We can imagine a world in which ectogenesis provides a safe gestating space that eliminates maternal morbidity and mortality while maximising healthy outcomes for babies. In this world, women, no longer physically—and visibly—pregnant, are no longer economically, socially or physically disadvantaged due to the potential for pregnancy and birth. Because everyone can access the same technology, women are able to work without fear of pregnancy-related discrimination or restrictions, and health disparities among individuals in gestation and birth based on socioeconomic status (...) are eliminated. This imagining allows us to explore the ethical and social underpinnings of such a world, and consider how to achieve it in our current paradigm. Having explored the freedom and equality that is possible in an ideal hypothetical where all have equal access to such technologies, we can now imagine that same world without ectogenesis: women, no longer economically, socially or physically disadvantaged due to pregnancy and birth, despite still becoming pregnant. Such is the potential political perspective and provocation that can be spurred on by discussion of ectogenesis. As Cavaliere argues, the technological reality of ectogenesis may not achieve the freedom and equality that …. (shrink)

With the growth and evolution of the field of clinical ethics, the one constant has been its variation. Resolving ethical issues at the bedside is done differently across the country based on one’s...

Gestational surrogacy relies on a legal agreement between the surrogate and the intended parents to define the roles and responsibilities of the parties, including explicit consent by the surrogate to allow the physician to release all pregnancy-related medical information to the intended parents. In the event of surrogate misconduct, however, physicians may feel conflicted if the surrogate asks the physician to withhold information about potentially dangerous behaviour in pregnancy from the intended parents. While the American Society for Reproductive Medicine guidelines (...) may support disclosure over the objections of the surrogate, the authors argue that such disclosure is a violation of the surrogate’s rights and the physician’s ethical and professional duties. A surrogate’s confidentiality must be maintained as it is an essential element of the physician–patient relationship. (shrink)

Gestational surrogacy relies on a legal agreement between the surrogate and the intended parents to define the roles and responsibilities of the parties, including explicit consent by the surrogate to allow the physician to release all pregnancy-related medical information to the intended parents. In the event of surrogate misconduct, however, physicians may feel conflicted if the surrogate asks the physician to withhold information about potentially dangerous behaviour in pregnancy from the intended parents. While the American Society for Reproductive Medicine guidelines (...) may support disclosure over the objections of the surrogate, the authors argue that such disclosure is a violation of the surrogate’s rights and the physician’s ethical and professional duties. A surrogate’s confidentiality must be maintained as it is an essential element of the physician–patient relationship. (shrink)

Contraception works by preventing fertilization of an egg or preventing implantation of a fertilized embryo. For those who believe pregnancy begins at implantation, contraceptives preventing implantation are not abortifacient. However, for those who assert that pregnancy begins at fertilization, any agent causing the intentional loss of an embryo, even prior to implantation, is abortifacient, both morally and for lack of a different term to describe the postfertilization, preimplantation loss. In the debate on this topic, much of the discourse on both (...) sides wrongly focuses on the opposing side's perceived ignorance in denying scientifically proven definitions rather than on the substance of the conflict. Indeed, both sides accuse the other of prioritizing its “subjective” views over “objective” facts. In this essay, we unpack the scientific, cultural, and religious factors that underlie this debate. We argue that the only way to move forward is to clarify our terminology and engage with the substance of the argument, rather than merely the rhetoric. (shrink)

Given the enduring debate over what constitutes quality, and therefore appropriate training, in clinical ethics consultation, it is unsurprising that there is variation in the structure and content of clinical ethics fellowship programs. However, this variation raises questions about the value of fellowship training when the ethicists that emerge from these programs might be quite different. The specifics of fellowship programs are largely internal. As such, the extent of variation and whether such variation is problematic remains unclear. In this article, (...) we summarize lessons learned from discussions between fellows, their mentors and program directors at the 2020 Clinical Ethics UnConference, and outline some possible ways to advance the conversation about variation in fellowship programs and training. We argue for the more open sharing of training specifics in order to help break down the siloed nature of fellowship programs. Greater transparency could, firstly, allow for more robust reflection on and refinement of training practices and, secondly, allow us to better balance professionally appropriate consistency with unavoidable or desirable variation based on local norms, culture and leadership. (shrink)

What were once considered private domains of life have become more public in the last 20 years with the rise of social media. Illness narratives of patients with chronic, severe, or terminal condit...

