Over 20 unstable microsatellite repeats have been identified as the cause of neurological disease in humans. The repeat nucleotide sequences, their location within the genes, the ranges of normal and disease‐causing repeat length and the clinical outcomes differ. Unstable repeats can be located in the coding or the non‐coding region of a gene. Different pathogenic mechanisms that are hypothesised to underlie the diseases are discussed. Evidence is given both from studies in simple model systems and from studies on human material (...) and in animal models. Since somatic instability might affect the clinical outcome, this is briefly touched on. Available data and theories on the timing and mechanisms of the repeat instability itself are discussed, along with factors that have been observed to affect instability. Finally, the question of why the often harmful unstable repeats have been maintained throughout evolution is addressed. (shrink)

Background Clients are invited to play a role in decisions about their care. Collaborative deliberation comprises constructive engagement, recognition of alternative actions, comparative learning, construction and elicitation of preferences and preference integration. Collaborative deliberation between clients and professionals is a process that requires an interest in each other, sharing of views on alternatives and preferences and integrating into decisions. The aim is to gain insight into collaborative deliberation in consultations and the clients’ perception of arranging long-term care. Design A descriptive (...) qualitative study to explore collaborative deliberation in consultations between clients and professionals. Six organisations providing long-term care were included. Data collection of nine clients involved observations of consultation with field notes and audio-records, interviews with clients and professionals shortly and 3–6 months after the consultation and questionnaires to collect background information. The data were analysed by deductive content analysis. Findings Constructive engagement was visible in all consultations. Clients and professionals showed respect, empathy and curiosity towards each other. In most consultations, two or more alternative actions are recognised and discussed. Comparative learning appears to be two sided, the client and the professional learn from each other's knowledge and experiences. Construction and elicitation of preference, and preference integration, seems to be present, but difficult to recognise in all consultations. Discussion/conclusion Although all propositions could be identified, there seems room for improvement in preference elicitation and integration of these preferences in the discussions on courses of action. Assistance seems needed with preference elicitation, both for the clients and for the professional. (shrink)

During the past few years, feminist critics have approached writing by women with an "abiding commitment to discover what, if anything, makes women's writing different from men's" and a tendency to feel that some significant differences do exist.4 The most common answer is that women's experiences differ from men's in profound and regular ways. Critics using this approach find recurrent imagery and distinctive content in writing by women, for example, imagery of confinement and unsentimental descriptions of child care. The other (...) main explanation of female difference posits a "female consciousness" that produces styles and structures innately different from those of the "masculine mind." The argument from experience is plausible but limited in its applications: the argument from a separate consciousness is subject to mystification and circular evidence. In both cases, scholars tend to list a few characteristics of writing by women without connecting or explaining them.· 4. Annette Kolodny, "Some Notes on Defining a "Feminist Literary Criticism"", Critical Inquiry 2 : 78.Judith Kegan Gardiner is an associate professor of English and a member of the women's studies program at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle. The author of Craftmanship in Context: The Development of Ben Johnson's Poetry as well as articles on Robert Burton, feminist literary criticism, and contemporary women writers, she is currently working on a study of twentieth-century fiction by women. (shrink)

This paper discusses the occupational health nurse's dilemmas by illustrating two cases faced by nurses in occupational health practice and setting out their analysis according to a decision-making model. The counter-interests, which may offend the principles of conserving professional occupational ethics among service consumers and employers as well as fellow professionals, are emphasized. This paper also describes the complex problems involved in the worker's safety and the safeguarding of their autonomy, while preserving interpersonal relations among the various people concerned.

Reappraisal is an adaptive emotion regulation strategy associated with favourable mental health outcomes. It is unclear whether the adaptive outcomes of habitual reappraisal are associated with better implementation of reappraisal when faced with negative affective situations. The current study aimed to examine whether habitual reappraisal predicts the implementation of instructed reappraisal and to evaluate the potential moderating effects of situational factors, namely – emotional intensity and reappraisal affordance. To address this question, 100 participants reported their habitual reappraisal tendency and were (...) asked to imagine themselves in different hypothetical interpersonal situations. Participants rated emotional intensity levels and reappraisal affordance for each situation, followed by instructions to implement reappraisal. Implementation success was measured by self-reported affect pre-and-post-implementation. Results indicated that habitual reappraisal was associated with greater reappraisal implementation success. While higher intensity scores predicted greater reappraisal implementation success, intensity did not moderate the association between habitual reappraisal and reappraisal implementation success. Reappraisal affordance did not predict reappraisal implementation success, nor did it moderate the association between habitual reappraisal and reappraisal implementation success. Our findings suggest that individual-centred factors play a significant role in reappraisal implementation success, while the effects of situation-centred factors demand further investigation. (shrink)

_The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere_ represents a rare opportunity to experience a diverse group of preeminent philosophers confronting one pervasive contemporary concern: what role does—or should—religion play in our public lives? Reflecting on her recent work concerning state violence in Israel-Palestine, Judith Butler explores the potential of religious perspectives for renewing cultural and political criticism, while Jürgen Habermas, best known for his seminal conception of the public sphere, thinks through the ambiguous legacy of the concept of (...) "the political" in contemporary theory. Charles Taylor argues for a radical redefinition of secularism, and Cornel West defends civil disobedience and emancipatory theology. Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan VanAntwerpen detail the immense contribution of these philosophers to contemporary social and political theory, and an afterword by Craig Calhoun places these attempts to reconceive the significance of both religion and the secular in the context of contemporary national and international politics. (shrink)

