Conscientious objection in healthcare has come under heavy criticism on two grounds recently, particularly regarding abortion provision. First, critics claim conscientious objection involves a refusal to provide a legal and beneficial procedure requested by a patient, denying them access to healthcare. Second, they argue the exercise of conscientious objection is based on unverifiable personal beliefs. These characteristics, it is claimed, disqualify conscientious objection in healthcare. Here, we defend conscientious objection in the context of abortion provision. We show that abortion has (...) a dubitable claim to be medically beneficial, is rarely clinically indicated, and that conscientious objections should be accepted in these circumstances. We also show that reliance on personal beliefs is difficult to avoid if any form of objection is to be permitted, even if it is based on criteria such as the principles and values of the profession or the scope of professional practice. (shrink)

William Simkulet has recently criticised Colgrove et al ’s defence against what they have called inconsistency arguments—arguments that claim opponents of abortion act in ways inconsistent with their underlying beliefs about human fetuses. Colgrove et al presented three objections to inconsistency arguments, which Simkulet argues are unconvincing. Further, he maintains that OAs who hold that the fetus is a person at conception fail to act on important issues such as the plight of frozen embryos, poverty and spontaneous abortion. Thus, they (...) are morally negligent. In response, we argue that Simkulet has targeted a very narrow group of OAs, and so his criticisms are inapplicable to most OAs. We then explain why his responses to each of Colgrove et al’s objections do not succeed, even for this restricted group. Finally, we note that Simkulet fails to provide evidence for his claims regarding OAs’ supposed failures to act, and we show that OAs veritably do invest resources into these important issues. We conclude that Colgrove et al ’s reasons for rejecting inconsistency arguments remain intact. (shrink)

Prabhpal Singh has recently defended a relational account of the difference in moral status between fetuses and newborns as a way of explaining why abortion is permissible and infanticide is not. He claims that only a newborn can stand in a parent–child relation, not a fetus, and this relation has a moral dimension that bestows moral value. We challenge Singh’s reasoning, arguing that the case he presents is unconvincing. We suggest that the parent–child relation is better understood as an extension (...) of an existing relationship formed during the gestational period. The change in this relation at birth is not sufficient to justify the radical change in moral status required to rule out infanticide while accepting the permissibility of abortion. Given that the moral status of orphans is also problematic under Singh’s account, we conclude that Singh has not shown that a newborn has greater moral worth than a fetus. (shrink)

The 14-day rule restricts the culturing of human embryos in vitro for the purposes of scientific research for no longer than 14 days. Since researchers recently developed the capability to exceed the 14-day limit, pressure to modify the rule has started to build. Sophia McCully argues that the limit should be extended to 28 days, listing numerous potential benefits of doing so. We contend that McCully has not engaged with the main reasons why the Warnock Committee set such a limit, (...) and these still remain valid. As a result, her case for an extension of the 14-day rule is not persuasive. (shrink)

Kyle van Oosterum and Emma Curran have recently argued that the impairment argument against abortion is weak and accomplishes little. They also claim that impairment fails to explain what makes giving a child fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) immoral, which is an important premise of the argument. Here, I explain that the impairment argument is not as weak as they believe. Further, I argue that impairment offers a superior explanation for what makes giving a child FAS immoral than their proposal based (...) on creative beneficence. (shrink)

Opponents of abortion are often described as ‘inconsistent’ (hypocrites) in terms of their beliefs, actions and/or priorities. They are alleged to do too little to combat spontaneous abortion, they should be adopting cryopreserved embryos with greater frequency and so on. These types of arguments—which we call ‘inconsistency arguments’—conform to a common pattern. Each specifies what consistent opponents of abortion would do (or believe), asserts that they fail to act (or believe) accordingly and concludes that they are inconsistent. Here, we show (...) that inconsistency arguments fail en masse. In short, inconsistency arguments typically face four problems. First, they usually fail to account for diversity among opponents of abortion. Second, they rely on inferences about consistency based on isolated beliefs shared by some opponents of abortion (and these inferences often do not survive once we consider other beliefs opponents of abortion tend to hold). Third, inconsistency arguments usually ignore the diverse ways in which opponents of abortion might act on their beliefs. Fourth, inconsistency arguments criticise groups of people without threatening their beliefs (eg, that abortion is immoral). Setting these problems aside, even supposing inconsistency arguments are successful, they hardly matter. In fact, in the two best-case scenarios—where inconsistency arguments succeed—they either encourage millions of people to make the world a (much) worse place (from the critic’s perspective) or promote epistemically and morally irresponsible practices. We conclude that a more valuable discussion would be had by focusing on the arguments made by opponents of abortion rather than opponents themselves. (shrink)

John Lennox published 2084 in 2020, several years prior to the unveiling of OpenAI’s ChatGPT to the world in November 2022. ChatGPT and its rivals such as Google’s Gemini displayed astonishing capa...