McCarthy et al. have made an important contribution to the field of ethics by identifying the important similarities between Christian and secular bioethics that can be drawn on to further s...

Efforts to professionalize the field of bioethics have led to the development of the Healthcare Ethics Consultant-Certified (HEC-C) Program intended to credential practicing healthcare ethics consultants (HCECs). Our team of professional ethicists participated in the inaugural process to support the professionalization efforts and inform our views on the value of this credential from the perspective of ethics consultants. In this paper, we explore the history that has led to this certification process, and evaluate the ability of the HEC-C Program to (...) meet the goals it has set forth for HCECs. We describe the benefits and weaknesses of the program and offer constructive feedback on how the process might be strengthened, as well as share our team’s experience in preparing for the exam. (shrink)

Evolving Clinical Ethics: A Working UnConference, held 5 through 7 February 2020 in Houston, Texas, brought together 91 participants from a variety of institutions, many of whom are engaged in clinical ethics work. The event followed the success of the first Clinical Ethics UnConference hosted by the Cleveland Clinic Center for Bioethics in 2018, and offered an opportunity for ethicists to share both their challenges and their solutions to clinical ethics issues. In this article we explore the emerging themes of (...) the second UnConference and identify the top 10 questions currently faced by the field. We address both unresolved issues and areas of agreement and highlight new collaborations that have been developed to work toward greater standardization in our field. (shrink)

The OpenNotes (ON) mandate in the 21st Century Cures Act requires that patients or their legally authorized representatives be able to access their medical information in their electronic medical record (EMR) in real time. Ethics notes fall under the domain of this policy. We argue that ethics notes are unique from other clinical documentation in a number of ways: they lack best-practice guidelines, are written in the context of common misconceptions surrounding the purpose of ethics consultation, and often answer questions (...) of a different nature than other documentation. Thus, we believe the clinical ethics community would benefit from clarification on when the withholding of ethics notes is justified. We provide recommendations for excluding information from ethics documentation based on the likelihood and magnitude of harm that may occur with particular disclosures and suggest approaches to decrease the potential harms that may occur. We define and explain six types of reasons to exclude information from ethics notes based on significant harms that are not addressed in the ON policy: (1) harmful revelations from a protected chart note; (2) negative emotional effects on patients or families; (3) the purpose of the consultation is undermined by harmful consequences; (4) avoidable negative impact on interpersonal dynamics; (5) inappropriate labeling or disclosure of medical, social, or financial information; and (6) inclusion of biasing or otherwise unfair information. We also suggest approaches to mitigate harm when excluding, including, reframing, or delaying release of information that is perceived to be relevant to an ethics case. Overall, we hope our analysis and recommendations will initiate a much-needed discussion about the impact of the ON mandate on clinical ethics documentation. (shrink)

Constraining collective cell migration in vitro using different types of engineered substrates such as microstructured surfaces or adhesive patterns of different shapes and sizes often leads to the emergence of specific patterns of motion. Recently, analogies between the behavior of cellular assemblies and that of active fluids have enabled significant advances in our understanding of collective cell migration; however, the physiological relevance and potential functional consequences of the resulting migration patterns remain elusive. Here we describe the different patterns of collective (...) cell migration that have been reported in vitro in response to geometrical constraints, explore the in vivo pertinence of the in vitro systems used to impose the geometrical constraints, and discuss the potential physiological ramifications of the collective migration patterns that emerge as a result of physical constraints. We conclude by highlighting key upcoming challenges in the exciting field of constrained collective cell migration. (shrink)