Well-Being and Death addresses philosophical questions about death and the good life: what makes a life go well? Is death bad for the one who dies? How is this possible if we go out of existence when we die? Is it worse to die as an infant or as a young adult? Is it bad for animals and fetuses to die? Can the dead be harmed? Is there any way to make death less bad for us? Ben Bradley defends the (...) following views: pleasure, rather than achievement or the satisfaction of desire, is what makes life go well; death is generally bad for its victim, in virtue of depriving the victim of more of a good life; death is bad for its victim at times after death, in particular at all those times at which the victim would have been living well; death is worse the earlier it occurs, and hence it is worse to die as an infant than as an adult; death is usually bad for animals and fetuses, in just the same way it is bad for adult humans; things that happen after someone has died cannot harm that person; the only sensible way to make death less bad is to live so long that no more good life is possible. (shrink)

Philosophers of logic are particularly interested in understanding the aims, epistemology, and methodology of logic. This raises the question of how the philosophy of logic should go about these enquires. According to the practice-based approach, the most reliable method we have to investigate the methodology and epistemology of a research field is by considering in detail the activities of its practitioners. This holds just as true for logic as it does for the recognised empirical and abstract sciences. If we wish (...) to systematically understand the aims and epistemology of logic, we are best placed achieving this by looking at what logicians do, rather than reflecting upon the nature of logic itself. In this entry, we outline the motivations for a practice-based approach towards the philosophy of logic and highlight its advantages over more “top-down” approaches, which attempt to infer conclusions about the nature of logic and its methodology on the basis of traditional assumptions about knowledge, metaphysics, or logic itself. We end by addressing several prominent concerns raised against the practice-based approach. (shrink)

One of the most talked-about scholarly works of the past fifty years, Judith Butler’s _Gender Trouble_ is as celebrated as it is controversial. Arguing that traditional feminism is wrong to look to a natural, 'essential' notion of the female, or indeed of sex or gender, Butler starts by questioning the category 'woman' and continues in this vein with examinations of 'the masculine' and 'the feminine'. Best known however, but also most often misinterpreted, is Butler's concept of gender as a (...) reiterated social _performance _rather than the expression of a prior reality. Thrilling and provocative, few other academic works have roused passions to the same extent. (shrink)

One of the most talked-about scholarly works of the past fifty years, Judith Butler’s _Gender Trouble_ is as celebrated as it is controversial. Arguing that traditional feminism is wrong to look to a natural, 'essential' notion of the female, or indeed of sex or gender, Butler starts by questioning the category 'woman' and continues in this vein with examinations of 'the masculine' and 'the feminine'. Best known however, but also most often misinterpreted, is Butler's concept of gender as a (...) reiterated social _performance _rather than the expression of a prior reality. Thrilling and provocative, few other academic works have roused passions to the same extent. (shrink)

Ever since feminist theory introduced the distinction between sex and gender, the question of what it means to be a woman has preoccupied feminist thought. In ____Gender__ ____Trouble ____ Judith Butler questions whether it is possible to "be" a woman at all or, for that matter, any gender.

Healthcare practitioners have access to a range of ethical guidance. However, the normative role of this guidance in ethical decision-making is underexplored. This paper considers two ways that healthcare practitioners could approach ethics guidance. We first outline the idea of deference to ethics guidance, showing how an attitude of deference raises three key problems: moral value; moral understanding; and moral error. Drawing on philosophical literature, we then advocate an alternative framing of ethics guidance as a form of moral testimony by (...) colleagues and suggest that a more promising attitude to ethics guidance is to approach it in the spirit of ‘critical engagement’ rather than deference. (shrink)

A paper was published in 2003 discussing the ethics of nurses participating in executions by inserting the intravenous line for lethal injections and providing care until death. This paper was circulated on an international email list of senior nurses and academics to engender discussion. From that discussion, several people agreed to contribute to a paper expressing their own thoughts and feelings about the ethics of nurses participating in executions in countries where capital punishment is legal. While a range of opinions (...) were presented, these opinions fell into two main themes. The first of these included reflections on the philosophical obligations of nurses as caregivers who support those in times of great need, including condemned prisoners at the end of life. The second theme encompassed the notion that no nurse ever should participate in the active taking of life, in line with the codes of ethics of various nursing organisations. This range of opinions suggests the complexity of this issue and the need for further public discussion. (shrink)

The philosophical study of well-being concerns what makes lives good for their subjects. It is now standard among philosophers to distinguish between two kinds of well-being: - lifetime well-being, i.e., how good a person's life was for him or her considered as a whole, and - temporal well-being, i.e., how well off someone was, or how they fared, at a particular moment in time or over a period of time longer than a moment but shorter than a whole life, say, (...) a day, month, year, or chapter of a life. Many theories have been offered of each of these kinds of well-being. A common view is that lifetime well-being is in some way constructed out of temporal well-being. This book argues that much of this literature is premised on a mistake. Lifetime well-being cannot be constructed out of temporal well-being, because there is no such thing as temporal well-being. The only genuine kind of well-being is lifetime well-being. The Passing of Temporal Well-Being will prove essential reading for professional philosophers, especially in moral and political philosophy. It will also be of interest to welfare economists and policy-makers who appeal to well-being. (shrink)