Florence Ashley has argued that requiring patients with gender dysphoria to undergo an assessment and referral from a mental health professional before undergoing hormone replacement therapy is unethical and may represent an unconscious hostility towards transgender people. We respond, first, by showing that Ashley has conflated the self-reporting of symptoms with self-diagnosis, and that this is not consistent with the standard model of informed consent to medical treatment. Second, we note that the model of informed consent involved in cosmetic surgery (...) resembles the model Ashley defends, and that psychological assessment and referral is recognised as an important aspect of such a model. Third, we suggest that the increased prevalence of psychiatric morbidity in the transgender population arguably supports the requirement of assessment and referral from a mental health professional prior to undergoing HRT. (shrink)

In their previous book,1 Samuel and Maureen Condic provided a comprehensive defence of the position that a human being's life begins at fertilisation. They briefly addressed the twinning argument,...

Volume 25, Issue 4, December 2019, Page 377-380.

Charles Camosy’s Losing Our Dignity is a concise and disturbing account of how our long held understanding of human equality, largely inherited from Christianity, is gradually being undermined by t...

A crucial question in reproductive ethics is whether a human being’s life begins at conception – if it does not, it is more difficult to argue that early embryos possess substantial moral status. I...

The rapid development of artificial womb technologies means that we must consider if and when it is permissible to kill the human subject of ectogestation—recently termed a ‘gestateling’ by Elizabeth Chloe Romanis—prior to ‘birth’. We describe the act of deliberately killing the gestateling as gestaticide, and argue that there are good reasons to maintain that gestaticide is morally equivalent to infanticide, which we consider to be morally impermissible. First, we argue that gestaticide is harder to justify than abortion, primarily because (...) the gestateling is completely independent of its biological parents. Second, we argue that gestaticide is morally equivalent to infanticide. To demonstrate this, we explain that gestatelings are born in a straightforward sense, which entails that killing them is infanticide. However, to strengthen our overall claim, we also show that if gestatelings are not considered to have been born, killing them is still equivalent to killing neonates with congenital anomalies and disabilities, which again is infanticide. We conclude by considering how our discussion of gestaticide has implications for the permissibility of withdrawing life-sustaining treatment from gestatelings. (shrink)

Florence Ashley has responded to our response to ‘Gatekeeping hormone replacement therapy for transgender patients is dehumanising.’ Ashley criticises some of our objections to their view that patients seeking hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for gender dysphoria should not have to undergo a prior psychological assessment. Here we clarify our objections, most importantly that concerning the parity between cosmetic surgery and the sort of intervention Ashley has in mind. Firstly, we show Ashley’s criticism of our comparison is insubstantial. We then examine (...) their comments regarding the analogy between abortion and HRT, and the language of informed consent. We also scrutinize the data upon which Ashley relies to defend the claim that informed consent without assessment always yields positive outcomes, finding this conclusion to be overstated. Finally, even if Ashley’s arguments were vindicated, the claim that the gatekeeping of HRT is motivated by hostility towards transgender people remains unsupported. (shrink)

We provide empirical examples to conceptually clarify some items on Firestone & Scholl’s (F&S’s) checklist, and to explain perceptual effects from an attentional and memory perspective. We also note that action and embodied cognition studies seem to be most susceptible to misattributing attentional and memory effects as perceptual, and identify four characteristics unique to action studies and possibly responsible for misattributions.

Michael A. PetersBeijing Normal UniversityMy deepest condolences to Pepe, Dom and Marcus and to Jim’s grandchildren. Tina and I spent a lot of time at the Marshall family home, often attending dinn...