The Discourse on the All-embracing Net of Views: the Brahmajala Sutta and its Commentaries translated from the Pali by Bhikkhu Bodhi. Buddhist Publication Society, Kandy 1978. xiii-359pp. Rs. 75, £5.00.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Pragmatist in Paris: Frédéric Rauh’s “Task of Dissolution”Richard HornerIntroductionRichard Rorty has suggested that we think of “pragmatism in the professorial sense” as “just a repudiation of the quest for certainty and foundations.” 1 In other words think of a pragmatist as someone who links the quest for privileged method with the quest for foundational knowledge and gives up both. As Rorty explained several years ago,If one believes, as (...) I do, that the traditional ideas of “an absolute (‘objective’) conception of reality” and of “scientific method” are neither clear nor useful, then one will see the interlocked questions “What should be the method of the social sciences?” and “What are the criteria of an objective moral theory?” as badly posed. 2Pragmatists not only give up the quest for grounding, foundations, or essences, then, but they also understand that the dissolution of essences leads in turn to “the dissolution of inquiry into a self-reweaving web of beliefs.” If this “seems wacky to you,” Rorty notes, “consider that such a dissolution is a natural and [End Page 289] easy consequence of a generalized antiessentialism.” 3 Whether he speaks in terms of foundations or essences, Rorty’s message remains the same: pragmatists not only let go of the quest for foundations, they also let go of the quest for privileged method.Perhaps the principle difficulty with this way of defining pragmatism is that not very many people seem to qualify as pragmatists. What Rorty has been able to do with remarkable consistency, others have been less willing and less able to do. There are, of course, still numerous foundationalists among us who are explicit about their commitment to the quest for foundations and to the quest for method that accompanies it. While anti-foundationalism may be all the rage, “it would be too much to say that the foundationalist argument lies in ruins. It is in fact remarkably resilient and resourceful in the face of attacks against it.” 4 Furthermore, even where the “death of foundationalism” is a given, 5 the quest for method continues to hold interest. To cite only one notable example among many, Jürgen Habermas may have successfully resisted the seductive attraction of the quest for Letzbegründung or ultimate foundations, but he clearly remains committed to “a metahermeneutical analysis” of communication, the purpose of which is “to identify universals and thus to produce a type of theoretical knowledge.” 6 This kind of “anti-foundationalist theory hope,” 7 can be found among Deweyan pragmatists as well. While many of them let go of the quest for foundations with relative ease, they find it difficult to abandon the quest for method 8 or to allow the epistemological enterprise to succumb to Rorty’s “vulgar pragmatism.” 9 Furthermore, in doing so they believe that Dewey would have sided with them rather than with Rorty.Given the difficulty in identifying pragmatists who have consistently abandoned both quests, it is especially striking to discover Frédéric Rauh practicing “pragmatism in the professorial sense” in the philosophy section of the Faculté [End Page 290] des lettres of the Sorbonne and Ecole normale supérieure during the first decade of the twentieth century. While this period of French history certainly produced intellectuals who were sympathetic to the American pragmatists, these intellectuals were, as Durkheim noted, “far from subscribing to all their theses.” 10 Renouvier, for instance, remained, in James’s own words, “too classic in the general rationalism of his procedure.” 11 Similarly, James’s good friend Boutroux, though “simpatico” toward American pragmatism, also “betrayed... a philosophical inheritance quite foreign to that of James.” 12 Ralph Barton Perry, comes to a similar conclusion with regard to Bergson, writing that Bergson and James “exchanged salutations and gifts, and then proceeded on their way. In no sense did they coincide either as systems or in their particular theorems.” 13 Apparent alliances, then, emerge finally as “misalliances,” showing that “what has passed as pragmatism in European philosophical thought has not been distinctive of the essential and most important features of American pragmatism.” 14 Whatever their affinities with pragmatism may have been and whatever their contributions to dissolving the... (shrink)

Two experiments examined similarities and differences in the effects of consciously and unconsciously perceived rewards on the active maintenance of goal-relevant information. Participants could gain high and low monetary rewards for performance on a word span task. The reward value was presented supraliminally or subliminally at different stages during the task. In Experiment 1, rewards were presented before participants processed the target words. Enhanced performance was found in response to higher rewards, regardless whether they were presented supraliminally or subliminally. In (...) Experiment 2, rewards were presented after participants processed the target words, i.e., during maintenance. Performance increased in response to relatively high rewards when they were presented subliminally, but decreased when they were presented supraliminally. We conclude that both consciously and unconsciously perceived rewards boost resources supporting the maintenance of task-relevant information. Conscious processing of rewards can, however, heavily interfere with an ongoing maintenance process and impair performance. (shrink)