According to hedonism about well-being, lives can go well or poorly for us just in virtue of our ability to feel pleasure and pain. Hedonism has had many advocates historically, but has relatively few nowadays. This is mainly due to three highly influential objections to it: The Philosophy of Swine, The Experience Machine, and The Resonance Constraint. In this paper, I attempt to revive hedonism. I begin by giving a precise new definition of it. I then argue that the right (...) motivation for it is the ‘experience requirement’ (i.e., that something can benefit or harm a being only if it affects the phenomenology of her experiences in some way). Next, I argue that hedonists should accept a felt-quality theory of pleasure, rather than an attitude-based theory. Finally, I offer new responses to the three objections. Central to my responses are (i) a distinction between experiencing a pleasure (i.e., having some pleasurable phenomenology) and being aware of that pleasure, and (ii) an emphasis on diversity in one’s pleasures. (shrink)

Strategies to increase influenza vaccination rates have typically targeted healthcare professionals and individuals in various high-risk groups such as the elderly. We argue that they should focus on increasing vaccination rates in children. Because children suffer higher influenza incidence rates than any other demographic group, and are major drivers of seasonal influenza epidemics, we argue that influenza vaccination strategies that serve to increase uptake rates in children are likely to be more effective in reducing influenza-related morbidity and mortality than those (...) targeting HCPs or the elderly. This is true even though influenza-related morbidity and mortality amongst children are low, except in the very young. Further, we argue that there are no decisive reasons to suppose that children-focused strategies are less ethically acceptable than elderly or HCP-focused strategies. (shrink)

Adults have been shown to attribute certain properties more frequently than others to the dead. This category-specific pattern has been interpreted in terms of simulation constraints, whereby it may be harder to imagine the absence of some states than others. Afterlife beliefs have also shown context-sensitivity, suggesting that environmental exposure to different types of information might influence adults? reasoning about post-death states. We sought to clarify category and context effects in adults afterlife reasoning. Participants read a story describing the death (...) of a human protagonist after exposure to a biological prime, an emotional prime, or no prime. Emotions, desires, and epistemic states were more frequently attributed to the dead character than biological, psychobiological, and perceptual states, partially replicating previous findings. The biological prime decreased the attribution of certain post-death states relative to the control condition, whereas the emotional prime had no effect. Simulation theory does not provide a satisfactory explanation of the present findings, which may be better accounted for by conflict between different cognitive systems that are engaged in thinking about the dead. (shrink)

Three plausible views—Presentism, Truthmaking, and Independence—form an inconsistent triad. By Presentism, all being is present being. By Truthmaking, all truth supervenes on, and is explained in terms of, being. By Independence, some past truths do not supervene on, or are not explained in terms of, present being. We survey and assess some responses to this.

The historical consensus is that logical evidence is special. Whereas empirical evidence is used to support theories within both the natural and social sciences, logic answers solely to a priori evidence. Further, unlike other areas of research that rely upon a priori evidence, such as mathematics, logical evidence is basic. While we can assume the validity of certain inferences in order to establish truths within mathematics and test scientifi c theories, logicians cannot use results from mathematics or the empirical sciences (...) without seemingly begging the question. Appeals to rational intuition and analyticity in order to account for logical knowledge are symptomatic of these commitments to the apriority and basicness of logical evidence. This chapter argues that these historically prevalent accounts of logical evidence are mistaken, and that if we take logical practice seriously we fi nd that logical evidence is rather unexceptional, sharing many similarities to the types of evidence appealed to within other research areas. (shrink)

If musical works are abstract objects, which cannot enter into causal relations, then how can we refer to musical works or know anything about them? Worse, how can any of our musical experiences be experiences of musical works? It would be nice to be able to sidestep these questions altogether. One way to do that would be to take musical works to be concrete objects. In this paper, we defend a theory according to which musical works are concrete objects. In (...) particular, the theory that we defend takes musical works to be fusions of performances. We defend this view from a series of objections, the first two of which are raised by Julian Dodd in a recent paper and the last of which is suggested by some comments of his in an earlier paper. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Future of Sexual Difference: An Interview with Judith Butler and Drucilla Cornell*Pheng Cheah (bio) and Elizabeth Grrosz (bio)EG:Luce Irigaray’s writings have always figured strongly in your works, probably more than in the work of other American feminist theorists. Out of all the feminist theorists you both interrogate, she seems to emerge as a kind of touchstone of the feminist ethical, political, and intellectual concerns to which you (...) seem to aspire. Could each of you briefly outline how she figures in your work, whether your relations to her have changed, and if so, how?JB:I think that probably early on, when I started working on French feminism as a graduate student in the early ‘80s, I was not interested in her at all because she seemed to me to be an essentialist and that was a term we used quite easily then, when we thought we knew what it meant. In the late ‘80s, I started to rethink my objections to her on that basis and found that she was, among the feminist theorists I had read, perhaps the most versed in philosophy and that her engagement with philosophy was a curious mixture of both loyalty and aggression. And it became very interesting to me when I started thinking about her whole practice of critical mimesis—what she was doing when she was reading Freud, what was she doing when she was reading Plato—and I read Speculum again and again, frightened by its anger, compelled by the closeness of the reading, confused by the mimetism of the text. Was she enslaved to these texts, was she displacing them radically, was she perhaps in the bind of being in both positions at the same time? And I realized that whatever the feminine was for her, it was not a substance, not a spiritual reality that might be isolated, but it had something to do with this strange practice of reading, one in which she was reading texts that she was not authorized to read, texts from which she was as a woman explicitly excluded or explicitly demeaned, and that she would read them anyway. And then the question is: what would it mean to read from a position of radical deauthorization in order to expose the contingent authority of the text? That struck me as a feminist critical practice, a critical reading practice that I could learn from, and from that point on, highly influenced by both Drucilla’s work and Naomi Schor’s work [see Schor], I started to read her quite thoroughly.PC:Is this kind of relationship that she has with the philosophers she reads a sexual relationship? I am thinking of some of the sexualized terms you just used: loyalty and aggression.JB:Yes, there is no doubt that there is an eros of a certain kind, usually the kind that frightens me, quite frankly. I think Carolyn Burke has made this argument that Irigaray [End Page 19] has a romance with the philosophers [see Burke]. I think she has a certain masochistic-sadistic erotic engagement with the philosophers.EG:Do you think it is sado-masochistic?JB:Well, I think it was much more aggressive in Speculum of the Other Woman than it became in An Ethics of Sexual Difference. There, I think there is an engagement that is still very difficult, but at least there is evidence of a more loving engagement.PC:I hope that we can return to the question of love at the end. Is this the kind of relationship that you have to her texts?JB:No, I’m probably too frightened. [Everybody laughs.] And I don’t engage them that closely, probably because I find it frightening to be in that particular knot. She doesn’t actually have a chapter in any of my books. I think I can’t quite devote a chapter to her....EG:No, but you devote large sections of chapters....JB:That’s true, but I can’t stay there for a prolonged period of time [laughs], whatever that’s worth.EG:I’d like to come back to this later, because I think it is a really interesting... (shrink)

