Environmental ethicists have not reached a consensus about whether or not individuals who contribute to climate change have a moral obligation to reduce their personal greenhouse gas emissions. In this paper, I side with those who think that such individuals do have such an obligation by appealing to the concept of integrity. I argue that adopting a political commitment to work toward a collective solution to climate change—a commitment we all ought to share—requires also adopting a personal commitment to reduce (...) one’s emissions. On these grounds, individuals who contribute to climate change have a prima facie moral duty to lower their personal greenhouse gas emissions. After presenting this argument and supporting each of its premises, I defend it from two major lines of objection: skepticism about integrity’s status as a virtue and concerns that the resulting moral duty would be too demanding to be morally required. I then consider the role that an appeal to integrity could play in galvanizing the American public to take personal and political action regarding climate change. (shrink)

Supererogatory acts, those which are praiseworthy but not obligatory, have become a significant topic in contemporary moral philosophy, primarily because morally supererogatory acts have proven difficult to reconcile with other important aspects of normative ethics. However, despite the similarities between ethics and epistemology, epistemic supererogation has received very little attention. In this paper, I aim to further the discussion of supererogation by arguing for the existence of epistemically supererogatory acts and considering the potential implications of their existence. First, I offer (...) a brief account of moral supererogation and how morally supererogatory acts generate a strong intuition that a similar phenomenon should exist in epistemology. Afterward, I argue for the existence of epistemically supererogatory acts by examining five cases where an epistemic activity appears to be epistemically supererogatory. Epistemic supererogation appears to provide the best explanation for our considered judgments about the individuals’ behavior in these different cases. Finally, I consider how epistemic supererogation might impact the contemporary study of epistemology, particularly with regard to how we appraise certain epistemic duties. (shrink)

An orthodox view in marketing ethics is that it is morally impermissible to market goods to specially vulnerable populations in ways that take advantage of their vulnerabilities. In his signature article “Marketing and the Vulnerable,” Brenkert (Bus Ethics Q Ruffin Ser 1:7–20, 1998) provided the first substantive defense of this position, one which has become a well-established view in marketing ethics. In what follows, we throw new light on marketing to the vulnerable by critically evaluating key components of Brenkert’s general (...) arguments. Specifically, we contend that Brenkert has failed to offer us any persuasive reasons to think that it is immoral to market to the vulnerable in ways that take advantage of their vulnerability. Although Brenkert does highlight the fact that the specially vulnerable are at greater risk of being harmed by already immoral marketing practices (e.g., deception, manipulation), he fails to establish that the specially vulnerable are a unique moral category of market clients or that there are special moral standards that apply to them. Moreover, even if Brenkert’s position were theoretically defensible, the practical implications of his position are far less tenable than he suggests. If our criticisms are sound, then Brenkert and others who endorse his position are seriously mistaken regarding how one can permissibly market products to vulnerable populations, and, in addition, they have improperly categorized certain morally permissible marketing practices as being immoral. (shrink)

This book examines the link between population growth and environmental impact and explores the implications of this connection for the ethics of procreation. In light of climate change, species extinctions, and other looming environmental crises, Trevor Hedberg argues that we have a collective moral duty to halt population growth to prevent environmental harms from escalating. This book assesses a variety of policies that could help us meet this moral duty, confronts the conflict between protecting the welfare of future people (...) and upholding procreative freedom, evaluates the ethical dimensions of individual procreative decisions, and sketches the implications of population growth for issues like abortion and immigration. It is not a book of tidy solutions: Hedberg highlights some scenarios where nothing we can do will enable us to avoid treating some people unjustly. In such scenarios, the overall objective is to determine which of our available options will minimize the injustice that occurs. This book will be of great interest to those studying environmental ethics, environmental policy, climate change, sustainability, and population policy. (shrink)

