in aesthetic valuing. I will not claim that artworks express emotions or even that they necessarily evoke emotions.. (shrink)

Current theories of knowledge, art, and power are locked into sterile debates around the question of representation. This book examines the limits of antirepresentationalism in these fields and argues that the anarchist tradition can point the way beyond our contemporary crisis of representation. The author rereads the theory and practical experiences of anarchism from the nineteenth century to the present, proposing a radical revision of received notions of the subject - from the equation of anarchy with literary decadence to the (...) interpretation of anarchism as yet another discourse founded on a notion of the human essence. What emerges, instead, is a complex portrait of anarchism as a body of thought that provides the framework for a kind of critical realism, with implications for fields ranging from aesthetics to economics, from philosophy to politics. Jesse Cohn teaches English at Purdue University North Central. (shrink)

Nicholas Agar, Jeff McMahan and Allen Buchanan have all expressed concerns about enhancing humans far outside the species-typical range. They argue radically enhanced beings will be entitled to greater and more beneficial treatment through an enhanced moral status, or a stronger claim to basic rights. I challenge these claims by first arguing that emerging technologies will likely give the enhanced direct control over their mental states. The lack of control we currently exhibit over our mental lives greatly contributes to our (...) sense of vulnerability. I then argue moral status should be viewed in terms of vulnerability. The enhanced will slowly gain the ability to command their mental states, reducing their vulnerability. These radically enhanced beings will have greater capacities, and possibly an inner life more valuable than our own. They will also be less vulnerable, and as a result, their moral status will be subordinate to our own. (shrink)

The present article examines how people’s belief in an afterlife, as well as closely related supernatural beliefs, may open an empirical backdoor to our understanding of the evolution of human social cognition. Recent findings and logic from the cognitive sciences contribute to a novel theory of existential psychology, one that is grounded in the tenets of Darwinian natural selection. Many of the predominant questions of existential psychology strike at the heart of cognitive science. They involve: causal attribution (why is mortal (...) behavior represented as being causally related to one’s afterlife? how are dead agents envisaged as communicating messages to the living?), moral judgment (why are certain social behaviors, i.e., transgressions, believed to have ultimate repercussions after death or to reap the punishment of disgruntled ancestors?), theory of mind (how can we know what it is “like” to be dead? what social-cognitive strategies do people use to reason about the minds of the dead?), concept acquisition (how does a common-sense dualism interact with a formalized socio-religious indoctrination in childhood? how are supernatural properties of the dead conceptualized by young minds?), and teleological reasoning (why do people so often see their lives as being designed for a purpose that must be accomplished before they perish? how do various life events affect people’s interpretation of this purpose?), among others. The central thesis of the present article is that an organized cognitive “system” dedicated to forming illusory representations of (1) psychological immortality, (2) the intelligent design of the self, and (3) the symbolic meaning of natural events evolved in response to the unique selective pressures of the human social environment. (shrink)

Childhood obesity is in important respects a result of legal policies that influence both dietary intake and physical activity. The law must shift focus away from individual risk factors alone and seek instead to promote situational and environmental influences that create an atmosphere conducive to health. To attain this goal, advocates should embrace a population-wide model of public health, and policymakers must critically examine the fashionable rhetoric of consumer choice.

Moral metasemantic theories explain how our moral thought and talk are about certain properties. Given the connection between what our moral terms are about and which moral claims are true, it might be thought that metasemantic theorising can justify first-order ethical conclusions, thus providing a novel way of doing moral epistemology. In this paper, we spell out one kind of argument from metasemantic theories to normative ethical conclusions, and argue that it fails to transmit justification from premises to conclusion. We (...) give three reasons for this transmission failure, which together pose a serious challenge to such metasemantic arguments. (shrink)

This paper presents a way of thinking about how to respond to the pluralism of modern societies that avoids any commitment to contractualist norms of political justification. The argument developed appeals to the notion of a constitutional settlement. Constitutional settlements are complex on-going social practices that both express certain values to which political societies are committed and establish procedures for resolving disputes among members of these societies. As such, they are a product of both moral commitment and the balance of (...) power. The paper shows how constitutional settlements relate to issues of stability and non-subjugation in politics, and explains how they can ground a distinction between justice and legitimacy. (shrink)

In the article "What Sin Is: A Differential Analysis," Jesse Couenhoven delves into the definitions and categorizations of sin according to various Christian doctrines. The author critically examines traditional definitions, such as those provided by the Westminster Confession and catechisms, and argues that they fail to adequately distinguish between sin and evil, often conflating natural evils with sinful acts. Couenhoven also considers gray areas of ethical behavior, such as the actions of a schizophrenic who curses against God or the (...) mistakes made by medical residents that result in harm to patients, and questions whether these actions should be classified as sin. The primary question driving the article is how sin is differentiated from that which is "merely" evil. To address this, Couenhoven analyzes and evaluates three views of sin, testing their coherence with Christian beliefs and practices. The article aims to provide a more nuanced and sufficient understanding of sin within the Christian tradition, going beyond the necessary elements of the doctrine of sin to better identify and differentiate sin from evil. (shrink)

