Instead of an editorial, in this issue of Environmental Values the publishers have been invited to comment on a local environmental issue that currently looms large in our Scottish island backyard. Divided from mainland Scotland by fifty miles of sea, the Outer Hebrides are a peripheral part of the already peripheral Scottish Highlands - a region of low production, and high demands on thinly spread national services. Fifteen years ago our economic salvation was to be the creation of the largest (...) stone quarry in Europe, to supply aggregate for the construction industry in South-east England and mainland Europe. After two Public Inquiries and much legal wrangling this proposal was eventually laid to rest. Its eventual defeat was at least partly due to the united front against the proposed development that was maintained by a coalition of virtually all the environmental NGOs that function north of the English border.1In environmental terms, aggregates, the landscape damage caused by quarrying, and the connection with road-building and increasing motor traffic are readily characterised as a 'bad thing', but the latest threat to the Scottish and island landscape is a less clear-cut environmental bad. The prospect of large-scale windfarms, and the associated transmission lines that would be required to deliver electric power from them to markets in the South, is one that has already divided environmental groups; with Friends of the Earth generally in favour, Greenpeace equivocal, and landscape- and wildlife-oriented NGOs against. For wind energy has long been promoted as a 'green' alternative to damaging fossil fuels and dangerous nuclear power, and its proponents argue that we should not be deflected on merely aesthetic grounds from grasping a technology that could save the world from climate catastrophe. This division of the environmental camp inevitably makes it more likely the developers will prevail. As with the superquarry, scale is part of the problem: the proposed developments are massive - mouth-wateringly so to local councils and landowners attracted by the prospect of multi-million pound revenues, devastatingly so to the majority of local residents and to the many walkers and climbers who visit the Highlands and Islands for their majestic and unspoilt scenery.The following extracts from recent press releases by the John Muir Trust and the local campaigning group Moorlands Without Turbines, and the developers' mock-up of thevisual impact of one of the local proposals above, will convey to readers the scale of proposals for Scottish windfarms, the strength of local feeling and the real dilemmas faced by NGOs in developing a coherent response.... targets set in the [renewable energy] strategy for Highland Council area are greater than those of the Scottish Executive for the whole of Scotland ... The Scottish Executive has a renewable energy target for 2020 which requires another 3,400 MW in Scotland. The Highland Council Renewable Strategy sets a target of over 4,000 MW from new renewable energy.The Highland Council targets do not seem to have been strategically set in relation to factors outside the Highlands but look as if they are based on the maximum possible installation based on the most liberal planning regime.2Scottish Executive Minister Allan Wilson has given the first official statistics on the number of objections for the proposed North Lewis Peatlands Windfarm - the world's largest onshore windfarm.In a response to written questions by Green MSP Shiona Baird, Mr. Wilson states: 'Prior to Comhairle nan Eilean Siar [Western Isles Council] submitting its consultation response the Executive recorded six responses in support and 2,713 objections to the Lewis Windpower proposal from Western Isles residents. Since Western Isles Council submitted their consultation response, the Executive has recorded 11 responses of support and 1,860 objections to the Lewis Windpower proposal, from Western Isles residents'In total a massive 6,131 objections have been received of which 4,573 come from local people. The figures show that for every person who wrote to support the scheme from the islands 269 people wrote and objected.Lewis based Moorland without Turbines chairperson Catriona Campbell, who is campaigning against the joint AMEC and British Energy project said:'At last we have official confirmation of the unprecedented level of protest against this industrialisation of our land. Till now our local MSP and Council have refused to acknowledge the sentiment of the island. The Council voted in favour of it against the wishes of those who will be affected. Every community council and councillor in North Lewis, the area directly affected, has voted resoundingly against it.'...The proposed 234 turbines, each higher than the Forth Rail bridge, and 167km of new road would cover moorland that is protected by European Law for its wildlife interest, including international populations of species such as Golden Eagles, Red-throated Divers and Golden Plovers.3The Lingerabay Superquarry saga was a rich source for academic case-studies; we confidently predict that we shall hear more about the 'green energy' debate in the pages of this journal. (shrink)

This project examined the ethical issues faced by academics and professionals in the Humanities. We conducted focus groups to gather information about the ethical concerns in these fields and used the qualitative data arising from the discussions to create a taxonomy that represents the structure of ethical issues in the Humanities. A key implication of our findings is that while the focus of ethics research and interventions has been primarily on the sciences and engineering, academics and professionals in other fields (...) also encounter some unique critical ethical dilemmas that require further research and methods of intervention. (shrink)