Population ethics is the subfield of philosophy that focuses on the moral aspects of how actions affect who exists in a particular population and what quality of life they have. The choices regarding what policies are adopted in response to climate change will affect the identities of those who exist in the future, the size of future populations, and the quality of life that future people will have. This chapter examines the nonidentity problem, various theoretical outlooks on population ethics, some (...) recent policy proposals aimed at reducing fertility, and the relationship between population reduction and the impacts of climate change. After summarizing the relevant issues, the relevance of the discourse to climate policy is highlighted, and points of consensus and dissensus are noted. Disagreement on some of the key theoretical questions in population ethics is significant and poses a challenge for deriving meaningful conclusions about climate policy. Fortunately, emerging points of consensus on other aspects of climate policy and its relationship to population provide reasons to think moral decision-making about these matters is far from hopeless. (shrink)

An increasing recognition over the past five decades of the importance of patients’ autonomy and the right to be able to choose to limit medical treatment at the end of life has led to the development of a number of documents related to advance care planning, including the advance directive, medical power of attorney, and portable orders for life-sustaining treatment (POLST). While these documents are important aspects of advance care planning, without having goals-ofcare conversations, a specific plan, and necessary supports (...) to achieve these goals, the documents alone offer a false promise. Healthcare professionals must be trained on how to have indepth goals-of-care conversations with patients and their families, and effectively document the decisions. Advance care planning needs to be viewed as a process that must continue as the patient’s health status, social support system, and living environment change. Designating a healthcare representative who participates in goals-of-care conversations and can work with the healthcare team to make “just in time” decisions about care reduces the burden and stress on friends and family. In this article we discuss the strengths and limitations of advance directives, medical power of attorney forms, and POLST forms; propose concrete changes to optimize the effectiveness of each; and present a comprehensive approach to advance care planning that we hope will improve care for those nearing the end of life, and ensure that their wishes and goals to have or to limit treatment are more consistently honored. (shrink)

‘Doing gender’ has often been used as the theoretical entrance for research on gender issues in the social sciences. However, research has been accused of using the concept in a ‘ceremonial’ way, treating gendered structures as static. In response to this claim, this article investigates the process of ‘hierarchization’, or how gendered and racial hierarchies occur through everyday practices and political and economic contexts in the rural, wild berry industry in contemporary Sweden. The industry has gone through a thorough transformation, (...) from irregular and small-scale production to regularized and large-scale production, which has affected the intersection of gender and racial structures. In particular, Thai women have gone from being active participants both as entrepreneurs and as workers, to working under native men, or being passive receivers of men’s remittances. The mechanisms behind the intersection of gender and racial structures are a complex interplay of economic, social and institutional factors, which act on nested global, national and translocal scales. (shrink)

Journal Name: SATS Issue: Ahead of print.

This paper addresses the plausibility of practical apatheism: an attitude of apathy or indifference about philosophical questions pertaining to God’s existence grounded in the belief that they lack practical significance. Since apatheism is rarely discussed, we begin by clarifying the position and explaining how it differs from some of the other positions one may take with regard to the existence of God. Afterward, we examine six distinct objections to practical apatheism. Each of these objections posits a different reason for thinking (...) that belief in God is practically significant. Five of these objections prove unsuccessful. The sixth, which appeals to the practical significance of belief in God with respect to our fates in the afterlife, is more promising but nonetheless encounters significant obstacles. Since the success of this objection is controversial, whether we have good grounds to reject practical apatheism should be similarly controversial, and the view should be given further examination. (shrink)

Many environmental philosophers have argued that there is an obligation for individuals to reduce their individual carbon footprints. However, few of them have addressed whether this obligation would entail a corresponding duty to limit one’s family size. In this paper, I examine several reasons that one might view procreative acts as an exception to a more general duty to reduce one’s individual greenhouse gas emissions. I conclude that none of these reasons are convincing. Thus, if there is an obligation to (...) reduce one’s unnecessary greenhouse gas emissions, then people should also limit the size of their families when they have the means to do so. (shrink)