The move to satisficing has been thought to help consequentialists avoid the problem of demandingness. But this is a mistake. In this article I formulate several versions of satisficing consequentialism. I show that every version is unacceptable, because every version permits agents to bring about a submaximal outcome in order to prevent a better outcome from obtaining. Some satisficers try to avoid this problem by incorporating a notion of personal sacrifice into the view. I show that these attempts are unsuccessful. (...) I conclude that, if satisficing consequentialism is to remain a position worth considering, satisficers must show (i) that the move to satisficing is necessary to solve some problem, whether it be the demandingness problem or some other problem, and (ii) that there is a version of the view that does not permit the gratuitous prevention of goodness. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 31.4 (2001) 22-40 [Access article in PDF] Giving an Account of Oneself Judith Butler In recent years, the critique of poststructuralism, itself loquacious, has held that the postulation of a subject who is not self-grounding undermines the possibility of responsibility and, in particular, of giving an account of oneself. Critics have argued that the various critical reconsiderations of the subject, including those that do away with the (...) theory of the subject altogether, cannot provide the basis for an account of responsibility, that if we are, as it were, divided, ungrounded, or incoherent from the start, it will be impossible to ground a notion of personal or social responsibility on the basis of such a view. I would like to try to rebut this view in what follows, and to show how a theory of subject-formation that acknowledges the limits of self-knowledge can work in the service of a conception of ethics and, indeed, of responsibility. If the subject is opaque to itself, it is not therefore licensed to do what it wants or to ignore its relations to others. Indeed, if it is precisely by virtue of its relations to others that it is opaque to itself, and if those relations to others are precisely the venue for its ethical responsibility, then it may well follow that it is precisely by virtue of the subject's opacity to itself that it sustains some of its most important ethical bonds.In all the talk about the social construction of the subject, we have perhaps overlooked the fact that the very being of the self is dependent not just on the existence of the Other—in its singularity, as Levinas would have it, though surely that—but also on the possibility that the normative horizon within which the Other sees and listens and knows and recognizes is also subject to a critical opening. This opening calls into question the limits of established regimes of truth, where a certain risking of the self becomes, as Levinas claims, the sign of virtue [see Foucault]. Whether or not the Other is singular, the Other is recognized and confers recognition through a set of norms that govern recognizability. So whereas the Other may be singular, if not radically personal, the norms are to some extent impersonal and indifferent, and they introduce a disorientation of perspective for the subject in the midst of recognition as an encounter. For if I understand myself to be conferring recognition on you, for instance, then I take seriously that the recognition comes from me. But in the moment that I realize that the terms by which I confer recognition are not mine alone, that I did not singlehandedly make them, then I am, as it were, dispossessed by the language that I offer. In a sense, I submit to a norm of recognition when I offer recognition to you, so that I am both subjected to that norm and the agency of its use.As Hegel would have it, recognition cannot be unilaterally given. In the moment that I give it, I am potentially given it, and the form by which I offer it is one that potentially is given to me. In this sense, one might say, I can never offer it, in the Hegelian sense, as a pure offering, since I am receiving it, at least potentially and structurally, in the moment, in the act, of giving. We might ask, as Levinas surely has, what kind of gift this is that returns to me so quickly, that never really leaves my hands. Is it the case that recognition consists, as it does for Hegel, in a reciprocal act whereby I recognize that [End Page 22] the Other is structured in the same way that I am, and I recognize that the Other also makes, or can make, this very recognition of sameness? Or is there perhaps an encounter with alterity here that is not reducible to sameness? If it is the latter, how are we to understand this alterity? On the one hand, the Hegelian Other is always found outside, or at least... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Future of Sexual Difference: An Interview with Judith Butler and Drucilla Cornell*Pheng Cheah (bio) and Elizabeth Grrosz (bio)EG:Luce Irigaray’s writings have always figured strongly in your works, probably more than in the work of other American feminist theorists. Out of all the feminist theorists you both interrogate, she seems to emerge as a kind of touchstone of the feminist ethical, political, and intellectual concerns to which you (...) seem to aspire. Could each of you briefly outline how she figures in your work, whether your relations to her have changed, and if so, how?JB:I think that probably early on, when I started working on French feminism as a graduate student in the early ‘80s, I was not interested in her at all because she seemed to me to be an essentialist and that was a term we used quite easily then, when we thought we knew what it meant. In the late ‘80s, I started to rethink my objections to her on that basis and found that she was, among the feminist theorists I had read, perhaps the most versed in philosophy and that her engagement with philosophy was a curious mixture of both loyalty and aggression. And it became very interesting to me when I started thinking about her whole practice of critical mimesis—what she was doing when she was reading Freud, what was she doing when she was reading Plato—and I read Speculum again and again, frightened by its anger, compelled by the closeness of the reading, confused by the mimetism of the text. Was she enslaved to these texts, was she displacing them radically, was she perhaps in the bind of being in both positions at the same time? And I realized that whatever the feminine was for her, it was not a substance, not a spiritual reality that might be isolated, but it had something to do with this strange practice of reading, one in which she was reading texts that she was not authorized to read, texts from which she was as a woman explicitly excluded or explicitly demeaned, and that she would read them anyway. And then the question is: what would it mean to read from a position of radical deauthorization in order to expose the contingent authority of the text? That struck me as a feminist critical practice, a critical reading practice that I could learn from, and from that point on, highly influenced by both Drucilla’s work and Naomi Schor’s work [see Schor], I started to read her quite thoroughly.PC:Is this kind of relationship that she has with the philosophers she reads a sexual relationship? I am thinking of some of the sexualized terms you just used: loyalty and aggression.JB:Yes, there is no doubt that there is an eros of a certain kind, usually the kind that frightens me, quite frankly. I think Carolyn Burke has made this argument that Irigaray [End Page 19] has a romance with the philosophers [see Burke]. I think she has a certain masochistic-sadistic erotic engagement with the philosophers.EG:Do you think it is sado-masochistic?JB:Well, I think it was much more aggressive in Speculum of the Other Woman than it became in An Ethics of Sexual Difference. There, I think there is an engagement that is still very difficult, but at least there is evidence of a more loving engagement.PC:I hope that we can return to the question of love at the end. Is this the kind of relationship that you have to her texts?JB:No, I’m probably too frightened. [Everybody laughs.] And I don’t engage them that closely, probably because I find it frightening to be in that particular knot. She doesn’t actually have a chapter in any of my books. I think I can’t quite devote a chapter to her....EG:No, but you devote large sections of chapters....JB:That’s true, but I can’t stay there for a prolonged period of time [laughs], whatever that’s worth.EG:I’d like to come back to this later, because I think it is a really interesting... (shrink)