Technological advances in veterinary medicine have produced considerable progress in the diagnosis and treatment of numerous diseases in animals. At the same time, veterinarians, veterinary technicians, and owners of animals face increasingly complex situations that raise questions about goals of care and correct or reasonable courses of action. These dilemmas are frequently controversial and can generate conflicts between clients and health care providers. In many ways they resemble the ethical challenges confronted by human medicine and that spawned the creation of (...) clinical ethics committees as a mechanism to analyze, discuss, and resolve disagreements. The staff of the North Carolina State University Veterinary Hospital, a specialty academic teaching institution, wanted to investigate whether similar success could be achieved in the tertiary care veterinary setting. We discuss the background and rationale for this method, as well as the approach that was taken to create a clinical ethics committee. (shrink)

A growing literature testifies to the persistence of place as an incorrigible aspect of human experience, identity, and morality. Place is a common ground for thought and action, a community of experienced particulars that avoids solipsism and universalism. It draws us into the philosophy of the ordinary, into familiarity as a form of knowledge, into the wisdom of proximity. Each of these essays offers a philosophy of place, and reminds us that such philosophies ultimately decide how we make, use, and (...) understand places, whether as accidents, instruments, or fields of care. (shrink)

This volume contains ten new essays on a priori knowledge by authors from Canada, the United States, Australia, & Europe Topics addressed include the nature, explanation, & indispensability of a priori knowledge, its connection with analytic truth, its place in mathematics, in logic, & in empirical theory, & the contribution of Kant & Quine to these topics. The focus is on twentieth-century contributions to these issues, but most essays also address earlier discussions at some length, & the essays that focus (...) on Kant also relate his views to more recent discussions. Contents: Introduction. A Rationalist Manifesto. Analyticity, Undeniability, & Truth. Analyticity & the A Priori. The Doubtful A Priori. Some Remarks on Indiscernibility. The Constitutive A Priori. Kant's A Priori Methods for Recognising Necessary Truths. EPR as A Priori Science. Gaps, Gluts, & Paradox. An Essay on Material Necessity. (shrink)

The relative importance of the Jones’ [Jones, T. M.: 1991, Academy of Management Review 16(2), 366–395] six components of moral intensity was measured using a conjoint experimental design. The most important components influencing ethical perceptions were: probability of effect, magnitude of consequences, and temporal immediacy. Contrary to previous research, overall social consensus was not an important factor. However, consumers exhibit distinctly different patterns in ethical evaluation, and for approximately 15% of respondents social consensus was the most important dimension.

Studying personal identity, the continuity and sameness of persons across lifetimes, is notoriously difficult and competing conceptualizations exist within philosophy and psychology. Personal reidentification, linking persons between points in time is a fundamental step in allocating merit and blame and assigning rights and privileges. Based on Nozick’s closest continuer theory we develop a theoretical framework that explicitly invites a meaningful empirical approach and offers a constructive, integrative solution to current disputes about appropriate experiments. Following Nozick, reidentification involves judging continuers on (...) a metric of continuity and choosing the continuer with the highest acceptable value on this metric. We explore both the metric and its implications for personal identity. Since James, academic theories have variously attributed personal identity to the continuity of memories, psychology, bodies, social networks, and possessions. In our experiments, we measure how participants weighted the relative contributions of these five dimensions in hypothetical fission accidents, in which a person was split into two continuers. Participants allocated compensation money or adjudicated inheritance claims and reidentified the original person. Most decided based on the continuity of memory, personality, and psychology, with some consideration given to the body and social relations. Importantly, many participants identified the original with both continuers simultaneously, violating the transitivity of identity relations. We discuss the findings and their relevance for philosophy and psychology and place our approach within the current theoretical and empirical landscape. (shrink)

While some of the great thinkers (Socrates, Kant) have argued for an absolutist view of ethical behavior, over the past 250 years the relativist view has become ascendant. Following the contingency framework of Ferrell and Gresham (1985) and the issue contingent model of Jones (1991), a model for ethical research is proposed. The key components include the moral agent/transgressor, the issue type and its intensity, and the nature of the victim. In addition, a statistical methodology, namely conjoint analysis, is introduced (...) to investigate the trade-offs inherent in relativistic inquiry. In two ethical scenarios, in each of which three factors were varied, conjoint analysis provided important insight. The individual transgressor factor of gender had minimal impact on observer responses to two scenarios of questionable ethicality. In contrast, both the dollar magnitude of the transgression and the organizational status of the transgressor (salesperson/manager/owner) did affect observer responses. (shrink)

Western Political Thought in Dialogue with Asia is a unique collection of essays that examines the exchange of political ideas between Western Europe and Asia from the Middle Ages to the early twentieth century. The contributors to the volume call for globalizing the scope of research and teaching in the history of political thought.