Travis Rieder's Toward a Small Family Ethic confronts the effects of population growth and addresses what individual procreative obligations might follow from it. In this review, I summarize the main arguments that Rieder deploys to defend his position that those with large ecological footprints morally ought to follow a small family ethic. I express sympathy with some of his claims and praise the book's accessibility, but its short length inevitably means that some important issues are omitted or given only superficial (...) treatment. I highlight a few of those issues at the end of the review. (shrink)

The Asymmetry in procreative ethics consists of two claims. The first is that it is morally wrong to bring into existence a child who will have an abjectly miserable life; the second is that it is permissible not to bring into existence a child who will enjoy a very happy life. In this paper, I distinguish between two variations of the Asymmetry. The first is the Abstract Asymmetry, the idealized variation of the Asymmetry that many philosophers have been trying to (...) solve. The second is the Real-World Asymmetry, a non-idealized variation that applies explicitly to cases of ordinary human reproduction. I argue that the Real-World Asymmetry can be defended by properly acknowledging the general wrongness of causing someone else to suffer, the limits of what morality can reasonably demand of us, and the significance of respecting women’s autonomy. I then argue that the Abstract Asymmetry is indefensible. (shrink)

In Animal Ethics in Context, Clare Palmer tries to harmonise two competing approaches to animal ethics. One focuses on the morally relevant capacities that animals possess. The other is the Laissez-Faire Intuition (LFI): the claim that we have duties to assist domesticated animals but should (at least generally) leave wild animals alone. In this paper, I critique the arguments that Palmer offers in favour of the No-Contact LFI - the view that we have (prima facie) duties not to harm wild (...) animals but no duties to assist them. I argue that Palmer's endorsement of the No-Contact LFI is unwarranted. Her arguments actually provide strong reasons to endorse what I call the Gradient View - a position that posits weak presumptive duties to assist wild animals that become stronger as our relations with the animals grow stronger. (shrink)

Online education has become an essential component of education. Thus, several factors, such as the student’s learning strategy and motivation, generally contribute to their academic success. This study investigates the relationship between learning strategies, motivation, and online learning environment among 150 first-year college students. Employing correlational design, the statistical findings of the study reveal that the r coefficient of 0.59 indicates a moderate positive correlation between the variables. The p-value of 0.00, which is less than 0.05, leads to the decision (...) to reject the null hypothesis. Hence, a significant relationship exists between learning strategies, motivation, and the online learning environment. (shrink)

Within the Givenness Hierarchy framework of Gundel, Hedberg, and Zacharski (1993), lexical items included in referring forms are assumed to conventionally encode two kinds of information: conceptual information about the speaker’s intended referent and procedural information about the assumed cognitive status of that referent in the mind of the addressee, the latter encoded by various determiners and pronouns. This article focuses on effects of underspecification of cognitive status, establishing that, although salience and accessibility play an important role in reference (...) processing, the Givenness Hierarchy itself is not a hierarchy of degrees of salience/accessibility, contrary to what has often been assumed. We thus show that the framework is able to account for a number of experimental results in the literature without making additional assumptions about form-specific constraints associated with different referring forms. (shrink)

Despite its potential implications for the objectivity of scientific knowledge, the claim that “scientific instruments are perspectival” has received little critical attention. I show that this claim is best understood as highlighting the dependence of instruments on different perspectives. When closely analyzed, instead of constituting a novel epistemic challenge, this dependence can be exploited to mount novel strategies for resolving two old epistemic problems: conceptual relativism and theory-ladeness. The novel content of this article consists in articulating and developing these strategies (...) by introducing two fine-grained notions of perspectives as the key units of analysis: “broad perspectives” and “narrow perspectives.”. (shrink)

Croatia is a transitional society in that it is a country emerging from a socialist command economy toward a market-based economy with ensuing structural changes of a social and political nature—some extending into the healthcare system. A legacy from our past is that, until now, Croatian healthcare institutions have had no real experience with clinical ethics support services. When clinical cases arise presenting complex ethical dilemmas in treatment options, the challenges presented to the medical team are substantial. The case described (...) below recently occurred on a ward in a university hospital in Croatia. An unexpected request from the patient’s parents created a number of issues that needed to be addressed by the medical team, which was made more difficult by the lack of clinical ethics support services. Such cases press the question currently being debated as to what type of ethics support services would be suitable for Croatia and why. (shrink)