Objectives The study uses a qualitative empirical method to define Health Research for Development. This project explores the perspectives of stakeholders in an international health research partnership operating in Ghana and Tanzania. Methods We conducted 52 key informant interviews with major stakeholders in an international multicenter partnership between GlaxoSmithKline and the global health nonprofit organisation PATH and its Malaria Vaccine Initiative program,. The respondents included teams from four clinical research centres and various collaborating partners. This paper analyses responses to the (...) question: What is Health Research for Development? Results Based on the stakeholders’ experience the respondents offered many ways of defining Health Research for Development. The responses fell into four broad themes: i) Equitable Partnerships; ii) System Sustainability; iii) Addressing Local Health Targets, and iv) Regional Commitment to Benefit Sharing. Conclusion Through defining Health Research for Development six key learning points were generated from the four result themes: 1) Ensure there is local research leadership working with the collaborative partnership, and local healthcare system, to align the project agenda and activities with local research and health priorities; 2) Know the country-specific context - map the social, health, legislative and political setting; 3) Define an explicit development component and plan of action in a research project; 4) Address the barriers and opportunities to sustain system capacity. 5) Support decentralised health system decision-making to facilitate the translation pathway; 6) Govern, monitor and evaluate the development components of health research partnerships. Overall, equity and unity between partners are required to deliver health research for development. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:How I Hate You, CancerClaire YarMigraine. That’s what we thought. They run in my family, so why not? My beautiful, bright, extroverted ten–year–old daughter’s neurological exam was unremarkable, but she had a bad headache and was vomiting in the early morning hours. Migraine didn’t seem that much of a stretch. Our savvy pediatrician had a gut feeling that it was more than a migraine and sent her for an (...) MRI.We had not even left the children’s hospital before I received a voicemail to call our pediatrician. When I returned the call, on our way to pick up Ellie’s younger brother from school and already running late I heard the words that no parent wants to hear, “I have bad news. We found a brain tumor and it’s rather large”. This conversation would turn our lives into a frenzy of fear and leave unanswered (unanswerable?) questions. I was told to bring her to the ER where we would be met by a neurosurgeon and oncologist. I could not process this information. My initial fears were too scary to utter. Was she going to die? Do children survive brain surgery “intact”? Is it operable? Oncologist = scary cancer, doesn’t it? Did we do something to cause it? What if our insurance doesn’t cover the best treatment?Clinging to the life I knew before—needing to stay in the “before,” not even pulling the car over, I reached backwards, held Ellie’s leg and spoke the words out loud for the first time. That’s what a brain tumor diagnosis does to your family. It breaks up time into “before” and “after”. Her reaction was a terrified wail and then, oddly, hysterical laughter. Is that what shock looks like? My own reaction to the call was of stunned silence. The sound of my heartbeat and the blood rushing in my ears meant I could not ask the questions I had in that moment.Ellie has always been exceptional. She is a bright light in any room. At only ten–years–old, she spoke like a teenager; had the vocabulary of an adult. Never again would I be able to take this for granted. In every waking moment that our lives were unoccupied with the practicalities of a brain tumor diagnosis, the questions I couldn’t think of or say out loud during that terrible phone call continually flooded my thoughts. Your child’s brain is everything after all; it’s what makes them “them.”An avid horse rider, she had been off her favorite horse’s back for a few weeks saying that the bouncing hurt her neck. I had kept her off school for several days, but we had seen marked improvement in [End Page E12] the day or two leading up to that devastating D–Day of diagnosis, and she had been back at school doing well. Only a week before, Ellie had been dancing at a party with friends. How could she have a brain tumor?We rushed home and hurriedly packed our bags for “at least a week”—and I recall that life seemed to be both in slow motion and traveling at the speed of light. I desperately wanted to turn the clock back to the innocence we had known a few hours before. This was way too much news to hear in one day. Even when I heard the diagnosis, I was surprised that we would have to go to the hospital that day. Now! Don’t people get time to process or plan and get second opinions? We had no time to tell family and friends or ask for help. We didn’t have the luxury of time. Time is another thing I no longer take for granted.Upon arrival at the large children’s hospital we felt as if we were given so much information, but looking back, I now know that these angels are trained in giving parents only what they can handle—in tiny pieces, nibble by nibble. You don’t (can’t) hear half of it anyway. Our families live far from us, and trying to gather and figure out... (shrink)