In two recent papers, Christian List and Philip Pettit have argued that there is a problem in the aggregation of reasoned judgements that is akin to the aggregation of the preference problem in social choice theory. 1 Indeed, List and Pettit prove a new general impossibility theorem for the aggregation of judgements, and provide a propositional interpretation of the social choice problem that suggests it is a special case of their impossibility result. 2 Specifically, they show that no judgement (...) aggregation function for a group is possible if the group seeks to satisfy certain `minimal conditions' designed to ensure that the function is both responsive to the individually rational views of its members and collectively rational in the set of judgements it holds. In this article, I resist the List and Pettit claim that there is the same propensity for collective irrationality or incoherence in the aggregation of reasoned judgements as there is in the aggregation of preference. I argue that reason, because it has a logical structure that is lacking in mere preference, has the effect of giving priority to some aggregations over others, a priority that is not permitted by one of the conditions imposed by List and Pettit. This avoids the incoherence that would otherwise exist if these different aggregations, not consistent with one another, were to compete at the same level of priority. The priority of some aggregations is particularly apparent, I shall argue, if one views the aggregation of judgements through the lens of common law decision-making. Key Words: social choice • judgement • Condorcet jury theorem • collective rationality • public reason • doctrinal paradox • discursive dilemma. (shrink)

A review of Philip McShane's Pastkeynes Pastmodern Economics: A Fresh Pragmatism.

This paper is an attempt to identify a functional division of labour in art studies. To that end I have adopted the strategically minimalist approach advocated by Philip McShane in Method in Theology: Revisions and Implementations (2007).

This collection of ground-breaking essays considers the many dimensions of prayer: how prayer relates us to the divine; prayer's ability to reveal what is essential about our humanity; the power of prayer to transform human desire and action; and the relation of prayer to cognition. It takes up the meaning of prayer from within a uniquely phenomenological point of view, demonstrating that the phenomenology of prayer is as much about the character and boundaries of phenomenological analysis as it is about (...) the heart of religious life.The contributors: Michael F. Andrews, Bruce Ellis Benson, Mark Cauchi, Benjamin Crowe, Mark Gedney, Philip Goodchild, Christina M. Gschwandtner, Lissa McCullough, Cleo McNelly Kearns, Edward F. Mooney, B. Keith Putt, Jill Robbins, Brian Treanor, Merold Westphal, Norman Wirzba, Terence Wright and Terence and James R. Mensch. Bruce Ellis Benson is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Wheaton College. He is the author of Graven Ideologies: Nietzsche, Derrida, and Marion on Modern Idolatry and The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue: A Phenomenology of Music. Norman Wirzba is Associate Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Georgetown College, Kentucky. He is the author of The Paradise of God and editor of The Essential Agrarian Reader. (shrink)

The Man in the High Castle is an Amazon TV show, based on the Philip K. Dick novel, about an "alternate present" (beginning in the 1960s) in which Germany and Japan won World War II, with the former Western US occupied by Japan, the former Eastern U.S. occupied by Nazi Germany, and a small "neutral zone" between them. A theme of the story is that in this alternative world there is eager speculation, fueled by the illicit newsreel, The Grasshopper (...) Lies Heavy, about how the world would have been different if America had won the war. -/- In The Man in the High Castle and Philosophy, twenty-two professional thinkers look at philosophical issues raised by this ongoing enterprise in "alternative history." One question is whether it really made a profound difference that the Allies won the war, and exactly what differences in everyday life we may expect to arise from an apparent historical turning point. Could it be that some dramatic historical events have only superficial consequences, while some unnoticed occurrences lead to catastrophic results? (shrink)

Philip E. Tetlock and I agree that forecasting tools are best evaluated in peer-reviewed settings and in comparison not only to expert judgments, but also to alternative modeling strategies. Applying his suggested standards of assessment, however, certain forecasting models not only outperform expert judgments, but also have gone head-to-head with alternative models and outperformed them. This track record demonstrates the capability to make significant, reliable predictions of difficult, complex events. The record has unfolded, contrary to Tetlock's contention, not only (...) in government and business applications, but also in numerous peer-reviewed publications containing hundreds of real-time forecasts. Moreover, reliable prediction is achieved while avoiding significant false-positive or false-negative rates. (shrink)