John Rawls’s ‘just savings’ principle is among the better-known attempts to outline how we should balance the claims of the present with the claims of the future generations on resources. A central element of Rawls’s approach involves endorsing a sufficientarian approach, where our central obligation is to ensure ‘the conditions needed to establish and to preserve a just basic structure’.1 This engaging paper by Christian Munthe, Davide Fumagalli and Erik Malmqvist (‘the authors’) does not explicitly mention Rawls’s work on this (...) issue.2 Still, there are parallels in their aim to generate a ‘sustainability principle’ for healthcare systems. The authors defend the broadening of our focus to the relations between rounds—particularly, how decisions in one period can affect our choice range in the next, whereas current principles for allocating healthcare resources operate within ‘allocation rounds’. Where Rawls is concerned about future generations, the authors’ concern is with future sets of patients. Our present decisions may generate system ‘dynamics’ which are either positive—where ‘more resources per health need’ become available—or negative—where (otherwise justified) decisions taken now leave us with less bang for our buck in the future. The paper’s important and compelling central claim is that we have an obligation …. (shrink)

Recent literature on intrinsic value contains a number of disputes about the nature of the concept. On the one hand, there are those who think states of affairs, such as states of pleasure or desire satisfaction, are the bearers of intrinsic value (“Mooreans”); on the other hand, there are those who think concrete objects, like people, are intrinsically valuable (“Kantians”). The contention of this paper is that there is not a single concept of intrinsic value about which Mooreans and Kantians (...) have disagreed, but rather two distinct concepts. I state a number of principles about intrinsic value that have typically (though not universally) been held by Mooreans, all of which are typically denied by Kantians. I show that there are distinct theoretical roles for a concept of intrinsic value to play in a moral framework. When we notice these distinct theoretical roles, we should realize that there is room for two distinct concepts of intrinsic value within a single moral framework: one that accords with some or all of the Moorean principles, and one that does not. (shrink)

This article considers whether using leadership language may be one under-explored reason why there continues to be a significant lack of women at executive level. Do women make less of a linguistic impact in the boardroom than men? By analysing linguistic data from senior management meetings and follow-up interviews in seven multinational UK companies, we suggest that senior women and men use a very similar range of linguistic strategies to lead their teams except in one key respect. Women appear to (...) monitor and regulate their use of language more than men, adjusting what they say in the light of their colleagues’ concerns and agendas. This use of ‘double-voiced discourse’ enables women to survive in a male-dominated business world, but this can sometimes make their voice ‘harder to hear’. However, double-voiced discourse is also a form of linguistic expertise and potentially might offer women leaders a strategy for success. (shrink)

According to attitudinal theories of pleasure and pain, what makes a given sensation count as a pleasure or a pain is just the attitudes of the experiencing agent toward it. In a previous article, I objected to such theories on the grounds that they cannot account for pleasures and pains whose subjects are entirely unaware of them at the time of experience. Recently, Chris Heathwood and Fred Feldman, the two leading contemporary defenders of attitudinal theories, have responded to this objection, (...) in very different ways. In this paper, I reconstruct and evaluate these responses. My conclusion is that neither response succeeds. (shrink)