In this paper, I analyze multiple aspects of how gender norms pervaded the 2016 election, from the way Clinton and Trump announced their presidency to the way masculinity and femininity were policed throughout the election. Examples include Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and Gary Johnson. I also consider how some women who support Trump reacted to allegations about sexual harassment. The difference between running for President as a man and running for President as a woman makes all the (...) difference in the world. (OPEN ACCESS). (shrink)

Linguists, biological anthropologists, and cognitive scientists come together in this book to explore the origins and early evolution of phonology, syntax, and semantics. They consider the nature of pre- and proto-linguistic communication, the internal and external triggers that led to its transformation into language, and whether and how language may be considered to have evolved after its inception. Evidence is drawn from many domains, including computer simulations of language emergence, the songs of finches, problem-solving abilities in monkeys, sign language, and (...) the structure of languages today. (shrink)

The essays in this interdisciplinary collection share the conviction that modern western paradigms of knowledge and reality are gender-biased.

Recently, the theory theory has led to much interesting research. However, this is the first book to look at the theory in extensive detail and to systematically contrast it with other theories.

This paper argues that, by construing emotion as epistemologically subversive, the Western tradition has tended to obscure the vital role of emotion in the construction of knowledge. The paper begins with an account of emotion that stresses its active, voluntary, and socially constructed aspects, and indicates how emotion is involved in evaluation and observation. It then moves on to show how the myth of dispassionate investigation has functioned historically to undermine the epistemic authority of women as well as other social (...) groups associated culturally with emotion. Finally, the paper sketches some ways in which the emotions of underclass groups, especially women, may contribute to the development of a critical social theory. (shrink)

Using path-breaking discoveries of cognitive science, Mark Johnson argues that humans are fundamentally imaginative moral animals, challenging the view that morality is simply a system of universal laws dictated by reason. According to the Western moral tradition, we make ethical decisions by applying universal laws to concrete situations. But Johnson shows how research in cognitive science undermines this view and reveals that imagination has an essential role in ethical deliberation. Expanding his innovative studies of human reason in Metaphors (...) We Live By and The Body in the Mind, Johnson provides the tools for more practical, realistic, and constructive moral reflection. (shrink)

David Albert explains why we can typically influence the future but not the past by appealing to an initial low-entropy state of the universe. And he argues that in the rare cases where we can influence the past, we cannot use this influence to knowingly gain future rewards: so it does not constitute control. I introduce an important new case in which Albert's account implies we can not only influence the past but control it: a case where our actions in (...) the present are reliably correlated with several events in the present and past. To deal with such cases, we need to appeal to epistemic conditions on deliberation: being agents requires our decisions being epistemically undetermined at the time we make them. In a world with the past-hypothesis, this implies that deliberation will typically come prior to decision. Once deliberation in this direction is established, correlations towards the past cannot then be exploited for control. To explain why we cannot effectively control the past, we need to appeal to deliberation, whether as part of a defence of Albert's account, or used independently to explain the asymmetry of control. (shrink)

This is a bold and controversial feminist, philosophical critique of postmodernism. While providing a brief and accessible introduction to postmodernist feminist thought, Enlightened Women is also a unique defence of realism and enlightenment philosophy. The first half of the book covers an analysis of some of the most influential postmodernist theorists, such as Luce Irigaray and Judith Butler. In the second half Alison Assiter advocates a return to modernism in feminism. She argues, against the current orthodoxy, that there can (...) be a distinction between "sex" and "gender". For students trying to pick their way through the maze of literature in the area of postmodernist feminism, Enlightened Women is a concise guide to contemporary thought - as well as a radical contribution to the debate. (shrink)