Philip E. Tetlock and I agree that forecasting tools are best evaluated in peer-reviewed settings and in comparison not only to expert judgments, but also to alternative modeling strategies. Applying his suggested standards of assessment, however, certain forecasting models not only outperform expert judgments, but also have gone head-to-head with alternative models and outperformed them. This track record demonstrates the capability to make significant, reliable predictions of difficult, complex events. The record has unfolded, contrary to Tetlock's contention, not only (...) in government and business applications, but also in numerous peer-reviewed publications containing hundreds of real-time forecasts. Moreover, reliable prediction is achieved while avoiding significant false-positive or false-negative rates. (shrink)

Blurb: Thoreau wrote that we have professors of philosophy but no philosophers. Can't we have both? Why doesn't philosophy hold a more central place in our lives? Why should it? Eloquently opposing the analytic thrust of philosophy in academia, noted pluralist philosopher Bruce Wilshire answers these questions and more in an effort to make philosophy more meaningful to our everyday lives. Writing in an accessible style he resurrects classic yet neglected forms of inquiring and communicating. In a series of (...) personal essays, Wilshire describes what is wrong with the current state of philosophy in American higher education, namely the cozy but ultimately suffocating confinements of professionalism. He reclaims the role of the philosopher as one who, like Socrates, would goad us out of self-contentedness into a more authentic way of being and knowing. Table of Contents Preface 1. Nihilistic Consequences of Analytic Philosophy 2. ” The Ph.D. Octopus”: William James's Prophetic Grasp of the Failures of Academic Professionalism 3. The Pluralist Rebellion in the American Philosophical Association 4. Phenomenology in the United States 5. Nature or Nurture?: The Significance of Indigenous Thought 6. Conceptual Problems in Grasping Genocide 7. Henry Bugbee: Philospher of Intimacy 8. William James on the ” Spiritual” 9. Looking for Bek Acknowledgments Index. (shrink)

The ninth edition of Media Ethics: Issues and Cases has been updated to reflect the most pressing ethical issues in media. Featuring 25 new cases on hot topic issues from fake news to drones and a new chapter on social justice, this authoritative case book gives students the tools to make ethical decisions in an increasingly complex environment.

The most successful theory in all of science--and the basis of one third of our economy--says the strangest things about the world and about us. Can you believe that physical reality is created by our observation of it? Physicists were forced to this conclusion, the quantum enigma, by what they observed in their laboratories. Trying to understand the atom, physicists built quantum mechanics and found, to their embarrassment, that their theory intimately connects consciousness with the physical world. Quantum Enigma explores (...) what that implies and why some founders of the theory became the foremost objectors to it. Schrodinger showed that it "absurdly" allowed a cat to be in a "superposition" simultaneously dead and alive. Einstein derided the theory's "spooky interactions." With Bell's Theorem, we now know Schrodinger's superpositions and Einstein's spooky interactions indeed exist. Authors Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner explain all of this in non-technical terms with help from some fanciful stories and bits about the theory's developers. They present the quantum mystery honestly, with an emphasis on what is and what is not speculation. Physics' encounter with consciousness is its skeleton in the closet. Because the authors open the closet and examine the skeleton, theirs is a controversial book. Quantum Enigma's description of the experimental quantum facts, and the quantum theory explaining them, is undisputed. Interpreting what it all means, however, is controversial. Every interpretation of quantum physics encounters consciousness. Rosenblum and Kuttner therefore turn to exploring consciousness itself--and encounter quantum physics. Free will and anthropic principles become crucial issues, and the connection of consciousness with the cosmos suggested by some leading quantum cosmologists is mind-blowing. Readers are brought to a boundary where the particular expertise of physicists is no longer a sure guide. They will find, instead, the facts and hints provided by quantum mechanics and the ability to speculate for themselves. (shrink)

The proposition that digital innovations can put people in charge of their health has been accompanied by prolific talk of empowerment. In this paper we consider ethical challenges and opportunities of trying to achieve justice and empowerment using digital health initiatives. The language of empowerment can misleadingly suggest that by using technology, people can control their health and take responsibility for health outcomes to a greater degree than is realistic or fair. Also, digital health empowerment often primarily reaches people who (...) already have high technological and health literacy, leaving others behind. We critically investigate whether the concept of health empowerment could be re-engineered to mean something different, namely the process of improving the health literacy and access of those who least possess it, in line with recent proposals for conceptual engineering in the service of justice. We settle on the weaker conclusion that underlying ethical values including justice should be used to interpret the existing concept of empowerment. To conclude, we take a high-level view of various strategies for achieving the ethical value associated with digital health empowerment. (shrink)