In this essay I present some of my thoughts on the issue of boundaries in the professional relationship between service users and social workers. As a graduate student of social work, I had an opportunity to discuss ethical dilemmas in an international perspective in one of my courses. A guest professor, who provided international perspectives, was Prof. Kim Strom from UNC at Chapel Hill in North Carolina, USA. The lectures offered a fresh perspective that raised many questions about thick and (...) thin boundaries in social work – especially when approaching social work by following prevailing guidelines for social work in Slovenia requiring us to co-create solutions through dialogue with service users, keeping in mind that service users are actually the ones who are the experts from experience. In this way, the working relationship seeks to foster a sense of partnership between social workers and service users. In this essay I would like to challenge the idea of rigid boundaries in social work and explore the possibility of fluid boundaries, keeping in mind that boundaries should reflect their main purpose, which I believe is to protect human dignity. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to investigate human spatiality and perception in general, with the experience of adventure sports as its background. These activities highlight especially our strong relationship with the world when we consider the specific way in which the environment participates in the development of human potential. We first analyse the notions of risk and instability as important elements in adventure sports. Then we explore the notion of experience and spatiality, considering the way in which we establish (...) our relationship with the world. The theoretical background is found in the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and Bachelard’s phenomenology of imagination to investigate perspectives of space among adventurers. We hold that more than a different range of corporeal techniques, adventure sports can teach us a way of interrogating and looking at the world. They require a peculiar sensibility that allows our body to experience the environment in favour of a corporeal wisdom. Alternative sports indicate the possibility that we have to build up different ways of inhabiting the world and comprehending it. (shrink)

Lack of vaccine confidence can contribute to drops in vaccination coverage and subsequent outbreaks of diseases like measles and polio. Low trust in vaccines is attributed to a combination of factors, including lack of understanding, vaccine scares, flawed policies, social media and mistrust of vaccine manufacturers, scientists and decision-makers. The COVID-19 crisis has laid bare societies’ vulnerability to new pathogens and the critical role of vaccines in containing this and future pandemics. It has also put science at the forefront of (...) the response, with several governments relying on academics to help shape policy and communicate with the public. Against this backdrop, protecting public trust in scientists and scientific output is arguably more important than ever. Yet, conflicts of interest in biomedical research remain ubiquitous and harmful, and measures to curb them have had limited success. There is also evidence of bias in industry-sponsored vaccine studies and academics are voicing concerns about the risks of working in a CoI prevalent research area. Here, we set out to challenge established thinking with regard to vaccine confidence, by shifting the gaze from a deficit in public understanding towards probity in research relationships and suggesting an alternative and perhaps complementary strategy for addressing vaccine mistrust. We argue that a concerted effort needs to be made to revisit the norms that undergird contemporary vaccine research, coupled with a willingness of all stakeholders to reimagine those relationships with an emphasis on demonstrating trustworthiness and probity. (shrink)

Aggregating snippets from the semantic memories of many individuals may not yield a good map of an individual’s semantic memory. The authors analyze the structure of semantic networks that they sampled from individuals through a new snowball sampling paradigm during approximately 6 weeks of 1-hr daily sessions. The semantic networks of individuals have a small-world structure with short distances between words and high clustering. The distribution of links follows a power law truncated by an exponential cutoff, meaning that most words (...) are poorly connected and a minority of words has a high, although bounded, number of connections. Existing aggregate networks mirror the individual link distributions, and so they are not scale-free, as has been previously assumed; still, there are properties of individual structure that the aggregate networks do not reflect. A simulation of the new sampling process suggests that it can uncover the true structure of an individual’s semantic memory. (shrink)