Kierkegaard is no doubt a philosopher whose focus is inwardness and irreducible individuality. On the surface, he therefore seems to have little to teach us about the sphere of the political: not only was this dimension never explicitly addressed in the writings of the Danish philosopher, but also the positions he took with regard to such a domain where always marked by a strong critical attitude. Moreover, he appeared to be a conservative with regard to any movement towards democratization and (...) equality, opposing liberal democracy as well as socialism, while not refraining from taking up explicitly misogynous positions. With this in mind, one could easily dismiss Kierkegaardian philosophy as exclusively relevant to the private domain of individual existence and irremediably unable to speak to wider concerns such as those encountered in the public dimension. However, in spite of his emphasis on singularity, or perhaps precisely because of it, over the years Kierkegaard's philosophy has given rise to interpretations that recognise its relevance for the political. For instance, the crucial importance of such ideas as self-choice, earnestness and subjective passion are easily imported from the individual sphere into the realm of the political, coming to have a bearing on notions such as responsibility and commitment. In addition, Kierkegaard's accent on the irreducibility of the individual to the universal resonates interestingly in those forms of thinking that, from the margins, call into question the domination of an exclusionary model of reason. Furthermore, his ethical writings on love are directly relevant to the political sphere. This book seeks to draw out, from a range of perspectives, some of the ways in which Kierkegaard's ideas are not only relevant, but highly significant for political thought. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Negotiating Maternal IdentityAdrienne Rich’s Legacy for Inquiry into the Political-Philosophical Dimensions of Pregnancy and ChildbirthCandace JohnsonGiving birth has been described as the crossing of an imaginary threshold, which separates an independent maternal self from some sort of dual or subordinate existence. The metaphor of a border has also been employed to demonstrate this transformation, which may be liberating, oppressive, or some complex combination thereof (Weir 2006; Martinez 2004). What (...) happens, in psychic and sociopolitical terms, in the journey across this border? Can a woman, as an independent, autonomous being, preserve her identity, her selfhood as a mother? Is the transition to motherhood an expression of culture or nature? The answers to these questions are infinitely complex, yet are at the core of philosophical, political, and personal explorations of the maternal. Central to these explorations are academic critiques and personal responses to the biomedical mediation of the transition to motherhood. For some women, medical intervention in pregnancy and childbirth is inherently oppressive, whereas for other women such intervention is a marker of privilege. In a groundbreaking volume published in 1998, Margaret Lock and Patricia Kaufert argue that women respond to different biomedical interventions in pragmatic ways, which reflect their lived experiences. They claim that “it is more appropriate to understand women’s responses in medical settings as reflecting their daily experiences as part of a domestic group, a community, or a society” (19). [End Page 65]I would like to advance this analysis by suggesting that women respond to biomedical intervention in pregnancy and childbirth in ways that reflect not simply their practical needs and realities, but important details about inequality and identity. Women’s relative degrees of power and agency in society are expressed through their preferences for care during pregnancy and childbirth. In addition, and in connection with the (structural) dynamics of inequality, these preferences reflect the complexities of shifting, negotiated, maternal identities. In order to consider the ways in which women negotiate maternal identity through their preferences concerning care during pregnancy and childbirth, I will examine the contributions of Adrienne Rich, which effectively serve as the foundation for this and countless other areas of women’s and gender studies. In Of Woman Born, Rich dedicates two full chapters to childbirth, and explains in these chapters that the institution of childbirth has come to dominate and eclipse women’s experiences. Moreover, the patriarchal circumscription of childbirth is reinforced by the isolation of childbirth (and motherhood) from other life events. Rich demonstrates these problems through the metaphor of “giving birth to oneself ” (29), which has (at least) two distinct meanings: self actualization and self replacement.My investigation into these meanings will include an examination of Rich’s philosophical treatment of pregnancy and childbirth and an assessment of the sociopolitical implications of both conceptions of “giving birth to oneself.” I will then subject these conceptions to empirical testing, as Rich insists. Such empirical testing is crucial because the social and political dimensions of the institutions of childbirth and motherhood are complex and differ from one context to the next. Rich explains that[t]o hold power over others means that the powerful is permitted a kind of short-cut through the complexity of human personality. He does not have to enter intuitively into the souls of the powerless, or to hear what they are saying in their many languages, including the language of silence. Colonialism exists by virtue of this short-cut—how else could so few live among so many and understand so little?(65)This essay will avoid a similar shortcut often taken by theorists, which builds philosophical arguments without empirical support. The empirical cases to be considered in the context of philosophical debate include Canada, Honduras, and Cuba, and details of each case will be drawn from extensive interview data from a larger empirical study.1 In the Canadian context, resistance to the constraining effects of motherhood as institution is reduced to resistance to medical regulation of pregnancy and childbirth. The benefit indicated by this resistance is that women have found ways to expand their range of options and reinterpret the birthing event, thereby integrating it into other realms [End Page 66... (shrink)