Visual artists and scientists frequently employ the labour of assistants and technicians, however these workers generally receive little recognition for their contribution to the production of artistic and scientific work. They are effectively “invisible”. This invisible status however, comes at the cost of a better understanding of artistic and scientific work, and improvements in artistic and scientific practice. To enhance understanding of artistic and scientific work, and these practices more broadly, it is vital to discern the nature of an assistant (...) or technician’s contribution to the production of a work, which is difficult as it is uncommon to discuss these workers. To address this, I investigate how different kinds of parallel working arrangements in collective artistic and scientific practices affect the creative potential of individuals involved. Different working arrangements permit different degrees of autonomy for individuals involved in these practices. Significantly, a lack of autonomy precludes the opportunity to act spontaneously and so exercise, what I term, “creative agency”. Evaluating the contribution of an assistant or technician based on the degree of autonomy that they are granted in the production of a work is an approach that I show can be used to precisely determine the nature of their contribution to the production of a work and accordingly, what kind of recognition an agent should receive for this. Importantly, this approach has the advantage of explaining the artistic and epistemic significance of different kinds of contribution to the production of artistic and scientific work. (shrink)

The Enkratic Principle enjoys something of a protected status as a requirement of rationality. I argue that this status is undeserved, at least in the epistemic domain. Compliance with the principle should not be thought of as a requirement of epistemic rationality, but rather as defeasible indication of epistemic blamelessness. To show this, I present the Puzzle of Inconsistent Requirements, and argue that the best way to solve it is to distinguish two kinds of epistemic evaluation – requirement evaluations and (...) appraisal evaluations. This allows us to solve the puzzle while accommodating traditional motivations for thinking of the Enkratic Principle as a requirement of rationality. (shrink)

Can we make mistakes about what rationality requires? A natural answer is that we can, since it is a platitude that rational belief does not require truth; it is possible for a belief to be rational and mistaken, and this holds for any subject matter at all. However, the platitude causes trouble when applied to rationality itself. The possibility of rational mistakes about what rationality requires generates a puzzle. When combined with two further plausible claims – the enkratic principle, and (...) the claim that rational requirements apply universally – we get the result that rationality generates inconsistent requirements. One popular and attractive solution to the puzzle denies that it is possible to make rational mistakes about what rationality requires. I show why (contra Titelbaum (2015b), and Littlejohn (2015)) this solution is doomed to fail. (shrink)

A familiar part of debates about supererogatory actions concerns the role that cost should play. Two camps have emerged: one claiming that extreme cost is a necessary condition for when an action is supererogatory, while the other denies that it should be part of our definition of supererogation. In this paper, I propose an alternative position. I argue that it is comparative cost that is central to the supererogatory and that it is needed to explain a feature that all accounts (...) agree is central to the very notion of supererogation: optionality. Perhaps because of this agreement on its importance, few attempts have been made to clarify and explain the notion of optionality. I argue that giving an account of the optionality of supererogatory requires drawing a line between doing the bare minimum permissible and going beyond the bare minimum and that this line ought to be drawn based on comparative cost of alternative permissible acts. Having outlined my account and motivated it, I discuss and reject two concerns that might be raised: firstly, that it is extreme cost, not comparative cost, that matters and, secondly, that in fact no cost is needed for an act to be supererogatory. (shrink)

This article examines the artistic potential of forms of image-making that involve registering the features of real objects using mind-independent processes. According to skeptics, these processes limit an agent’s intentional control over the features of the resultant “automatic images,” which in turn limits the artistic potential of the work, and the form as a whole. I argue that this is true only if intentional control is understood to mean that an agent produces the features of the work by their own (...) bodily movements alone. Not only is this an unrealistic standard to uphold, but I show that a definition of intentional control based on the skeptic’s position does not prohibit an agent from realizing the features of an image by means beyond their own actions. An agent can exercise intentional control over the features of an image if they successfully anticipate the effect that the remote consequences of their actions will have on these. This, I argue, entails that to exert intentional control over the features of an image is to exercise “creative agency,” which is a species of executive agency. Consequently, I defend the idea that the origin of automatic images in creative agency grounds their artistic significance. (shrink)

A recent article argued for the immorality of abortion regardless of personhood status by comparing the impairment caused by fetal alcohol syndrome to the impairment caused by abortion. I argue that two of the premises in this argument fail and that, as such, one cannot reasonably attribute moral harms to abortion on the basis of the moral harms caused by fetal alcohol syndrome. The impairment argument relies on an inconsistent instantiation, which undermines the claim that personhood is irrelevant, and it (...) does not fulfill its own ceteris paribus clause, which demands that no additional benefit be gained from abortion that would not be gained from causing fetal alcohol syndrome. (shrink)