Authentic leadership has become increasingly important in the literature, attracting the attention of many scholars in the last decade. This study adopted an employee-centered perspective to guide its examination of the relationship between authentic leadership and individual performance and investigation of the sequential mediation of employees’ affective commitment and individual creativity. An analysis was conducted of data collected from 214 employees working in different business sectors. The results reveal a statistically significant positive relationship between authentic leadership and employees’ workplace performance, (...) which are both directly connected and indirectly linked through the two proposed psychosocial mechanisms. The findings thus indicate that authentic leadership reinforces workers’ emotional connection with their organizations, thereby increasing their individual creativity and, subsequently, promoting better on-the-job performance. This study presents new and significant results since, on the one hand, it relied on a sequential mediation analysis of variables and, on the other hand, integrated the four main constructs into a single model. The proposed model displays the chain of effects between authentic leadership, affective commitment, individual creativity, and employee workplace performance. Implications for organizational management are discussed. (shrink)

Flexibility in conceptual projection constitutes one of the most challenging issues in the embodiment and conceptual metaphor literatures. We sketch a theoretical proposal that places the burden of the explanation on attentional dynamics in interaction with mental models in working memory that are constrained to be maximally coherent. A test of this theory is provided in the context of the conceptual projection of time onto the domain of space. Participants categorized words presented at different spatial locations (back–front, left–right) as referring (...) to the past or to the future. Responses were faster when the irrelevant word location was congruent with the back–past, front–future metaphoric mapping. Moreover, when a new highly task-relevant spatial frame of reference was introduced, it changed the projection of past and future onto space in a way that was congruent with the new frame (past was now projected to left space and future to right space), as predicted by the theory. This study shows that there is substantial flexibility in conceptual projection and opens a venue to study metaphoric variation across tasks, individuals, and cultures as the result of attentional dynamics. (shrink)

Analytic study of ethical conviction and beliefs with reference to the Advaitavada of Śaṅkarācārya and Śuddhādvaitavāda of Vallabhachars.

Body ecology by cosmosis refers to the experience of immersion, or the incorporation of the elements of nature through a body practice, leisure or sport. In this article, we propose comprehensive u...

ResumenLa descortesía de Donald Trump ha causado preocupación en su país y en casi todo el planeta por los efectos geopolíticos que su discurso racista, xenofóbico y misógino podría tener en la política mundial (Wodak y Krzyżanowski, 2017). En América Latina, México ha sido blanco de su discurso ofensivo y esto ha generado respuestas de diferentes sectores de la sociedad. En este trabajo, nos concentramos en la respuesta que el diario La Jornada ha dado a los insultos y amenazas contra (...) los migrantes mexicanos y de otras nacionalidades desde su campaña electoral para presidente cuando amenazó con construir un muro entre Estados Unidos y México. Planteamos que aquí la descortesía es una práctica política de (auto)legitimación ideológica que amerita un estudio más allá de la construcción de la imagen social de los interlocutores individualmente porque, en este caso, se trata de una descortesía con implicaciones sociales, económicas y políticas para el diálogo internacional. Desde una perspectiva lingüística, interaccional y crítica (Bolívar, 2018, 2019) analizamos la situación, analizamos la situación entre México y EUA a través de los editoriales de La Jornada, concebidos como un espacio para el diálogo mediado por la prensa. Analizamos un corpus de editoriales que comprende de 2016 a 2020. El estudio revela cómo funciona la descortesía en la práctica política de Trump y la forma en que La Jornada responde en su rol de actor social. (shrink)

The language of ethics expertise has become particularly important in bioethics in light of efforts to establish the value of the clinical ethics consultation, to specify who is qualified to function as a clinical ethics consultant, and to characterize how one should evaluate whether or not a person is so qualified. Supporters and skeptics about the possibility of ethics expertise use the language of ethics expertise in ways that reflect competing views about what ethics expertise entails. We argue for clarity (...) in understanding the nature of expertise and ethics expertise. To be an ethics expert, we argue, is to be an expert in knowing what ought to be done. Any attempt to articulate expertise with respect to knowing what ought to be done must include an account of ethics that specifies the nature of moral truth and the means by which we access this truth or a theoretical account of ethics such that expertise in another domain is linked to knowing or being better at judging what ought to be done and the standards by which this “knowing” or “being better at judging” is determined. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our analysis for the literature on ethics expertise in CEC. We do think that there are clear domains in which a clinical ethics consultant might be expert but we are skeptical about the possibility that this includes ethics expertise. Clinical ethics consultants should not be referred to as ethics experts. (shrink)