The evidence most of us have for our beliefs on global climate change, the extent of human contribution to it, and appropriate anticipatory and mitigating actions turns crucially on epistemic trust. We extend trust or distrust to many varied others: scientists performing original research, intergovernmental agencies and those reviewing research, think tanks offering critique and advocating skepticism, journalists transmitting and interpreting claims, even social systems of modern science such as peer-reviewed publication and grant allocation. Our personal experiences and assessments of (...) evidential indicators themselves may be buttressed significantly by trust, not just in. (shrink)

What is the role of pleasure in determining a person’s well-being? I start by considering the nature of pleasure (i.e., what pleasure is). I then consider what factors, if any, can affect how much a given pleasure adds to a person’s lifetime well-being other than its degree of pleasurableness (i.e., how pleasurable it is). Finally, I consider whether it is plausible that there is any other way to add to somebody’s lifetime well-being than by giving him some pleasure or helping (...) him to avoid some pain. (shrink)

Several recent publications in biomedical ethics argue that organ donation is generally morally obligatory and failure to do so is morally indefensible. Arguments for this moral conclusion tend to be of two kinds: arguments from fairness and arguments from easy rescue. While I agree that many of us have a duty to donate, in this article I criticize these arguments for a general duty of organ donation and their application to organ procurement policy. My concern is that these arguments neglect (...) the role that trust plays in contemporary organ transplant policies and in differential rational attitudes toward donation. Recognizing donation as an achievement of trust, and acknowledging the warrant of many people's rational distrust or withheld trust in medicine, I argue, should have significant implications for the ethics of organ procurement. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue against Millian Descriptivism: that is, the view that, although sentences that contain names express singular propositions, when they use those sentences speakers communicate descriptive propositions. More precisely, I argue that Millian Descriptivism fares no better (or worse) than Fregean Descriptivism: that is, the view that sentences express descriptive propositions. This is bad news for Millian Descriptivists who think that Fregean Descriptivism is dead.

In a world of industralized farming and feed lots, is eating meat ever a morally responsible choice? Is eating organic or free range sufficient to change the moral equation? Is there a moral cost in not eating meat? As billions of animals continue to be raised and killed by human beings for human consumption, affecting the significance and urgency in answering these questions grow. This volume collects twelve new essays by leading moral philosophers who address the difficult questions surrounding meat (...) eating by examining various implications and consequences of our food choices. Some argue for the moral permissibility of eating meat by suggesting views such as farm animals would not exist and flourish otherwise, and the painless death that awaits is no loss to them. Others consider more specific examples like whether buying french fries at McDonalds is just as problematic as ordering a Big Mac due to the action's indirect support of a major purveyor of meat. The Moral Complexities of Eating Meat is a stimulating contribution to the ongoing debate on meat consumption and actively challenges readers to reevlaute their stand on food and animal ethics. (shrink)

Recent works by feminist and social epistemologists have carefully mapped the contours of epistemic injustice, including gaslighting and prejudicial credibility deficits, prejudicial credibility excesses, willful hermeneutical ignorance, discursive injustices, contributory injustice, and epistemic exploitation. As we look at this burgeoning literature, attention has been concentrated mainly in four areas in descending order of emphasis: phenomena of epistemic injustice themselves, including the nature of wrongdoings involved, attendant consequences and repercussions, individual and structural changes for prevention or mitigation, and restorative, restitutive, or (...) retributive responses. This project urges greater attention to the last of these, and to that end offers a relational approach to epistemic justice drawing upon Margaret Walker’s work on moral repair and reparative justice. In developing and enacting better epistemic practices, how can such practices be made meaningfully restorative: not only recognizing the prospects for epistemic improvement, but responding to the perpetration and experience of epistemic injustice with effective epistemic amelioration? (shrink)

This book concerns the foundations and implications of a particular form of liberal political theory. Colburn argues that one should see liberalism as a political theory committed to the value of autonomy, understood as consisting in an agent deciding for oneself what is valuable and living life in accordance with that decision. Understanding liberalism this way offers solutions to various problems that beset liberal political theory, on various levels. On the theoretical level, Colburn claims that this position is the only (...) defensible theory of liberalism in current circulation, arguing that other more dominant theories are either self-contradictory or unattractive on closer inspection. And on the practical level, Colburn draws out the substantive commitments of this position in educational, economic, and social policy. Hence, the study provides a blueprint for a radical liberal political agenda which will be of interest to philosophers and to politicians alike. (shrink)

Ethical arguments about assisted dying often focus on whether or not respect for an individual’s autonomy gives a reason to offer them an assisted death if they want it. In this paper, I present an argument for legalising assisted dying which appeals to the autonomy of people who don’t want to die. Adding that option can transform the nature of someone’s choice set, enabling them to pursue other options voluntarily where that would otherwise be harder or impossible. This does not (...) contradict the more familiar arguments for legalising assisted dying based on the autonomy of those who seek to die. But it does suggest that a wider constituency of support for that legislative change might be created by emphasising that one need not be in that position to be benefited by the change. (shrink)