The genetic modification of pigs as a source of transplantable organs is one of several possible solutions to the chronic organ shortage. This paper describes existing ethical tensions in xenotransplantation (XTx) that argue against pursuing it. Recommendations for lifelong infectious disease surveillance and notification of close contacts of recipients are in tension with the rights of human research subjects. Parental/guardian consent for pediatric xenograft recipients is in tension with a child’s right to an open future. Individual consent to transplant is (...) in tension with public health threats that include zoonotic diseases. XTx amplifies concerns about justice in organ transplantation and could exacerbate existing inequities. The prevention of infectious disease in source animals is in tension with the best practices of animal care and animal welfare, requiring isolation, ethologically inappropriate housing, and invasive reproductive procedures that would severely impact the well-being of intelligent social creatures like pigs. (shrink)

The Beloved Self is about the holy grail of moral philosophy, an argument against egoism that proves that we all have reasons to be moral. Part One introduces three different versions of egoism. Part Two looks at attempts to prove that egoism is false, and shows that even the more modest arguments that do not try to answer the egoist in her own terms seem to fail. But in part Three, Hills defends morality and develops a new problem for egoism, (...) an epistemological problem. She shows that it is not epistemically rational to believe the most plausible versions of egoism. The first part of the book will be most relevant to those interested in moral theory, as it contains detailed discussions of recent interpretations of virtue ethics and especially of Kant's moral theory. The second and third part of the book turn to epistemology, particularly moral epistemology, and include an account of the relationship between knowledge and action, a new theory of moral understanding, and a discussion of the epistemically rational response to various kinds of disagreement. Hills also defends a new account of virtue and of morally worthy action. (shrink)

Obesity is one of several targets of public health efforts related to availability of and access to healthy foods. The tension between individual food decisions and social contexts of food production, preparation, and consumption makes targeting individuals deeply problematic and yet tempting. Such individualization of responsibility for obesity and nutrition is unethical and impractical. This article warns public health campaigns against giving into the temptation to individualize responsibility, and presents an argument for why they should proceed with all due caution, (...) advising providers and public health organizations to keep in mind structural factors rather than aiming at individuals. (shrink)

This paper problematises the ways women’s leadership has been understood in relation to male leadership rather than on its own terms. Focusing specifically on ethical leadership, we challenge and politicise the symbolic status of women in leadership by considering the practice of New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. In so doing, we demonstrate how leadership ethics based on feminised ideals such as care and empathy are problematic in their typecasting of women as being simply the other to men. We apply (...) different strategies of mimesis for developing feminist leadership ethics that does not derive from the masculine. This offers a radical vision for leadership that liberates the feminine and women’s subjectivities from the masculine order. It also offers a practical project for changing women’s working lives through relationality, intercorporeality, collective agency and ethical openness with the desire for fundamental political transformation in the ways in which women can lead. (shrink)

Abstract: If anger is the emotion of injustice, and if most injustices have prominent epistemic dimensions, then where is the anger in epistemic injustice? Despite the question my task is not to account for the lack of attention to anger in epistemic injustice discussions. Instead, I argue that a particular texture of transformative anger – a knowing resistant anger – offers marginalized knowers a powerful resource for countering epistemic injustice. I begin by making visible the anger that saturates the silences (...) that epistemic injustices repeatedly manufacture and explain the obvious: silencing practices produce angry experiences. I focus on tone policing and tone vigilance to illustrate the relationship between silencing and angry knowledge management. Next, I use María Lugones’s pluralist account of anger to bring out the epistemic dimensions of knowing resistant anger in a way that also calls attention to their histories and felt textures. The final section draws on feminist scholarship about the transformative power of angry knowledge to suggest how it might serve as a resource for resisting epistemic injustice. (shrink)

I argue that miscarriage, referred to by poet Susan Stewart as “the event that was nothing,” is a liminal event along four distinct and inter-related dimensions: parenthood, procreation, death, and induced abortion. It is because of this liminality that miscarriage has been both poorly addressed in our society, and enrolled in larger debates over women's reproduction and responsibility for reproduction, both conceptually and legally. If miscarriage’s liminality were better understood, if miscarriage itself were better theorized, perhaps it would not so (...) easily be enrolled in these other debates to the detriment of women who miscarry, and their families. However, its very liminality and the fact that it is enrolled in these debates sheds light on the complicated network of concepts within which miscarriage lies. (OPEN ACCESS AT URL). (shrink)