Disabled people frequently find themselves in situations where their quality of life and wellbeing is being measured or judged by others, whether in decisions about health care provision or assessments for social supports. Recent debates about wellbeing and how it might be assessed (through subjective and/or objective measures) have prompted a renewed focus on disabled people’s wellbeing because of its seemingly ‘anomalous’ nature; that is, whilst to external (objective) observers the wellbeing of disabled people appears poor, based on subjective assessments, (...) people with disabilities report a good quality of life. In this paper, I examine an article by the philosopher Dan Moller in which he seeks to explain this ‘disability paradox’. Despite agreeing with his analysis that there is more to what people value than happiness, his explanation reflects some of the difficulties presented in philosophical accounts which seek to understand the lives of disabled people: this includes an analysis which fails to problematise definitions of wellbeing and who has the ‘voice’ to do the defining; which negates the multiple identities and subject positions that disabled people occupy; and which lacks recognition of the social contexts which mediate disabled people’s lives. I suggest that there is a need to incorporate disabled people’s voices into research which deepens our empirical knowledge about the relationship between impairment and wellbeing, including the social circumstances that shape disabled people’s agency. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss Whiting’s (2021) account of rational belief and discuss some unresolved issues arising from its reliance on epistemic possibility and, by extension, perspective-relative aprioricity.

De Re Significance accounts of moral appraisal consider an agent’s responsiveness to a particular kind of reason, normative moral reasons de re, to be of central significance for moral appraisal. Here, I argue that such accounts find it difficult to accommodate some neuroatypical agents. I offer an alternative account of how an agent’s responsiveness to normative moral reasons affects moral appraisal – the Reasonable Expectations Account. According to this account, what is significant for appraisal is not the content of the (...) reasons an agent is responsive to, but rather whether she is responsive to the reasons it is reasonable to expect her to be responsive to, irrespective of their content. I argue that this account does a better job of dealing with neuroatypical agents, while agreeing with the De Re Significance accounts on more ordinary cases. (shrink)

I argue that there are some situations in which it is praiseworthy to be motivated only by moral rightness de dicto, even if this results in wrongdoing. I consider a set of cases that are challenging for views that dispute this, prioritising concern for what is morally important in moral evaluation. In these cases, the agent is not concerned about what is morally important, does the wrong thing, but nevertheless seems praiseworthy rather than blameworthy. I argue that the views under (...) discussion cannot accommodate this, and should be amended to recognise that it is often praiseworthy to be motivated to do what is right. (shrink)

Is normative uncertainty like factual uncertainty? Should it have the same effects on our actions? Some have thought not. Those who defend an asymmetry between normative and factual uncertainty typically do so as part of the claim that our moral beliefs in general are irrelevant to both the moral value and the moral worth of our actions. Here I use the consideration of Jackson cases to challenge this view, arguing that we can explain away the apparent asymmetries between normative and (...) factual uncertainty by considering the particular features of the cases in greater detail. Such consideration shows that, in fact, normative and factual uncertainty are equally relevant to moral assessment. (shrink)

I argue for the unexceptionality of evidence about what rationality requires. Specifically, I argue that, as for other topics, one’s total evidence can sometimes support false beliefs about this. Despite being prima facie innocuous, a number of philosophers have recently denied this. Some have argued that the facts about what rationality requires are highly dependent on the agent’s situation and change depending on what that situation is like. (Bradley 2019). Others have argued that a particular subset of normative truths, those (...) concerning what epistemic rationality requires, have the special property of being ‘fixed points’—it is impossible to have total evidence that supports false belief about them. (Smithies 2012; Titelbaum 2015). Each of these kinds of exceptionality permits a solution to downstream theoretical problems that arise from the possibility of evidence supporting false belief about requirements of rationality. However, as I argue here, they incur heavy explanatory burdens that we should avoid. (shrink)

Incoherence is usually regarded as a bad thing. Incoherence suggests irrationality, confusion, paradox. Incoherentism disagrees: incoherence is not always a bad thing, sometimes we ought to be incoherent. If correct, Incoherentism has important and controversial implications. It implies that rationality does not always require coherence. Dilemmism and Incoherentism both embrace conflict in epistemology. After identifying some important differences between these two ways of embracing conflict, I offer some reasons to prefer Incoherentism over Dilemmism. Namely, that Incoherentism allows us to deliberate (...) about what we ought to believe using ordinary epistemology, and it does a better job of accommodating the positive features of incoherence. (shrink)