To explain the phenomenon that certain English verbs resist passivization, Pinker proposed a semantic constraint on the passive in the adult grammar: The greater the extent to which a verb denotes an action where a patient is affected or acted upon, the greater the extent to which it is compatible with the passive. However, a number of comprehension and production priming studies have cast doubt upon this claim, finding no difference between highly affecting agent-patient/theme-experiencer passives and non-actional experiencer theme passives. (...) The present study provides evidence that a semantic constraint is psychologically real, and is readily observed when more fine-grained independent and dependent measures are used. We conclude that a semantic constraint on the passive must be incorporated into accounts of the adult grammar. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Understanding and Experience of Compassion:Aquinas and the Dalai LamaJudith BaradHis Holiness the fourteenth Dalai Lama writes that the essence of Mahayana Buddhism is compassion.1 Although most people recognize compassion as one of the most admirable virtues, it is not easy to find discussions of it by Christian theologians. Instead, Christian theologians tend to discuss charity, a virtue infused by God into a person. Some of these theologians, such (...) as Cardinal Henri de Lubac,2 insist that Christian charity and Buddhist compassion are very different from each other. Are they correct? A good source to investigate this claim is in Aquinas's Summa Theologica, which contains a very developed discussion of charity. If we look at Aquinas's text and compare it to what the current Dalai Lama writes about compassion, we will recognize that they are discussing the same virtue. Moreover, by combining the insights from East and West, as expressed by the thoughts of the current Dalai Lama and St. Thomas Aquinas, we can achieve a better grasp of compassion so that we can more easily practice it in our daily lives. Though remarkably similar, the two accounts offer differing perspectives, which can be incorporated for mutual enrichment.Much of Aquinas's philosophy of compassion derives from his Christian beliefs, just as much of the Dalai Lama's teachings on compassion are based on Tibetan Buddhism. This explains some of the differences in their accounts. Unlike Christians, Buddhists neither believe in a personal God nor in a soul. Yet despite their theological differences, Aquinas and the Dalai Lama generally share a very similar view of compassion. In fact, one could well imagine Aquinas agreeing with the Dalai Lama who, after acknowledging his religious influence, writes that his goal is "to appeal for an approach to ethics based on universal rather than religious principles."3 It is appropriate, therefore, to begin by considering the similarities in their accounts of compassion, starting with their definitions of compassion. [End Page 11]DefinitionsEtymologically, the word "compassion"—compassio—comes from two Latin words: com means "with" and pati means "suffer." Literally, then, "compassion" means "to suffer with." Aquinas discusses compassion as an interior effect of charity, a theological virtue. It is interior because compassion is felt within the person who has charity. The cause of compassion, charity, Aquinas describes as the friendship between God's children and God Himself. Although Aquinas wrote prolifically on the subject of charity, someone could overlook his writing on compassion because he discusses it under the term "mercy." Diana Fritz Cates, for instance, who draws on an Aristotelian-Thomistic ethical framework to develop a theory of compassion, observes, "Aristotle and Thomas have little to say about compassion: hence, it will not be helpful to begin with their accounts."4 However, Aquinas uses the word misericordia (mercy) as a synonym of compassio (compassion). The synonymous relationship between compassion and mercy is also recognized by the Dalai Lama, who affirms, "Mercy and compassion are the same."5Aquinas defines mercy as "heartfelt sympathy for another's distress, impelling us to succor him if we can." If we experience this heartfelt sympathy, we're not discouraged if the person we try to help doesn't respond. Explicitly connecting mercy and compassion, Aquinas add that mercy, misericordia, gets its name "from denoting a person's compassionate heart (miserum cor) for another's unhappiness."6 The concept of "another's unhappiness" is important to his discussion. A necessary condition of being happy, in Aquinas's view, is that an individual must obtain what he or she wishes. Conversely, someone is unhappy when he suffers what he doesn't wish to suffer. Aquinas maintains that the suffering produced by one's frustrated desire for what he or she perceives as good is a sufficient condition for evoking mercy. In regard to the merciful response, it shouldn't matter what the suffering person perceives as good. So long as the person is suffering what he doesn't wish to suffer, this person should be treated mercifully. Suppose a teenager suffers from being unpopular with his peers. Although the compassionate person may not value popularity, she should extend compassion to the... (shrink)

Judith Butler follows Edward Said's late suggestion that through a consideration of Palestinian dispossession in relation to Jewish diasporic traditions a new ethos can be forged for a one-state solution. Butler engages Jewish philosophical positions to articulate a critique of political Zionism and its practices of illegitimate state violence, nationalism, and state-sponsored racism. At the same time, she moves beyond communitarian frameworks, including Jewish ones, that fail to arrive at a radical democratic notion of political cohabitation. Butler engages thinkers (...) such as Edward Said, Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi, Martin Buber, Walter Benjamin, and Mahmoud Darwish as she articulates a new political ethic. In her view, it is as important to dispute Israel's claim to represent the Jewish people as it is to show that a narrowly Jewish framework cannot suffice as a basis for an ultimate critique of Zionism. She promotes an ethical position in which the obligations of cohabitation do not derive from cultural sameness but from the unchosen character of social plurality. Recovering the arguments of Jewish thinkers who offered criticisms of Zionism or whose work could be used for such a purpose, Butler disputes the specific charge of anti-Semitic self-hatred often leveled against Jewish critiques of Israel. Her political ethic relies on a vision of cohabitation that thinks anew about binationalism and exposes the limits of a communitarian framework to overcome the colonial legacy of Zionism. Her own engagements with Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish form an important point of departure and conclusion for her engagement with some key forms of thought derived in part from Jewish resources, but always in relation to the non-Jew. Butler considers the rights of the dispossessed, the necessity of plural cohabitation, and the dangers of arbitrary state violence, showing how they can be extended to a critique of Zionism, even when that is not their explicit aim. She revisits and affirms Edward Said's late proposals for a one-state solution within the ethos of binationalism. Butler's startling suggestion: Jewish ethics not only demand a critique of Zionism, but must transcend its exclusive Jewishness in order to realize the ethical and political ideals of living together in radical democracy. (shrink)