In Feminist, Queer, Crip Alison Kafer imagines a different future for disability and disabled bodies. Challenging the ways in which ideas about the future and time have been deployed in the service of compulsory able-bodiedness and able-mindedness, Kafer rejects the idea of disability as a pre-determined limit. She juxtaposes theories, movements, and identities such as environmental justice, reproductive justice, cyborg theory, transgender politics, and disability that are typically discussed in isolation and envisions new possibilities for crip futures and feminist/queer/crip (...) alliances. This bold book goes against the grain of normalization and promotes a political framework for a more just world. (shrink)

You might think a simple “No” would suffice as an answer. But there are features of Kant’s ethics that appear to be strikingly similar to virtue oriented views, so striking that some Kantians themselves have argued that Kant’s ethics in fact shares these features with virtue ethics. In what follows, I will argue against this view, though along the way I will acknowledge the features of Kant’s view that make it appear more like a kind of virtue ethics than it (...) really is. My plan is to first set out the distinctive features of what is nowadays called “virtue ethics”, those features that make it a genuine alternative to other normative theories. I then consider the features Kant’s view might share in common with virtue ethics and the case for saying that it is, therefore, fundamentally the same sort of theory. I follow these two sections with an argument against this position. I want to warn you at the outset, however, that my argument itself will be quite unsurprising, since it is an argument that has been central to the way in which most philosophers have understood Kant’s ethics. Any novelty I can claim here is in my account of what makes virtue ethics a genuine alternative to other normative theories, and my defense of this argument against those, in particular Barbara Herman, who have apparently found the argument unpersuasive. (shrink)

This book examines the ways that Heidegger, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Nancy adopt and reconfigure the Kantian understanding of "aesthetic presentation." In Kant, "aesthetic presentation" is understood in a technical sense as a specific mode of experience within a typology of different spheres of experience. This study argues that Heidegger, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Nancy generalize the elements of this specific mode of experience so that the aesthetic attitude and the vocabulary used by Kant to describe it are brought to bear on things in (...) general. The book goes beyond documenting the well-known influence of Kant's Critique of Judgment , however, to open up a new way of approaching some of the central issues in post-Kantian thought—including why it is that art, the art work, and the aesthetic are still available as a vehicle of critique even, or especially, after Auschwitz. It shows that a genealogy of contemporary theory needs to look at the question of presentation, which has arguably been a question that has worried philosophy from its very beginning. (shrink)

Standpoint theory is an explicitly political as well as social epistemology. It’s distinctive features are commitment to understand the social locations that shape the epistemic capacities and resources of individuals in structural terms, and a recognition that those who are marginalized within hierarchically structured systems of social differentiation are often epistemically advantaged. In some crucial domains they know more and know better as a contingent function of their situated experience and knowledge. This “inversion thesis” counters the alignment of social with (...) epistemic privilege. (shrink)

This Element introduces the philosophy of Frances Power Cobbe (1822-1904), a very well-known moral theorist, advocate of animal welfare and women's rights, and critic of Darwinism and atheism in the Victorian era. After locating Cobbe's achievements within nineteenth-century British culture, this Element examines her duty-based moral theory of the 1850s and then her 1860s accounts of duties to animals, women's rights, and the mind and unconscious thought. From the 1870s, in critical response to Darwin's evolutionary ethics, Cobbe put greater moral (...) weight on the emotions, especially sympathy. She now criticised atheism for undermining morality, emphasised women's duties to develop virtues of character, and recommended treating animals with sympathy and compassion. The Element links Cobbe's philosophical arguments to her campaigns for women's rights and against vivisection, brings in critical responses from her contemporaries, explains how she became omitted from the history of philosophy, and shows the lasting importance of her work. (shrink)

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is an urgent, global threat to public health. The development and implementation of effective measures to address AMR is vitally important but presents important ethical questions. This is a policy area requiring further sustained attention to ensure that policies proposed in National Action Plans on AMR are ethically acceptable and preferable to alternatives that might be fairer or more effective, for instance. By ethically analysing case studies of coercive actions to address AMR across countries, we can better (...) inform policy in a context-specific manner. In this article, I consider an example of coercive antimicrobial stewardship policy in Canada, namely restrictions on livestock farmers' access to certain antibiotics for animal use without a vet's prescription. I introduce and analyse two ethical arguments that might plausibly justify coercive action in this case: the harm principle and a duty of collective easy rescue. In addition, I consider the factors that might generally limit the application of those ethical concepts, such as challenges in establishing causation or evidencing the scale of the harm to be averted. I also consider specifics of the Canadian context in contrast to the UK and Botswana as example settings, to demonstrate how context-specific factors might mean a coercive policy that is ethically justified in one country is not so in another. (shrink)