Standing in San Marco Cathedral in Venice, you immediately notice the exquisitely decorated spandrels: the triangular spaces bounded on either side by adjoining arches and by the dome above. You would be forgiven for seeing them as the starting point from which to understand the surrounding architecture. To do so would, however, be a mistake. It is a similar mistaken inference that evolutionary biologists have been accused of making in assuming a special adaptive purpose for such biological features as fingerprints (...) and chins. I argue that a mistake of just this sort is being made by ethicists who appeal to the intrinsic value of supererogatory acts in their efforts to make space for supererogation in ethical theory. Many cases of supererogatory action are simply spandrels: by-products of uncontroversial commitments elsewhere in our moral thought. This is not to downplay their value but rather to show that their value need not be the justification for making room for the supererogatory. I demonstrate this by examining two areas: rights and the distribution of burdens among a group. My argument has significance for those who take themselves to be defends of the possibility of supererogatory actions, as well as those who are committed to the contrary and those who believe themselves to be indifferent on the matter. (shrink)

It is well-documented that the alteration of portrait photographs can have a negative impact on a viewer’s self-esteem. One might think that providing written disclaimers warning of alteration might help to mitigate this effect, yet empirical studies have shown that viewers continue to feel like what they are seeing is real, and thus attainable, despite knowing it is not. I propose that this cognitive dissonance occurs because disclaimers fail to show viewers how to look at the contents of a photographic (...) image differently. Consequently, viewers have the same perceptual experience, where the picture appears to faithfully resemble a direct visual experience of the subject, which conflicts with their changing sense of warrant. However, I argue that the degree of perceived similarity, and so contact, may be subject to change depending on what a viewer is attentive to during their viewing of an image, including subtle but unrealistic signs of alteration. (shrink)

In this article, I deal with the notion of ‘academic identity’ holistically, seeking to bring together the teacher and researcher roles of academics in the neoliberal university. The article begins from the perspective of early-career academics who occupy the majority of fixed-term, teaching-only contracts in Higher Education, arguing that such casualisation of academic labour entrenches the role of the academic asHomo economicus. Drawing on the work of Foucault, I demonstrate how a neoliberal governmentality is now not only exerted upon academics (...) from without, but increasingly they are subjecting themselves to the logic of efficiency and effectiveness too. The neoliberal governmentality of the university thus influences and shapes academic subjectivities, such that what it means tobean academic is confined to this marketised logic. Despite the pressures placed on academics to ‘produce’ measurable outputs and demonstrate their impact, I argue that moving beyondHomo economicusis possible, arguing instead for a re-claiming of ‘the academic’ asHomo academicus. The idea ofHomo academicuscan only be supported when three conditions are present: collegiality is afforded greater importance than competition; the discourses of ‘productivity’ and performativity are balanced against simply ‘doing good work well’ (Pirrie in Virtue and the quiet art of scholarship, Routledge, London, 2019), and; academics are mindful to practice the ‘quieter’ intellectual virtues, including the virtue of ‘unknowing’ (Smith in J Philos Educ 50:272–284, 2016). (shrink)

Nietzsche’s interest in tragedy continues throughout his work. And yet scholarship on Nietzsche’s account of tragedy has focused almost exclusively on his first book, The Birth of Tragedy – a work which is in many ways discontinuous with his more mature philosophical views. In this paper, I aim to illuminate Nietzsche’s post-Birth of Tragedy views on tragedy by setting them in the context of a particular historical conversation. Ever since Plato banished the tragic poets from the kallipolis, various philosophers have (...) attempted to respond to his challenge to offer a ‘defense of poetry’. What Nietzsche offers, I argue, is a distinctive form of response to Plato’s challenge. I show how Nietzsche takes seriously Plato’s worries, and even ends up in partial agreement with him: tragedy is not (unqualifiedly) valuable; it can be spiritually dangerous. Key to Nietzsche’s account is a distinction he draws between two types of tragic audience. For the ‘lower types’, tragedy is – as Plato feared – dangerous. For the ‘higher types’, however, tragedy can act as a regenerative force. Finally, I discuss a distinctive form of value that tragedy makes available to a modern audience: tragedy can act as a stimulus towards the process of the revaluation of values. (shrink)