Several recent articles have weighed in on the question of whether moral philosophers can be counted as moral experts. One argument denying this has been rejected by both sides of the debate. According to this argument, the extent of disagreement in modern moral philosophy prevents moral philosophers from being classified as moral experts. Call this the Argument From Disagreement. In this article, I defend a version of AD. Insofar as practical issues in moral philosophy are characterized by disagreement between moral (...) philosophers who are more or less equally well credentialed on the issue, non-philosophers have no good reasons to defer to their views. (shrink)

Virtue consequentialism has been held by many prominent philosophers, but has never been properly formulated. I criticize Julia Driver's formulation of virtue consequentialism and offer an alternative. I maintain that according to the best version of virtue consequentialism, attributions of virtue are really disguised comparisons between two character traits, and the consequences of a trait in non-actual circumstances may affect its actual status as a virtue or vice. Such a view best enables the consequentialist to account for moral luck, unexemplified (...) virtues, and virtues and vices involving the prevention of goodness and badness. (shrink)

Some philosophers and segments of the public think age is relevant to healthcare priority-setting. One argument for this is based in equity: “Old” patients have had either more of a relevant good than “young” patients or enough of that good and so have weaker claims to treatment. This article first notes that some discussions of age-based priority that focus in this way on old and young patients exhibit an ambiguity between two claims: that patients classified as old should have a (...) low priority, and that patients classified as young should have high priority. The author next argues, drawing on a problem raised by Christine Overall, that equity cannot justify giving “old” patients low priority, since there is wide variety in the total lifetime experiences of older people, partly influenced by gender, race, class, and disability injustice. Finally, the author suggests that there might be a limited role for age-based prioritization in the context of infant and childhood death, since those who die in childhood are always and uncontroversially among the worst-off. (shrink)

While anti-exceptionalism about logic is now a popular topic within the philosophy of logic, there’s still a lack of clarity over what the proposal amounts to. currently, it is most common to conceive of AEL as the proposal that logic is continuous with the sciences. Yet, as we show here, this conception of AEL is unhelpful due to both its lack of precision, and its distortion of the current debates. Rather, AEL is better understood as the rejection of certain traditional (...) properties of logic. The picture that results is not of one singular position, but rather a cluster of often connected positions with distinct motivations, understood in terms of their rejection of clusters of the various traditional properties. In order to show the fruitfulness of this new conception of AEL, we distinguish between two prominent versions of the position, metaphysical and epistemological AEL, and show how the two positions need not stand or fall together. (shrink)

Subjectivists think that our well-being is grounded in our subjective attitudes. Many such views are vulnerable to variations on the ‘paradox of desire’, where theories cannot make determinate judgements about the well-being of agents who take a positive valuing attitude towards their life going badly. However, this paradox does not affect all subjectivist theories; theories grounded on agents’ prudential values can avoid it.This paper suggests a new paradox for subjectivist theories which has a wider scope, and includes such prudential judgement (...) theories. I outline the new paradox and show how two plausible idealisztions (coherence and consideration) will not help. Subjectivists about well-being must either add an additional idealization that can solve the paradox of judgement or explain why such paradoxes do not constitute serious objections to a theory of well-being. (shrink)

Whilst certain verbs may appear in both the intransitive inchoative and the transitive causative constructions (The ball rolled/The man rolled the ball), others may appear in only the former (The man laughed/*The joke laughed the man). Some accounts argue that children acquire these restrictions using only (or mainly) statistical learning mechanisms such as entrenchment and pre-emption. Others have argued that verb semantics are also important. To test these competing accounts, adults (Experiment 1) and children aged 5–6 and 9–10 (Experiment 2) (...) were taught novel verbs designed to be construed — on the basis of their semantics — as either intransitive-only or alternating. In support of the latter claim, participants' grammaticality judgments revealed that even the youngest group respected these semantic constraints. Frequency (entrenchment) effects were observed for familiar, but not novel, verbs (Experiment 1). We interpret these findings in the light of a new theoretical account designed to yield effects of both verb semantics and entrenchment/pre-emption. (shrink)

In recent literature on plurals the claim has often been made that the move from singular to plural expressions can be iterated, generating what are occasionally called higher-level plurals or superplurals, often correlated with superplural predicates. I argue that the idea that the singular-to-plural move can be iterated is questionable. I then show that the examples and arguments intended to establish that some expressions of natural language are in some sense higher-level plurals fail. Next, I argue that these and some (...) other expressions should instead be classified as plurals whose reference is articulated, an idea explained and elaborated in the paper. I also show that the related categories of plural and superplural predicates collapse to that of ordinary predicates. In the process we also see that the law of substitutivity salva veritate should be elaborated for cases involving expressions more complex than singular ones. (shrink)

This book explores the role of causal constraints in science, shifting our attention from causal relations between individual events--the focus of most philosophical treatments of causation--to a broad family of concepts and principles generating constraints on possible change. Yemima Ben-Menahem looks at determinism, locality, stability, symmetry principles, conservation laws, and the principle of least action-causal constraints that serve to distinguish events and processes that our best scientific theories mandate or allow from those they rule out. Ben-Menahem's approach reveals that causation (...) is just as relevant to explaining why certain events fail to occur as it is to explaining events that do occur. She investigates the conceptual differences between, and interrelations of, members of the causal family, thereby clarifying problems at the heart of the philosophy of science. Ben-Menahem argues that the distinction between determinism and stability is pertinent to the philosophy of history and the foundations of statistical mechanics, and that the interplay of determinism and locality is crucial for understanding quantum mechanics. Providing historical perspective, she traces the causal constraints of contemporary science to traditional intuitions about causation, and demonstrates how the teleological appearance of some constraints is explained away in current scientific theories such as quantum mechanics. (shrink)