Mobile health tools are often said to empower users by providing them with the information they need to exercise control over their health. We aim to bring clarity to this claim, and in doing so explore the relationship between empowerment and autonomy. We have identified three distinct models embedded in the empowerment rhetoric: empowerment as information, empowerment as control, and empowerment as values. Each distinct model of empowerment gives rise to an associated problem. These problems, the Problem of Interpretation, the (...) Value Alignment Problem, and the Priority Problem, show that mobile health tools in their current form are either insufficient for empowerment or are self‐defeating. These digital health technologies encourage users to adopt an individualized conception of autonomy, one that may weaken the doctor–patient relationship and undermine practices in shared decision making, and ultimately may not deliver on improving the health outcomes for those that need it the most. (shrink)

Epistemic accounts of luck define luck’s chanciness condition relative to a subject’s epistemic position. This could be put in terms of a subject’s evidence or knowledge about whether the event will occur. I argue that both versions of the epistemic account fail. In §2, I give two types of counterexamples to the evidence-based approach. In §3, I argue—contrary to the knowledge-based view—that an event can be a matter of good or bad luck for a subject even if she knows that (...) it will occur. In §4, I argue that epistemic accounts cannot explain some instances of constitutive luck. Because of these problems, luck’s chanciness condition cannot be adequately defined in epistemic terms. (shrink)

This paper outlines a theoretical context for research into ‘the subject of ethics’ in terms of how students come to see themselves as self-reflective actors. I maintain that the ‘subject of ethics’, or ethical subjectivity, has been overlooked as a necessary aspect of creating politically transformative spaces in education. At the heart of egalitarian politics lies a fundamental tension between the equality of voices and the notion that one way of being or one voice may be deemed more legitimate than (...) another; which in turn puts the equality of beings into question. Building from Michel Foucault’s work regarding ethics and subjectivity, I suggest that a ‘subject of ethics’ can be viewed, in part, as a series of relations of self that form the horizon upon which a subject comes to work on themselves relative to moral codes and power relations. Ethical relations of self can be a useful concept for those interested in educational research that furthers social and ecological justice. In the conclusion of this paper I also discuss the limitations of locating ethics entirely within a constituted human subject. (shrink)

There seems to be a large gulf between percepts and concepts. In particular, con- cepts seem to be capable of representing things that percepts cannot. We can conceive of things that would be impossible to perceive. (The converse may also seem true, but I will leave that to one side.) In one respect, this is trivially right. We can conceive of things that we cannot encounter, such as unicorns. We cannot literally perceive unicorns, even if we occasionally ‘‘see’’ them in (...) our dreams and hallucinations. To avoid triviality, I want to focus on things that we can actually encounter. We perceive poodles, perfumes, pinpricks, and pounding drums. These are concrete things; they are closely wedded to appearances. But we also encounter things that are abstract. We encounter uncles and instances of injustice. These things have no characteristic looks. Percepts, it is said, cannot represent abstract things. Call this claim the Imperceptability Thesis. I think the Imperceptibility Thesis is false. Perception is not restricted to the concrete. We can perceive abstract entities. (shrink)

Empathy can be characterized as a vicarious emotion that one person experiences when reflecting on the emotion of another. So characterized, empathy is sometimes regarded as a precondition on moral judgment. This seems to have been Hume's view. I review various ways in which empathy might be regarded as a precondition and argue against each of them: empathy is not a component, a necessary cause, a reliable epistemic guide, a foundation for justification, or the motivating force behind our moral judgments. (...) In fact, empathy is prone to biases that render it potentially harmful. Another construct—concern—fares somewhat better, but it is also of limited use. I argue that, instead of empathy, moral judgments involve emotions such as anger, disgust, guilt, and admiration. These, not empathy, provide the sentimental foundation for morality. (shrink)

What kind of mental phenomenon is romantic love? Many philosophers, psychologists, and ordinary folk treat it as an emotion. This chapter argues the category of emotion is inadequate to account for romantic love. It examines major emotion theories in philosophy and psychology and shows that they fail to illustrate that romantic love is an emotion. It considers the categories of basic emotions and emotion complexes, and demonstrates they too come short in accounting for romantic love. It assesses the roles of (...) culture and evolution in shaping the romantic love phenomenon and evaluates the ways in which the norms of rationality that are applied to standard emotions fail to apply to love. It considers the category of sentiments and argue that despite coming close, it does not adequately capture the nature of romantic love. Finally, the chapter makes a case for love being best characterized as a syndrome. (shrink)

The moral domain is broader than the empathy and justice concerns assessed by existing measures of moral competence, and it is not just a subset of the values assessed by value inventories. To fill the need for reliable and theoretically grounded measurement of the full range of moral concerns, we developed the Moral Foundations Questionnaire on the basis of a theoretical model of 5 universally available sets of moral intuitions: Harm/Care, Fairness/Reciprocity, Ingroup/Loyalty, Authority/Respect, and Purity/Sanctity. We present evidence for the (...) internal and external validity of the scale and the model, and in doing so we present new findings about morality: Comparative model fitting of confirmatory factor analyses provides empirical justification for a 5-factor structure of moral concerns; convergent/discriminant validity evidence suggests that moral concerns predict personality features and social group attitudes not previously considered morally relevant; and we establish pragmatic validity of the measure in providing new knowledge and research opportunities concerning demographic and cultural differences in moral intuitions. These analyses provide evidence for the usefulness of Moral Foundations Theory in simultaneously increasing the scope and sharpening the resolution of psychological views of morality. (shrink)

Dependencies are identified in two recently proposed first-order axiom systems for plane hyperbolic geometry. Since the dependencies do not specifically concern hyperbolic geometry, our results yield two simpler axiom systems for absolute geometry.

Gut Reactions is an interdisciplinary defense of the claim that emotions are perceptions of changes in the body.