Citizenship is no longer an exclusive relationship. Many people today are citizens of multiple countries, whether by birth, naturalization, or even through monetary means, with schemes fast-tracking citizenship applications from foreigners making large investments in the state. Moral problems surround each of those ways of acquiring a second citizenship, while retaining one's original citizenship. Multiple citizenship can also have morally problematic consequences for the coherence of collective decisions, for the constitution of the demos, and for global inequality. The phenomenon of (...) multiple citizenship and its ramifications remains understudied, despite its magnitude and political importance. In this innovative book, Ana Tanasoca explores these issues and shows how they could be avoided by unbundling the rights that currently come with citizenship and allocating them separately. It will appeal to scholars and students of normative political theory, citizenship, global justice, and migration in political science, law, and sociology. (shrink)

Fencing for the blind and visually impaired is an emerging sub-discipline of fencing that creates unusual conditions for meaning-making through interaction between embodied endowments and worldly affordances. With the rules of fencing slightly adjusted to the needs of the blindfolded participants – regardless of their sightedness – the discipline requires the fencers to engage in a duel by relying on other than visual cues. This article explores what an autoethnographic account of experiences of participation in fencing for the blind and (...) visually impaired brings to debates on the embodied, and specifically sensory difference. The discussion of these experiences intersects with debates on affect, affordance, and habit, with all three having important roles in related semiotic processes. Presented vignettes draw upon the author’s lived experiences of participation in fencing for the blind and visually impaired and are analyzed as part of a mixed-method autoethnographic study, accompanied by sensory methodologies, with a focus on an inquiry beyond the visual. The vignettes elucidate how we make sense of our surroundings through a complex engagement with the ecology of sensory and affective processes. In addition to exploring the role of affective and pre-conceptual aspects of our experiences, the article seeks to understand how semiosis occurs through both exposure to as well as the active pursuit of specific environmental signs available to us. The article also derives from biosemiotics to examine the complex relationship between meaning-making processes and habits. Finally, the autoethnographic account provides an insight into how we habituate the world and our embodied differences and thus enable meaning-making processes. (shrink)

In her recent book Gillian Brock argues that states’ legitimacy depends on their being part of a just state system that protects human rights. Here I discuss some practical limitations raised by Brock’s legitimacy framework: mainly, (1) the problematic real-world implications of such an account, and (2) the epistemic challenges that judgements inspired by this account would have to face, were we to proceed solely on the basis of it.

The structuralist reconstruction of the metabolic biochemistry here presented is a more complete and revised version than the one presented in Donolo, Federico & Lorenzano (2006). This version, as the previous one, continues with the reconstructive task initiated by César Lorenzano (2002), but advances further on those elements which remained pendent of reconstruction: applications subsequent to the paradigmatic one, for being these “too diversified and numerous” (p. 210).In line with which is said before, the objective of this new reconstruction is (...) to make the theoretical network of the biochemistry wider, in order to be able to capture the many successful applications (paradigmatic examples or exemplars) which appear in modern university textbooks. In order to accomplish this, major conceptual precisions are being introduced which will have repercussions in a modification and increased complexity of the fundamental law implicit in the text books, but still conserving the previous basic idea. Because of all this we can say that the present article goes further into the reconstruction task of the metabolic biochemistry theory. (shrink)

In my contribution to this symposium on Miriam McCormick's Believing Against the Evidence, I challenge her claim that true beliefs are not valuable for their own sake. I argue that positing that true beliefs have at least some non-instrumental value better explains our attitudes toward the pursuit of truth than her alternative view. McCormick offers a response in the next segment of the symposium.